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Pseudoscience in Wrestling - Ep10 - Archaic Wrestling
79 Plays1 year ago
**DO NOT UTILIZE THE INFOMATION IN THIS CONTENT AS MEDICAL ADVICE**
Sasha and Evan are joined by @Rhino184 to take on an ever topical subject. Athletes are willing to try a lot to gain an edge in competition. Sometimes this leads to a bit of snake oil seeping under the mat...
(Technical and personal difficulties kept this Ep from being released in a timely manner.)
Music by Josh Kasen
Twitter: @ArchaicWrestle
ArchaicWrestling@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Injury Update
00:00:18
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of Archaic Wrestling, folks. It's going to be a good one. I'm excited about it. And my name is Evan, and I've always got Sasha with me. How you doing, Sasha? Good. Well, all right. Just all right. Yeah, I almost popped out my elbow two days ago. BJJ, just quick, quick arm bar. I was a little bit rusty. I probably rolled through it in a weird way.
00:00:48
Speaker
Had it bent, straightened it out, cracked, you know, popped it. Big loud pop and then went over, but I'm doing okay. It's not as bad as my other elbow injuries have been. All right. Well, as long as you're okay. If only you had a buddy that you could talk to.
Pseudoscience in Sports
00:01:07
Speaker
about this sort of thing. But I do want to mention real quickly, it's not going to be quite the usual show. We won't be focused too much on wrestling history. A little bit of that will come up, but we have a kind of fun topic. We're going to talk a little bit about pseudoscience in wrestling and in sports more broadly, I think. You know, there might be some spicy conversation that could come from this and that's good. We're excited about that. And we are,
00:01:35
Speaker
you know, really happy to have someone here that's going to talk with us about it. We have Dr. Dylan Ryan, who's joining us and I'll be calling him Rhino. He's that type of guy. How are you doing, Rhino? Doing well. Lazy Saturday, just watching a lot of football with the dogs. But it was good to be off work today and have some time to chat about some fun topics.
00:02:01
Speaker
Hey, and it's a real pleasure to have the master of vague sports posting of wrestling Twitter on. It's always great. I'm glad to get just these ethereal updates about something that's happening in the sports world. And it really helps me feel connected. Yeah, you never know. It's like one second. It's like some kind of...
00:02:24
Speaker
scripted professional wrestling tweet that is a marked tweet or it's I was asked today like why, why watch so much this year? Why I've watched so much Minnesota football and I didn't really have a great answer other than when my cable went out. Those are the games that I was getting. And so a lot of my random vague tweets have been terrible tweets about like the Minnesota Gophers or some other stupid event. But I'm glad some people appreciate it.
00:02:53
Speaker
Oh, it's got to be many, many people. Well, I want to give you an opportunity for those that don't know, you have a little bit of relevant background.
Rhino's Journey: Wrestling and Medicine
00:03:04
Speaker
And maybe I can give you a minute to just say what that is when it comes to our topic today and I guess your background in wrestling. Yeah, so wrestled very poorly at Duke University and graduated in 2015, got to wrestle a lot of
00:03:21
Speaker
A lot of quality opponents did not always go well, but I had a great experience wrestling and kind of parlayed that awesome academic experience that I got and being able to go learn at Duke, to go to medical school and ended up doing a residency in neurology at Duke as well. And now trying to finish up my fellowship and continue to move forward with that while
00:03:50
Speaker
also annoying my wife with as much sports as I can watch. But yeah, a lot of my majored in bio and chem and have a lot of experience now, trying to read into medical evidence and break down medical evidence and kind of in building my own practice or the way that I practice. So this should be a fun topic for me and all of us to just kind of
00:04:19
Speaker
generally talk about in the prevalence to the wrestling world. Awesome. Well, I like once again, we appreciate you coming on, man. I fully anticipate that I'll be, I'll find out that I'm incorrect about something today. Hopefully, hopefully, right? Or else it's not that productive. Well, hey, Sasha, I wanted to give you a sec to introduce a quick topic before we jump all the way into it.
Debating the Three-Point Takedown Rule
00:04:49
Speaker
What do you have to say about the three point takedown right now? Um, as I haven't been watching too many of, you know, these, uh, Campbell versus army or Maryland versus American, uh, dual meets. I don't think I've had a great look at, I don't think we're getting into the, you know, the meat and like the real meat of like what it's going to mean for college wrestling. Um, so far it seems like the guys who were winning,
00:05:20
Speaker
last year are continuing to win. And, uh, well, I guess there was, there was one that could have been interesting, which was, uh, Latona versus Gabe Wisenhunt. Latona got put to his back seven point move, uh, got two takedowns and was not able to get back from it. So I guess we're kind of seeing some of the same things that we were already seeing. Rhino, uh, before the season has started, um, what was your opinion of the three point takedown?
00:05:48
Speaker
And how are you feeling about it so far, even though it's still pretty early? So I was definitely one of the people who was opposed to the idea, didn't like the, you know, though it's just an extra point, you're increasing the scoring of the takedown by 50%. That can change a lot of,
00:06:10
Speaker
match dynamics to me. Some of the reasons I didn't like it was I didn't really feel it was truly necessary. And thinking about one of the common complaints was people getting taken down at the end of a period. If somebody had two takedowns, these four or four matches that can indeed happen that now would be different with a three-point takedown. I totally get that. But some aspects of it didn't like that.
00:06:36
Speaker
without the change in kind of stalling certain guys. Now you have an extra stall to play with outside because the discrepancy is two points from a takedown to an escape with a stall still being one, you know, the proximity to a major, the fact that a lot of these matches, you may end up getting less wrestling. Um, you know, seeing some of the good guys and matches very quickly, which was always going to happen as kind of Sasha was saying, the guys who win are still winning. They're just winning with bigger margins now.
00:07:05
Speaker
As well as, um, you know, changing the way you would then think about certain things like team scoring. Like this came up in, I was watching Oregon state, North Carolina, and there were still a lot of close matches. So the three point takedown didn't change, like how people approach the match, but at 90 set at one 97, you know, max Shaw, who's pretty good and he's pretty tough, uh, had one take down riding time and escape. He's now a take down away from a major and, you know, Oregon state's up eight.
00:07:34
Speaker
the dynamic of, say, somebody who may have been down 4-0 with a two-point takedown, now 5-0. The losing guy, if he gives up a takedown or tries to score, takes the last 10-second shot and gives up a takedown, now he's getting majored and the kind of team scoring aspect changes. So you may paradoxically affect some of your aggressiveness as well by changing the metric.
00:08:00
Speaker
Um, and I just didn't think it was going to bring new fans. I, so I've kind of still been on that train though. Um, there's just not as much, I haven't seen enough from the early season to really get a huge grasp on exactly what will happen. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of your criticisms, Sasha and I were, we're pretty strongly behind the three point take down.
00:08:24
Speaker
Um, but he, but we, I think we would still agree with a bunch of your criticisms, like, especially the idea of like people saying that it would bring new fans to the sport, like something like that. I think we're both, you know, that's kind of ridiculous. Um, but then a lot of the points you make, like, I do see like, okay, I know where he's going with that, but then my attitude towards it is like, I don't care though. I would, I would like the trade-off totally get that. And I think that's totally valid. We need more ways.
00:08:54
Speaker
for people who are really bad on bottom to win, okay? I've been saying this forever. Maybe too many people on the podcast today can relate to that. Yes, me, certainly. In college, the bias guy, me not doing well on bottom, being like,
00:09:16
Speaker
know, writing time, it's kind of dumb or whatever. Yes, it negatively affects me in my matches. So it's kind of unnecessary. In college, one of my teammates who was just a beast on top, we were talking about, you know, because it was a while ago, but they had been talking about the three point takedown. And like he was he was really good. I think he was like round 12 at one point.
00:09:38
Speaker
You've got like, yeah, it's just like a lot of tech falls with his top. But he just looked at all his most serious face. He's like, I might never win a match again. I mean, like like we've all said, we need to see more of it. You know, we really need to see how people are going to figure things out. Right. Like where the disconnect will be with with the intent and and the application. Yeah, we need to see more.
00:10:06
Speaker
more of the top athletes wrestle, the other kind of top guys to see how it shakes out a little bit. Because as Sasha said, the guys who are highly ranked are going to beat up on the guys who are like me in college. That's going to just happen a little bit faster now with a three point takedown. So that aspect really wasn't going to change. The matches may end sooner, but the dynamic of how people
00:10:32
Speaker
Wrestle we'll see as we get deeper into these better tournaments to see how people approach it Well before we really get into it. I got to catch a little bit of Cal Poly verse Duke recently Was everything okay right now You know good
00:10:56
Speaker
Aiden Wallace looked good at 165 as a freshman. Coach Dom's guy from Bergen. Had a couple good guys from Bergen. We're just, Duke is super young. A lot of new guys fresh out of high school wrestling against a couple quality teams out there. So things didn't go too well. And there's going to be a lot of
00:11:23
Speaker
you know, learning this year as Coach Lanham would have said, winning and learning is going to be a lot of learning this year. All right. Well, we're all excited for the season, but let's get into a little bit.
Snake Oil and Health Trends
00:11:35
Speaker
So I wanted to start talking about the term snake oil. Are either of you familiar of like where the term actually comes from? I assume a guy selling an oil from a snake that he said would cure things. Oh, you couldn't be more wrong.
00:11:54
Speaker
Well, yeah, correct. So the story of the first snake oil salesman is this guy named Mark Stanley. This is kind of like the myth, right? And he, like back in like 1890s, he was essentially selling this serum where he just would boil rattlesnakes and water.
00:12:16
Speaker
And that was the snake oil, right? So it was literally, excuse me, boil it in oil. So it was literally snake oil, right? You need to sell that as a cure-all, which is a really common thing that you see around, you know, what we would refer to as snake oil is they often will say, oh, it cures everything. It does all this different stuff, right? It is built for it all. And kind of the shitty thing is this guy stole the actual idea of snake oil.
00:12:45
Speaker
what it was was Chinese immigrants came out west and they had their own version of snake oil where they would boil a Chinese water snake. However, the water snake was super rich in omega-3 fatty acids. So the oil actually had some medicinal qualities. So when this guy stole that from them, the medicinal qualities of the American rattlesnake was essentially nil. So
00:13:13
Speaker
The idea of a snake oil salesman comes from something that medicine, generally speaking, and if I could be so bold to say it fully speaking.
00:13:25
Speaker
is pretty much just based on what we can synthesize from nature, right? Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day. So sometimes, you know, we don't want to fall into like an appeal to nature too much, right? But we do, we can still recognize that, you know, medicine is about how we manipulate our world, right? Agreed. Yeah. Interesting.
00:13:48
Speaker
fitting, certainly fitting for the term and fitting for the, uh, some of the topics that we'll kind of get into, uh, this evening and like touches of, you know, good idea or these qualities that make a lot of sense, but then, you know, spinning an aspect or taking the aspect in a slightly different direction that, uh, then was maybe intended.
The Sauna Debate: Weight Cutting and Health
00:14:11
Speaker
Speaking of that, I think our first topic, uh, when we're talking about pseudoscience and wrestling,
00:14:16
Speaker
is gonna be real familiar and we're gonna tackle saunas a little bit. Just to contextualize this saunas are somewhat controversial in wrestling you know they're heavily used obviously because they're great at keeping a sweat going right getting water weight off they're often using weight cuts they are you know they were you know notoriously banned because you know there were some deaths in the wrestling community and
00:14:43
Speaker
The theory was that, you know, excessive weight cutting and the methods in which people were cutting weight was leading to dangerous outcomes. But at the same time, we have people like, you know, the legendary Dan Gable is very into saunas. He's a huge advocate for them. He like does sauna retreats and stuff. Apparently he's really into it. There's folks on other podcasts that talk about, you know, going to the sauna, they talk about their being health benefits that are, you know, scientifically backed.
00:15:12
Speaker
about the sauna. And, Rhino, I want to ask you a little bit, where, or, well, you know what, let's, Sasha, have you, did you ever use a sauna to cut weight, Sasha? No, I mean, look, we practiced in a cafeteria. We're not, we weren't working with like, the best facilities around, you know, and I wasn't gonna go seek it out, like, every once in a while, I'd be like,
00:15:36
Speaker
should really go, go find out. I just, I wasn't going to go make that happen, you know, and go find the Russian sauna and do that. So no, I've actually, I think I've been in a sauna maybe like twice in my life. Yeah, I, I've, I've entered a sauna literally twice in my life. Both times I went, this is awful. And I left. It sucks. And I, you know, I cut, I, I cut a lot of weight, especially in college, but I never entered a sauna to do it. Rhino, do you have any experience in cutting weight with a sauna?
00:16:06
Speaker
I plead the fifth. Yeah, for sure. Not not certainly not as much as other people, I would say, who I have at least been around or kind of being around the sport itself, but certainly have been in a sauna, you know, in first experience is probably in high school a bit and had
00:16:33
Speaker
use it somewhat as exactly as you all had said, they're great at keeping people sweating and potentially not having to use as much energy, which is why, you know, people seem to love them for that aspect, at least for cutting weight. And I guess there, there is to some extent, some evidence that saunas in certain context and through certain usage, um, can have some pretty good, uh, some positive medical benefits. Uh, is that your understanding?
00:17:04
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree so there's on any of these topics there may not be as much of the like rigorous evidence that somebody might get from a new medicine or a drug that a company is trying to develop and a lot of that may be funding or government funding for grants to like study these things, but there are people who are active in these
00:17:28
Speaker
in these spaces. Much of it from my understanding is more on the like acute aspect of it and the type of sauna that we're thinking about. So like you're Russian or you're Finnish like your Scandinavian view of the sauna like getting in a hot dried out room for 10 to 20 minutes and then potentially getting into a cold region. And there's been some evidence that
00:17:54
Speaker
acutely, this can help with things like potentially your blood pressure or your cardiac output. So the ability of your heart to pump a better fraction of blood in return, there may be some respiratory benefit to that as well as the people who
00:18:14
Speaker
you know, potentially do the things like get in the sauna for 20 minutes and then get out into like a colder space or slowly subverse themselves in like a cold tub may have some benefits from like a recovery standpoint. There's at least some degree of evidence that that may be the case. Long-term, there's just not as much. What I'm hearing is it could use more evidence and more replication within the literature. That would be nice. Um,
00:18:41
Speaker
But from what they have seen, there is some limited, um, positive stuff, especially around blood pressure, excuse me, blood pressure and cardiovascular stuff. Um, like, like you said, very acutely, just like within the time right after use, right? Um, but we don't have enough to say that this is going to then mean that these people will live longer necessarily. Agreed. Yeah. There's like a lot of, there's such a limited stuff in kind of doing a,
00:19:11
Speaker
kind of review on this on long-term health effects from people who might recurrently use a sauna like in certain cultures who do this three or four times a week. We don't know as much of that long-term effect. But yeah, there's certainly there's evidence from like stress hormones and things like norepinephrine that have been affected at least in people who are using the sauna as compared to
00:19:39
Speaker
to people who may not be doing that in that very acute setting after it. So. All right. All right, folks, we just had a technical difficulty. No big deal. Every once in a while, someone has to jackhammer and drill into some concrete nearby. And that's part of life. You got it. You got you got to have some mental toughness here. And speaking of mental toughness, I do want to differentiate between
00:20:07
Speaker
The way we're talking about how asanas can be used in a healthy way, at least, you know, in a probably a non-harmful way at the very least, right? And the way in which we talk about sauna use and how to use a sauna within the wrestling community. I think it's very easy that people will, as you said, Rhino earlier, take something that, you know, has, you know, some truth to it and some evidence and some good reason to utilize or practice.
00:20:36
Speaker
And then it can kind of blow up into a way to make an excuse for a whole other different way of practicing something. And I think that's what we see in wrestling sometimes. Yeah, I completely agree. And that's like the heart of a lot of these debates that happen or these takes online that can run rampant is exactly that. There's this element of truth.
00:21:00
Speaker
But then somebody doesn't like look into the methods like what what are they actually talking about? Who are the people that they're actually studying or the behavior that they have? and then just kind of trying to make that valid for everything because as we've hinted at at the beginning of this like a lot of us as wrestlers we're doing this to lose weight and stay in the sauna for extended periods of time to cut off water and
00:21:29
Speaker
for other means that are much outside of like a immediate health benefit. So we've seen that argument with like wrestling, certain people in wrestling is like, oh, they need to unban this sauna or let people use sauna because there's all these health benefits and the goal from a wrestling perspective is not that.
00:21:51
Speaker
Right. Right. And it would be, it's naive to say like, Oh, these wrestlers are just going in the sauna cause you know, they're getting on their 10 minutes in the sauna after a workout because they want to raise their blood pressure, you know, cause you know how all those wrestlers out there really need to work on their blood pressure. Yeah, exactly. They're not getting enough exercise, right? Their, their heart, their, their heart rate and their, you know, cardiac output and all these things. And you know, they need to mimic another workout by getting into a very hot room. Yeah. That's totally what we're doing.
00:22:20
Speaker
So, Rhino, when you were saying, just had a question about, so like, the, you know, 20 minutes after when you're in a cold place. So are we talking like, you could have some sort of, you know, athletic benefit to hopping in the sauna for 20 minutes, then hopping out into something cold, or we're talking like,
00:22:40
Speaker
If you were about to go wrestle in a very cold gym, it would be advantageous to be in a sauna for 20 minutes right before that. Thinking, thinking more like the, there's probably, I don't think I read anything on like the ladder aspect of that, but the more the former in like the way they've.
00:22:57
Speaker
looked at some of the people who recurrently use the sauna and say Russia, they'll get in the sauna and then jump out in the snow or go in a cold tub. There's people in wrestling who will do that from a recovery standpoint. And you may have faith. There may be, in looking at some research into this, some recovery benefit from doing something like that. There are also risks. I apologize, my dog just grabbed a toy.
00:23:26
Speaker
some risks in doing that because you can abruptly change your blood pressure or you know constrict your blood vessels at that point so like the very this isn't really relevant to wrestling but the person who has a lot of like comorbid disease who does that and then dunks their head in a cold
00:23:48
Speaker
pool, maybe not the best idea. But generally, like an athlete who does that, maybe there might be some recovery benefit from that. I really do want to jump in and talk about, like, it isn't just a wrestling thing, obviously, like, this is an athletics thing, right?
Desperation Recovery Methods: A Personal Insight
00:24:06
Speaker
A big part of why we see so many athletes who are like, sometimes fall for like legitimate scams, sometimes are willing to try experimental procedures,
00:24:18
Speaker
are sometimes willing to just spend money on stuff just because they're trying to do anything. I'm really talking from a place of experience. I have a pretty major moment in my life where I was doing anything I could just because I was trying to be the best athlete I could.
00:24:41
Speaker
I tore my labrum 190 degrees my senior year of high school. You know, it's senior year. It's my year kind of deal. Um, and it was going to be a long road back. Um, and I was definitely going to be missing most of the wrestling season, right? But I was going to come in before it was over. It was a five month recovery for me. And I got back on the mat at that point, um, back to competition. But what did I do in the meantime? I had the surgery. I went to my PT that was prescribed, right?
00:25:10
Speaker
And that's the sort of stuff that I really credit with Getting me back was you know religiously going to PT and working hard there to get back But I also did a lot of other stuff I I was going to kind of a weird primary care physician at the time. He gave me some homeopathic medicine. I was taking that I
00:25:31
Speaker
heard that you could use magnets to pull more blood towards an area of your body to heal it faster. So I had this whole magnetic shield that I put over my shoulder. I I did acupuncture twice a week. And that was an interesting experience. And I also did I'm forgetting something. Oh, to getting into our next topic, which is going to be grounding, the concept of grounding or earthing.
00:26:01
Speaker
I actually actually wore a little stone on a necklace around my neck, because it was supposed to help the electronic homeostasis of my body. You're fully into it. So I'm showing my ass right now. But you know, I do want to say like, as we talk about this stuff,
00:26:18
Speaker
We're not trying to tell people that they're stupid or they're idiots or it's just it's really easy when you're really focused on competing to just kind of be like, you'll try anything, you know, you'll you'll you're you're in this competitive nature where, okay, what does it cost me to wear wear a thing around my neck? Nothing, you know, okay, I'll do that, right? What's this this shoulder magnet thing gonna cost 20 bucks? I guess I'll do that, right? I don't know. Did either of you ever do something that you look back on and go,
00:26:48
Speaker
Oh, that was that was just desperation or like that was a silly thing I tried. I get like some of that. The same thing, like senior year football, I got a really bad high ankle sprain and and was going like I can that resonates with me some of the story in regard to at that point in your life, like that's the most important thing in the world to you. It's your last go around and
00:27:15
Speaker
thinking about whatever I can do at home to get better, because I'm gonna play like I was gonna do. I remember freezing huge blocks of ice and setting up a huge tub and doing dumb thing and trying to come back way too fast and reading anything. It depends on who you trust. You're all kids as a kid at that point. It's very impressionable and trying to find whatever
00:27:43
Speaker
kind of little road back or advantage and not thinking about other stuff. And some of that reminded me, I remember my like shrine bowl year. That's when like, I don't know if you guys remember like balance bands or whatever, those like wristbands with the little hologram and they'd get you at the mall and be like, stand there and they tug on you. And then you'd be like, oh, do it with the band on.
00:28:07
Speaker
And the big trick is like you're used to the tug once you put the band on, so your balance is going to be better or whatever. But it reminds me of stuff like that. And you're like, you see it in person. You're like, oh, you know, that makes sense. Like, oh, we should wear this thing or whatever. Are you guys familiar with who James Randi is? No, no. Or was he died? He was a magician that was also like a psychic debunker.
00:28:33
Speaker
And he was the guy that had the million dollar prize that if you could prove that you did something supernatural, you'd win a million dollars, but he would essentially devise experiments to expose whether someone was actually doing something supernatural. And they used to hold a convention called the Amazing Meeting every year. And I went one year, I was working it and I was a cameraman for them. And every year they'd have someone come to challenge for the million dollar prize. And the person they brought out was a guy
00:29:03
Speaker
with those bands. And I remember they're really popular in baseball, especially, right? And yeah, they did a whole test where it was a double blind, essentially, making sure no one knew which one was which. They had a placebo and everything. And it was depressing to watch this guy get embarrassed in front of an audience. It was really bad. But yeah, that's the sort of thing, right? That's the snake oil, where it's not even
00:29:33
Speaker
you know, really connected to anything like the sauna stuff, you can kind of see what's going on here. Like you can kind of bring some positivity towards it. Stuff like those power bands were like just a scam from the get go. Yeah, 100%. Exactly. And it was going after someone like me or like the, you know, high school athlete exactly baseball, like playing baseball growing up, um, any little edge you could get, um, because
00:29:59
Speaker
16 year old it's not like I'm gonna go look up Let's look with this medical journal that I have no idea what the methods look like and understand But oh this person it's gonna make me better and I've seen it in action so I should go do that because you know My buddy did this and this and this and it kind of just carries on from there What about you Sasha? Did you ever embarrass yourself?
00:30:22
Speaker
I I'm I'm actually embarrassed right now because I had this I had like a really bad knee injury my senior year that put me out for super long and My I don't feel I'm my unmotivated ass just kind of just the PT and nothing else I Didn't I didn't search for any secret. I feel I'm ashamed. I'm like, wow, I I must have not wanted it that bad And that was it and it took a while. I took a long time to come back
00:30:52
Speaker
I'm like, damn, I didn't I didn't I didn't think I didn't even think of doing magnets. I didn't even like I didn't even give that a shot. I didn't like drink a ginger smoothie. I like, damn, I should have tried something. Christ. To be fair, you were this for me, it was like 2006, right? So it was before you could like there was a lot of stuff on the Internet that was easily accessible where you can like actually look up
00:31:21
Speaker
like, Oh, is this bullshit or not? Is this stuff that my weird that my weird primary care physician that gave me homeyopathy stuff said is correct. I didn't have a quick YouTube video to go to for it, right? I have I have been prescribed acupuncture before from Kaiser for tendonitis in my forums like tight forearm tendonitis, which used to be
00:31:49
Speaker
a real big problem is a recurring problem for me but so and I was like well I don't know it's I mean again I have no idea at this point I have I cannot I'm completely neutral on that experience I was prescribed it by my doctor and they were like yeah here's what we can offer you you can go get the needles and I did it and I don't know I would leave and I'd be like yeah maybe I feel better I don't know
00:32:14
Speaker
I mean, I don't if you told me it worked, I'd be like, yeah, shit. I guess it works. If you told me it's it doesn't work at all. I'd be like, damn, I guess they they didn't want to pay for good health care. I could go either way on this because I have I don't know. I have no idea. I just did what they told me to do. That brings up a good point because, you know, because I did a whole bunch of crap, right? Now, if some were to say, oh, but you came back like a whole month because I did, I came back a month earlier than they said, you know,
00:32:43
Speaker
if someone were to say like, oh, how were you able to do that, right? Now I have a whole bunch of things that I can't directly say, like, oh, it was the acupuncture, or it was this, or I could say, yeah, it was all that. Definitely, right? Yeah. Now I've put myself in a position that I can't actually really point to a cause outside of going like, okay, well, you know, but it was probably the good PT guy.
00:33:08
Speaker
But we should get into, as we were saying, so grounding or earthing. Sasha, do you want to say where this is coming from? Why are we talking about grounding and earthing in particular?
Grounding: Science or Pseudoscience?
00:33:23
Speaker
The first time I ever heard about this was watching like a flow film on Kyle Dake. And he's just going through all of the weird shit he does. You know, he does a lot of weird shit.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, one of the things is he's like he runs I'm not I mean maybe I'm trying to interrogate it too hard because it kind of seems like a nonsense concept but from what I can tell he runs he has a wire like a copper wire that Goes is like connected to the dirt outside of his house and it runs up into his bedroom window Onto like is connected to like his bed or something. I
00:34:07
Speaker
Yep. And when he was explaining it, he's like, yeah, my whole my whole house is grounded. I make sure like where I sleep that it's grounded. And then he just says like, yeah, I don't know if it works, but like, you know, I'll try anything, whatever. There you go. Any nation for what it is or what it would be doing, but that he's just like, I just do it. Yeah. You know, it's the same reason he does like the barefoot stuff, right? Like a big part of it is like the connection with the earth. Rhino, do you want to get in here on this here?
00:34:37
Speaker
So I didn't know what the term was until you guys had had asked me about it because I was I was familiar with it from the same reason that Sasha had brought up more people and like wrestling or being like, yeah, I walk outside barefoot and I do this and I like rub dirt on my food or whatever. And I was like, OK, I guess. But wasn't wasn't as much familiar with the
00:35:06
Speaker
the term itself so it was uh, it was interesting to read about some of that aspect or some of the beliefs behind it because it wasn't generally something I was all that familiar with. So is it like an electrical thing? Yeah, yeah, what's your steel man of how it works? I've seen a few different
00:35:33
Speaker
things are about like our proposed mechanisms from people so like some of them and and it's it's a lot of the same like people who are involved in the space or who like promote this it's the same few people and all the stuff um one thing is like oh they're you know you can create a current so there's electrons coming from the surface of the earth that then get into your skin and help like oxidative stress or you're then like
00:36:02
Speaker
having current back into the earth, or it's giving you just benefit from the fact that you're touching the earth and being one with nature more of that aspect of it. But I don't think there's anything that somebody has shown to give a clear mechanism behind being like, oh yeah, this is exactly
00:36:29
Speaker
why this is a thing and much of what is out there is these few people or these 10 people all hooked a wire up to their bed and connected it outside and they said they slept better. It's like, sure, but you don't know if that's the reason why or why that's the case. They don't have any explanation beyond, they're not even going to attempt to take this thing beyond, well,
00:36:57
Speaker
Could be something or it could be a placebo. Who cares? Like they are not even really attempting to make that like delineation. Yeah. And then a lot of people still kind of buy into that misunderstanding of like what the placebo effect is. Like a lot of people like kind of think that the placebo effect means, oh, it still worked, though. Right. Yeah. And it's like, no, no, that's that's that's not what's going on.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yep. And they feel like, well, if I just trick myself with placebo, that's just as good for my pain management. It's like, okay, I'm glad that it didn't hurt as much for a while, but like, that's not what placebo effect like is actually going like me. Yep. So yeah, that's frustrating. Exactly. It's like the electrons in the earth, like you were saying, it's supposed to like create like a balance within your body, right? Like the concept being like, if your body is not electrically
00:37:50
Speaker
like balanced with the earth, you know, you don't have homeostasis between your body and the earth, then bad is essentially where I get where I get from there. Because I'm not sure like what the mechanism then transfers from there, right? That's kind of vague with them. Yep. But yeah, that's that's my understanding. So that's, that's, you know, probably not a real thing. Well, this one seems pernicious, because it's like,
00:38:17
Speaker
it's like it's one thing if you go out there and you say like a bunch of wrong ideas that you can are fairly easy to you like you propose an idea of like this is how this is working and you go in depth on it someone else can look at that and go well here's about you proposed a bunch of ideas that you can debunk them this one seems like more pernicious than that there's like
00:38:41
Speaker
There's there doesn't seem to be much of a mechanism proposed for how it works. So how could you possibly debunk it? It's just like there's look there's like there's electrons in your body and there's electrons in the earth. Yeah, so You do the math and it's like well, I don't I don't know anything like Something of you know, electrical current and why like we have all kinds of math for that. It seems a little bit They're gonna disprove that your feet are you know, like it's
00:39:07
Speaker
It's unclear what is even being alleged, so it seems hard to debunk it. We're not saying going out and being in nature and like, yeah, go swimming in the lake and do all that stuff. We're not saying that that's not beneficial, right? That's obviously beneficial to get away from work and get away from noise pollution and get away from your neighbors and leave life behind and go out in the woods and go on a hike and exercise and
00:39:37
Speaker
That's where a lot of this stuff will come from. I think it was Andrew Huberman's podcast where someone asked him about grounding. And his response was like, oh, well, maybe. But we do know that studies show that if you go hang out outside, then you're happier. And it's like, well, yeah, that's right. But that should be obvious that that will happen as opposed to it's because I got some more electrons in me.
Financial Ecosystem of Pseudoscience
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's where some of this gets
00:40:06
Speaker
Conflated because they're clear as you've said clear obvious benefits to going outside like sunlight for vitamin D it even can help with sleep and you're like people's energy level and there's real like actual evidence behind this like exercise getting outside getting away from some of these aspects of Modern life are clear like clearly very clearly have health benefits and any nobody's gonna debate that but now
00:40:35
Speaker
exactly as we're kind of hinting at before this aspect of like, well, now you need to be barefoot like walk the path barefoot or do this or don't wear sunscreen or like, you know, put all this stuff on your
00:40:48
Speaker
your food and now like that gets more complicated as well with this mechanistically because then people are like well the grounding with all like the 5G or Wi-Fi and all this other electrical signaling and now you need to be one with the earth and that's how it was supposed to be and it's like okay well I can't really answer that question with anything or like find a means of combating that belief and it's not like this is like a huge bat like if
00:41:18
Speaker
somebody wants to walk outside barefoot, like, go ahead, like, yeah, don't like slice your foot open on a rock and do nothing about it. But like, it's not hurting somebody really, it's probably not gonna hurt you to do all this stuff. But like, do we need to have, you know, eight books that are selling to people to be like, Yeah, you need to be helped, you have to do this to be healthy in here, buy this and do all this and get rid of all this stuff. That aspect is like,
00:41:46
Speaker
just isn't backed by really any evidence. Well, and unfortunately, like a big part of what pushes this stuff is there's a financial ecosystem around it, right? Like the supplement industry is a big thing where another example of something where, Hey, there's a ton of, there's a ton of supplements, supplements you can take that are going to work, you know, and there's a ton of supplements that you can take that are gonna like,
00:42:11
Speaker
They kind of have evidence behind them and then there's supplements that do not work, but there's a lot of money to be made. There's a lot of money to be made in selling unregulated advice to people and we see that with like pickup artists, right? We see that especially with talking about health, right? And unfortunately, because athletes or just famous people, I guess, in general are often trying to chase these things and chase this
00:42:41
Speaker
these, these, uh, like pinnacles essentially to better themselves. Those are the people that are most likely to go after things. And then they become a kind of big mega horn for a lot of these, uh, uh, really problematic and I guess, unfortunate, um, uh, trends in, in where people are getting their healthcare information from. Yeah, exactly. Like who you trust and there are people who are very impressionable.
00:43:08
Speaker
Um, now in this space and we have so much more access to any, and that's like the buzzword not to like say whatever everybody else says, but there's just so much access now through the internet, our phones, we have tons of access to information. You can put out whatever you want and don't necessarily have to rigorously defend that through anything. And, and because of your potential, potentially your platform or your title, and I have to be even like very cognizant of that.
00:43:37
Speaker
people can take your advice and leave that impression and kind of carry on this belief that may not be backed by anything more than just somebody's word. And real quick, I forgot to do the start of the podcast, but no medical information in terms of advice is being put forth here today. I don't think we've done that at all yet anyway, but it's important. What we're saying about others goes for us as well, right?
00:44:07
Speaker
Please seek out experts on topics. Please seek out expert consensus on topics because sometimes experts can be kooks and be kooky and throw a big monkey wrench into a lot of really important stuff. I think we've seen that a lot with like COVID and the amount of like vaccine denial that, you know, we're all really familiar with right now. It's rough.
00:44:35
Speaker
Uh, yeah, no, and it just, we, I think any person can be overly confident in some aspect. Like my, myself for sure, it could be like overly confident in an aspect where maybe I don't know as much of it. Like I don't know what I don't know. And there's a danger in not knowing what you don't know. And then kind of expressing that.
00:44:59
Speaker
Like expressing some kind of strong opinion and is exactly as you all said like not trying to give advice here I'm not a sauna expert or an expert on like walking around barefoot outside but do you have like some experience trying to answer some of these questions for people are at least looking into The methods behind why people are talking in the way they do everything we're saying right now is about we want people to be safe when people make safe decisions and
00:45:26
Speaker
And that's all it is. And, you know, don't make decisions that are going to, you know, lead you to being taken advantage of either. Right. Yeah. Or harm somebody else. Like if you're if you're not harming somebody else, like you can typically make the decisions you want to want to make, at least from like my perspective, like take certain things and read up and kind of foster your own opinion and kind of go from there. Well, maybe we could do a little example of that right now.
00:45:57
Speaker
Um, because there's, there's some new chatter, especially in the wrestling world, uh, about some age old, uh, uh, taboos being broken. Um, Sasha, let me ask you real quick. Growing up doing any corner, any kind of sport, um, when you were really tired and out of breath, uh, how were you coached to deal with that?
Debunking Traditional Recovery Advice
00:46:20
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, definitely. Yeah. It was always hands on the hips. It was like head up hands on the hips. Always. Like.
00:46:27
Speaker
walk around, head up, put your hands on your hips and take deep breaths. And my whole body would just be like, I remember every time this happening, I would just be like, God, this fucking sucks. I really want to bend over, put my hands on my knees and breathe really fast. But I guess this way is better. I got to do it this way. Well, you were taught wrong, Sasha. You were wrong. Your coaches were wrong.
00:46:51
Speaker
No, no. I mean, I had the same experience. You know, I was often told, like, put my hands up or like over my head. Right. But there's like new controversy around this in the wrestling world, because apparently there was a new little study that came out saying that it was more advantageous and you could bring in more oxygen into your lungs and allow your lungs to open up even more by doing what your body very naturally wants to do, which is kind of put your hands on your knees and your thighs and bend over a little bit.
00:47:21
Speaker
and breathe from that position instead. And I, after, you know, just reading that abstract, made sure not to read anything about it ever again, because I wanted to be educated today by Rhino. Rhino, what do you think about this? So I think it was, so within wrestling, it was interesting, because this like paper kind of makes the rounds, and everybody's sharing it, certain coaches, or
00:47:50
Speaker
Uh, former athletes, like, and the big joke that like came from, it was like, Oh, we're all taught to put our hands on our head and like doing that as like a high school or college athlete have the same experience. Like, Oh, this sucks. I don't feel like I don't feel like my breathing is any better right now. Cause my hands are above my head. Like I'd rather bend, like just bend over or sit here or do something else. Um, so it became like this huge meme or not really a meme, but like.
00:48:19
Speaker
This is like, Oh, my coaches were wrong type thing. And that's fine. But, uh, it also like centered along in thinking about like a wrestling context, like what that position would mean or what this recovery aspect would mean. Like when are you getting in a certain position? Cause I think it's a very, to me, it was a very different concept before I had read the paper.
00:48:45
Speaker
about, okay, are you saying that somebody should do this posture when they go out of bounds in the middle of a wrestling match and it's going to help them recover? Is that different or are we talking like after sprints in practice? I think those are very different things as well from like a psychological
00:49:04
Speaker
point of view and it felt like as this was making the rounds that not a lot of people were actually reading the paper. They were just like reading the conclusion of the paper and not how they got to what they got to. If that makes sense. Yeah, I didn't read it. I just read it. I lied earlier. I did read it.
00:49:27
Speaker
So essentially what they, they did, um, so it was a small ish study. So it's like 20 is 24, um, women's soccer division, two women's soccer players. So, um, young college athletes. So that like fits the type of population that we're talking about. Um, and what they did was recurrent, um, high intensity interval training workouts on like a treadmill and they had a certain warmup period that was standardized.
00:49:55
Speaker
They were randomized to a certain breathing posture, whether it was like the bent over posture that we've all, that every human has done when they're tired ever, like bending over it, it makes sense that maybe your body would want to do that considering it's your natural like hesitancy to do this versus more of what we're talking about, like upright posture. So they did these recurrent high intensity workouts and then they were
00:50:24
Speaker
bent over in that position or in the breathing posture for like three or four minutes. That's a long rest. Exactly. And that was like the main, looking at the methods, kind of the main thing that stood out as like, oh, they're really doing this for a long time. So this isn't like, hey, I'm doing this for 15 seconds or I'm doing this for a few seconds and then I have to go back and compete again. And what they found was
00:50:53
Speaker
You know, it improved like time to recovery. Looking at like their title volume and the volume of carbon dioxide that they had tested with kind of the bent over posture. So certainly there's like some kind of physiologic reason that we all do this. But like, what is the benefit if you're really going to do that for three seconds when you go out of bounds in a wrestling match? Like there's a very different context to that. So.
00:51:24
Speaker
I felt like there were a lot of conclusions that kind of similarly to the sauna, like you take this thing that is based on something real, with real evidence behind it, but then you try to push it into a realm where it doesn't really fit. So I'm gonna ask you both, not as a doctor, not
00:51:45
Speaker
as a employee of a unified school district. But as a wrestling coach, if you're coaching some kids and, you know, if I'm coaching some kids, I'm going like, okay, how should I teach my kids to recover? Right? Like, I want to take on that responsibility.
00:52:03
Speaker
Um, and all I got to go on is, you know, the, what's been handed down for generations of, of knowledge. I've got this new paper. I've got what I'm seeing the kids would prefer to do. Right. Um, what do I do? Well, how do I teach? What do I tell the kids do to recover faster? This is tough. I also wonder if this is like, uh, could this be a freestyle versus folk style thing too? It has a little of that aspect. Yeah.
00:52:34
Speaker
You have a like 30 second towel off, right? Like you walk over there, 30 second towel off, and then maybe, you know, you get to come back and you do a little music hive. You go like, well, I didn't hear you take another 10 seconds, 40, 40 seconds bent over. You know, would that be enough? I guess we don't really know. We don't know. We don't know. Yeah, exactly. We can't conclude. But I think that is a really interesting point about the discussion in that you have this
00:53:03
Speaker
You know, it's really 30 sec, everybody extends that as they can in freestyle, where you do see some of the people bend out hands on their knees, bent over with the towel. And would there be some recovery, you know, small, but some recovery benefit? I think that would be a totally reasonable hypothesis based on some of what we're seeing or some of what's looked at in people who are in great health who are college athletes.
00:53:32
Speaker
Um, over an all bit longer period of time versus exactly like folk style where you don't have really that time, except in like an injury time or blood time to do these certain things, which is a much different, much different discussion within a match. And then after the match as well. What if you coach them? What if you say, Hey, rest of the match, you know, in between period, like go out of bounds, you're rushing back to the center, you're doing the thing.
00:54:02
Speaker
keeping your head up you know when you're because it seems like it has a double purpose right like when you make them keep their head up during the practice it's also like maybe part of the goal is just to ingrain the idea of keeping your head up while you're tired right which is so important but maybe you just say hey you know when there's blood time you know when there's injury time bent over all the way bent over
00:54:26
Speaker
So maybe that's the move because you can you can some you can get three to four minutes, you know, yeah happens or or Video review you're throwing the brick. Maybe you say this is when you get your bent over breathing See, I wonder if there's been anything done with like Olympic sprinters Like I could see there being some literature out there on them and how quickly they can recover after you know, a really strong burst I think that that could even be
00:54:54
Speaker
I don't know like I don't know if that would be more or like just just some variety in terms of like Results from different types of athletes would probably be Would help to inform the overall perspective on this because right now it's like I don't know if I'm a coach right now if I went back to coaching I'd just be like
00:55:13
Speaker
I don't know, man, just take a deep breath. Just get whatever oxygen you can get in there. I'm going to focus on talking about what's going on the match. You just breathe. So, yeah, I agree. It would be interesting to look at like these high mean a sprinter who may practice doing these recurrent bursts, looking at something like that in the time to recovery versus, you know, somebody who's running a longer, longer distance or, you know, somebody who has a different muscle composition, looking at some of this would also be
00:55:42
Speaker
in an interesting way to look at overall recovery. And I agree with Sasha in looking at the head up component. A lot of this coaching isn't necessarily about recovery as much as some of it is psychological or pushing through when you're tired, expressing this
00:56:05
Speaker
viewpoint to an opponent or an opposition that like, oh, I can do that. I'm fine. I can do this forever. Like, because my my whole when there was some debate on this, it's like if somebody, you know, say is wrestling to Santa or somebody like that who wrestles at an extremely high pace and goes out of bounds and bends over like this for four seconds, like could that have more maybe they get this transient recovery benefit from breathing. But does that have a
00:56:35
Speaker
worsen kind of or a Psychologically negative effect where now this person's like oh that person just gave the universal sign of I'm exhausted and Changes the dynamic of a match. Yeah, I think that kind of speaks to like we can often talk about like what is the Idealized way in which to practice a sport or something right in which it's it's idealized for your health
00:57:01
Speaker
Right. Like, oh, you should, you know, get your heart rate up to, you know, this amount for this amount of time and these intervals. And that's going to create the exact whatever. Right. This is the get your lactic acid to this thing. Like we can do all that stuff. Right. But there's a big difference between that and kind of the mental aspect of the game sometimes where sometimes we do stuff that's like a little bit overboard in terms of like, is this actually going to be beneficial physically? You know, like doing too many sprints or something where you're not really getting a lot out of them.
00:57:29
Speaker
But it's a little, it's about something else in that, in that moment sometimes where it is about like, okay, sometimes it's, you're going to be in a really tough spot, uh, physically and you're tired and it's going to be hard, but you have to tap into something mentally to get through it. And sometimes we will over train in certain ways in order to get you in that mindset. Yeah, exactly. To know that you can get through it when it eventually does happen. Like that, that idea of being broken and wrestling, um,
00:57:58
Speaker
Like having to be broken at times in the wrestling room to be able to know that you can navigate, um, from a physical and really mental aspect in, in a match that's going to be close or that's high pace, um, to be able to operate and not panic. Um, because once some of that, we've, we've all probably been in that experience where once it.
00:58:22
Speaker
goes out the window and a lot of that doubt creeps in as you get fatigue, things just become quicksand and get worse and worse and worse. I can certainly tell you that from the college standpoint of wrestling some good guys where it's like, oh no, this is not going well.
00:58:41
Speaker
Yeah. I also wonder, I mean, this, maybe I should ask this earlier. I obviously the results were like significant, you know, like in the scientific, uh, term of significant where, you know, you could tell there was a difference, but in the, uh, you know, colloquial term was significant, like, were they performing with athletes who bent over performing in a way that we would consider like drastically better or, or we were just like,
00:59:09
Speaker
that was better like that was you know maybe ran a couple hundred meters more or like we're looking at like oh wow they really the other ones out of the water I mean I think at the end of the day like if a coach saw these results like a wrestling coach and said you know what that's as best as I got I'm gonna tell my my wrestlers to you know when they're waiting for the other guy to come back to center and get into referees position feel free to put your hands on your knees you know it's the bet this is the best evidence I got kind of thing you know I mean if you
00:59:37
Speaker
I don't think it's going to be the deal breaker and stuff like that. So, you know, it's one of those things. I hope this was like a decent example of like, how can we like just quickly, you know, casually evaluate something like this that is, you know, could at least be a little bit beneficial and encourage people to just take new things with the grain of salt for a little bit, you know, and like we said earlier, just seek out the
01:00:04
Speaker
the proper expertise and expertise consensus to understand topics a little bit better. Agreed. Yeah. So I thought we could do a quick little thing. I put together a list of some things that are borderline,
Cold Therapy and Controversial Recovery Methods
01:00:19
Speaker
right? Pseudo science stuff. And maybe, maybe we can get some different opinions out of it. Sasha, right away, the first thing I'm going to talk about is cold therapy.
01:00:29
Speaker
because I know that that's a question that we need to bring up in terms of this can range from anything to putting ice on a bum knee to getting into a cryo chamber for 30 minutes for super fast recovery. So cold therapy, how do we react when we hear about that? I will say there are like when I am at my most
01:00:54
Speaker
sore and like my most tired, you know, like work a 10 hour day and then do a bunch of, you know, wrestling or whatever. I sometimes I do hop in the pond because it's about like 60 degrees in there. And I feel really good once I feel so much better. So I don't know. Maybe it's kind of I don't know. It feels good when I'm like really inflamed that I can tell my whole body's hot, especially like my knees.
01:01:25
Speaker
I really, I'll hop in some cold water, I'll hop in the pond. Yeah. I think a lot of that is what some of this comes down to, at least with like ice or your generic ice bath or like going and swimming or
01:01:44
Speaker
dipping into like a colder body of water. Those are like really cheap interventions that anecdotally when you ask people like, and I have the same experience, like with my knees in college and everything, I would often, you know, wrap the ice packs up around them and walk out to breakfast that way. It's like, cause you know, this feels better. I feel less pain with these on right now. And there, there may be some, like you're going to reduce swelling that way. There may be some, it may not,
01:02:14
Speaker
I don't think there's a lot of evidence that it like hastens your recovery or because you're reducing some of that inflammation, which still would be needed to like recover from, you know, some kind of trauma. Yes, exactly. Okay. This is kind of in like the same term is like this kind of in the same term is like the bent over breathing thing, right? I almost feel like I used to think that sometimes in high school, I'd be like, well, my body's doing that.
01:02:42
Speaker
And I'm doing ice. So like, I don't know. Does that make sense? I don't know. My doctor told me to do it. I'll do it. And I still do it. Like when my knees hurt, I put ice on them every time. Yeah, so do I. But I do. I have questions about it. I don't know. I couldn't tell you because I always do it. I don't have a sample size for like when I don't ice and I heal better or something because I'm just always doing the ice. Yeah. Yeah. I looked into this a little bit. And so.
01:03:13
Speaker
From what I understand, ISIS still has some pretty good evidence that it helps with pain, right? Especially like localized initial pain. The evidence on that's pretty good. However, when it comes to recovery, that's where I guess there's a little bit less strong evidence that ISIS is helpful in that sense. And I guess it's leaning more towards like range of motion and movement is better for recovery rather than being too static.
01:03:41
Speaker
But it's also, it seems to be like this is very situational. You know, like at what point are you in when dealing with an injury or is it a real injury? Is it, you know, just like, you know, micro terrors that you're dealing with or something like that, right? So yeah, it's wishy washy. But even something as simple as like put ice on an injury, you know, it's okay to kind of go, you know, there's more to this. There's more going on. Like people are still talking about like what the right way to do this stuff is.
01:04:11
Speaker
Yeah. And that's, that's. Where do we fall on rice? Rice. Not the food, I assume. Yeah. Terrible. Yes. No, the same thing Evan had said is my understanding as well. Like much of the evidence behind like ice is a people report that it's helps their pain. It helps them feel better.
01:04:36
Speaker
Um, but we don't know as much of this, like long-term people may recover the same way and completely agree. Like there's a lot more evidence for things that somebody in PT may do, like range of motion exercises, staying somewhat active with it, rather than just not doing anything and being, um, still. So I think like rice is certainly going to reduce, like localized swelling and may make somebody feel better in the same way.
01:05:06
Speaker
Um, how much it helps with somebody's like recovery or getting back to full playing time quicker. I don't entirely know. All right. I got another one here. Uh, KT tape. Do you
Skepticism on KT Tape and CBD Oil
01:05:21
Speaker
know what I'm talking about? When I say that KT tape? Yes. Oh, Rhino's already laughing. I'm going to let you say what you got to say. Well, no, like it's just, uh, it's another one of these things that I feel like the first time I saw it, I think it was like one of the years of like the summer Olympics, like a lot of the like
01:05:36
Speaker
beach volleyball. It's like all over people. They come out in the Olympics. These things always come out in the Olympics. And then it became like the big craze because it almost like it's like, oh, that kind of looks cool. And then people are like, oh, it has this benefit and this is why. And it's one of those things is like an impressionable high schooler. It's like, oh, injured. How about I try this? And I've like had it on my body before and everything or been taped with from like a training staff. But I have
01:06:03
Speaker
I have no clue if it's really better than just generic tape or actual tape or. Well, like regular athletic tape is meant to like actually control your range of motion, right? It keeps you locked in. Yeah. Right. But when you have this stuff that just is literally just laying on your skin, it's it's not it's not doing anything other than like providing an elasticity on your skin. Right. Like I don't I feel like if if my skin is being pulled a direction,
01:06:32
Speaker
just because that place on my skin lines up with a particular muscle, doesn't mean that muscle is also gonna be... Yes, yes, from a mechanic standpoint, completely agree. Okay, I'm gonna chime in. Oh yeah, go ahead, go ahead. The one time that it was put on me, like some sort of like, I think it was like a shoulder or tricep injury or whatever, it's the lady put it on me, I like moved around, I was like, this feels pretty good.
01:07:00
Speaker
I was like, I think I feel I feel a little bit better. I feel a little bit safer. You look cool. You know. Yeah. I was like, all right. Yeah. You look like a cyberpunk guy. You know, it's fun. My injury. The times I think I had it on were like under other rolls of tape as well. So my sophomore year had sprained one of my like an LCL sprint like day of a match. We were wrestling NC State. I remember practice last 10 minutes just trying to like float off some weight, fool around, play wrestle.
01:07:30
Speaker
Uh, get a little knee sprain, didn't really tell anybody. Um, and then actually spraying my other MCL in the middle of the match, um, or early in the match. Have you had your knee scoped by the way? Me never know. I have not. Oh, nice. Okay. Yep. Um, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. No, you're good. Um, so it was both knees. I ended up winning a match and a lot of that is like early on. You can kind of deal with the injury and then the next day really stiff. Um, we had to go to.
01:07:58
Speaker
Franklin and Marshall for some duels, much of our team was already injured. So I ended up basically having both my knees taped from ankle up to my mid quad. I really couldn't do anything. And there were just tons of layers of tape under. I remember cutting weight, our heavy weight helped me cut weight. I could basically hop in place in all my sweats and do line drills. And then he would just pull me around and hand fight.
01:08:24
Speaker
It was awful. Um, but that was, I think the one time I had the tape on, it's like, Oh yeah, this is, uh, this feels pretty nice on my skin. Uh, but I don't know if it actually did anything help other than I just, I mean, I can definitely see, I can see it being used in a way that's effective, right? Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. Like it can be used in effective way. I think there's definitely times where I see stuff and I'm like, that, that little piece of tape is not like holding back your scapula muscles. Nope. That's just a design on your skin.
01:08:56
Speaker
But you look good. Here's one close to my heart, CBD oil. Oh, whoa. Go ahead, Sasha. No, I realized we're talking about a topical treatment, right? There's multiple ways you could use it. There's oral ways as well, but CBD oil has had some small studies done that shows some effectiveness with pain relief.
01:09:23
Speaker
However, there's been a recent, much larger study that takes a meta-analysis that has found that it's not any better than placebo. So that's kind of a big point of attention, I think.
01:09:39
Speaker
With that so that's I thought I don't know I just want to throw that one out there because I think a lot of people have just kind of like Accepted like oh, yeah, you know weed bad, but CBD, you know, you got it's it's great It's like pet treats now and anything you can get in a lot of different forms so one way this comes up in my
01:10:02
Speaker
world, more so in pediatric populations. So there's a drug for epilepsy that's approved called Epidiolex, which is a cannabidiol. It's not the same thing, but kind of related. That is an effective anti-epileptic drug. It's like an adjunct. So there is some evidence with seizures. There's some drug interactions with it. That's less of what we're talking about. But there are, again, getting at these elements of, hey, there's aspects of this real life
01:10:32
Speaker
derive from a plant, this real compound that may have a benefit here. Where I've seen it more often is people hear it from a friend or some kind of other source and somebody buys a product and spends way too much money on something where it's like, hey, for your problem, say your neuropathy, hey, this may not be hurting you.
01:10:55
Speaker
But there's not evidence right now that this is benefiting you and you're spending a lot of money on it. So if you want to continue to do that and you perceive a benefit, hey, that's totally fine with me. It's probably not harming you and I'm okay with that. But just as you had said, there's just not much evidence on it at this point that, hey, to kind of really narrow down like what the utility of this is.
01:11:23
Speaker
My, my only experience is, um, like drinking it. So I will say the other, the other day I was at work and you know, I, I'm like up, it's 5am. So I'm like, I'm pretty tired. I have to drink coffee. Uh, but I'm really sensitive to caffeine and I find it most of the time, like fairly unpleasant and I get really jittery and I was like really anxious at work. Uh, and I bought like a 25 milligram CBD soda. And I will say I drank the soda.
01:11:53
Speaker
And I was just chilling the rest of it. I felt really good. So I don't know. I don't know. I believe that I was, I was vibing and driving around in the truck, listening to the Smiths and I felt really good. So maybe it might've been a, might've been a different particular concept. I once saw a guy in the hospital, uh, who, uh, believe was thought he was taking like a CBD gumming.
01:12:19
Speaker
but got a couple THC gummies. And he had never used anything before. He's a 67-year-old guy or whatever. And he comes in and they sort of coat him because he thinks he's seeing deities and other... He's basically having a hallucinogenic experience.
01:12:38
Speaker
And it's like, Oh, he's just, you know, he tests his urine. It's like, Oh, he's just really high. He accidentally took the wrong stuff. Yeah, yes, exactly. Yeah. Seemed to have a good, a good time. He was very, very pleasant. Just eyes bugged open, like this family's like, so obviously they have no idea. It's like out of his personality. It's like, Oh, here's what's going on. And he did fun. It was very funny. It is just funny seeing like the suburban housewives that are just like,
01:13:05
Speaker
CBD everything, you know, and it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's just funny to see like the way culture has taken, uh, yeah, there was a, there was an article, not the same compound, but there was an article in Boston magazine, uh, as a Boston Homer, um, about like, you know, prior culture of like the, the moms who would get together and have like drinks and do something.
01:13:29
Speaker
This like growing culture of the the quote unquote like weed mom to like have the sure Yeah, like the cannabis mom or whatever, which is very interesting read actually about like some of these people's Perspective on like how this aspect of like legalization or decriminalization has led to their like impacting their parenting is compared to like a
01:13:53
Speaker
going in usually the quote unquote, the like old school wine bomb, so to say like contrast. Yeah. But specifically with like CBD stuff, like especially for the crowd that's like, you know, isn't going to be into any sort of THC consumption, right? Yep. And they're just like, but they kind of like have this little like, they purchase CBD oil the same way they purchase 50 shades of gray, right? Yep.
01:14:19
Speaker
That's what it is. It's kind of like this, like, ooh, it's a little taste of like something, right? And it's fun, right? And it's fun to be able to open up your purse or, you know, pull something, you know, while you're hanging out with your buddies and be like, oh, here's, you know, this is my CBD, the stuff that I put on my knees, which I've done, you know? Yeah. I put on my knees, make them feel good, you know? It's like a little bit rebellious. It's a little bit different. It's new. It has that
01:14:48
Speaker
edge to it. Some people perceive a benefit. If you do, that's great. It's the John Bowen Jovi of supplements. Here's a fun one.
Cupping and Split-Toe Shoes: Myth-Busting
01:15:05
Speaker
Another Olympic one that showed up in the Olympics was cupping. For those that don't know, cupping is when you see on wrestlers or whoever you see. It's like all the UFC guys.
01:15:15
Speaker
Yeah, circular bruises all over. And this this comes from ancient Chinese medicine, which if you're not familiar is not that ancient. But it's a it's it's essentially, they'll create a suction on like glass bulbs, essentially on different areas of your body. And this will suck your skin into there because you've created a vacuum. Nowadays, it's done with like little literal pumps to create a vacuum. But back in the day, they'd like put some like fire up in there. They'd even like
01:15:45
Speaker
Uh, put, uh, they'd even like lace your, your, uh, Lance, excuse me, your, uh, your skin to make it bleed and pull. And it was like essentially a form of bloodletting. Well, I've seen that one like, and like modern, like on, on Olympic athletes and. Yeah. Yeah. So it's all over them. Like it's, and it's still kind of going, but it exploded one year and you saw it on all sorts. I think it was, yeah, it was Michael Phelps, right? When he was like, he was like a huge,
01:16:12
Speaker
where everybody, obviously the Olympics, you get all these new stories, but Phelps is a pretty widely known name, at least in the international athletics world, especially in the US, where I think he was doing this and then it became a craze after that. And you see little businesses or places where there may be PT or some other health aspect that are now doing this procedure and
01:16:38
Speaker
It's a real easy sell. Yeah, it's it's very minimal equipment. The equipment is cheap, you know, you charge 50 bucks a session, right? It's it's real good. It's a real good. It's a real good deal. You can get going. And what essentially happens is these are bruise making machines. They create a bruise like a hickey on your body is essentially what's happening. The claim is that these are
01:17:02
Speaker
once again, pulling blood to an area to create more healing, right, and create inflammation essentially. But it is just creating bruising. And it can actually damage your skin. It's not actually a good thing for you. You know, you're probably not going to have any like super severe complications from this, but cupping is one of those things that's pretty
01:17:26
Speaker
strongly, in my opinion, on the side of things that are it's it's just pseudoscience. It's it's very much snake oil. I will say I haven't seen it stick around. I mean, literally, the only athlete I've seen use it recently is Kyle Dake. That is the only time I've seen it recently. Yeah, well, these things are cyclical, like they'll go away for a bit. They'll come back a few decades later, you know.
01:17:53
Speaker
And it'll last for a few years and it'll always be there. But yeah, we see that happen with with With these sort of things all the time. They go away. They come back. They they go out of fashion, right? They always kind of like similar simmer in the background like in like some you know, usually some crunchy kind of hippie community sometimes or like a
01:18:13
Speaker
a right-wing anti-vax community or something will hold on to something here or there. Little communities will keep them alive and it'll kind of explode again because it'll become novel again to new people. That's why you keep having to debunk the same things over and over again for new generations. It sucks. Yeah, it almost aspects of it remind me of because it's exactly what you're saying. You're creating a number of bruises which themselves are going to heal and almost
01:18:40
Speaker
some of it that reminded me of like old jokes like somebody's hurting somewhere like Hurt my finger or whatever and you're like, oh do you want me to you know? Take your mind off your finger Like do you want it to not hurt anymore? And then the joke is like punching them elsewhere and be like now you're not thinking about your finger like some of it reminds me of that in ways and and it's another one of these things were like hey, there's probably not a lot of evidence that this is actually a
01:19:05
Speaker
doing what people are saying it's doing to you and as you exactly said, there are risks in this too. It's not like where CBD oil, it's a pretty benign thing where now you're like
01:19:21
Speaker
sucking skin, you're creating local trauma, you can tear your skin, you can have complications related to that because you're literally paying somebody to like locally injure you at that point for this whatever perceived benefit is. The only other one I got here is split toed shoes. I don't know if you've seen these. I've actually seen a wrestling shoe prototype out there of split toes.
01:19:47
Speaker
Which looked like the worst idea I'd ever seen. Yeah, I think I saw this online. But there's a lot of groundswell, especially a few years ago around split-toe shoes, like it gets really into that naturalistic fallacy or like an appeal to nature, like this is how our bodies are meant to work, right? And that means that these are the things that you should be wearing, right?
01:20:10
Speaker
Um, and, uh, yeah, what do you guys think of those? They look comfy, right? They look fun. Like little, little, uh, socks with toes on them. Same kind of deal. Right. Have any of you ever read or heard of born to run? I've heard of it, not read it. Okay. So I feel, I feel like this is, cause this is the split toe shoe is also like, we're also, I feel like a kind of in the realm of the, like the sock shoe thing that was going on. Right.
01:20:40
Speaker
where they're sure that as well. Yeah. The five toed shoe that had no support anywhere. So, OK, my born when I was in like middle school, I think like I was this before I ever wrestled, I was doing track and I read this. I read Born to Run. And so like the whole idea with Born to Run, like it starts off as some guy, you know, like some like guy who likes running.
01:21:08
Speaker
is getting injured because he's running a lot and it's hurting his you know his feet or whatever is hurting his knees and then he hears of like this tribe uh in like mexico of all these people who they run constantly and they run like crazy distances and they do it all and like you know little like sandals and stuff and he finds them and like the for a little bit i remember reading it being like oh this is kind of cool like
01:21:33
Speaker
It's, this is interesting. It's an interesting investigation and then it quickly turns into, um, just starts making completely like evangelizing claims about, he's like, look, I found this tribe, they are really good at running and they eat acai. They like, I think it was, I think it was acai or maybe it was another berry, but, um, I'm pretty sure it was acai and he's like, look, they eat acai or they eat this berry.
01:22:01
Speaker
And they run around in shitty little sandals. And they're really good at it. So that must mean the only way to be good at running is you have to eat this berry and run around in sandals that have no support. And that's what's going on because they're doing it more natural style. And that's why they're so good at running. And then I think it was around the time that those shoes became popular. So I'm sure it had some part of that.
01:22:31
Speaker
But I remember even in middle school reading this and being like, all right, it's fucking, it's fucking bullshit. You gotta shit. This is stupid. This is dumb as hell. I know if I run around without my shoes on, it hurts real bad everywhere. I'm going to wear the running shoes. Well, and to be fair, like there is a sense of like, if you are running barefoot, like obviously there's the caveats of, you know, watch what you're running on, all that stuff. Um, but there's something you said about like running without some support, at least, uh, uh, you know, not extensively, but without support to,
01:23:01
Speaker
build some strength in different areas of your legs, right? Like that's totally legitimate, right? But it's one of those things where someone will say, you should buy these shoes, right? Because they will protect you from stepping on bad things. There is evidence that it helps with this. And then they'll bundle a bunch of other stuff in there, right? As a selling point.
Chasing Success: Personal Paths and Fads
01:23:22
Speaker
And that bunch of other stuff is not there to like really, to really support what they're selling to you, right?
01:23:30
Speaker
Uh, it's, it's, it's, well, it's, it's another example of, Hey, you got a little kernel of truth. You got something that you could work with in a productive way, but other, the bullshit gets pulled in with it. And now you're kind of stuck with all this stuff too. Yeah. And some of that gets at this idea. And we've like hinted at this, that because somebody who's successful did something some way means that's the way to be successful. And I have to like replicate that.
01:23:55
Speaker
When there are so many different ways for like any individual, you know, knowing how you operate or, or what things you like, what works for you in like being successful and reaching your, your goals. Like you don't have to necessarily be like, say like Kobe or someone like that, um, to achieve some kind of level of, of success. There's a lot of different ways. And with like the, the aspect of the,
01:24:23
Speaker
split toe shoe, like somebody wants to wear that. Like the main thing that I originally saw this with was like people who climb or do something like that. If you need like a toehold or something else that your typical shoe might not give you, there may be like an advantage or some reason that you might wear that shoe. And some of this gets back to the split chode. What we were talking about with like earthing or
01:24:51
Speaker
or grounding there's some ideas there that like sneakers are really bad for you and it's a terrible invention and it's like, well, probably not like for a lot of things like playing basketball like I think it's important to have a specific type of shoe that helps you cut and pivot and stop the way you need to. So, like,
01:25:11
Speaker
If that's a that's a shoe that you like or you find some benefit from it like power to you. But I don't think like we all need to to wear those types of shoes just because like somebody did this and they was on and they think it was better for like X or Y or whatever. I will so it was I look it up. It was chia seeds. It was like this chia drink.
01:25:37
Speaker
And because the tribe would run like like he would just take a guy and he'd just run like 50 miles He'd be like, ah, no problem. So it was very much portrayed as like look you eat this cheer drink You're like, it's basically gonna give you superpowers I mean, it does sound healthy. I'll give it that another thing I that's interesting that I'm aware of right now and you know, maybe this is like just doing my I'm It's like my biases
01:26:06
Speaker
that I'm like, this is the real one because it's the current fad and because that's how I feel. Like I have really bad knees and I need like a lot of like not just support for my like pronation and I, but I also need a lot of like cushion anytime I run, otherwise I'm just screwed. But currently now in the running world, they're just making shoes with more and more cushion and they have to like regulate how much cushion
01:26:35
Speaker
a marathon runner shoes can have because the best marathoners are just now getting the most cushion in their shoe possible and like winning a lot of races with that. So maybe that is actually just a current fad. That's interesting. It seems like the more cushion the better like the less impact the better. Yeah, there was a guy that they that they
01:26:57
Speaker
I forget which company he did, but they basically designed like not a legal shoe for competition, but like the perfect cross country shoe, like uber cushion and like, yeah, basically they were like these big blocks essentially. And they just had a guy run a marathon in them, not like an official time because he was wearing shoes that are not, you know, within regulation, but he like demolished the world record. It was like under, it was like under two hours or something like that. It was wild.
01:27:27
Speaker
It was personal to me because I have I have I've held that grudge forever because it was it was a very like you don't have the world record. No. Against the book board. Basically, I just really hate the book born to run. But I was a kid.
01:27:43
Speaker
It just really pissed me off. It was just this white guy who's like, you got to be there. They're incredible. The these this tribe, they're just you have to live like this tribe. They're they're so noble. They know every and I've just held it. So as soon as I heard about the cushion thing that you were talking about, I was just like, let's fucking go. This is my moment. This is my time.
Rhino's Fitness Journey and Wrestling Evolution
01:28:10
Speaker
Well, before we before we move on to a little bit of a conclusion, is there anything either of you want to want to throw in here? I don't I wish we could I wish we could show the show the listeners rhinos biceps right now. Oh, throw them up right now. Throw them up and then we'll do an artist. At least for us. No, I haven't worked out today. Oh, OK, OK, OK.
01:28:37
Speaker
I'm bigger than I am fatter than I used to be. I got way too in college. I came in like decently sized and then part of this is like some body image like not to get personally into me too much like body image stuff and stayed way too light. It was just like recurrently cutting weight for really no reason and stayed probably way too light and now
01:29:05
Speaker
in a much healthier place where I'm eating too much, but enjoying things. For the record, Rhino's frickin' jacked. I appreciate it. I try. Well, Rhino, one thing I want to start asking our guests before they leave is, is there something you would be interested in hearing us cover?
01:29:34
Speaker
Um, you know, we, we, uh, we're going through folk styles, moments of history, um, or even just like little side topics like this too. Um, you know, we're, we're, we're interested to hear what others would want to hear because, you know, we're going to be in our own little world. We got our own little ideas about what we want to do, but we want to, we want to, we want to know. That's a great question. I have to think from like a historical aspect. I mean,
01:30:05
Speaker
some people, like I could imagine some people might be interested in aspects of, you know, I think things like title, not to be like negative about aspects, but like, you know, changes that led to a lot of programs being dropped or the change kind of in the framework of what college wrestling looks like today.
01:30:31
Speaker
That would be, I think, an interesting overall discussion, which is a challenging topic to really go over. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's definitely in the cards. It's a tough topic. I can say it right now. We have the right people to do it. One that's more recent from a historical aspect, things that are more recent that are kind of a bit
01:31:00
Speaker
a fascination to now talk about are things like in freestyle, like the freestyle Greco, like the, like the, the light clench or the ball grab, whatever you want to call it that era of wrestling, or it's like period scoring and literally my best wrestling, which is, I did my best wrestling during ball draw, which is just like really fascinating. Like you could get just demolished one period and win, you know, two draws and win a match. And
01:31:30
Speaker
And to see like the people who were successful in both of those aspects, or if you remember the period where briefly there was like the near takedown was a point where it was like, as a as a young, like Mark, who was who was dumb, like, Oh, yeah, maybe maybe we should do this to like encourage them action was very wrong about that, like immediately seeing it. It's like, this is really dumb. This is so dumb. I will say like,
01:31:57
Speaker
rule changes can be stressful for a lot of people it seems like like they get really worked up about it. Even when I even like when I look back at a lot of the rules that I think have been kind of crappy. It's still a lot of fun like when things change in wrestling. Just because I don't know like Sasha mentioned the term arms race in a previous episode and just how like wrestling evolves like we come up with new techniques or like
01:32:25
Speaker
you know things come back around they become more useful again to respond to stuff you know take technique wise right but I am curious like how rules changes are a reflection of that arms race sometimes right like how we've had to had to adjust some of our five count rules recently right because people are coming up with different stuff and I think that's a really cool thing about wrestling that we need to constantly change our rules like we have to actually
01:32:55
Speaker
be open to rule change to respond to stuff like that's kind of cool like a lot of a lot of sports get to be a little bit more stagnant at least in from what I can tell right there's sometimes big changes and stuff and there's always little changes but wrestling is like really forced to evolve uh just by the nature of what it is yeah I agree there are
01:33:16
Speaker
And I think that's a great point because as you see like the way people approach things change or how many different positions now people are getting into, especially in folk style, you start to see the more like certain coaches pick up on things and then teams where they're taking advantage of certain positions that kind of.
01:33:37
Speaker
favor within the rules. So as you're talking about hooking in on an ankle or working an ankle ride, something along those lines, you can build a lot of clock on riding. This can give you advantages with scoring or burning time that way, but as well, getting to certain positions are really actually preventing somebody from getting somewhere else. So at least being open to experimenting. And that's why it's still, though, I was
01:34:06
Speaker
against some of the aspect, and maybe that's because I'm a bit of a creature of habit and stubborn, like the three-point takedown. It's at least good to see it. Let's see what it looks like. Let's see if it had an impact, because thinking back to when they changed in college near fall to four points, for me, it was like, okay, why are we really doing this? Does it really matter? And now I'm very used to that aspect. And for me, it's like, oh, okay, well, there is
01:34:33
Speaker
Now putting somebody on their back is even more valuable. You may incentivize that. Not that it's like changing the way somebody might approach top wrestling, but the people who are really good in that position with the goal of pinning somebody at least now have more advantage to actually get to those positions. So that's a rule change that I like didn't like that now I was like, okay, I'm totally fine with this. I actually think it makes a lot of sense.
Conclusion and Future Collaborations
01:35:00
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's gonna be fun. The season's just getting started and it's gonna be a fun one. Rhino, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. We had a good time, man. I had a great time. You two are very gracious hosts for having a complete degenerate on who rambled about a lot of random stuff. But I had a really awesome time. So if anything else comes up, I'd be happy to come back on and I look forward to
01:35:27
Speaker
listening to more of what you guys dig into over time. Rhino is, of course, referencing the episode where we had on Mike. That is the degenerate he's referring to. Mr. Old School. We loved having you on too. Yeah, man. No, we'll definitely have you back. There will be more times where stuff will need to be talked about. So yeah, we would love to back man.
01:35:52
Speaker
You're not a medical correspondent. No medical advice from good old Rhino. But yeah, it is funny to have some of that role and get certain messages from people these days. They're like, oh, hey, what do you think about this? And it helps me learn as well. Hey, if there's something that keeps cropping up that you see a lot, let us know and we'll talk about it. I would love to. I'd love to.
01:36:21
Speaker
All right. All right, everyone. Peace.