Knees Over Toes Guy - Building A Bulletproof Body

Ben Patrick (Knees Over Toes Guy) is an athletic coach and an author. Keeping our bodies bulletproof is something everyone wants as they age. Bad knees, backs and shoulders not only stop you from doing the things you want in sport, but then begin to suck the enjoyment out of your life too. Ben has some solutions. Expect to learn the 3 most important exercises to maximise your body's robustness, what Ben's biggest takeaways have been from Andrew Huberman, the relationship between flexibility and strength, how to make your shoulders more mobile and less painful, the optimal training frequency to see results and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Check out Ben's website - https://www.atgonlinecoaching.com Buy Ben's book - https://amzn.to/37M5USu Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #kneesovertoesguy #rehab #fitness - 00:00 Intro 00:59 Common Basketball Injuries 06:59 Flexibility vs Strength 12:38 Ben’s Knee Transformation 17:45 Accepting Importance of Rehab 30:32 Practicing Gratitude 37:22 Lessons from Andrew Huberman 41:38 Highest-Return Exercises for Knees 50:18 Ben’s Exercises for Shoulders 58:38 How to Bulletproof Lower Backs 1:03:33 When is Too Much or Too Little? 1:06:00 How to Find Ben - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Principle number one, get stronger in reverse to the pain because that's usually the simplest and the least painful thing you can do. It's the full range of motion that often scares people. Principle number two, restore and train full range of motion, but at the level that doesn't hurt you. If you have only those two principles and if you then worked at it, you could probably create a cool system for just about any area of the body.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you are everywhere right now. You're on fire. It's a competition between you and the Liver King for who's got the most exposure on Instagram at the moment.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm lucky, man, but not an influencer.

• 0:38Chris Williamson?

  No, not an influencer. I agree, and I don't mean to put you in the same bucket as the Liver King, although he does do a lot of sled drags, man.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I appreciate it. I mean, that guy's reaching a ton of people. I don't think I have as much engagement as him, so I'm honored for the comment, but he's got me beat.

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, he does do a lot of sled drags.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Very cool.

• 0:58Chris Williamson?

  So, talk to me about the first major injury that you had, because as far as I'm aware, you had a laundry list of injuries throughout your athletic career as a youth.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, around age nine, I had something where my knee would kind of, it would pop out of place and sometimes it wouldn't go back in. And it was probably 20 years before I, like, not quite 20, but almost 20 years later before I realized a lot of people have this. So I've made videos on this now. Probably someone listening to this right now is like, oh my gosh, I thought I was the only person whose knee pops out of place. So, starting at nine, I knew my knees were a little bit shaky compared to other people. And by 12, that was really chronic pain. Maybe around 14 is when doctors thought I had the first real severe injury to it. So nine, 12, 14, those are dates that come to mind.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  So definitely not like a normal developing young adult body because my knees were having injuries and pains.

• 1:59Chris Williamson?

  What was the sports that you were pursuing?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Just basketball, which when you go so crazy hard after one pursuit, probably just about every sport is going to have some kind of overuse injury that if you, that you could just over, overuse, drive yourself into a problem with an area.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  What are the most common injuries that basketball players get?

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Knees by far.

• 2:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay, why?

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Well, we not only run a lot, but you're running and then stopping, running, stopping. And yeah, you have that in football, soccer, but then we're jumping thousands of times. So you're adding, you're adding the running, stopping, cutting and jumping. So it seems to have the greatest total volume of the stops and the jumps. So in terms of the actual amount, like if a mathematician just analyzed how many pounds of force is going into someone's knees, you know, basketball players would be putting the most stress on their knees.

• 2:58Chris Williamson?

  I guess as well, the shoes and the court is designed to facilitate that super fast deceleration.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's made to grip so you can, you can thrash against yourself harder, basically.

• 3:10Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, yeah. I have a friend, Ross, in Australia, we're the same age, so both 34, and he'd played basketball at university up until 21 and then stopped, and I played cricket at university and then stopped. And both of us decided a couple of years ago that we were going to re-take up the sport that had captured our youth, right? You know, we'd spent 10 years, all that we did throughout school was play this sport. And the equivalent thing happened to both of us. I ruptured my Achilles in my first game back, and he decided to start playing hoops, two on two, I think, or three on three with some friends. And he tore his ACL the first day that he went back.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 3:49Chris Williamson?

  And I was like, this is such, you know, for every single guy or girl who's done a sporting pursuit throughout their youth and then thinks, oh, it'll be so cool to get back into that a little bit later on. It's like, yeah, it would be, but condition yourself first.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, condition yourself and, you know, you're 34, I'm 30, I want to be playing basketball with my kid, he's one year old. So I'm training so that I can still be super active in my 40s and not be sidelined, not being able to participate or in pain to do so. So in some ways, I could say it's as important to train for this. Now, when we're older, even if we're not training for a pro career, I would say it's as important, if not more important, to be trying to bulletproof our bodies.

• 4:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's what you see, I think, as you get older, right? That you realize increasingly you start training for longevity. You start thinking about, I want to be still crushing it in 20 years' time, even if you're 50. You know, it's not about the summer shred to look good on the beach with the boys that you might have been aiming for when you were 23. And that, I called it the fitness menopause. That sort of occurs toward the end of your 20s, when you do maybe get an injury, or your recovery takes a bit longer, and you realize, actually, my body isn't, it's not made of rubber and magic like it used to be.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah, if you look at a little kid, so it's never been clear to me how we bulletproof the body, because I have a one-year-old, so he can go into any position that adults would look at, and it hurts to look at. So his, the mobility is off the charts. However, he's getting hurt all the time, not within himself, against the outside world, because he's weak. If he stumbles, he falls, he trips, he can't, so you have these qualities, you have the mobility and you have the strength. And the way you bulletproof a body is, you train them both in harmony, not separately. So the more strength you can gain through ranges of motion, and working at a pain-free level, meaning a level that your body can probably tolerate and adapt to, rather than

• 5:54Speaker 00

  too much, too much force that it hurts. Like, it's a simple indicator, it should feel good what you're doing. But yeah, if you can get the strength and mobility to have a marriage in training, which has never, there's never been any mainstream system for that. You have yoga one side, you have powerlifting. For example, yoga, powerlifting would be like two opposite sides of the coin, and there's both, there's truth to both. And if you can get those to marry together, you might not be the best at yoga, you might not be the best at powerlifting. But you could create a far more resilient body and get freakishly athletic. And by learning from each other, the yogi could be more bulletproof against the outside world. The powerlifter could be more bulletproof within himself to not injure himself. But it's that, it's that realization of, holy crap, little kids aren't hurting within themselves, but the outside world is hurting them.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Now we get older, we don't trip and we don't fall as hard as we did, but we, we pull things within our own body. We have non-contact injuries. Then what happens once we start tipping over 40? We start losing both of them. We start losing the mobility and the strength. And then we really are falling down the stairs and, and having terrible problems.

• 6:59Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about that tension between flexibility or mobility with strength? Because as far as I was aware, the more flexibility that you have, the less power that you're able to put out. What does it mean when you're talking about training through range? Strength through range? And, and what's the tension or trade-off that you have there?

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if you just stretch, what signal are you sending to your body? You want to be able to move through that range of motion. But the whole reason for lifting weights, like if you just press pink dumbbells, it doesn't matter what your intent is. You're, you're not going to bench press 400 pounds. It's not going to happen because you're not giving your body that, that stimulus. So it's, there's unusual exercises, but some of these have been used. Some of the stuff I do that gets people to breakthroughs was already being used 100 plus years ago. And everything's pretty intuitive. And the idea is to gain strength through full ranges of motion, to gain strength in areas that we're normally weak or that we normally don't train.

• 8:03Chris Williamson?

  What would be an example of something like that?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  So the, my favorite exercise I use, I call it an ATG, ass to grass split squat. So you've been in the gym, you've seen people do split squats. You may have seen people do some ass to grass squats. You've probably never walked into a gym and seen someone do an ass to grass split squat. So like I can do a front splits just off two strength exercises. I do a

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Strength exercise for my hamstring and I have this astrophysic split squat for my hip flexor and I can do a front splits. So that's an example. You can gain flexibility, but I'm only doing so through strength exercises. And in an astrophysic split squat, which anyone can just search, you can, if you watch one of my videos, it'll be hard not to see that exercise. I put endless content on this if someone is new to my stuff. And that's going through a full range of motion on the front leg. So the knee is going through a full range of motion, the back hip flexors are stretching to their full range of motion, but I'm trying to get stronger from within those positions. And in the isolated instances where they analyze what happens when you actually get stronger through a range of motion, you seem to get an exponential reduction of injury.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  So it's not like, it's not like I think the ATG split squat would make you twice less likely to be injured because you're working strength and flexibility. I think it would make you four times less likely to be injured compared to if you, if your strength you did only through limited ranges and then you separately stretched those same muscles, but not with loads. So that's an, that's the most classic example from my program.

• 9:37Chris Williamson?

  Is there any loss of strength? What about the guys that are concerned that they're going to lose speed or power by increasing their flexibility?

• 9:45Speaker 00

  We have a number of power lifters breaking their own records on their squat because most of these guys are working on mobility in some ways. So all of a sudden now they get to work mobility and be carving into new muscle tissue. So like my legs have totally changed from this stuff coming from being like a chicken leg guy. And now I actually have leg muscles. So we're seeing power lifters who have stalled and have knee pain blasting through the knee pain and hitting new numbers. But not from only doing that, from doing power lifting plus using this as the accessory work. So I still go, I can do all kinds of basketball dunks now. Even though I reached age 20, I'd never been able to grab the rim. Not even one time in my life did I grab the rim up till age 20. Now I'm 30 and I'm dunking every which way, but.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  That is part of the stimulus that makes me jump higher is the jumping. It's not like I don't jump at all. I go, I play basketball. But I do this training plus basketball. It's not like a powerlifter wouldn't do their powerlifting. This would be my entire system, I think of as an accessory system for whatever someone's trying to do. So for me, I use it for basketball.

• 10:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, I remember seeing videos of Tom Platts doing, they might have been heel elevated, almost look like sissy squats, but like real narrow legs together, knees touching, right? So feet completely side by side with a, I'm pretty sure he had a good amount of weight on his back. And obviously homeboys just repping it out like 30 reps deep. And all his friends are screaming in his face in the gym. Um, and you know, he's probably got the best legs of all time.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, but there's articles and videos using his image saying, "Don't do this. You'll tear up your knees." Only Tom's in his 60s and can still squat deep with amazing mobility. So he's actually a product of the work he put in. Now, he was taking, he was in bodybuilding, which means he's, he's juicing out of his mind as part of the sport. They all are. So he's juicing out of his mind. He started doing this in his teens and he gradually built up over decades. And he had tremendous attention to detail on form. Like what you would see him do, he built that from decades of mastering his subject. But what was the product, man?

• 12:06Speaker 00

  The guy bulletproofed his knees and he's still mobile as heck in his 60s. And he achieved what he was trying to. He's trying to build the best legs in the world and he, and he did. He could squat 500 pounds rock bottom for 23 reps he did one time. So, um, he was, he was able to get the, you know, arguably the strongest um, legs through full range of motion. You could argue he has, you could argue he created the most bulletproof knees of all time. Yet people have used his images to scare people into not training their knees over their toes.

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  It is a strange one.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  That's the world we live in.

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  So go back to, you're 15 years old. You've had this laundry list of injuries and you're struggling a little bit. How'd you go from there to then, whatever, within 10 or 15 years, being able to touch the rim?

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was trying everything. I would go to trainers, physiotherapists. I went to dozens of specialists for knees or trainers. And not all trainers do this, but the ones I went to did. And clearly, the majority were telling people, "Don't let your knees over your toes." And at the time, this made sense. When my knees go over my toes, that hurts, so avoid that position. And then I saw a quote from an Olympic trainer. And it said, "No, no, no. The athlete whose knee can go farthest and strongest over the toes has the least chance of knee injury." His name was Charles Pollockman. And because of what I had been through, I instantly knew that piece of data was true. Now, I was a pretty smart kid. I wasn't an idiot, so I didn't assume that the way out would be working through pain.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  And so my career from that point has basically been, "What clues could I gather from athletes who do have healthy knees and bulletproof knees? And how do I turn that into a system that the average person, or the person like me with super fragile knees, who isn't an Olympic-level athlete? How does Mr. Fragile, how does Mr. Old..." My nickname in high school was "Old Man." I was made fun of for the lowest vertical jump on my team. Now, I jump higher than all the guys I went to high school with. But in high school, I had the lowest vertical jump. I was made fun of. I had the slowest sprint time. And I had all kinds of nicknames harassing me for my lack of knee ability. So that's what I did from that point. If I hadn't lived through such crap and been prevented from knees over toes,

• 14:22Speaker 00

  then see this piece of really forceful data of the athlete whose knee can go farthest and strongest over the toes. But it gave me such a contrast that I knew that it was true. And then how do I get there? And so I've been able to bridge that gap now. That's my career in a nutshell.

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it is that allowing the knee to slide over the toes, other than the fact that people that have knee pain have knee pain? I don't have knee pain, but that's been one of the cues that I've been given in the past as well. Why is that such a no-no to many trainers?

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Because 50 years ago is found that when your knee goes over your toe, there's more pressure in your knee. That's seems like common sense to me. It wasn't found that it was bad. It was found that's where there's more pressure. Now, coming later in, every longevity expert knows that the body needs pressure. You actually have to, a sedentary lifestyle doesn't make you live longer. Avoiding bending your knees, for example, that's a scientific death wish for your knee, because you're signaling to your body not even to fully use the joint. So if you're not training with your knees over your toes through a full range of motion, it means you're not signaling to your body that you want that area robust with circulation and strength, so you can actually develop those internal structures of your knees. So for some people who have never had a problem, I wouldn't tell them to change what they're doing.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Let's start with all the fragile people who have been told not to let their knees over the toes. And let's start with just the lowest regressions that anyone could do just for basic mobility for life. Like you should be able to like bend down and play with your kids. You should be able to, even in your case, for example, when you restrict the knee over the toe, when you don't let the knee over the toe, you start preventing the soleus muscle, which is proven to be the key for protecting your Achilles. So saying no knees over toes is also a death wish for the Achilles. You're saying, I don't want my body, I don't want the tendons and the muscles to develop in the area that I need to protect my Achilles. So you choose your heart. I mean, it's either gonna be hard now.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  The good thing is, I just paved the way so that people can follow a way simpler, gentler route than there was before I came onto the scene. That's why I'm knees over toes guy. That's why it's blown up, because people can access it. It's not mythical. It's not expensive. It's, it's simple stuff that anyone can learn and apply, but that is hard in its own way. Studying is hard. Learning is hard. Being willing to go into the gym and do new things. Being willing to go into the gym and go backward when everyone else is going forward, to use a full range of motion. Like I said, unless you saw someone on my program, you probably have never seen someone doing an astergrass split squat, and you might get called sus. That's hard. That's hard, but it's pretty cool that we can change.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Like now I get to go, some, some people will comment like, boy, I'd love to do that. But my buddies in the gym would make fun of me. Well, let me tell you, I'm not lacking for, you know, any admiration when I'm throwing down. I'd rather be throwing down these dunks than hobbling around on weak knees and getting injured. To me, it's a lot cooler. And to me, it's a lot cooler to be yourself and to pursue what you know you want to. Society sets up certain structures. It doesn't mean they're right. So it set up certain structures which have been found to be incorrect, but they were the prevailing ways at first. Now found incorrect, found to be long-term longevity problem makers. And it takes some serious guts to change a system once it's established.

• 17:45Chris Williamson?

  Let's sink into that a little bit. I'm fascinated by the mindset that people need to be able to continue to do rehab. The basics, the boring stuff. And this is coming from my own personal experience of fighting a bunch of disc bulges from the last few years. I've worked with Dr. Stu McGill for the last three and a half years since he came on the show. And dude, me in the corner of a powerlifting gym, doing the big three. And then taking a kettlebell and then having the other hand up here. And, you know, walking up and down, doing loaded carries, doing weight carries, doing bottoms up carries and bottoms up press. Doing cat cows, all this stuff.

• 18:29Chris Williamson?

  I've enjoyed, I haven't really enjoyed, I haven't enjoyed being the guy in the corner of the gym. But I have enjoyed the lessons that it taught my ego about what it means to kind of be in that big group. About being able to throw down. But it's not easy, you know, it's not tremendously enjoyable to not be able to. If you're doing CrossFit or powerlifting or weightlifting or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, whatever, like with the class, with your bros or your friends, just doing the thing. Talk to me about, obviously, that's something that you went through through your junior years. And then you're now coaching people to get through that. How do you advise them to deal with the discomfort of no longer being a part of the, the main throw down?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Well, the first part of that equation, because I was there and I tried all the normal rehab stuff you would see. So, one reason I fell in love with what I do now is you're active, you're getting some of the hardest workouts of your life. It never quite felt right to me to go to the gym and not get an incredible workout. So, that's what I deliver for people, an incredible workout that also happens to be rehabbing your body. People come in, pro athletes come in, get some of the best workouts, often saying, "That was the best workout of my life." I mean, they're drenched in sweat and their muscles are pumped and so, most people didn't realize that rehab can make you sexier, that rehab can give you an amazing workout.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  So, that's what I try to do is make rehab sexy and make people realize that you can and should be getting incredible workouts and that physical therapy and exercise don't have to be two different things. Maybe in early stages, that's not, my role is not being a doctor. So, in early stages, if you have an actual surgery or whatever, that's not my role. I was already years removed from surgeries. I had one knee full of surgeries, was so stiff from the surgeries, partially artificial kneecap. My other knee was like loose because I was diagnosed with tears and that, that I didn't have surgery on. I was already years removed from gnarly stuff in both knees by the time I started applying this.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  It's not like I was coming fresh off a surgery and like, "Now, let me try this new thing." So, I can't tell someone what to do immediately after an injury and that would be unethical. But for someone who wants to make their body more resilient and change their longevity, you can and should go to the gym and get incredible workouts. And that's why people are falling in love with this. That's why it's not staying a boring physical therapy thing. It's becoming a really bona fide system of actually being able to exercise your body. I go get my cardio and strength for my whole body and I have my six-pack and I power up my legs for sports. What I do... Now that I'm super healthy is no different than what I did to get healthy.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  It's the same exact program. My program's almost identical to what it was like five years ago. Because the more I find out, the very thing that can bulletproof me and rehabilitate something, what if I continue that? And no one's ever tried that. That's what hasn't been tried, is the idea of physical therapy and exercise, physical therapy and strength training staying as one. And that's what we're seeing in the results is we're seeing 30 year olds all over the place are now dunking and having the mobility of younger people and sprinting faster. And so that I think that's why it's caught on. It's because it turns into something that people enjoy. If if a workout program or a diet is not something that becomes something you enjoy, I think it'll stay a fad and it'll fall off quickly. And we're seeing the opposite.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  There's over 700 coaches now being certified in my program. So people are people are starting to realize that physical therapy and exercise can work together.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  I would agree. I think that you're definitely talking about playing on hard mode if you're doing something that you don't enjoy as opposed to playing on easy mode if it's a diet or a training plan that you do. But I would also say that, you know, in any one gym, there's maybe one person that's going to be doing your program. So there's still, you know, you're still the guy or the girl in the corner. You're still the person that's got to generate your own motivation. You're still watching the people that maybe you used to train with or you want to train with or you could train with if only you were a bit more healthy, doing the thing and the music's blaring and there's high fiving. Talk to me about that. That's the pain that I'm talking about.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  I look at these things and I'm grateful as heck what I went through and being the guy. Because at some point I was, there wasn't even one other person in the gym doing this stuff. So.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Being the knees over toes guy, for example, that was like, I chose, man, I don't give a shit about Ben Patrick. I care about helping people. Screw my name. I didn't even like social media. But I said, I'm gonna sacrifice and be knees over toes guy to educate people on that myth. So going through the things I went through, being the only guy in the gym doing something backward of everyone else, it made me mentally like on a different level from what I was before. I'm over 470 days without a cheat meal or any entertainment, not a single sports game, not a TV show, not a movie. I'll break on either of those when my kid asks me to. He's one year old. So I've, I've blown up on social media and in the trainer world by saying, hey,

• 23:49Speaker 00

  why not outwork everyone in the industry, literally every single person, sacrifice more than anyone else. Anyone can go a day without a cheat meal, but going 470 days, you have to be like another level mentally. Same with not doing a TV show. Why? Because I'm a great dad and I spent a ton of time with my kid, but I want to also work on my business. So every half hour TV show, that's half an hour away that I could be getting more successful, that my mind could be operating more creatively. But I think there's no way I could have gotten to these mental toughness levels, this, these abilities to control myself without every time being the guy walking backward with a sled. Because every time you do that, you're making your body do something that you know is right for you,

• 24:33Speaker 00

  but you're having to control your body to do it. It's not that you can't just go with the flow and do the easy thing. So I'm as grateful for the mental aspects of this as the physical from going and being the guy walking backward with the sled. It's now given me a cheat code at life that I feel like I'm like distant from all the sheep. And it's like, I feel like I could pick anything and be successful at it now because I could determine and get myself to do the things that are right, rather than just being shoved along with the current. So a lot of people have noticed this effect now that the more they walk backward with the sled, the more they start to. Be the person they want to be in life, as crazy as that sounds.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  I think that there's something, there's something that you learn. It's a combination of swallowing your ego and having to generate your own motivation to do something boring and repetitive and hard. You know, I honestly wouldn't surprise me if I've spent a thousand hours in the big three positions over the last four years or whatever. It really wouldn't surprise me.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  What do you think that did for you mentally?

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  It was, it was weird, man, because throughout most of my twenties, I was always in shape, doing commercial male modeling and then got toward the end of my twenties and was like jacked out of my mind and in really, really good condition and then had, you know, two disc bulges in the space of six months. And then everything that I was relying on, it made me wonder, what does it mean to not be, you know, one of the leanest or most muscular guys in the gym? And I realized a lot of my identity and a lot of my self-worth and a lot of my confidence had become wrapped up in the aesthetic of how I was. And this is common, right? This is why young guys go to the gym. This is a big bit of, you know, like the simply shredded bodybuilding.com forum era gym

• 26:20Chris Williamson?

  culture. Like, that was what a lot of young guys transcended their insecurities, their lack of confidence around women, their desire to feel powerful and in control and capable and responsible and like a man. They wanted that. They wanted that. And going to the gym gave them a sense, first, that they had mastery over something in their life. So if their girlfriend split up with them, or if their most recent university assignment went to shit, or if they got, the job wasn't happy, or they were living in a place that they didn't like, they knew that they'd got themselves one step closer toward their bodies. So that was the first thing. And all of the other bits and pieces, right? But you roll that forward and I had to sort of question, like, what does it mean to be?

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  Me now, what does it mean? Because I can't be, I can't rely on my physique for my self-worth. Because if I want to do what I need to do, which is what Stu said, and take a very sort of long, slow iterative process on building this up over time, I'm going to lose, I'm going to become smaller, fatter, less muscular and slower, up until a point at which I can then begin to start to add some of this stuff back in. And that was hard, man. Like that was, you know, it's a difficult period. You're just not as resilient. But that being said, it's, it's the same as having anything taken away. That when you realize that you were relying on it, it was buttressing your life, right?

• 27:48Chris Williamson?

  I enjoyed going sober. I know that you're a sobriety user for like a productivity tool. And I loved doing that because I realized that it was buttressing my self-confidence. It was buttressing my desire to be outgoing and charismatic on a night out, because I didn't have that. I didn't, I'd never had to develop those skills. In the same way as I'd never had to develop genuine confidence or a sense of self-worth around other people aside from being in really, really good shape. Because as soon as I lost that, I was like, oh, okay. Well, I have two choices. I can either have no self-confidence or self-worth or whatever, or I can be forced to develop it because I no longer have that support structure in place. It was very interesting, very, very interesting transition.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. At the end of the day, what's going on, what's going on up here in our head is going to be more important than what's going on in our body. So it seems like, it seems like that's a common theme and that we can take something that seems like a downfall and maybe actually be grateful for it in some strange way. So that was one of the things that helped me through too, was just getting a different viewpoint on what I was grateful for. And so when I was trying to get myself out of pain, I would go do my leg days and I would be just grateful that I had legs. No joke, like I would be like, this is amazing that I just, that I get to go to the gym and even try to work on this. So.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  It's hard to say, looking back, what exact factors led to what, but changing my mindset, being really grateful for stuff like to this day, like I'm just, whether I lift five pounds more or not, like I'm just grateful that I can go to the gym and like do my workouts. I'm grateful that I can go tomorrow, I get to go play basketball with my friends. Like, I'm not nervous about whether I'll make a shot or not. Like, I'm just grateful to go do that. So I think that could be really valuable advice for someone as well. And I had to note this down for myself. I find for myself, my ideas can get scattered. I have to have pretty simple note structure in my phone that I remind myself of the

• 29:56Speaker 00

  really key things that I'm working at in my life. So that really helped me to remember, you know, you look at your schedule and it's leg day and just to remind myself to be grateful for that. And I think that started to change some things. And it seemed like for you, you, when it took away certain things, maybe that just powered you up to get more skilled. So like, I now have new skills on how to train the body because of what was taken away from me. So there's a lot of interesting stuff to it. Unfortunately, I'm not, I'm not Jordan Peterson, so he would probably figure out what the hell I'm talking about a lot better. But maybe one day I'll, I'll figure out how to rationalize it all.

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend, George, who, once a month, he has a reminder on his phone when he wakes up to spend five minutes lying in bed imagining what it would be like to not have any legs. And I told him this story, and it was, it made me laugh. And, but it reminds me kind of, of what you're talking about. He said, it's really, really imagine what it would be like to, to lose both of your legs in some accident. And think about how grateful you are for the fact that that hasn't happened. And he used this, used this example, the comparison game that we play online. A lot of the time, we're seeing the worst of our own life compared with the best of everybody else's. So he, while he was still in the

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  UK, he would go to a hospital to the, what's the, is it palliative care? Is that the very, is that the old people?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 31:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, whatever the whatever the end of life sort of care is, you know, where you've got the older people in there and stuff, maybe they've not got so long to live. And he would go and I think he volunteered to just help out doing whatever he did. And he said, dude, I come out of there and the contrast effect, the difference between Instagram, best of my multimillionaire friend's life, living on a yacht versus mine, working a job in Manchester. And then I flip that and it's me, 20 something year old guy with all of his life ahead of him and the liberty to do whatever he wants against some, you know, 72 year old dude that's got pancreatic cancer and is about to leave a widow behind.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  That's huge. And I think we have to give ourselves credit for this, which is that these best ofs are forced in on us all over the place. So we can, people complain about people complaining. I see posts complaining about people complaining. Like, should I make a, maybe I should make a post complaining about the people complaining about people complaining. But, um, look, we're, it's natural. These things can happen to all of us because it's shoved in on us at every turn, making us think that we shouldn't be happy if we don't have a yacht. So we're complaining about this and that, but it's, it is a different age and more of these kind of false senses of happiness are pushed in on us at all turns.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  So I try to just surround my, to me, it comes down to who I surround myself with. And that goes both in person and that goes online. So even identifying people, there are certain people I, I tend to follow online, that when I watch that, I feel a lot better about myself. So like, like Jordan Peterson, an example, when I see a video from him, I tend to feel better about myself and more motivated for life. And then there's certain people that even if they're respected in the training industry or whatever, and I see him on the boat or whatever, I don't, you know, it could be something different.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  You just get that icky feeling, man. I know. And this is, this is something-

• 33:18Speaker 00

  I unfollow the icky feeling.

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  And I follow the people who- Are gonna make me feel more grateful.

• 33:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and you're right. I mean, that's such a it's more difficult in the real world. If you've got a job, you can't you sadly can't unfollow that colleague that's a dick. You know, they're there in the meeting every day. They kind of remind you of the thing that triggers you. I spent Douglas Murray was on the show yesterday, and I adore that man. I spent pretty much all of yesterday afternoon. He did Rogan in the morning and then came to my show. And then we went for dinner, straight to dinner on the night time.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  And dude, he he just he's so like positive. And and and I walk away from every interaction just feeling like my capacity to do stuff. And he's not an inspirational speaker, right? The guy talks on culture wars and writes for The Spectator and the New York Post and shit. But I leave every single interaction with him, feeling like the world's at my feet and feeling like I can go and do whatever I want. And it's like, that's the world that you should be trying to create with with the people that are around you. And yeah, especially if you're going through hardship, especially if you're struggling, you know, injury is a good example, because we have injury occurs physically, but it also happens at different other things. You know, we have a relationship injury, or we have the loss of a family member, or we have

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  financial injury, you know, some sort of setback that we need to deal with. And everyone needs a Douglas Murray, man. Everyone needs that person that they can rely on. And I feel really bad for people who don't have that community. Because, you know, for a big chunk of time, I didn't really feel like I had someone that or a big community of people. I was heavily relying on my business partner. I was heavily relying on a couple of other people in the UK. And then when you finally get just a little bit more of a social circle like that, you see why network effects are so important, and how you can impact your life like that. So yeah, man, I really hope that the if there are people that are struggling with injuries

• 35:18Chris Williamson?

  and stuff like physical injuries, like, look, get your mind right, find some people that can support you, and know that it's going to do you well for the rest of your life, not only in terms of your body, but also in terms of your mindset. That was what I took away from that that period.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And and maybe that bad thing happening to you, maybe you'll maybe that'll end up being.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Maybe there'll be a silver lining to it that you're able to actually become greater because of what happened. That's just how I look at things now. Like, your Airbnb is cancelled. Awesome. Can't wait to see the next one that I find and be going, "Man, thank God they cancelled that other one." It doesn't mean it always happens like that, but it really can. So, yeah, I think fitness, that's just one area of life. I don't take fitness too seriously. You might think I'm all into fitness because that's my job. Fitness is just one part of life. Family can have setbacks, just as you said. Family, finance, fitness, there's all kinds of areas we could be having setbacks. And in a natural lifestyle, we

• 36:23Speaker 00

  would be what? We would be kind of living as communities. We'd have close family around us. We'd have close friends around us. We would be out in the fresh air. We would be active. We would be eating only organic foods. So, all these things that we now try to put in, those would have just been baselines for living. So, it's very easy to say, "Man, why are we all complaining when we have such incredible technology at our fingertips?" Well, I'm a mathematics guy. Like, I think of things in terms of math. And the math is that more people are struggling and depressed and having mental health problems. So, if that's the case, where have we deviated? Something must be wrong. I'm not just gonna

• 37:07Speaker 00

  blame the human race for what's going. There must be something there that's actually deviated. And, you know, I think you're on to it with just how easily we can be comparing some other lives to what we're actually going through.

• 37:22Chris Williamson?

  That stuff that you've just mentioned there, that more primal approach to fitness and health, sounds a lot like what Andrew Huberman pushes forward. I know that you guys have been spending a good bit of time together recently. What have you learned from your time with Andrew? What stuff have you taken away from his work and the time that you've spent together?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Man, first off, he's just a great guy. And so it's pretty cool when you see someone online. And then when you meet him in person, you know, like, this is just a great person. Like, he genuinely wants to help people, and he's super interested and passionate in what he's doing. And I think that can really help us as well. And the modern education system, the way it's set up, like, how many of us end up winding up doing something, it's not like we're incredibly passionate about that. So seeing how passionate he is, having something that you look forward to, that you're really into, I can see that as a big component of happiness. Like, deep down, he's a really happy person compared to the average person that I meet.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  He's also very interested and passionate about what he's doing, yes, and he looks forward to. And so in the time we had together,

• 38:39Speaker 00

  getting out, taking walks in the morning before you have your cup of coffee. I mean, there's too much to count, but really basic things that someone could start doing to construct habits that could lead to better things. So it would be, if someone's just hearing of Andrew Huberman, it'd be better to really dive into his content. But

• 38:58Chris Williamson?

  What have you applied? You've applied the morning walk before coffee, sunlight in the eyes?

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:03Chris Williamson?

  Any other stuff?

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Any other stuff from him?

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  I mean, I would just say, I would just say, a bit of renewed, looking at my life differently of my happiness is not just a thing right now, like, that will just stay the same forever, that you make your happiness. And part of that is really having things that you're interested in, looking forward to, and chomping at creatively and business-wise. So we just enjoyed our time together. I wasn't like, I wasn't like grilling him. I try to, I try to be like, you know, pretty gentle when I'm meeting people.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  Play cool.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  I like to observe, and then I usually take away something pretty big based on what I observe. So that's as far with Huberman. But we're buddies and we stay in touch, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot more.

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

  You can also observe the fact that he is jacked out of his mind. You don't see this. It doesn't come across on his podcast. But I bumped into him in Kuya, which is the sauna and ice bath place that I love going to in Austin. Have you been?

• 40:07Speaker 00

  No, but I was right next to there at on it. It's right next to each other.

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  Yep, it's literally next door. Dude, when you're in town, I got it. I have to take you. I have to take you to Kuya. And so the door opens and it's late on an evening time and the front doors face the west, right? So the sun's setting and the sun sort of bursts in through the doors and it opens up. It's just this fucking gorilla stood like silhouetted from behind. He comes in, he's like, hey, we've been talking on Instagram. I was like, hey, man, how are you doing? You know, you shake someone's hand and you do that handshake where you shake the hand and then you you'd put your other hand on their forearm. Dude, it was like hitting the outside of a shed. Like, what the fuck? Andrew, what are you built of? What's what's wrong with you?

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, he's he's jacked out of his mind. He's really, really nice dude. He's coming on the show. I can't wait to bring him on.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Oh, that's huge.

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's he's a big one. We're gonna do something special for it as well, I think.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  But I just couldn't believe how how big he is. It really doesn't show on camera.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  He really takes care of himself and I think that's one of the things that makes him great is that you have you have the mind, you have the body and he's working both angles and he's he's really living it. He's not just sitting off detached, out of shape, out of touch. So, I mean, yeah, he's he's jacked.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  Skin in the game, I think.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. Skin in the game, exactly.

• 41:37Chris Williamson?

  All right. So getting back to the knees over toes stuff, we've spoken about the fact that strength through range, muscular, the the ability to do muscular contraction through bigger ranges. So that's not just the sort of physical way that the muscles move or the functional way that they move, but also the movement n-grams, right? It's what the brain knows that it's able to do and how it's able to deploy and contract that muscle in those positions. What else is it that you're getting? Because it's not just muscles and movement, right? There must be some, I'm gonna get, I would have thought the first thing would have been like ligaments or tendons or synovial fluid or stuff like that. What's happening there?

• 42:15Speaker 00

  All of those were correct, meaning you could get into some angles and pump up muscles, and that would be good. Like, you should be getting circulation and strengthening to your muscles. But when you don't put it in these angles of pressure, and when you don't fully bend a joint, taking that for example, fully bending a joint signals to your body that you're maximally using the joint, so you get more of the synovial fluid which carries the nutrients to the joint. Now, if you did that with an amount of load, or an angle that caused you pain, that wouldn't mean that it wouldn't have some constructive mechanism, but how are you going to be able to recover from that? So the idea is to find, not alter

• 42:55Speaker 00

  the movements, not run away from the movements, find the level of full use. So, not avoiding full use of the joint. What is the level of full use, the amount of load of full use, that you could do? As a terrible example, some of the exercises, if you see it, well, if you imagined walking backward underwater, or bending your knees underwater, there would be less pressure there. So essentially, you're honestly finding the level of pressure that there isn't pain. We need the pressure to build up. We need the pressure through a full bend. We need the pressure knees over toes. Among other areas, the ankles, the front of the shin, the hamstrings, we need these pressures to build things up. But we

• 43:37Speaker 00

  may have gotten to a point in life where we're very weak and tender in some of these angles, and so fully avoiding it, that becomes hugely problematic. Finding the level you can do has taken a lot of work with a lot of people to find the right angles. How do we do that? How do we get into these angles? And then building up from there to what the people with healthy knees can do.

• 43:57Chris Williamson?

  Take me through a couple of your highest return exercises for knees, and then a couple for shoulders as well, because I know that you've got a big set of work around shoulder health too.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Good. So dragging a sled backward would be the simplest way to get a knee workout started. Forward is also great on the sled. I use a mixture, but we do even more backward than forward. Most of us haven't worked backward. When we work backward, you take your step back, you're actually working your knees over your toes. So you're not just using such a heavy weight that you're leaning your body back. If you look from a side angle, every step, your knee should actually be over your toes. So that's the gentlest way to start building up strength with your knees over your toes. You're building strength, cardio, circulation, you're strengthening through your foot. What are the typical leg day exercises? Squat, deadlift, leg press, leg extension. Did you ever work your foot?

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Not once did your foot actually bend and load. So this is building from the ground up for your knees. Getting in that position, knees over toes, dragging a sled backward, then getting into full ranges of motion on a split squat would hit it from a totally different angle. You pump up, you get circulation with the sled, then you start to work on your full range of motion, build strength from there. And then a couple of classic finishers would be actually lifting weights. You can do a bodyweight version against the wall, but Tibialis raise, T-I-B-I-A-L-I-S raise. And you'll see endless videos on this now since we've started popularizing this. And now there's tons of people making equipment like you couldn't even buy a device to load free

• 45:37Speaker 00

  weights and strengthen your Tibialis muscles. Didn't exist. It was no longer being sold. Now Rogue Fitness is selling a Tibialis bar. They're being sold everywhere. And it started with an Australian friend of mine reaching out saying, "What piece of equipment needs to exist that doesn't?" And they fell out of style. They actually came about like 50 years ago, but they just didn't get into a style. A guy named Bob Gaida, who was one of the early bodybuilders before steroids was around. And then right when steroids came in, Bob worked at the YMCA getting kids off the, off the streets, off drugs. Then he sees people shooting up steroids. So he's kind of an interesting guy. He wasn't business minded. He was apparently terrible at business. So you couldn't buy these things to strengthen

• 46:18Speaker 00

  your shins. Now you can buy them everywhere. That's the muscle that's closest right up underneath the kneecap. And then also doing, doing hamstring work and hamstring curl machines are common and are great. Back extension machines. What's less common is what's called like a Nordic bench. So that's essentially doing a body weight hamstring curl. And the reason that is so related to the knee is that as you lower down, now you're just directly resisting your knee, your knee's ability to not be pried apart. So for example, an athlete, if they couldn't resist their knee being pried apart, they're let, they're at more risk of a ligament tear. So that's like a really simple bulletproofer. But even for

• 47:01Speaker 00

  some older people, getting that into, into these regress, everything has like a regression. So you can start somewhere, see where you're at, train there, get a great workout, recover, come back, get a little bit stronger. So

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me, just before you go on, talk to me about either duration, intensity, loading, repetition, distance. Just so we've got sled.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  I'll give you a sample, an example. Go 10 minutes straight backward sled at whatever level feels good for you. Drag a sled backward for 10 minutes. Then do five sets of 10 reps on this full range of motion split squat at the lowest level that you have to get into by elevating the front foot or assisting yourself. Just getting into these mobile stretched out positions, but gradually loading. And then, then do three sets of 20 reps on that tibialis muscle, which you can start against the wall. You'll be, you'll be scorching, you'll be on fire. Many of us who are fragile realize, oh my gosh, we never strength trained these baseline preventers of Achilles and knee injuries. And then a simple three sets of 10, just controlling down on a Nordic. Or if you don't, if you don't have something

• 48:08Speaker 00

  to set up for that, a hamstring curl, you know, just get some work in there behind the knee. So what did we do? We, we got stronger. We put energy on getting better backward of what hurts our knees with the sled backward, full range of motion, strengthening below the knee, strengthening behind the knee. That's all pretty common sense. Like, okay, like Get circulation, get strengthening for the knees, strengthen the knee itself, like these top muscles, these top thigh muscles, and particularly when you go to a full range of motion, you start to train that vastus medialis, that teardrop shaped muscle that's closer to the knee. So what did we do in the workout? We trained the muscles that are closest to the knee, and we got stronger at all the areas closest to the knee.

• 48:54Chris Williamson?

  One of the things-

• 48:55Speaker 00

  That's to make it unfancy sounding. Sorry to spoil the party.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  We just proved our pain-free ability everywhere around our knees.

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  One of the words that you used earlier on was pain and avoiding pain and not pushing yourself too hard into that. But presumably, especially if someone maybe hasn't done this before, or perhaps they've got a history of knee injury, there's going to be a modicum of discomfort here. What's the cues that you give people to know when pain is okay, pain's not okay?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  The best is just to start at the lowest level, even if it's like super easy, and then do more sets. It's not like we're just doing one set. We're doing, we're usually on a main exercise doing, it could be as low as three, but as much as 10 sets. Like you have time, there's, what's the rush? You got this workout, you got next workout. And also with the sled, the sled is so cool that it gives you something that you can, you can gradually work really hard at, even if you're someone who normally has that tenderness and has that pain. So the sled is like the lube, the backward sled is the lube that helps all this other stuff occur. Then start at the lowest level, feel the muscles working. See maybe if you can go to the next level, see how that feels, but never hit where you

• 50:11Speaker 00

  try a level that's harder, and maybe that gives you some discomfort. Just go back to the previous level and keep pumping out reps.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Right, shoulders.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Shoulders. There would be three big ones that are essentially all the opposite of the motions that hurt the shoulder. So usually, someone with shoulder pain, if they get their knee up on a bench, and if they rotate the musty, the external rotator muscles, and I have videos of these, using a dumbbell, usually they'll be really weak compared to like the front of the chest muscles. And so even without even having to dig into the front of your shoulder, without even having to do anything risky, you can start by strengthening your external rotation, you can start to strengthen the lower trap muscles, which are like in

• 51:03Speaker 00

  the middle of your back where you're on a, you get on a back extension machine, your body's at 45 degrees, arms are straight, so, and you can do a power raise where you're even, easiest is to start with a cable, so you're seeing how much weight can you strengthen behind your shoulder blades. So those, those big three set a really good foundation, like, your shoulders in trouble if, if all the muscles behind them are very weak compared to the front. But at the same time as doing that, we are restoring full range of motion of actually pressing and using our shoulders. So like, like I, I take bars behind my neck, and, and I press, like imagine you're setting up for a squat and the bar's on your back.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  How pain-free and strong someone is from that position of pressing the bar from behind their neck is the easiest predictor of shoulder problems. And imagine if you just took something super light and you gradually built that up. So even with the shoulders, and I rarely talk about the shoulders, because it's gonna take the same process as talking about the knees, the back, the shoulders, how you bulletproof parts of your body, is gonna follow these same common denominators. So the first three exercises that I described, if you watch a baseball pitcher, that's the sport where they're tearing up their shoulders the most. Kids are having like an epidemic of shoulder surgeries in America, trying to throw baseballs harder. It's like the knees for baseball, so knees in basketball, shoulders for baseball,

• 52:29Speaker 00

  we have a youth epidemic of surgeries, like that's not fun, that's gnarly stuff. And so far beyond a reasonable doubt, these kids in their teens who are having shoulder surgeries, they are just not strong enough in reverse of throwing a baseball. No different than the basketball player who's pounding into the knees is not strong enough in reverse. If you are strong enough in reverse of a motion that could injure you, you now have a math equation. So I can land from a dunk on one leg, but could I land from a skyscraper? No, I'd die. So it's just a math equation of how much I can handle. If you run and then you have to slow down and stop, for someone with really bad knees, that would hurt. They wouldn't be able to stop themselves.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  So with the shoulder, it's the same thing. Built on a foundation of how strong are you in reverse of the motion that hurts? And then to get the joint, to get the synovial fluid and for the joint itself to build up, it then needs full ranges of motion. A simple one for someone would be rehabilitating a full range of motion push-ups. So using rings or even hands on cement blocks and not stopping a push-up halfway. Not that there's anything wrong with any traditional exercises, but if you couldn't do a push-up with a full range of motion and if you never trained through a full range of motion, you wouldn't be giving your shoulders as much synovial fluid to heal. So it's the exact same principle as the knees. So you would basically say, principle number one,

• 53:57Speaker 00

  get stronger in reverse to the pain. Because that's usually the simplest and the least painful thing you can do. It's the full range of motion that often scares people. So number, principle number one, get stronger in reverse of what hurts. Principle number two, restore and train full range of motion, but at the level that doesn't hurt you. If you have only those two principles and you had no background in exercise, you could probably create, if you then worked at it, you could probably create a cool system for just about any area of the body. If you get stronger in reverse of what hurts and you restore full range of motion and train strength through a full range of motion, but at the level it doesn't hurt. So now my shoulders. I add weight around my waist and I do dips where like to me it's not a dip if my

• 54:40Speaker 00

  if my elbow isn't above my shoulder. So I'm fully stretching in and pressing out. So I use full range of motion on exercises and I'm strong in the reverse of these common pains. And it's like a cheat code, like it feels surreal to do some of these exercises that growing up like it would have hurt me to do this stuff. And now I can do stuff with my back, my shoulders that really would have hurt me when I was younger. And now it's like so easy and I'll be able to train the rest of my life and I'll have stronger joints. I'll have more actual tendon and ligament tissue. I'll have stronger tendons and ligaments and more strength in the muscles around those joints. So it's, it's pretty neat, but it's so cool. I'm not a podcast guy. I'll be honest. I don't like doing podcasts,

• 55:24Speaker 00

  but this was worth it because you made me think about it. And those two principles is really, that's the best way to describe it.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. I'm glad, I'm glad to have helped inspire you with that. One thing I noticed you haven't mentioned here, which I often see people talk about when regards to shoulder health is hanging. What's your thoughts on hanging?

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Well, just today I had 20 kilos, roughly 44 pounds around my waist and I'm doing full range of motion chin ups. So I'm a big fan of going through a full range of motion that chin up. I go all the way down to a full hang position and then I explode up. So that works for me. If someone wanted to do-

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  So what we're, sorry, what we're talking about here is the equivalent, when I'm saying hanging, whatever it is-

• 56:07Speaker 00

  I know. You're talking about actually just hanging or-

• 56:09Chris Williamson?

  Passively, right? But what, that would be the equivalent of, you know, sitting in a passive Yin yoga style, whatever, glute stretch or some shit as opposed to doing your-

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Sitting in a squat.

• 56:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yep, yep.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Ido Portal, I believe. I mean, I haven't met Ido, but I believe people have told me that you sit like 10 minutes in a squat. Like the goal is to be able to sit down in a squat, the way people do in, in every native culture. They, they rest in a squat and you build up to where you can rest in a squat for 10 minutes. And that's helped a lot. A lot of people have gotten out of knee pain from doing that. Now, in my case, I've found better results from doing actual motion based strength training. That worked better for me. And even if someone is doing my motion based strength training through full range of motion- I'm not going to stop you if you want to do some extra hanging.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  I just can't make, I can't get myself to go do something that I, I am the ego lifter. I'm the skinny kid with bad knees, with terrible form rounding his back on a deadlift to get a PR. And I, I am the ego lifter. So I, I need it to be enjoyable. You'll never catch me on a, I never foam roll. I don't go in ice baths. I don't, I don't do anything for recovery and I don't hang, even though I'm not against it. But I go full range of motion on my chin ups, trying to get stronger. I want a challenge. I, I do each set of chin ups.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  The question would be, why not? You know, like you, you're going to do the chin ups in any case. Why not bother to do it? And this is what you said earlier on about you maybe need to take a few steps back first. Because you're used to doing four by 10 at, with 20 kilo weight belt around your weight. But you're only taking your arm to there, right? You're not going to full extension. So you go, oh, so you're telling me now that I'm going to have to drop down to only five kilos. You go, well, yeah, okay, you are. But then, once you're able to build yourself back up toward that 15 to 20 range, think about how much more activation, how much more range you're moving through, much more help.

• 58:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, I, as a simple tool to be used, thinking about what are the stretches that you're doing? How can you make those more active? How can you try and find a way to move through that plane of motion so that, you know, it's not dangerous? You take it one step at a time. You realize that fitness is a lifelong pursuit, not a pursuit that needs to be completed and mastered within this very one session.

• 58:38Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned as well just before about backs and lower backs is something that I have far too much familiarity with. I see that you're a fan of Jefferson curls and other stuff. What have you found when it comes to bulletproofing lower backs? What have you found that's, that's effective for you?

• 58:58Speaker 00

  What seems to be the foundation of the lower back in getting someone out of pain is the ass to grass, full range of motion, split squat. Because where have we deviated? Why are people having so much back problems? I refuse to believe that like, whoops, we screwed up designing the human body and all 80% of the human race is going to have back problems. It's the same with the knees. We see that in areas where people live more naturally, they have less of these problems. So I would have to assume that the amount of sitting we do in chairs, our hip flexors get very shortened. And it's not just a theory. People who get good at this ass to grass split squat remark all the time, they're just having, there's thousands of people doing this and there's so much less back problems

• 59:42Speaker 00

  with people whose hip flexors are lengthened out and strong. So already we're strengthening in reverse of all the excess sitting. So I sit like a normal guy. I'm not the guy with a fancy chair or something, or I don't sit on my computer.

• 59:57Chris Williamson?

  You're standing now, you're standing at the moment to do the podcast.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Forrest set this up for me. I didn't, I didn't even choose.

• 1:00:03Chris Williamson?

  Standing podcast, standing podcast, the hack man, I'm telling you. People that want to start doing a podcast. Oh dude, your energy's better, you're able to move more, you can shift from side to side. I can't, I do the sit down podcast now and I'm like, oh God, just, I feel so constricted. I don't like it. So he's, your man's got it right. He's given you one of the hacks.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Good job, brother. So, so it starts right there. Be strong and mobile in reverse of the excess sitting. And then from there, your back itself has, there's one level of back strength is the ability to resist being crunched over. Like imagine, imagine you have a deadlift and you go to an amount of weight that you can't hold your back straight and it, and it rounds, like the weight is breaking the strength of your back muscles. That is a form of back strength. But you also have some areas into your upper back muscles that help hold things up. So meaning even into what's called the thoracic spine for someone who's not into exercise.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Now we're talking about higher up the back and it's found that people with a more, with less thoracic spine ability, those people have more chance of lower back surgeries and shoulder surgeries. So you have, you have your whole spine and part of it is being able to resist the pressures and injuries that could come in on your back. But another part would be your ability when you are lengthened out. So if you wound up in a position in life where you bent over and now your back was in a rounded position, it's found that people who can go into that position better have less back injuries. So what I do is I use very light amounts, like I think of training the rounded position

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  of the back as a quality that I want to be really good at, but really gentle with. And then I think about the ability to resist rounding as a quality that I want to be really strong in with built on that foundation of my hips being set properly from the astrophysic split squat that my hip flexors are really lengthened out and strong through stretched positions. So I, I think different joints are, are different. And then you have the spine, which is different than like a knee joint.

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  The spine is a unique beast all of its own, yeah.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think it would still wind up rationalizing pretty similar, like, like, actually it does rationalize similar, which is, okay, you want to be, you want to be able to resist your back rounding, but you also want to be able to round your back. Just like you want your, you want to be strong in reverse of the knee pain, but you also want to be able to be strong if your knee is fully bent. So it's not like you're avoiding the fully, so the, the fully bent position of the knee would be the same reason that I intentionally train my back in a rounded position. And man, I haven't had a back tweak in like many years and I used to have to go to a chiropractor or feel like crap for some weeks or not be able to lift or not be able to, you know, struggle to play basketball feeling my back. Just, I thought that was normal because so many people I knew had back problems. So

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  yes, the majority is knee success stories that people send me every day like a flood, but many people are having these same realizations because my program's always just been a full body program. It's not just a knee program. It's always been a, just a full body exercise program. But using those concepts, be able, be able to resist that position where we get hurt, but also be training the position that would be the tougher position at a gentler level, basically.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about the type A go get a gym guy, and this was another mentality that I had to let go of. You go from being someone who's chasing down your aesthetic goals by pushing hard in the gym, by training frequently, maybe, you know, six days a week with active recovery, maybe double sessions. What, how much is too much in regards to training frequency when it comes to your stuff? Is there a point of diminishing returns? Is there a point where you can do too much?

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  I think there kind of is for anything because you have the recovery process. You also have the mental side of it of getting burnt out, tired, not having the energy to focus. So I actually try to program it as conservatively as possible because we know the body is gonna, the body has the ability to heal and adapt and get stronger. So I try to almost program like, like not overdoing things. So the average person, I think, like what I currently have with my weight program is we do legs twice a week. So Monday, Thursday is legs, Tuesday, Friday is upper body. We sled all four sessions at the start because it just helps get that circulation, keeps our cardio in, gets our feet stronger. So we sled all four sessions to start, but then Monday, Thursday legs, Tuesday,

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Friday is upper body. So that's a very general schedule. Could someone go six days? Sure. But the people out there winning training six days, it doesn't mean they wouldn't make gains on four days.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  Do you find if someone was to do one upper and one lower session per week, are they still going to make progress? Are they going to be able to just mitigate damage?

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  They would still make progress. So the person just doing, say they're just supplementing one of my sessions a week for the legs, let's say, they're still going to make progress, they're still going to make gains. Most people like to exercise more often. So most people want to exercise their lower and upper bodies at least twice a week. And, and even with those Wednesday and weekends off, tons of the people doing the program go work on extra week links from the program and like they can't help it. They want to be in the gym. So it's your life. It's not, four days is not special. Even one day of doing, of like working, I have, I have different areas that we're trying to master, different movements we're trying to master. Heck, if you went one day a week and worked on some of those.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  One day a week is enough to cause changes, for sure.

• 1:05:58Chris Williamson?

  Ben Patrick, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the program and all the stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  ATG, that's my business, it stands for Athletic Truth Group.

• 1:06:09Chris Williamson?

  Also stands for Asta Grass.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Exactly, I really liked the word Asta Grass, and so I wanted to make an acronym with Asta Grass. So Athletic Truth Group is the business name and ATGOnlineCoaching.com is the website.

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  Awesome, knees over toes guy everywhere else, Instagram, YouTube, blah, blah, blah. It'll all be linked in the show notes below. Anyway, Ben dude, I really appreciate you. My coach Larry that I'm working with at the moment, he has very much taught me about the line between recovery, physical therapy, rehab, training, conditioning, strength, all just being one spectrum continuum matrix that you can move through. And I think increasingly I'm seeing people like yourself, like Larry, treating things like that. And I really hope that this continues. Your work's great, man, and I, long may it continue.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  Man, really appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me on.