I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast
that is Transcend.
Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did
for 14 years.
Suffering from sleep deprivation, body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido,
hair loss, etc.
Now when it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy, what I have
seen is a shift from doctors telling us that we were within normal limits, which was definitely
incorrect all the way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left,
right and center.
So I myself wanted to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology
and then offer supplementations without ramming, for example, hormone replacement therapy down
my throat.
Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason
why the 7X project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations.
They also have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first
responders through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual.
So my own personal journey so far filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood
drawn and a few days later I'm talking to one of their wellness professionals as they
guide me through my results and the supplementation that they suggest.
In my case specifically, because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago and been
very diligent with my health, my testosterone was actually in a good place.
So I went down the peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology
knowing full well the damage that 14 years of shift work has done.
Now I also want to underline because I think this is very important that each of the therapies
they offer, they will talk about the pros and cons.
So for example, a lot of first responders in shift work, our testosterone will be low,
but sometimes nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own.
So this company is not going to try and push you down a path, especially if it's one that
you can't come back from.
So whether it's libido, brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely
one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the
Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling.
This episode is sponsored by Five Eleven, a company that I've used for well over a decade
and continue to use to this day.
And Five Eleven is offering you guys, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast,
a discount on every purchase you make with them.
Before we get to that code, I want to highlight a couple of products that again, I personally
use today.
One of the most impressive products they just released is their Rush Backpack 2.0.
Now for many of you, whether you're going to the fire station, the police station, whether
you're traveling with your family, whether you're taking training courses, we have to
fly, we have to drive, we have to take trains.
And I have to say, I own multiple backpacks, many of Five Eleven's different ones, but
as far as a day pack, this one was the most impressive.
There are so many different compartments.
The way it sits on your back is incredibly comfortable if you are a concealed carry person.
There's also a spot for a weapon.
So they've thought of multiple, multiple things that a man or woman would have to do on a
daily basis.
That is in addition to all of the products that I talk about a lot.
They're uniforms fit for men or fit for women in the first responder professions.
The footwear that they offer, whether it's the Norris sneaker or the Atlas system that
is designed for foot health and therefore knees and back and hips and shoulders and
neck as a civilian.
I live in a lot of their clothes as well.
Their jeans stretch.
You can actually squat down in them.
We live in Florida here, so I wear a lot of their shorts, which again, very, very lightweight
material.
You can get it wet and it will dry almost immediately.
And then moving to the fitness and tactical space.
I used to have just a regular weight vest.
Recently I switched to a Five Eleven vest and actually bought ballistic plates as well.
And my thinking was simply, if I'm going to have a vest, when I have one that protects
me as well.
And that tack vest is trusted by law enforcement all around the country.
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So if you go to five 11 tactical.com and enter the code shield 15 S H I E L D one five, you'll
get 15% off not just that one purchase, but every time you visit their store.
If you want to learn more about five 11, their mission, their products, then listen to episode
three hundred and thirty eight of the behind the shield podcast with the CEO and founder
Francisco Morales.
This episode is sponsored by inside tracker.
And what makes me smile is before I even started my podcast seven years ago, when listening
to other wellness conversations inside tracker was always the company they recommended for
comprehensive blood work.
Well now in twenty twenty four, they have begun to offer a brand new first responder
panel, which will cover nine biomarkers hitting several of the pillars of health that affect
us in uniform stress, heart health, metabolism and gut health.
Now after a very simple intake form, a blood draw, you will get the results sent to your
computer, smartwatch, phone, not only detailing where you are on the scale from poor to optimized,
but also tips on how you can improve each of these markers.
Now this panel is usually three hundred and ten dollars, but they are also offering first
responders 30 percent off any of their blood panels.
So that brings this specific panel down to only two hundred and seventeen dollars.
Now I myself went through their ultimate, which is their comprehensive blood work, which
also includes micronutrients, hormones and other areas of overall health.
And I have to say I was absolutely amazed at firstly how easy it was.
But secondly, the comprehensive information I got and the actionable information on how
to improve each of my own biomarkers.
Now as with all my sponsors, if you want to hear more about InsideTracker, you can hear
my conversation with senior sales executive Jonathan Levitt on episode eight hundred and
eighty seven of the Behind the Shield podcast.
So to sign up or simply learn more, go to inside tracker dot com.
And for the first responder panel, the easiest way is to Google InsideTracker first responder
panel.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show world record holding strength athlete and doctor of physiotherapy, Andrew Locke.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from training the youth athlete,
physiotherapy, the world of shoulder injuries, the power of exercise to rehabilitate back
pain Dr. Stuart McGill's work, MMA, tactical athletes and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of almost nine hundred episodes.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So that being said, I introduce to you Dr. Andrew Locke.
Enjoy.
Well, Andrew, I want to start by saying thank you so much for waking up in your morning
in Australia and jumping on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
It's a total pleasure.
It's always good to get up early in Melbourne and get things done.
So it works for me to see everyone else in the world is enjoying the sun and the fun
that we're not even though it's supposed to be summer here.
It's not absolutely love Melbourne.
When I was in Australia, I lived there for how long?
It was like three months.
I lived on Manly for most of it in Sydney.
I've been a place to be.
Yeah.
Yeah, it wasn't bad, I got to say.
But we forget we were flying.
I think we were going into Melbourne and my girlfriend at the time and I hadn't figured
out anywhere to stay yet.
And the stewardess that was actually the hostess that was one of the people taking care of
us on the plane ended up taking us.
She met us after she got off the plane and then drove us to one of the hostels there.
So amazing people in Melbourne.
It's a beautiful place to be when you land over there in Sydney as well.
That's the Manly beach.
That's the real Australia I do enjoy.
But then again, I prefer Miami.
I prefer San Diego.
I do a lot of travel.
I do that travel.
So there are places I get to.
And you're in England, huh?
No, I'm just north of Miami.
I'm in Ocala, Florida, just above Orlando.
Fantastic.
Great place.
Yeah, we went up to Orlando last year because one of my friends is a WWE wrestler and we
went up and saw one of the tapings and had a bit of fun.
Brilliant.
Yeah, Florida is actually the home of wrestling.
There's a lot of wrestling camps here.
It always has been.
It's a good place.
So the action is on there.
What are you doing over in up there these days?
This Yeah, I transitioned out the fire service five years ago now, almost five and a half
years ago after seeing the mental and physical ill health of my brothers and sisters in uniform.
So it was kind of a force multiplier element.
I realized I was doing more good focusing on this full time than running one call at
a time, which I love doing 14 years, but it was kind of one of those life shifts where
you can take a leap of faith and try and do something a little bit different.
As we say, you got to go all in, don't you?
Absolutely.
Well, I would love to start at the very beginning of your life before we talk about me too much.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Well, the fun part of it is, my dear girl, we're getting married in Miami actually in
September the seventh.
Okay.
So we're coming out over there.
We've got our wonderful friend, Mike, that battle X gym, who's going to be the marriage
celebrant and my good friend Carlos is going to be the best man.
He comes over from LA.
He runs a gym, the El Luchador gym.
Now for me, my girl always says to me, why aren't you fucked up?
Because you had the most perfect freaking childhood anyone's ever had.
That's why I couldn't have a better childhood.
I've got everything.
I was a fourth child in the family.
I was not supposed to be there.
I was nine years after my brother.
My father honestly said straight up to me, you're not supposed to be here.
The condom broke.
So you're a lucky bastard.
And that's basically straight up fact.
They thought I was my sister's daughter, my sister's child when they went on holiday because
she's 18 years older than me.
So we really had a perfect family dynamic where my parents would be worn in by the other
three kids.
So when it got to me, I just lived the perfect life.
I used to stay out all day and all night playing sport.
I was obsessed with cricket.
My parents took my football boots away from me and said, you can't play football because
you'll hurt somebody.
You're too big.
And they made me play baseball.
Next thing you know, I ended up playing for Australia in the juniors in the, I played
in the junior world series in NERC, Ohio.
There we are.
So I was always figured I was going to be a pro athlete.
And then I made the mistake of seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger on a magazine, got some wonderful
body image dysmorphia.
So I became a guy who only ever saw himself as fricking small.
And that has taken me forever to even get close to managing.
So I use the disorder, which is a body image disorder, which is I see myself as small every
day when I wake up until about now.
Sometimes I drove that into the weight training world.
So instead of being a pro baseball player, I decided I was going to be a pro bodybuilder
and that never worked.
So being bright enough to get into university, I pursued a career in physiotherapy mainly
because from about the age of 12, I used to see physiotherapists for the various aches
and pains that came from being a junior athlete.
Useful thing, useful background.
Thought that'd be a good profession.
Get into it.
As I was coming through, I decided to become a professional wrestler and join the WWE as
it was going to be or WWF back then.
And got delightfully spectacularly injured by doing a dumb thing in the gym.
All right.
Well, at least I've still got my physical therapy to pursue.
So I was at university and basically went through and still had the dream of following
the wrestling career.
But the injury itself was significant enough that I knew I wouldn't be able to do what
I'd have to do.
So there came the reason I end up doing physical therapy.
Instead of you see me playing at Yankee Stadium or in the center ring.
Now what happens is I graduate and I'm at a sports medicine center and they took me
on a sports medicine center straight out of university because I knew how to play baseball
and they needed someone who knew how to throw for rehabilitation.
Well when you went to sports medicine back there, their idea of sports medicine was pressure
played cricket, maybe basketball, rode a bike, went for a run, but no one had a clue about
weight training.
So I was lucky enough that I was on this absolute spear tip when I came out that here I was
involved in the weight training world.
And I'm in a sports medicine place that's supposedly the best in the world at shoulders.
And I found out none of them even knew what a bench press was.
It's going to come in the door for me because people knew me, bench press shoulders.
So I really started developing the rehabilitation for weight training injured athletes.
And of course when you get people who get injured to weight training, you get people
who get injured during their vocations, you end up with a lot of military and a lot of
law enforcement and fire.
And so that's a relationship that I've had for quite a long time.
And that two years ago started a relationship with the Australian Army where I was fortunate
enough to go out onto base and work with the PTIs.
And it was really great, such a dedicated group to work with.
And amusingly, they bought a lot of reverse hypers and they wondered why the reverse hyper
didn't work for everybody.
And I was able to explain that.
We'll put that in the story today.
So that was a very quick summary of really where I've been and where I am now.
So essentially I was a shoulder guy, but I figured the shoulder solutions that nobody
has seen because I had to figure out what happens to people under load, not just as
swimmers, not just your basketball players.
I had to deal with people who were getting injuries in fairly heavy vocations and weight
training.
Well, because I injured my back delightfully enough that when the surgeon had a look at
the MRI that I had from the injury, he basically bought a tissue out and started to wipe it
thinking somebody has sneezed on the thing.
Dude, nobody sneezed.
That was the crap that exploded out of my disc.
I really did it.
I did probably one of the best disc injuries I've ever seen in my career.
That's getting on to 30 years now.
So I couldn't walk for two years at least in any way, shape or form correctly.
So there I am.
I've got this wonderful back injury, but I can't take time off to have surgery, so it
ain't going to happen.
And I had to persist through learning about back problems.
Now when I had it, I said to the lecturer who had finished and graduated, what I've
got has not been described in what we've done.
He said, man, I couldn't tell you everything.
I can pretty much tell you now that the university education doesn't tell you anything.
It's deteriorated to such a point that the graduates now are coming out with thinking
that nothing works.
They've been told that nothing works, and they sit there and talk to you like they're
half-arsed psychologists, and they're supposed to be physical therapists and movement scientists.
Well, I was lucky enough that here I am with the weight training world.
I know science exists.
I know physics works.
I know biology exists.
I know that if you take a biological tissue beyond its fatigue or load capacity, you're
going to get an injury.
It's not in your head.
It's a frickin' physical injury.
Now the personal experience of pain, that's a subjective thing.
But there's more than likely you've got a biological trigger.
And who knows how to find that?
Well, that's what takes you only about 25 years to figure out and be really damn good
at.
So yes, if I look at, now somebody asked me the question the other day, after a disc
injury, can you ever come back to a top level?
And the fact is, if you injure a disc, I'll bring up one of my little Chinese models,
okay?
This is a little crap one, right?
If you go and give yourself a nice disc injury, there's a nice disc bowl.
You got one?
Everyone love that one?
Once you've done that to the wall of the annulus, the outer part of the disc, your disc will
never be the same ever again.
It will never return to its previous state.
But does that mean that you can't perform at the highest level?
Absolutely not.
We can look at the case of Brian Carroll.
He's a guy in 2009, one of the great powerlifters of our time, and he suffered a huge injury,
massive disc problems, and he also fractured his spine as well.
Well, 2020, Brian breaks a world record with the world's greatest squad of all time, 1,306
years.
Can you return after injury?
Yeah, of course you can.
But you need to find someone who knows how to take you there.
So although the disc never recovers to its previous state, does that really overly matter?
So when I blew my disc up, and we're looking well back over 20 plus years, I don't have
a disc left at all.
It's bone on bone.
There is no disc left.
The two bones have now fused themselves naturally over those years.
Or the only difference is I'm just about a centimeter shorter than I used to be.
That's about all.
I can do anything I need.
So there doesn't have to be a relationship between the degeneration and your performance.
Well, that's where I've got to take you.
So there's a bit of a summary of my life.
I went into learning about myself being the best test pilot for it.
Went through postgraduate education with the McKenzie Spinal Group.
Learned from Professor Stuart McGill, spent some great time at his house, got a great
relationship with him, and I had to develop my own work.
So I'm a clinician, not an academic.
I've written some research papers, but realistically, I'm a clinician who has to apply reality
to a human being.
I don't sit behind a desk and say, oh, this is what the data says.
Mate, I don't care what your data says.
Can you apply that into a human being?
That's what matters.
So jumping on the education side for a second, there's so many parallels.
And I had a near career ending back injury, and I want to get into that because I healed
that with movement as well.
But before we even dive into that, I did exercise physiology and, what was it called?
Movement studies?
I forget even what it was called now, but it was a two year degree in the University
of North London.
And then finished my bachelor's in exercise physiology in the University of Florida here
in Gainesville.
Met some great people, had some great teachers, but overall, UK and US, when I came out the
back door, I really didn't feel like I had any skills to apply to the real world.
And the only semester I thought was phenomenal was there was one that actually did you prepare
you for the NSCA CSCS.
So at least then you had a piece of paper that you could walk away.
So I've been very disillusioned with higher education because, again, I've paid money.
I have loans.
I've put my time, and this was while I was a firefighter, into it.
But my observation I've asked, people, Matt Wenning and Jeff Nichols and a lot of these
people that come on the show that have both, they have the pieces of paper and they have
the experience.
And it seems like a lot of people feel the same.
Like we're not doing a good job preparing our young men and women that want to go into
athletic training, into physical therapy, all these elements for the real world application.
So talk to me about that.
It's a total corruption of the system.
The universities are basically now, because it used to be, I think, when I came through
essentially too, I was fortunate.
The universities were institutions of higher learning that were supported by the governments.
So you went there and the pressure wasn't on the university to have to fund itself.
That all changed.
Now the universities have to fund themselves.
Well, shit, that means they've got to fund their own research.
And then you end up just getting academics who are sitting in their chairs applying for
grants, as far as I can see, to bodies that are run by other people who have no other
jobs than sitting on their ass.
And they publish research papers and the research journals are full of corruption.
I've seen some of the highest level journals.
You can call it the Lancet.
You can talk about any of those.
And the stuff they publish can be absolute rubbish.
Now it costs a lot of money to get it published, by the way.
You could be looking at $10,000 in the highest journals to apply.
But it doesn't mean it's going to be good.
They're only going to publish what suits their agenda as well.
So yes, the academic world is now just full of, realistically, papers that you can get
published in low volume journals or low cost journals or you can go high journal.
And all that means is you're getting it funded by somebody else because you're not going
to pay $10,000 yourself to get it put up there.
So the universities basically take people in, spit them out, and then they said, ah,
the chiropractors call themselves doctors these days.
Perhaps we'll call the physical therapist doctors.
Yeah, let's do that.
Let's add another year and another $60,000 to their price tag.
Did you teach them anything better?
No.
And that's realistically it.
It's universities are just really money making machines.
Do not ever expect to do a degree and come out with the answers you will need to look
after real human beings.
You got to go do that in the clinic.
And if you're a weight training individual, you've got a huge advantage because you know
technique matters.
You know that load has to be managed.
So you don't learn that in your degrees, how to apply that to an injured human being.
There's my summary of the university system.
It's simply, hey, pay for your degree.
You get a degree and come out and guess what?
It's time for you to start learning.
Or you don't have to learn.
You can go get a job in the NHS or somewhere else and let the government supply you with
people.
I think the problem that I have, there is so little research when it comes to wellness
in the fire service.
There is research on flow patterns and ventilation and there'll be some thrown at cancer, for
example.
But when it comes to looking at and we'll get into this sleep and shift work and the
importance of strength and conditioning when it comes to longevity and performance, et
cetera, et cetera, there really isn't.
And the stuff that's in there is very myopic.
Oh, you know, we took 10 guys and we studied them for a week and it's looking at these
minute slivers of detail and it's not really replicating what we do.
Then to counter that, the people in the profession go, oh, we need to see peer-reviewed research.
For example, I'm trying to get the work week reduced because our men and women in America
are working 56-hour weeks, not sleeping every third day.
And then I'm trying to get it to where it's 24-72, so they would be down to a 42-hour
work week, so an extra 24 hours off in between their shifts where they're up 24 hours straight.
And I get asked, oh, can you show me the research?
And there's a certain point where you're like, where have we lost common sense?
Do you need me to show you papers that a 56-hour work week is more detrimental than a 24, excuse
me, a 42?
So this is a problem I have too, is people are almost so brainwashed about peer-reviewed
studies that they've kind of become disconnected from areas that don't need to be studied because
it's fucking common sense.
Hey, you got a great one there.
And I bet when you're at university, you're told you cannot quote a research paper that's
probably over five years old because it's old research.
And you can't quote anything over 10 years old.
Now, why is that?
Because that's called recency bias, which means you just made a decision on time but
not on the value of the science.
So guess where all the great studies on spines exist, the real studies about these things
here, the real studies here, you want to start about the 1980s.
And there's a lot of great work for the next 20 years, 1980s to 2000, that are solid and
they show the biological facts about how the human body behaves under loads and what the
mechanism of injury is.
Then you're going to get the recent new grads who are told by the university lecturers who
also are publishing their own crap that there is no evidence.
Oh, yes, there is, but you can't quote it because it was done 1980, 1990, and 2000.
They're being told you can't look at old research.
Well, the old stuff's like shit, Copernicus proved that the earth revolves around the sun.
But you've been not quite him because you know what, he's old.
So guess what?
That's why we're seeing a lot of flat earthers these days, because everyone's saying, oh,
the government's lying to us and stuff like there's this huge situations that occurred,
which is ignoring reality that exists.
So this structure here, it's so well studied.
And I can tell you straight up that if you read the research, which has been published
over the last 20 years, the last 40 years, you'll understand that if you want to get
a disc injury, it's flexing the spine under load beyond its capacity that produces a disc
bulge that direction with enough load, frequency and tolerance.
You want to fracture the back of your spine?
Well, try landing from a large height with a backpack on and you're gonna load your back
into extension.
Welcome to back fracture.
Look at Blaine Sumner, one of the greatest lifters of all time, 515 kilogram squat, walked
it out, stumbled slightly, recovered, perfect squat, world record.
You know what?
He fractured his spine when he stumbled because he went into a little bit of extension.
We don't need somebody saying, watch your studies on populations.
We can look at the science and says, well, that's how he did it.
And we can prove it.
It's straightforward.
So we should be returning back to what are the basics of how we get injured and now how
do we solve that problem?
And those things are well understood by people who have had to leave the university system
essentially and go into private practice and clinical work who are bothered to take themselves
into higher into postgraduate work, usually by private institutions.
So yes, the answers are always there.
I love the way you talk about sleep.
So one of my great athletes, a guy called Vassa, Vassa Samatua, right?
Now he's going to be competing in about seven weeks.
Vassa is a guy who squats 400 kilograms, but he works two jobs pretty much in security.
And as he gets bigger, he finds he has more problems to sleep, smokes a pack of cigarettes
a night probably.
So he goes to training after doing his shifts, no sleep, running after the family and he's
out there, he's going to he'll be like he was the last winner we had one of the big
comps here.
Yeah, you're going to have a 400 kilogram plus squat and deadlift in that individual,
but he's surviving on maybe I sleep every two days.
So there's a point where he's going to he's going to break, isn't there?
No one's found it yet.
Because I had Dr. McGill on the show.
It was a little while ago now.
It was a great conversation.
And when it comes to the sleep deprivation element, I mean, anywhere from long term diseases,
and suicide ideation and addiction all the way through to cancers and obesity, you look
at the disruption of the hormones from sleep deprivation.
You know, it's everything.
But he was looking at it from a musculoskeletal point of view, because I was telling him a
lot of the guys that men and women that take their job really seriously, you know, are
working out despite the environment they're working in.
You know, a lot of times we'll get hurt.
And you know, that we will be laughed at by the guys and the lazy boy that are, you know,
100 pounds overweight saying, oh, it's always the fit guys.
And it's like, yeah, it is.
Because if you train and you don't sleep for 24 hours every third day, it's only a matter
of time.
You know, there's not enough time for the rebuild after the breakdown.
So eventually we do break.
And there's so many factors there, isn't it?
Who can handle this?
Whose system can actually be so optimal that they can handle a minimal amount of sleep
and somebody else just can't?
So there's that human factor about recovery, which is very, very large and important as
well.
So we always evaluate the human on the individual basis, not just on what the research says.
And Stu McGill is a great one on firefighters there.
He did a study with Scanlon and somebody else down in Florida, Pensacola Fire Department.
He proved pretty conclusively that an exercise doesn't transfer to performance unless you
show somebody how that relates to the performance in their task, such as firefighters.
Even a deadlift doesn't come out when they go back to the job and unless you show them,
that's the technique and this is how it applies to lifting.
And then it works.
So yeah, this transfer of skill is imperative.
Just because you lift and waste doesn't make you resilient to work.
Absolutely.
Well, you're holding a spine at the moment.
So I just want to take a turn.
I heard you on a podcast and I'm scolding myself because I forgot to write it down.
I believe it was a Something Strength podcast and it was a British host, if my memory serves
me right.
But you were talking about the evolutionary element of the two-legged human versus our
ancestors.
I believe in evolution, so I think that there was a progression.
This is my personal belief.
So talk to me about that.
What factors from being all fours to standing upright have contributed to the challenges
that sometimes that we see today?
Yeah, I've got one right here.
These are great models, actually.
They're made by a wonderful friend of mine in Canada called Jerome Fryer called Dynamic
Disc Designs.
So these are cadaver models.
Now the beauty about it is we are the only primate on earth that actually has this curvature
in our spine, that thing called the lumbar lordosis.
So all our friends who are other primates such as chimpanzees, they don't have that
shaped spine.
I actually do a bit of, I'm doing a wonderful bit of work with a fellow Rudy Sorano down
in Miami who's a zookeeper and he looks after the primates and we're doing a little thing
on how primates walk and how humans walk.
The whole evolution of this spine took about, we'll call it four and a half to five million
years for the first evidence of the fossil change where the spine was accommodating to
upright stance.
So from about say four and a half, five million years ago to 400,000 years ago, there's about,
we'll say four and a half million years of change for a spine that made you and me an
apex predator.
And our apex predator depended upon the fact that this person walked and ran.
Now if you're going to walk and run, you've got to have a spine that can actually do that.
It's got to have a particular shape to it.
And even the pelvis itself has to have a particular shape and hip joints in there.
So all these things developed together to enable us to walk and run consistently over
long periods of time.
So we have a beautiful, now if you want to say Adam and Eve was there, that's fine by
me because either way, guess what?
That was a spine that he gave Adam and Eve, right?
And he didn't give it to the other rapes who are supposed to be on all fours for most of
their work.
You can stand them up, but they don't do it really well for very long.
So human spine has a particular purpose and that is to be able to walk and run, but the
load aspects of it are important too.
And that's where Matt Winningwood coming quite well.
You put excessive loads on this for excessive decades and it does have an impact.
Yeah, there are impacts about that.
Stuart McGill will talk about how the spine actually gets a little bit thicker at the
end plates.
That means nutrition decreases.
So discs themselves don't have a blood supply.
They don't have a nerve supply except for the very, very outside.
So if you don't have a blood supply, how the hell do you heal?
Well it changes things quite dramatically because realistically you only get your nutrients
through the end of the bone coming through in diffusion.
Now guess what?
The mechanism by which we get our disc nutrition happens to be walking.
It's what we call cyclic load loading.
So all that happens is you do that up and down, up and down as you walk every step and
that happens to increase the loading of your spine in enough fashion that it assists with
the healing, but it never comes back to its pre-injured state.
Now you want to take up rowing.
Rowing is a fantastic sport.
It also does cyclical nutrition, but what doesn't it do?
Well guess what?
It puts you in that position, flexed.
And guess what?
Rowers have more injuries than any other Olympic sport.
So there you are, cyclical nutrition, but flexion under load repetitively and you've
now got posterior disc injury.
So there is an important relationship to how you load your spine for the various factors.
This is a spine that was made to bear a normal human's body weight, not chucking on protective
vests, loaded material that suddenly puts, and you talk about the fact that a guy who
is 100 pounds overweight sitting in a Lazy Boy.
Yeah, well how much more weight you're going to be carrying in your protective gear?
Could be a nice 60 pound almost there.
So now you put 60 pounds on your body.
Although you might be in shape, work actually demands you're going to be carrying that extra
60.
It has a huge impact.
Especially once you get injured, it has a huge impact.
And now you've got to rehab that person so you can go back and do it again.
That probably means you don't want to teach a first responder how to break the world record
in their power lifting.
Because that's also taking a cost out of their ability to perform their work because they're
doing it outside as well.
So a lot about load management, super performance of your life.
You got to integrate the two things.
Makes sense, doesn't it?
No, it does completely.
What's interesting as well, when I hurt my back, so my straw that broke the camel's back,
no pun intended, was lifting a guy my size, so 170, 180 pounds, had an anxiety attack,
which at the time a lot of people that have those truly feel like they're dying.
So he wanted to go to the hospital, loaded him in the hospital.
Just the way the ambulance was parked, it was at an angle.
So the stretcher wouldn't go in.
So I ended up extending my back and felt a big old snap, ended up completing the trip
to the hospital, getting him out.
And then after I was like, yeah, I've been beating up a lot in my life, but this really
hurts.
I've done something bad.
So long story short, finally get an MRI done.
And I torn three ligaments.
Who was it looking at?
The PT was looking at it when he raised one arm, one of the vertebrae would actually rotate.
So also not good.
But what was incredible was when I was looking back, and I'll get to the therapy in a minute
and what I did to heal it, but when I was looking back, I was like, I did a lot of exercise,
but pretty diligently, I had a good background.
I was lifting pretty correctly overall.
I was doing yoga and what the hell was it that got wrong?
And as I progressed through, yeah, there were imbalances that I identified.
But one of the things that is probably the biggest contributor apart from the sleep deprivation
side was sitting.
Because in the fire service, you think of us being very active, but we sit for the morning
roll call.
We sit to write our reports for our online training.
We sit to drive to the call.
We sit in the back if we're doing the EMS side with the patient.
So there's a huge amount of sitting.
So talk to me about that element, that you can have an acute injury obviously from an
extreme event during a sport, but what are you seeing in sedentary and even in athletic
populations when it comes to the sitting element and how that affects our muscle imbalances?
Well, there's really two important factors there.
If you look at human beings, I got news for you, human beings are very predictable and
you can figure out what the problem is if you are bright enough to understand there's
only three directions human beings move forward and backwards, side to side and rotation.
Three directions, three planes of motion, right?
You can put them in combinations, but there's only the three pure planes.
Right, you got three pure planes.
Now you've also got three components of your spine structure, essentially in any orthopedic
injury and they are the passive elements.
That's your disc, your bone.
They're the things you can't contract.
You got your active elements.
They're the muscles that will attach onto the bones.
They're the things you can't contract.
And then you got your nervous system.
That's basically a software here.
Put it all together.
So the solution, three directions of motion, three components of the system to understand.
It's really not that hard.
They should teach that in first year at university.
Unfortunately, I don't put it all together for people.
So the mechanism of sitting down is passive.
You sit down and you relax into flexion.
That causes, if you imagine, there's your disc material that is relatively hydrated,
a fair bit of fluid.
I'll put that little spine over here so it doesn't fall.
And here's the gross model that says if you put flexion under load consistently and that
load can be used sitting in posterior pelvic tilt, and then you go to pick up your pen
that you just dropped at roll call, welcome to your disc.
Because you've reached its capacity through some load and your upper body is enough load
to do that.
So it bends forward, there's your upper body sheer force on your spine.
And if you've been working consistently and you haven't been, you've been trying to rest,
you've been resting in sitting positions, the load might not have to be significant
to create that last bit of injury.
So the spine itself is a very well evolved structure for walking and running upright,
but it's not evolved for modern society, ergonomic positions.
That's why you got hurt.
It's not the spine's fault.
It's basically the evolution of modern society that's the problem.
So this is where we can have impact.
Now if you've got a person whose disc may be a little bit compromised, the disc material
has been forced backwards, what can you do to help it out?
Well perhaps you put your hands on your hips and bend backwards 10 times, put the load
back there, guess what that's going to do to the disc material?
It's going to send it back towards the center.
So then when you bend over, you've now given yourself a huge capacity for loading.
And it doesn't take very much to do that if you're consistent.
There are some conditions I don't overly recommend that with, but the most common ones are going
to be your disc bulges with a relatively normal spine who doesn't walk enough and doesn't
bend backwards occasionally, which we, our ancestors would have done.
So we know that the forces you place upon that disc are very important.
MRI study show, you actually do it under scans.
You can see you put a body into sideways flexion and you'd find that the disc material moves
to the opposite side.
So we know it's predictable.
There essentially is one of the important parts.
That's your passive system.
You've just taught your body how to put body weight into a position that changes the passive
material and that is a huge way to prevent lower back injuries and even treat lower back
injuries.
All right.
Now, once you've got an incompetent structure there, you're now your passive structure is
injured.
You better get some muscles to make up for it.
So that's the concept behind the core stability.
You know how smart professor Stuart McGill is?
Well, he's giving you the bird, the basic big three, right?
But geez, come on.
McGill's written nearly 300 research papers.
The big three is not everything he ever did.
This is your basics.
This is where you may start and he might not start you there.
He's going to evaluate you.
Now, what does the big three do?
Well, they brace your abs up.
That's control of forward, backward motion.
Then he puts you into a side plank.
Control of side to side motion.
Then he puts you into a bird dog.
Oh, you got control of rotation.
They aren't just made up.
They're actually addressing three planes of human motion to stabilize the initial injury.
Now, you may do them forever, but they're not the only thing you do forever.
I can give you what we call suitcase walks.
I can put a weight on one hand and make you walk very perfectly.
And guess what?
You're suddenly going to stabilize your core into the frontal plane.
And what muscle might do that?
Well, your glutes might help with that too.
Oh, and the glutes extend the hip as well.
So now you've figured out how to address the frontal plane, but you're also getting sagittal
plane.
You combine anatomy to the planes of motion, to the three elements of injury, active, passive,
neurological, and you've now got yourself building a bespoke tailored suit, just like
the best tailors out of several row for back injury.
And all it takes is the understanding of the planes of motion and the components of injury.
And then you look at the ergonomics of the individual, put it together, and I'll take
you back to the Olympics if you need it, or the police and fire games.
Well, this is what's so amazing that I found my personal journey.
And I think more people need to hear that when you have an injury, it's not a death
sentence.
And it really breaks my heart when I hear firefighters, especially young ones that have
some sort of injury and then they're under the knife.
Oh, I'm better now.
It's like you're not better.
Everyone I know has had back injury.
And there may be exceptions to the rule, but a lot of people I know that have had surgery
immediately, there's another surgery and another surgery, another surgery.
I was very fortunate enough having the background that I did to really advocate for my own health,
tell them I didn't want the drugs and the surgeries and went down the chiropractic route,
the PT route.
And on that journey, I came across foundation training.
I don't know if you ever heard of Dr. Eric Goodman.
But yeah.
Oh, yes.
So and then that was another piece in the jigsaw puzzle, Cairo, I mean, all these little
pieces.
But once I understood that, as you just said, if I build that strength of that column of
muscle around my spine and alleviate the pressure on the nerves and then address the issues
of my glutes and my hamstrings that were causing that anterior pelvic tilt, that not only would
I overcome the pain that I was going through, but actually fix the underlying issue, which
is what happened.
I mean, I went back to work after five months and then competed in just like a fundraiser,
a fundraiser, but there was deadlifts and some other things in there and felt amazing
and lifted as much if not more than I've ever lifted pre-injury.
So I think this is the kind of hope that people need to hear that just because you have an
injury and it was a bad injury and I was laid out for weeks and weeks and weeks.
But surgery isn't the only option.
If you can figure out how to rebuild it, if that's applicable to your injury, that you
can have those herniated discs and live an incredible life.
Oh gosh, yeah.
A fellow I work with, a neurosurgeon called David Johnson in Brisbane runs the College
of Functional Movement Clinicians.
Now Dave's a neurosurgeon who sends his patients to his CrossFit gym to learn how to move correctly
rather than perform surgery as a first option.
Now what are the statistics on surgery and good outcomes?
Well, if you've had a fusion, you've got a 50% chance that you'll have to have another
one about five years later, that there will be more back injury.
Now why did that happen?
Well, mainly because the rehabilitation failed.
It wasn't the surgery.
The surgery is probably damn good.
But your rehabilitation was really basically useless.
Why?
Because no one addressed the reason you got injured in the first place.
Your initial injury is entirely predictable.
Now the work of a rehab specialist should be why did you get injured the first time?
I'm not here just to fix you now, make you feel better.
Because realistically, if you look at the stats on that and we can take those statistics,
90% of all people who have one lower back injury have a second infrasot at least.
That's a 90% recurrence rate.
So getting someone better really isn't such a big achievement because 80% of people are
better in four weeks anyway, or feel better.
And realistically, resolution of about 90% of people is over eight weeks.
That's a human body healing.
You had nothing to do with it.
Don't take credit for it.
Your body does natural healing.
But prevent the ongoing injuries that associate to it.
So the same statistics we can look at there is, yep, you heard it once, you'll heard it
again, about 90% chance at a time.
And if you have surgery, you got a 50% chance you'll need something else done in about five
years.
That's because no one's addressing the cause in the medical system appropriately.
And movements, positions, postures can all be influencing what happens to that initial
surgery.
We'll fix that.
There's Ronnie Coleman.
He's got 27 surgeries now.
Yeah, well watch Ronnie every time he goes back in the gym, he's still doing the same
very terrible movements.
But of course it's going to get heard again.
I don't know who is not advising him well, or perhaps he doesn't hear it.
But I do see it and looking to go, well, that's predictable.
You're just flexing your spine on the load again.
No wonder the screws broke.
How about we actually treat it like it should have been from day one?
So I do believe, yeah, I can look at the, you know, when I look at the, the groups and
populations from military to law enforcement, you know, I can look at the paratroopers who
come in who have got spondylolysis, they've got spinal fractures that they've been dealing
with for years and years, but they're not being taught how to move correctly, how to
load correctly and how to heal.
They've just been sent out and someone says, oh, go do pilates.
It's good for your back.
Really?
Well, laying on your back on a, on a bed that goes backwards and forwards is going to help
your spine recover.
Not really, mate.
It's going to help you back to what you have to do.
It's like you did.
Yeah.
When you hurt your, hurt your back, what did you do?
You finished the mission, right?
You finished the task.
And that's essentially what happens with a lot of first responders.
It's funny.
My daughter's, um, competed in jujitsu over a decade at least now.
And in one comp, she was lying on her back and she had, um, she was points ahead.
And she looked at me as I was there, staying there coaching and she goes, I just broke
my toe.
And I said, oh yeah, well, you've got 30 seconds to go on your head and it's not going to break
any worse.
So stick it out.
Did she win?
And that was it.
Yeah, of course.
There we go.
She wins lots.
Yeah.
So she's a, she competes in the world championships quite often.
Wow.
A good little, a good little fighter, but she joined the police force as well.
And um, yeah, now she's doing, um, the nine, she wants to be a paramedic now.
So that's her next plan.
It's an amazing, amazing profession.
It really is.
I mean, the firefight inside is, is incredible.
And when we get the exciting fires and extrications, you know, you're so glad that you do that
job.
But if we swallow our pride and get past the kind of, you know, heroic facade that is a
firefighter in all honesty, most of the actual life saving is done in the medical side.
And so a paramedic, once they get given a patient, she will save so many lives.
It may not be right at the brink of death, but sometimes it's just simple compassion
too.
It's patients that are homeless, that maybe you're found themselves into sex work in desperate
parts of town and maybe her compassion will be the words that, you know, make them turn
a corner.
So it's amazing the kind of spectrum of skills that you have to have.
And it's a beautiful profession.
It is a great thing.
And unfortunately, I think for a lot of the first responders and military is, once you're
on the injured list, you're not being viewed as a very valuable human quite a lot of the
time.
So I can look at one of the firefighter I worked with who suffered a significant injury
extricating a person using the jaws of life in a major truck crash.
Now he was in a really unusual position with a significant load using these things, cutting
someone out for about two hours.
Now he gets a huge disc aggravation out of that and a huge injury.
Now it's career changing, famous career ending.
And they try to fight him at the insurance level about him returning back to the gym.
Well, he was lucky to have the support that he has me and he had somebody else who wrote
medical reports that said, you know what, you're allowed to, you're actually allowed
to deadlift and go to the gym in recovery.
And this is important.
And we had to write letters to tell the doctors that, yeah, the insurance doctors didn't
want him doing that.
Well, we got him through and well, his career has been fine ever since outside of fire now.
Because he felt the support didn't support him once he'd been out.
That's a big part of it.
The support once you leave your family.
One of my best friends had a really bad injury.
He was an Olympic paddler.
So it was the kind of surf ski, the two man surf ski, high, high level and, you know,
great firefighter and had a couple of back injuries.
He had the fusions, I think, and was just terrified to do any kind of real PT because
he was worried that people were watching him and following him and they'd call bullshit
on his ultimate medical retirement.
And it's such a backwards system because you want people to heal and that psychological
fear like, oh, I can't do too much.
What if they see me is such bullshit.
Like your ability to function as a human being is not the same as your ability to be a firefighter
where you throw on a hundred pounds worth of gear and maybe climb 30, 40 stories and
then go to work.
That's a total different level that you have to operate at, but we should not have an environment
where our responders are so scared to rehab that they actually make it even worse for
themselves.
Yes, that's so important.
And that support an injured individual really needs.
They need to have someone on their side and they don't need their so-called employer fighting
against them.
That perception that they're not being helped.
Yeah, there's so much to that.
So yes, there's a huge component of the support system to enable a person to rehabilitate
because weight training for a lot of people is their mental release.
That's the thing they need to be able to function well is to actually go to the gym and do their
time.
Now, talk to me about the posterior chain or the muscles in the back of the body.
I worked with them.
I went and trained once with Julian Pono, the guy behind StrongFit.
And it was again, another really eye-opening, completely non-academic experience.
And I realized again, the kind of backstory of my injury that I did have this anterior
pelvic tilt.
When we did overhead yoke carries, you could see my hips kicked out to one side, just like
you were talking about.
So the suitcase carry on the weak side was the remedy for that.
But then when you understand that and you look at the average person with the pronation
of the hips and again, the excessive arch in their back, it seems to be everywhere at
the moment.
And then when you look at CrossFit, and this is where Julian first got into it, a lot of
us, and I did CrossFit for 16 years, a lot of it is explosive.
So we're not developing that strict motion that's activating our glutes and our hamstrings
and the rear delts that are creating that strong posture.
So what are you seeing in society in general as far as imbalances from whether it's sitting,
whether it's incorrect lifting that are also contributing to injuries, including the spine?
We can go back to your evolutionary spine, can't we?
What was it supposed to do?
It's supposed to have a curvature in it.
That's important.
But most people are spending their times out of that position.
Now you mentioned the lumbar spine lordosis with the anterior pelvic tilt.
In fact, you're pretty much one of the rare ones.
That's not common.
There was an era a long time ago, and I think it was Tracy and Robertson wrote an article
on T Nation about Neanderthal no more.
And they were indicating that people sat in anterior pelvic tilt.
Bullshit they do.
You sit in that chair right now.
You're in posterior pelvic tilt.
You're slumped.
That's that posture slump.
You're not sitting in anterior pelvic tilt.
That's dead wrong.
So that just shows you people who can write articles and it influences a lot of people
and it probably actually came from a chiropractor previously, I believe.
So there was this theory that you're sitting in anterior pelvic tilt when you're sat.
Well, that's rubbish.
You don't you sit in posterior pelvic tilt about 99.9% of people will.
So of course, sitting in posterior pelvic tilt, then you go and do a nice butt wink
in the gym and you do that repetitively under load and of course, there's your L5S1 posterior
disc bulge.
So realistically is the biomechanics of the tissues being exposed to load usually in a
posterior position.
So if you're in anterior pelvic tilt and you've got a lumbar lordosis, guess what?
It's probably not creating a disc bulge on you.
In fact, I've never seen anyone get a disc bulge from that posture.
Basically, it can't happen anyway, but you'll get a stress fracture out of it.
And why are your back muscles tight?
Well, perhaps they're the ones that are working.
What's not working?
Well, most guys over 40 have got no ass and they can't hold a front plank for 30 seconds
to save their life, but their back muscles are having to do all the work.
So when people come and see me, it's such a common thing.
I've got a bad back.
No, you don't.
In fact, you got a really good back.
You got a back that's working so damn hard to make up for all the things that aren't
working.
You don't have a bad back.
You got a damn good back, but you got no ass and you basically can't even do a squat.
And if I lay you on your back on the ground, you can't get up off the ground without looking
like a tortoise that's on its back in the midday sun.
You can't move like a human being is supposed to move.
You got no abs to get you up off the ground and you got no ass to extend your hip.
So no wonder your back is annoyed.
It's working overtime.
It's fatigued.
It's the thing that's not recovering.
How about we help it out?
Get hip extension strength, get abdominal strength, and you're probably going to be
immediately better.
And then we're going to do that every day for the rest of your life.
Because when you feel better, it doesn't mean that you've healed.
It just means you don't feel a problem.
And of course, if you go back to your previous things, well, it's going to happen again,
probably more than likely.
So when we institute a rehabilitation program, I would say my first instance and a person
who comes to see me, I might give them a series of things to do that I've analyzed and I'll
look at them and I'll grab them by the ears and say, you do this twice a day for the rest
of the next three months.
There's no negotiation.
This is twice a day.
Then it's once a day for the rest of your life.
When do you get to stop?
And they look and they go, never?
Good.
You got the message.
All right.
Exactly it.
I don't care if you feel better tomorrow.
It will take three months for you to learn the movement patterns unconsciously.
It takes about 10,000 repetitions.
We often say to learn a movement.
So I don't care if you feel good tomorrow.
That doesn't mean it's over.
I care enough that, hey, you know, I knew what I was doing.
So now you feel better.
But you got to do it every day for the next three months.
And there's no discussion.
It's twice a day.
Then you get to be able to do it once a day for eternity.
And if you go to the gym, it's probably that's when you do it before you start lifting.
And those people do not come and see me for problems ever again.
They might ring up on the phone five years later and said, I've hurt my back, but I haven't
been doing your exercises.
Can you tell me what they were again?
And I laugh and we laugh and I send them the exercise.
They don't need to come back in.
So yeah, all you got to do is correct that human body back to what it was essentially
structurally intended to perform.
And that means get yourself some mass and some abs back and you will find that your
back will appreciate the help.
It's not a whole lot more complex realistically to get you to the first level of success.
If you want to continue on with other tasks, then we progress to that as well.
So you can come in with like Brian Carroll, a significant huge disc extrusion fractured
spine, but you're going to end up breaking the world record about 10 years later.
You can do it, but you have to adhere to all the work in between.
You don't get a day off.
I am as guilty as the next man when it comes to pain being the teacher.
And now I'll say I wasn't in pain and I'm doing it now.
So I'm walking the walk.
But what I did is after that horrendous injury where I couldn't pick up my son, couldn't
put it on my shoes, I mean, just absolutely humbling, was diligent.
But then I got to the point where I felt good and it didn't hurt.
And I stopped doing some of the things and then had a tweak, lifting a sandbag and then
kind of went back into it again.
But it's, you know, it is that roller coaster and it's trying to forge that discipline that
it's as, you know, as repetitious as brushing my teeth.
And I'm on that again now.
What would you say to the people out there that have got out of pain but are unaware
of the fact that they are just on a countdown back to injury again?
You will need to see a very, very competent individual who can assess you and set up a
protocol that you need to do for the rest of your life.
How many of those individuals are there in the world?
Not very many.
So that's a tough one.
You know, unfortunately, social media is a huge information source for a lot of people.
And social media doesn't have fact checkers for anything but politics.
So when it comes to science, you can say anything you want.
You can go out there and say the earth is flat.
Right?
No fact checker is going to stop that.
No fact checker is going to say it doesn't matter how you squat.
Of course it does.
But people are going to post out there and say it doesn't.
So unfortunately, social media is the last place you're realistically going to be able
to understand how to find the right information.
So yeah, contacting me is a good one.
But I teach professionals now more than I actually treat patients.
So my work is in education.
So I'll be in the US from September, probably through to November-ish.
This time mostly up the East Coast, but I'll end in LA and San Diego for a little time.
So yeah, there are professionals I've taught and who I believe are competent in knowing
what to do in quite a few states.
Worldwide, yeah, I've taught around the world.
I'm off to Paris in about a month's time to work with someone over there.
Yeah, I've taught in England, Europe, Asia, Middle East.
There's people out there who I know have a clue.
But how do you find them?
That's a tough one.
Well, I want to go back to your youth again for a couple of reasons.
Firstly to kind of hear your journey into the injury.
But before we do that, it's really interesting coming from the UK to America.
And I've told this story many times, but I'll just kind of keep it short.
When I first moved over here, I was blown away by how many people, how many deconditioned
people had a, I could have, should have, would have been story.
I call it Uncle Rico story, where they were going to be in the major leagues, in the NBA,
in the NFL, had it not been for shoulder, knee, et cetera, et cetera.
And then fast forward another couple of decades, I have my own children, one of which is a
track runner at the moment.
And I start seeing from a parenting point of view, and you hear again, my fellow firefighters,
the kids are playing travel ball and they're pitching camps and strength and conditioning
camps and all these things.
And I realized that in the UK, there was longevity in sport.
We didn't play at a high level, most of us, unless you were an amazing football player.
But when we left school, you would see pub leagues and people would keep playing football
like into their fifties and sixties.
What I saw in the US was this elite level of performance in high schools and colleges.
And then a massive drop off in the general population after.
So what has been your observation with all these different kinds of perspectives that
you have coming from Australia, working with elite athletes and being a youth athlete yourself?
Realistically, the only difference between the athlete and the regular person is the
loading and volume of work that you have to do to pursue that.
But technique always matters.
Technique matters.
Whether you're going to go unload the dishwasher or whether you're going to pick up your sandbag
or your kid or you're going to go squat at the gym today because it's CrossFit.
The movement patterns themselves are essentially human movements that you should be taught
to do well.
So yeah, the same thing in the US, you're encouraged to be a high performer.
And if you're not a high performer, then you tend not to be able to pursue things outside
of that.
We could probably say to some extent that CrossFit was useful to help change that a
bit because people who weren't going to go to the gym went to CrossFit.
That's a gym, but no one realized it.
And then, of course, after you go to CrossFit, now, of course, you're going to get people
who go to CrossFit Games approach.
But there's a lot of good movement patterns for people who just want to move well.
Unfortunately, I don't think the coaching was that great in the early stages or the
timing, but it certainly has improved a lot that I've seen.
So you get people who went to CrossFit trying to do max hour deadlifts to see what your
max deadlift was or how many repetitions you could survive.
Not a really great healthy idea, but that seems to have changed a little bit better.
So you found people who started to move better in the US, I think it was as well, who were
doing more active participation who weren't elites.
But that hasn't always been there.
It's sort of been, oh, well, you didn't make it.
Enjoy watching it on TV.
It's changing a lot more now.
People are more aware of moving more.
But once again, the education system is not established to make truths evident to everybody.
And I don't think it ever will be.
So I have no belief that a universal truth that may be already established is ever going
to take over the minds of people who have mindsets otherwise.
I don't think you're going to change the world when you find the right answer.
Because other people are invested in other things.
There are practitioners out there who will show you your x-rays.
And they'll sit you in the room and come back five minutes later, making sure you're obsessed
over the x-rays.
And they'll tell you how bad they are.
And if you give them $10,000, they get 10% off for the next 100 treatments to make sure
you come back for your treatment twice a week.
Yeah, there's business models out there.
Now, they're being sold all the time by professionals.
You're not going to change that.
And I don't get upset about the fact that you can't change essentially what is a human
social construct.
All we can do is help the ones who come to us.
And we try and help professionals get better educated.
But we're not going to change the world.
We're just going to help those who want to be changed and are prepared to learn.
What about the youth athlete themselves?
Where I'm seeing a dangerous area, and this is maybe a little bit more retrospectively,
is a lot of these children are squeezing the performance out them.
But it's at the detriment of their wellness and longevity post high school or college.
And it's not going to stop.
Get ready.
That's exactly what's going to happen.
You're going to get a kid whose parents are looking at making a high performance athlete.
They're not going to back it off because it's competitive out there.
And when you're a kid, you're incredibly resilient.
You don't find, say, professional football players in their 40s very often, do you?
Well, your tissue does change.
Your collagen gets stiffer.
So you're not going to perform that same sport very well later compared to when you were
younger.
And so when you're younger and you're performing really well, no one's going to tell you very
well to back off.
Now you might find some intelligent coaches, but it's not going to actually change the
system because parents are going to want their kid performing well and making it to the pros.
And then we'll deal with the consequences after.
And as a kid, you're feeling good.
It's hard to coach outstanding movement and look at it this way.
When I was playing baseball, there's no way I would have thrown under 100 balls a night.
Not a chance.
I would have taken under 100 swings a night.
That would have been just getting happy.
You know, play for the next six or eight hours with your friends.
So yeah, your capacity for recovery is huge at that point.
And you're learning great motor skills.
They're the things that will take you forwards.
So if we were able to introduce good movement patterns to people in high school gyms, as
in this is the way that you lift, all right, we're going to correct that squat.
We're going to correct that deadlift.
So that person then transitions after high school to be able to safely train without
injury later.
Most of the big injured guys who I've met will also the same thing.
I wish I had learned this in high school.
Well then you're going to run into the academics who will tell you that the research says there's
no evidence.
So now you've got medicine actually working against teaching people how to move well because
you're going to get dickheads who sit in chairs in academic places, publishing their own research,
who don't treat human beings very often.
They don't have a record of success, who are going to set the standards to which you're
going to go into education because these are the academics.
That's the problem with what we currently face.
You don't have clinicians who deal with great people who are setting the rules.
And I don't see a way that that can change.
Things are moving too fast.
Academics aren't going to step out of their chairs and universities aren't going to suddenly
be funded by governments, except in some countries.
And that's where I've noticed that if I look at some of the Eastern countries like China,
Japan, I'm seeing better research coming out of there medically than I do in the West.
And it seems to be a bit of a better scientific support coming out of those countries for
pure science.
Another common denominator, I've had almost 900 episodes now, it seems like the young
athletes that were multi-sport athletes seem to foster a higher level of performance and
longevity, lower injuries than the ones that were just specializing.
Oh, for sure.
Specialization makes you really good at one thing.
And that's what you get paid to do.
Someone's going to be at the Super Bowl coming up.
They're a punter.
Guess what they do?
That's it.
They're specialists.
You know, this is what performance is about.
It might be your basketball center.
That's what they do really well.
You got your baseball reliever comes in in ninth innings.
That's what he does.
So yeah, we get paid for specialization.
That's for sure.
And as a firefighter, guess what, you get paid for specialization as well.
And as a military person, you get paid for specialization as well.
So these are the natural ways through which pathways will tend to take you.
Don't come to me for a hand injury.
Okay.
I'm not a specialist in that area.
Give me a spine.
Give me a back.
You'll be okay.
So yeah, specialties are the things that pursue us forwards.
Most of the time, we actually enjoy what we do too.
So it tends to make us move in that direction.
What's interesting about the fire service is that we are specialists, obviously, and
we have certain moves.
But like you said, it could be ascending, you know, with a hundred pounds of gear on
our back.
It could be climbing inside a minivan trying to cut someone free from the steering wheel.
So our planes of movement are completely unpredictable.
Unpredictable and loaded in a way that the human spine was never expecting to load consistently
for a career.
That human body was made to run and hunt prey and bring it back to the group for a period
of time.
And basically you probably say 60, 70 years, a good spine would last.
Well, now you're going to put a hundred, a hundred pound on that body, which didn't evolve
to have a hundred pound of body.
Because essentially one of the important parts about human evolution is calorie efficiency.
So when you've been forward to pick something up off the ground, like your sock or your
lumbar, spine muscles actually sit in here, turn off when you head to the bottom, you
use the elastic recoil of the tissues.
Your body learns to use less calories to perform tasks.
Well, that was a survival mechanism when calories weren't available.
Now you do that with a significant load and that's not the expectation that you do that
repeatedly.
So we do put our bodies into obtuse and unusual positions, which we should be able to do.
But you're not supposed to do a lot over a long period of time.
And that's where it is.
We're incredibly resilient.
We can really do a hell of a lot before we get to the injury.
And that's why you tend to see those peak injury years tend to be in that 20s, 30s,
40s.
The good news is as you get older, you just get stiffer, but you actually statistically
will have less pain, but you just don't move as well.
That's because realistically the spine gets a bit stiffer and the muscles and the ligaments,
especially the collagen, that's to get stiffer.
So that stiffness becomes part of reality.
Well, you don't get stiff junior athletes.
They're very flexible, very collagenous.
They have a different body to an older athlete.
Now it doesn't mean that a person is going to be hurting more when they're stiff, but
we do need to make people move well in those early years and translating into their adulthood.
And that'll translate to a better older age.
So we can really teach great movement patterns that people have never been taught.
That's why like I have Matt Wenning, if you look at him working with his fire departments,
his statistics on insurance claims, they've gone, they've dropped off the cliff.
He's saving the insurance companies millions, but he's working his fire departments with
really brilliant work.
Often doesn't even have them lift a weight for six months.
They have to learn and earn the right to actually have a weight.
Yeah, that's huge.
Teach movement patterns without load before you load them.
Yeah.
Well, I love Matt's philosophy because he's building the strength of his firefighters.
And it's interesting hearing all these different kind of ways of training us.
And a lot of them are phenomenal.
I personally love the strongman stuff, the sleds and the sandbags kind of mimic advancing
hose, dragging people, carrying equipment, et cetera, et cetera.
But when you listen to Matt talking about the strength, it makes perfect sense because
if we are going to have endurance, muscular endurance, our raw strength is a big part
of that.
And being a smaller firefighter as far as I'm not, I'm tall, but I'm slim.
It was always a strength component that I had to chase.
I had the motor, but I had to have that increase my strength so that, as you said, the jaws
of life, for example, weren't crushing me one minute into an extrication.
So here we are almost 900 episodes down on your podcast.
Have you ever had a professional come on who has experience who says it doesn't matter
how you move?
Just lift.
Have you had anyone say that?
Not a single person.
Thank God.
Yeah.
Well, there's a bunch of academics out there who are sitting in academic chairs who you
can invite and they'll tell you that they don't deal with human beings.
They're just making money out of the academic world and they're influencing the professionals
who are now graduating who are going to say that same rubbish.
So you're dealing with people who have established reputations for success and they all say the
same thing.
Guess what?
Movement matters.
How you move matters.
How you transfer to your task matters.
Every one of us.
But your poor graduating student who's coming out of university now will tell you the opposite
because that's what the universities are teaching them.
And go to social media and those kids who graduated yesterday and some of them even
having graduated are trying to shit on great clinicians like Professor Stuart McGill saying
he's wrong because their academics say that doesn't matter.
That's the problem that we have is that the information that's coming through to our current
professionals is full of rubbish.
They're not looking at the professionals have great successes.
You wouldn't hear Stuart McGill's name in Australia at a university.
No way they're going to mention him even though he's got 300 research papers and he's probably
the most competent biomechanist on the planet.
Oh yeah.
You're going to have your internet trolls who are going to say he doesn't know what
he's talking about and dead pig spines.
Yeah.
Well guess what?
The dead pig spine study shows exactly the same mechanism of injury and guess what?
It shows flexion and load relationships.
So in fact he didn't show anything different.
Yeah.
It's a very unfortunate thing.
You're getting a lot of people out there who learn how to say words like straw man argument.
You're making a logical fallacy.
Well fuck yeah.
How's that going to help you patient?
You can sit there and dribble on social media but you sure as hell can't treat a patient.
I think another thing that I've noticed is who trusts that practitioner with their own
body.
So for example foundation training you had Lance Armstrong, you had Kelly Slater, you
had Laird Hamilton, you had all these elite performers that tried it and use it.
These are people that obviously spent their lives investing in their health and diving
into the education and all the work.
So that's kind of one thing that I look like who trusts this person and I guarantee you
if you look at the academic side you're probably not going to find elite performers adding
their name to their work.
No you'll find none.
I often say that.
Tell me who you've actually done anything with.
I'll be interested.
Well it's always crickets when you say tell me who.
I've got probably four people I would have spoken to this week who have squatted or will
squat 400 kilograms.
Yeah.
It's not me.
That's performance.
I'll help you.
We'll just put another £200 on your chest.
Yeah exactly.
Alright well I want to get to shoulders as well but just before we do the tactical profession
you mentioned the reverse hyper.
Why not for all people?
Here's the beauty of it.
Thank you Professor McGill because you taught me this many years ago.
I actually think I first read his papers in 1996 first met him in 2015.
Alright so here's the spine.
We've basically got two things to consider.
Compression load and then we have shear forces.
Shear force means I'll get my little Chinese model out again.
Compression bends forward and the upper body weight has a tendency to do that.
That's anterior shear.
Other direction.
Posterior shear.
So you've got compression.
Anterior shear.
Posterior shear.
They're the physical effects of muscle contraction.
You have a person who has a disc bulge and when you put them on the reverse hyper the
posterior muscles here pull you into posterior shear.
Now for somebody posterior shear is stabilizing.
It helps you stabilize.
You're the person who loves the reverse hyper.
But the person who posterior shear from your lumbar muscles that will pull backwards that
may aggravate somebody and that's because they're posterior shear intolerant.
Now that person's not going to appreciate the reverse hyper.
That person you may have to you have to begin to find what muscles can you use to create
the stability and tightness around the spine that then allows them to tolerate posterior
shear.
So I would have a person for example lay on the ground lift up both your legs.
How does that feel?
That hurts.
All right brace your abs.
Ready we're going to do a front plank 30 seconds.
Now I want you to brace your abs lift your legs off the ground.
Does that hurt?
No it doesn't.
Good.
So basically your normal posterior shear pull aggravates you.
But now I've taught your abs to help stabilize you and posterior shear now is part of the
OK team.
And now I'm starting to construct you a rehab program.
I've just based around the fact that you needed some abs to work.
And now I'm going to test your glutes and I can do the same thing.
So we can look at basically that's where the reverse hyper comes in and it came from the
great Louis Simmons who's had years and years of back injuries and he basically did a reverse
hyper and started getting better.
Well was the reverse hyper fixed him or was it about time he got better?
That's also in there.
So there's a lot of concepts behind it.
Every exercise you can evaluate.
Does that reproduce your problem?
Does that produce this?
OK do this exercise.
Let's do it again.
Oh that feels better.
Great.
Now we know what we're doing.
Human beings are easy.
Forward backward side to side rotation.
Know the muscles that perform them.
One movement hurts.
OK let's do these muscles.
Test it again.
Oh it doesn't hurt now.
Change this movement pattern.
Oh that feels good.
Great.
Now we've got your program starting up twice a day every day for the rest of your life
or for three months once a day for the rest of your life and then we'll add more on top
of it.
It's not that hard.
Absolutely not.
Well moving up the body then.
So now we're at the shoulders.
When I look at again my slight anterior carriage I think about all the years sitting all the
years working in front and I didn't grow up in a generation that had devices in their
hands all the time.
Obviously my son's era does now.
So you've got that.
And then again in CrossFit when I'm looking at you know the way that we keep the pullups
and you know there's no real strict barbell rows or anything.
We're not doing a lot of posterior work on the upper body either.
So there's a couple of contributing factors.
Never had an injury specifically had impingement but and I'm working now to kind of rectify
that.
Talk to me about what you're seeing.
Fix it for you now.
Let's do it.
I'll fix that for you now.
That's pretty quick.
All right.
Once again pretty freaking easy.
All right.
Now here's here's a typical shoulder problem.
I got pain here.
Let me find a finger.
There we go.
Front of the shoulder.
That's where most people tell me the pain is right.
That's the most common one you're going to get.
What sits under there.
Your bicep tendon.
You know you walk in the physical therapist or whatever dry needles massages things don't
get better.
Send you off for a scan.
Presses presses on there and said yeah that hurts.
That's your bicep tendon scan comes back.
You got biceps tendinopathy.
Go off see the sports physician ultrasound guided cortisone injection may make you feel
better.
Well guess what.
It's not your freaking bicep tendon.
It's a problem.
The bicep tendon referral spot comes from a muscle behind the shoulder called the infraspinatus.
Now out of your neck around about the C5 the fifth nerve root comes down contributes to
nerve areas there and it splits basically in half.
Half goes down the front.
That's your muscular cutaneous nerve.
There's one that goes over the back called a suprascapular nerve.
Now infraspinatus is supplied by scuprascapular nerve.
So if a competent professional happens to test the trigger point there and you got a
person with enough chronic history they'll probably go I'm feeling that right in the
front right now and the person is pushing behind you.
And that's simply what that's called referred pain I prefer to call it misconstructed.
The brain is not getting the location correct.
Now that's not uncommon.
You can have a person who has pain in their calf muscle from sciatica.
Well yeah you got a disc injury that's basically three feet away from it.
So the location is not really really good is it.
The brain doesn't always give you a location very well and that's why a lot of additions
are crap because they don't realize that and they don't think about that.
So this pain at the front of the shoulder will be due to infraspinatus distress.
What's the most common exercise you're going to get somebody given.
Hmm external rotation.
Well that's great you've just told a marathon runner to go for another run.
The poor thing's fatigued as hell anyway and now you're going to give it more fatigue.
What's the solution.
Why is infraspinatus pissed off.
Because as you start to get there your postural position is your shoulders are forward.
That means your rhomboids and scapular retractors are basically not doing their job.
So now your pec minor is tight in the front here.
Oh yeah that's tight.
Great you're tight here.
You got shoulder pain here but your solution happens to be your shoulder blades connection
to your spine.
Now that means twice a day every day you're going to do the scapular stabilizing and strengthening
exercises for your rhomboids.
Not only that but I'm going to combine that with a postural move that makes you put your
hands by your side and externally rotate your palms outwards.
You do that guess what happens to your shoulder blades.
They retract.
So there's external rotation combined with scapular retraction.
And now I can put you under a bench press because I'm going to show you how to use that
technique with your lats to put a load on you and you suddenly stand up and go I've
been on a bench press for five years now I've got no pain.
What the hell.
Yeah well sometimes I can get that done in an hour with a person.
Sometimes you correct the motor pattern you put things deactivation actually exists.
Activation is a short and term for post activation performance enhancement.
PAPA.
That's a principle of physiology.
All muscles are influenced by their previous contractions.
So when you do an activation movement which could be for example with your glutes we might
do a particular glute movement.
I'm going to give you a 50 reps and then I'll put you into a squat position with a band
around your knees so that you're then transferring the activation to the task.
Now I take the band off your knees and I make you squat.
Now suddenly you don't have knee pain.
All we just did was activation insert into performance performance.
Same thing McGill shows the firefighters learning how to deadlift.
Great exercise.
But now how's it transferred to task showed the task.
So shoulder rehab.
Yeah.
But spectacularly misunderstood.
And I guess so many people who see so many eminent professionals who diagnose them with
things that have got nothing to do with their problem.
They may have those other problems but they're not the reason they're coming to see them.
So shoulders.
The biggest thing like you said is postural.
Everyone's sitting here protracted shoulders.
Well what's the answer to protracted shoulders?
How about you retract them?
Shit.
What?
How simple is this?
But don't worry.
The evidence doesn't show that the data doesn't say it.
Yeah.
So seriously you read the evidence you need to know what the evidence says.
So I read a wonderful thing that said activation of your shoulder work doesn't change the shoulder
thing.
Yeah.
When you read the methods in that particular study that came out it was once a week for
about four weeks with a therapist.
So you mean you're doing it once a week.
Well that's what doesn't work.
It's not that you didn't do it.
It's your volume's wrong.
It's amazing.
I mean there's studies out there that show cigarettes are good for you and fast food.
You know what I mean?
If the right person is funding a study they can prove anything to be true.
Well let's say nicotine is not a bad drug.
Nicotine actually works very well for preventing quite some neurological disorders.
It's actually very interesting.
Used with modafinol it actually appears to have a correction of MDMA damage in the brain.
How's that?
Interesting.
Nicotine itself is not the evil.
And I got to say it's so funny that pretty much I haven't met a military person who didn't
walk in who didn't have some form of basically nicotine salt.
Yeah.
And you know what?
A lot of them have to perform and it does assist with performance of the brain.
So there is a relationship.
So yeah smoking is bad for you but maybe nicotine isn't.
No I've heard that.
I mean I've had military sleep experts and other people on and it's exactly that.
I mean it's a nicotine pill they're given.
They're not chewing tobacco.
They're not smoking tobacco.
But yeah I mean as a stimulant it's definitely one of the ones that they seem to approve.
Yeah and there's a lot more of it I've seen used in sports performance lately.
It seems to be I mean Andrew Huberman who's obviously runs his podcast.
Seen him advocated.
Tucker Carlson, there's another fellow who uses these nicotine salts as well.
So yeah there it is.
Smoking is bad for you.
Yeah but maybe nicotine isn't.
But don't worry we'll just stick it all together because it's too hard to figure out.
I've got to say the military guys are coming in like you know I've used the three milligram
nicotine salts.
These guys are coming in with 28 and 40 milligram ones.
Their tolerances are spectacular.
Yes absolutely.
Well again sleep deprived you know group that we work with.
I want to say just one thing with the shoulders before we progress I want to talk about body
dysmorphia quickly.
One of the I forget I think it was Eric Goodman that showed me this but they said to relax
your shoulders and then you know do basically a forward bend and then he said just like
you just told us you know pull your shoulders back activate your lats and then try and round
your back and you can't.
So I didn't realize how important again that shoulder stability was especially on a dead
lift in maintaining you know the structure of the spine when we're lifting.
Yeah I just had one of my athletes who came and saw me a great fellow I've known for a
while and he was getting ready for a comp and he tore his lats on a 400 kilo deadlift.
He said that was the most painful experience he'd had and he's been through a lot of experiences
and I could see why he tore it.
He had little lats engagement in that lift.
The weight was above where he should have been and instead of being able to set his
back well with his lats he let them go and there he's got you know 400 kilograms and
there's your lat tear.
So it is a very important thing.
Now what happens when a baby first is born what's the first movement that it starts to
really work with?
Turns the head.
Now if you put a baby on its front what's the first movement that happens?
The head lifts.
What does the head lift do?
Turns on your spinal musculature.
So yeah you can't slump your back when you lift your head.
And there's that relationship that Eric's showing you.
It's that if you put your body in certain positions muscles activate with the expectation
of stability and that's as basic a primitive movement as you're going to get.
So yeah the body follows the head doesn't it?
So where are the eyes looking?
That's a fairly good direction.
That's where your body's going to also think about going.
So there Eric's showing you that this movement combines beautifully the scapular control
and then you lift.
You're going to be okay.
Now the beauty about this if you do a lot of great technique work what happens when
you hit a max weight?
Your technique will possibly break down as you'll see in Olympic weightlifters.
Yeah but you build such a capacity for it that it doesn't matter because you're only
doing that rarely.
Don't do shit technique for a long period of time and then go to your max because that's
where it pays out.
The best lifters all have great technique and maybe it will fail that top weight.
But here's an interesting one.
The top 10 squats in human history as far as absolute weight go have a look at how they
move.
There is zero knee movement across the frontal plane.
They are dead set.
You can't move a weight at absolute limits 400 kilos plus without perfect position.
You will not get away with doing this.
You'll get the way with doing that if you're a female who's setting the world record in
a deadlift or a squat for example but you've got 200 kilograms.
Yeah it's not 400.
Everything relates to absolute load and that's what a lot of people who don't understand
the science behind it.
Oh look this person does that.
This one does this.
Yeah but what's the absolutes do?
100% perfection.
So you see absolute technical evidence at absolute weight.
That was the humbling thing about being in CrossFit because I ended up coaching and I
agree with you completely.
We were woefully ill equipped early on in the CrossFit years.
I didn't specifically do CrossFit coaching that much.
I kind of loved the strongman stuff just from a tactical athlete point of view so that's
where I ended up kind of focusing on.
You'd watch an Olympic lifter doing a snatch and then you'd watch your regular joes doing
a snatch and unable to do an overhead squat with X amount and then expecting to be able
to snatch it and it's like we're missing the point.
You watch these incredible athletes that spend hours and hours and hours doing these movements.
That's why they can catch that weight.
So I think as CrossFit kind of matured, I think there was a lot of humility that needed
to take place and then we started getting Chad Vaughan and some of these incredible
experts in each of these fields coming in and doing more workshops and then the coaches
that really were ingrained in CrossFit really started to flourish and understand what they
were teaching.
It wasn't ill intention but we jumped into a range of modalities that was so varied from
gymnastics to Olympic lifting to all the things that was why people were getting hurt because
we really as coaches just weren't equipped to look at the human, how they moved, approach
them and tell them that they had to pump the brakes and give them a PVC pipe for example
and then just like you're saying with Matt, give them an on ramp where they have earned
the right to even lift the weight.
So beautiful isn't it, earn the right.
We'll have to translate that into Latin and just put it somewhere.
And then I get tattooed.
But there it is, yeah, earn the right.
So the challenge we have is professionals in our fields, medical fields are not educated
very well to individuals who have injuries from realistically extreme occupations such
as military and first responder.
And you've got to find a professional who has experience with those individuals and
an experience that means bringing them back to excellence.
And there's some good ones out there.
That's the thing about it.
It's just tough when you're in an area where you don't have a lot of support.
Absolutely.
Well I've heard you talk about proprioception a lot.
One of the things I love to do, I'm not out running marathons barefoot or anything but
I try and be out of shoes as much as I can.
I try and lift barefoot as much as I can.
I just feel like I'm more connected with the floor.
I feel like my body is more aware of where everything is.
What is your perspective?
I know it's more than just barefoot.
What is your perspective of getting out of shoes as much as you can?
For the right, let's put everything in context.
Everything is right for the right person to some extent.
So there are people who need to squat with heels.
There are people who should squat with bare feet.
There's a lot of things that are related to the assessment to know who's who because
their particular hip sockets, lever lengths, muscle mass, various things contribute to
it.
But the concept of proprioception, which was a term that was coined in 1906 by Lord Sherrington,
who won a Nobel Prize in regard to the physiology of the nervous system.
Essentially that was one of the big things.
Where's my little model?
I've got a good model.
There's another model, a sick one.
In spinal research, for example, we tend to talk about three muscles.
We talk about the thoracic extenders, superficial, they're called iliocostalis and longissimus.
Iliocostalis and longissimus actually have lumbar components.
So there's two of those.
And then there's a third one underneath called multifidus that attaches to the spinal processes.
Right.
There's actually a fourth muscle that gets ignored in research in regard to spinal rehab.
And that's because it's not big enough to produce force.
And that's this little fellow there called.
That one's going to be your intertransversari muscle.
They sit between them.
And then you've also got another one in here in between there called the interspinale muscle.
Those muscles have a high lot of what we say are muscle spindles.
That means their job is to tell your body is positioned in space.
People who have had low back injury have a disturbance of knowing where their body is
in space.
Your dry needling is not going to fix that.
Your stretching is not going to fix that.
Your massage isn't going to fix that.
Proprioceptive rehab does.
How do you start proprioceptive rehab?
Here's a good test for people.
I like this one.
All right.
A nice test we did.
I did this in a workshop with some professors a few years ago.
I said, everyone stand up, put your hands on your hips and bend backwards once.
Now tell me how that feels and how far you went.
Remember it.
Now stand on your right foot.
Shut your eyes for 30 seconds.
Then we went to the left foot.
Shut your eyes 30 seconds.
Did that twice.
Re-examine your backward bend.
And pretty much universally everyone went zip so much further.
All right.
So what happened?
Why does standing on one foot suddenly improve your lumbar spine movement?
Proprioception.
Your body's ability to give you movement because it knew where it is in space.
Now this is me working as a clinician figuring things out because I'm working with weight
trainers and I'm teaching them how to work with unstable weights to enhance their proprioception.
But on a normal human being, proprioception is actually important to rehab as well.
So your gen pop person still needs to rehab their proprioception.
It's an imperative.
It's that third part of the triad.
Passive system, active system, neurological rehab.
Big missing component.
Realistically, I think Vladimir Yandere back in about 1964 was talking about it.
No one else forgot about it because he was Czechoslovakian and most people didn't read
his work.
It's all there.
It's all in science, but it's not within the last five years.
So you're not allowed to read it if you're at university.
Is that one of the components that factors in to the psychological element of rehabbing
an injury?
Because what I've seen within myself first and then with people is even though structurally
they may have rehabbed to the point where they are safe to do those movements, that
fear almost creates instability.
Fear probably prevents them from challenging their stability.
It doesn't really create the instability.
It probably stops them going there.
So I did some work with a very famous individual recently.
It was quite an amusing one.
He's a martial artist, teaches a lot, wonderful fellow.
And he said, I asked him, what can't you do?
So show me, tell me.
He says, well, I can't do this particular movement where I've got to get off the ground
with a gun in my hand and control an opponent.
He said, it's integral.
That's what I teach.
He said, I can't do it.
And I said, OK, shut your eyes.
I want you to do it in your head.
Can you do it?
Go through it now.
And then he just opened his eyes and said, I can't imagine it.
I can't think of doing it.
And I just said, shit, exactly.
There's that sudden, if you can't do it in your head, you aren't going to do it physically.
So then all we do is we supply the exercises.
So I did the activation work with him in the various areas where he was weak.
And then I made him get on the ground.
I didn't give him 10 seconds.
I just, as soon as the last exercise was down on the ground, now get up, go.
And it was it.
It was like, OK, just go.
And he just stood up and goes, shit, just did it.
Yeah, we just broke the barrier because I didn't give him time to overthink it.
All I did was show him, re-it, just basically activated, strengthened.
But then put him into a neurological pattern he's done a million times.
So his body knew the neurology.
But his brain wasn't given the time to cognitively say, oh, I don't know about this.
No, it was perform now, immediate performance.
So he broke the barrier immediately with that point.
That's it.
Now he's up off the ground.
No problem.
Then I can make him think about it and he can do it.
So we often do that.
We have to say, I'll say to a patient, can you close your eyes and do what I'm asking?
And they go, damn, I can't actually do it in my head.
That's right.
So we had to actually make sure that you can consciously do it.
Yeah, I'm not a psychologist.
All I'm doing there is using some neuroscience.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
It's an important tool for some of us that maybe you've had an incident that got us hurt
on the fire ground.
And maybe there's a fear of doing that.
But to visualize climbing the ladder again or going into the confined space or whatever
it was that caused us a mental or physical injury prior seems like an interesting tool
to try.
Oh, definitely.
When I was playing, you know, I was in baseball.
We were taught we had to do mental rehearsal for all our tasks.
So it was analyze, visualize, center and execute.
It was AVSEC.
Analyze the task, center on the task, analyze, visualize, center on the task, execute in
your head.
That's how you had to practice.
So you practice that performance in your head before you came to training.
And that was a sort of like a 10 minute requirement for everyone on the team.
It needs to be there in occupations as well.
100%.
I want to throw one more thing at you before I go to some closing questions.
You mentioned body dysmorphia.
I don't know if I have a skewed perspective, but I grew up and we grew up when the bodybuilding
world really exploded.
And then you kind of tape it off a little bit.
There was more of the CrossFit thing.
Our action heroes weren't bodybuilders anymore.
They were arguably more CrossFit style physiques or even less than that.
But I feel like there's been a resurgence now of that entire area.
And what worries me is we're seeing a lot of very young kids that I'm assuming are on
TRT because there's no other way that they would suddenly be able to balloon and look
the way that they did that we knew everyone was on back in the 80s.
So talk to me about your observations of body dysmorphia, your own journey, and then if
you're seeing any kind of resurgence at the moment.
Yeah, well, social media is going to make it obvious.
That's the thing about it.
It may have been out there.
But of course, now it becomes more available and then it becomes you're seeing it all the
time.
So then people are going to find answers to their body dysmorphia a lot quicker.
So all I did was eat a lot of food and get real fat.
You know, that was me.
I got to 300 pounds with just eating three dozen eggs a day and, you know, a couple of
pints of milk a day every day for five years.
So yeah, I didn't need drugs.
I had to eat.
And also to become a really champion athlete takes a certain sort of mindset.
And the guy ran one of our I used to train with a couple of top pro bodybuilders back
in the early days of the pros.
And the coach used to say to me, you'll never be a good bodybuilder.
You're too smart, which means I over thought the tasks way too much.
And there was that element of that too.
Yeah, you know, I just noticed some of the best athletes.
They don't overthink it.
They do it.
So, yeah, with body dysmorphia, I got trapped into it.
And seriously, it's taken me forever to even try and handle.
So I just converted to it a positive.
So I took up powerlifting.
Yeah, that was it.
Great.
So I just took the body dysmorphia and made it a gift.
Now what does it do?
It made me learn about how to apply my profession to people who lifted weights.
So body dysmorphia was the best gift I ever had.
It made me learn about the tasks I was undertaking because I wanted to get bigger.
I wanted to load better.
So I had to learn how to move better.
So the science of weight training was actually would never come to me if I stayed baseball,
but I had to learn how to be bigger and stronger.
So body dysmorphia turned me into the professional I am today.
I know everything about spines due to body dysmorphia because it made me learn anatomy.
Then I had injury and I needed answers to injury.
So I always say embrace your gift.
Look at what it gives you.
Now with the kids there, yeah, unfortunately they haven't got to that stage yet.
And seriously, there's a reason that, you know, certain, but you can't drink in the
US until you're 21.
Well, there's a fairly good reason because your basic ability to understand and integrate
reality isn't very well set until about that age, if at all.
So you're going to get kids who are hitting the gym at 16.
Of course, how are you going to change them?
Well, chances are they're not going to listen to you that much anyway, except for the bright
ones.
The ones who are heading for goals are going to do what those goals are.
Now I've got a big population.
Is it really more body dysmorphia that exists or really you just see more of it put onto
the screens?
That's a hard call, but I understand it.
I probably would have gone the same route if I'd been born now, which was I'll do whatever
it takes to get there.
Hey, I want to be a winner.
That's what I did.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I really don't think it's going to change.
I don't think you can sit down in front of a classroom of kids and say, by the way, this
stuff should be used maybe later when you've reached a certain level of ability.
They look at each other and go, where can I get it?
Where do you think the root cause of your body dysmorphia was?
No idea.
I used to love when it came to my aspirations, baseball was it.
Then for some reason, I physically saw that Arnold Schwarzenegger magazine and thought,
yeah, that's how you're supposed to look.
Now why the hell did I look at that and think that that's how you're supposed to look?
No idea at all.
I used to watch boxing with my grandfather when I was probably five and six years old.
Took up boxing myself, enjoyed it immensely.
There was an element of seeing performance athletes in gyms and I always enjoyed the
heavyweights.
So, you know, didn't matter Ali, Frasier, things like that.
Imposing human beings.
I want to be an imposing human being.
Why did I want to do that?
Why didn't I want to drink a soy latte and, you know, write poetry?
I don't know.
It wasn't me.
You know, not saying there's anything wrong with it, but it wasn't going to be me.
I liked the things that have a little bit more, yeah, aspects of the alpha probably
mindset.
It's from some of the people I've had on that found themselves going that way, especially
more in just the bodybuilding side.
There was an element of building an armor around them.
There was a kind of frightened child.
I mean, in a compassionate way, deep inside and there was this projection of masculinity
that some maintained to this day and others then stepped away from and then became elite
soldiers or whatever it was.
But it was an interesting when you think about that, the women, you know, the body dysmorphia
ends up being losing weight, but we forget that men struggle and some of us, if we've
been hurt when we're young, some of us choose then to create this muscular armor.
You got me figured this one out.
I never actually took it there, but now you just explained it.
I have no insecurities whatsoever.
You have never met a person with less fricking toxic life.
No one who's probably could have had a better upbringing.
What happened to me?
I think it was very, very young.
I remember there was a there was a movie and there was a song called The Impossible Dream.
The movie was The Man of La Mancha.
And there was this particular moment in the movie where the singer song called The Impossible
Dream.
And it basically says that let's go to it.
And the world will be better for this that one man scorned and covered with scars, still
strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable star.
And this is my quest to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far,
to fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for
a heavenly cause.
That was my inspiration.
I was supposed to become big and strong and be good.
So I was actually that into the thing where I had to fulfill my destiny and my destiny
and potential requires that I become the best I can be.
I'm not doing it for I'm scared.
I'm not sure I'm doing it because there are people who are scared.
So yeah, I got the super I got the superhero approach.
Funny thing, Mike De La Pava down at the Battle Axe gym.
So he's a Colombian fellow and we caught up in Miami last year.
He's got the word courage tattooed on his head.
And here we are smoking cigars in the cigar lounge.
And suddenly, we both realized that the thing that had got us both in our lives was this
particular song.
That's why he has the tattoo.
He's got the same thing.
And we both sang the damn song in the cigar lounge.
We had it.
And it's the funniest thing we both are driven in our quest to be the best that we can be
only because we feel we we would be disrespectful to our potential if we didn't try and reach
our potential.
We're not expected to reach our potential.
It's impossible to be that good.
But it is not right that you don't try and reach your potential.
That's us.
So yeah, you got me now you figured it out.
I didn't see it from there.
I'm glad I asked that question.
That was a hell of an answer.
Well, I want to be mindful of your time.
So let me let me ask you the first of the closing questions.
Is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Well, it depends you want a book that's probably going to take you somewhere.
You've got to read Hamlet by Shakespeare.
I got you now because essentially what's going to happen is you probably look at your hell
of hell.
What?
Yeah, but I want you to read it.
Then I want you to try and find out how to understand it.
Probably the most important book on the development of a human being.
But take your time.
It is worth taking your time reading it, going back, rereading it, read the critic, the critics
who write about it.
Understand what this story, what this book is really about.
So yeah, get ready.
It's not easy.
It's not a little golden book.
You're going to have to do some work.
But yeah, I would say Hamlet is an imperative to understanding the human condition and what's
behind it.
That's a great one.
Then the book I've read the most would be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S.
Thompson.
Now, why?
Because it's authentically different.
It was a way of writing and a way of journalism, but it was about a change in the way that
you approach things.
And in there is one of the greatest paragraphs I think that's ever been written as well,
where he describes the end of the 1960s and the aspirations that were related to it and
the failure of it.
Yeah, that's a good book.
Watch the movie, but read the book a couple of times.
Very inspirational.
Didn't go into the drug culture myself because of that.
No, it was more, ah.
I can see we got something here that you're trying to understand and it was authentic.
Yeah, they might.
They'll be my two obvious go tos because the bookshelves are full of books.
Yeah.
And I'd say most of them are Thompson's work or somebody else.
Oh yeah, I could probably say you're going to go back, but you probably should listen
to The Ascent of Man by a guy called Jacob Bronowski.
You have to watch the videos because they were shot on video.
I think it must be 1980s.
But either way, a very good logical discussion about the development of humanity.
And there's a guy called Kenneth Clark who did one called Civilization.
They remade them.
Oh, they haven't remade those two.
They remade Cosmos with Carl Sagan.
But yeah, Bronowski, fantastic presentation.
Well worth if you find a way to download that one.
And Clark on civilization.
Very thoughtful human beings.
Brilliant.
And what about films and documentaries?
You know, I'm a sucker for any superhero stuff, really, aren't I?
So yeah, while everyone else can critically decry them, I want to see Thanos kick somebody's
ass.
So yeah, I'm happy to go there.
Yeah, get Man of La Mancha.
Go and watch it.
I think it's Peter O'Toole, Man of La Mancha.
Get a copy.
Watch it and feel it.
It's a great movie that it will take you a good place.
Dead Man by Johnny Depp's good.
It's more fun, though, if you actually understand who William Blake, the poet, was.
That will help a little bit as well.
I would put that in one of my top 10 movies.
And any any Western with Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill is going to do you good.
In fact, there's a there's a one that hardly anyone's going to know of called My Name
Is Nobody with Terrence Hill and Henry Fonda.
And it's a story about a gunfighter who wants to retire.
And he wants to disappear.
And this stranger turns up who won't let him disappear because he said, you're too much
of a legend.
You've got to go out in a gunfight.
You can't disappear.
And the whole thing is about not letting him disappear.
And the guy is naming it Nobody.
Great movie to watch, especially the final part.
When nobody faces down the famous gunslinger in the middle of the street because you can't
let him go without a gunfight.
Get a hold of that one.
My name is Nobody.
Brilliant.
All right.
Well, then, speaking of names, the next question, is there a person that you recommend to come
on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated
professions of the world?
Mike Dela Pava, the Battle Axe Jim.
He is a very interesting human being with a fine degree in social work, I think.
From shit could be Stanford.
He's pretty bright guy.
He runs a Battle Axe Jim and he is a great mental hygienist.
His work is about mental hygiene with, well, he does a lot of actually first responders
and he does a lot of high performance athletes.
He's been in the kickboxing ring.
He's done strong man.
He's done powerlifting.
His journey never ends either.
He's always about feeling potential.
But he is brilliant about the things you want to know about in regard to mental hygiene.
Get Mike on.
I will.
That would be fantastic.
He said he was here in Florida too.
He's down in Miami.
Okay.
Absolutely.
Perfect.
Beautiful.
All right.
Well, then the last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you in your
work, what do you do to decompress?
Podcast with you.
I never decompress, man.
I seriously I'm up to one o'clock in the morning working on writing courses.
I get up 730 in the morning, grab coffee and I go to the gym.
Now that's what I do.
I remember I don't, I don't, I don't negotiate on that.
We go to the gym every day.
So that's, that's my Zen.
Put on the headphones, train for an hour or two.
I don't need more than that.
My daughter's grown up.
She doesn't need me looking after her so she can look after herself.
My dear girl, Julie, she's pretty smart.
She looks after herself pretty well.
We're a good team.
So now I just go back into what I love, which is fulfilling my potential intellectually.
I better find the answers and I better teach professionals how to find those answers.
That is my quest to follow that star.
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.
Beautiful.
Well, speaking of your work then, so where can people find you online and social media?
Social media is pretty easy.
It's Andrew underscore lock underscore strength.
That's on Instagram.
And I work as part of a team with Julie and Danny in a thing called United Health Education.
So we put out courses to educate professionals on movement.
And I've got a lumbar spine leadership academy, which is a 12 month course to teach anybody
who's in the health and fitness industry in one year, what took me 30 years to figure
out.
So we put together a 12 module course that will take you from your planes of movement
through all the anatomy, all the movements.
And at the end of it, you learn how to squat and deadlift as well.
If you've got a high performance athlete or firm person, we do all the proprioception.
We do the how the passive structures work, the active structures work.
And that's a 12 month signup.
So enjoy that one.
Or you can just download the book if you want.
If you're a cheap ass and you just want the book and you want the lectures and the exercise
library and you're smart, you get a lot out of that.
That's beautiful.
Well, I want to thank you so much.
It's been an incredible conversation.
We've gone all over the place from the mental side and body dysmorphia through to back and
shoulder rehab and everything in between.
So I want to thank you for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the
Shield podcast today.
James, thanks for inviting me.
I can contribute to helping somebody out there in their quest.