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Episode 74: McGill We Go Again
1.4k Plays4 months ago
Welcome to Season 5 and Episode 74 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this unplanned episode, Laurel and Sarah discuss Stu McGill’s recent appearance on the Huberman podcast. In Episode 62, we identified McGill’s big themes around movement. In this episode, we go through his appearance on Huberman to see if he’s still promoting the same ideas or if he has updated his approach.
You will learn:
- Why we are once more deconstructing Stu McGill’s standpoint and outdated views on movement safety
- Why a hyperfocus on potential future pain is not only unhelpful but can put people off from exercising at all
- Why we need to be encouraging more people to lift weights vs scaremongering them away from it
- How McGill seems to continue to characterize himself as a ‘healer’ when in fact he is often well out of his scope of practice
- McGill’s continued overuse of anecdote and analogy in lieu of evidence and research
- Whether we will cover it if and when McGill goes on Rogan next (spoiler: we won’t)
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
I suddenly want to sing, McGill we go again on our own. Going down that no seabic road we know so well. I kind of fell apart there. Like a drifter he is born to walk alone. He's made up his mind. He ain't wasting no more time. He wasted a lot of mind though. McGill we go again.
Hosts' Background
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:01:00
Speaker
Welcome to the MovementLogic podcast.
Podcast Milestone
00:01:03
Speaker
I am Sarah Court and I am here with my co-host Laurel Beaversdorf. Laurel, we are in season five, which is awesome. And we have just passed 70,000 downloads, which is also awesome. Yeah. It's so awesome. It's exciting, right? Yep. our Our math isn't quite as precise as I know you would like it to be because we changed platforms. And so the numbers from the one previously we lost, but I remember them as being about us 20K. And we're up to 50K in our new one. So we're going to call it 70. Yee-hoo! Yeah.
Stu McGill's Podcast Appearances
00:01:36
Speaker
All right. So we're talking about...
00:01:40
Speaker
yess We're talking about Stu McGill again. ah This was not in our original plans for this season, but he recently went on Huberman and did another three hour interview. And we knew we needed to talk about it again, even before we started getting messages from people who are like, McGill went on Huberman, what are you gonna do about it? I mean, that's an exaggeration, but I am a bit concerned that this is turning into like a McGill response podcast or that that's what people are expecting. Before we get into it, Laurel, what is going on here? why Why is he going on podcast after podcast? It feels like a book tour, but he's not he doesn't have a new a new book or a new product to sell. like Is he on Huberman because he got so much pushback against what he said on Atiyah? Is he going on Rogan next? What is the deal?
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, it does seem there is such a thing as a Huberman to Rogan pipeline, at least from what I've observed. And then after Rogan comes Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson, these influencers are like alternative facts podcasting slash YouTuber YouTubing circuits of ah type attracting influencers that tend to be a little like-minded in their quackery and snake oil salesman tendencies. Yeah, but here's the thing, I'm not ready to call Miguel a quack or a snake oil salesman. It's interesting to think about his motives for continuing to do these interviews after I believe he said he's retired, although he's still meeting with people about their back pain.
McGill's Motivations
00:03:15
Speaker
I don't know if he's partially retired or what, but
00:03:17
Speaker
I think things that motivate people include money, fame, legacy, wanting to make a difference in the world, control, influence. But Miguel is probably, if you were to ask me, my opinion, motivated by legacy and wanting to make a difference in the world. But you can't discount the fact that he He's got money to make on his site with his programs and certifications. I guess the thing I find most confusing about him is that given his background as a researcher and academic, how he continues to entertain and propagate so much confusion and misinformation about back pain, given what we know from large bodies of evidence. yeah
00:03:56
Speaker
It just doesn't feel like he's staying true to the science and his role as a scientist. And he repeatedly steps way outside of his scope of practice as a scientist and researcher, often and with impunity. I don't know. I don't know what's up with him. But his, quote, controversial approaches do definitely seem to appeal to Huberman. And you know what? I have no doubt he could end up on Rogan soon. I guess we'll find out. We might have to do another episode, but then we have to listen to Joe Rogan. No, no. that's I'm going to draw the line at Rogan. Well, if if he goes on Rogan, we'll just do a social media carousel about it and people can suck it.
00:04:37
Speaker
all right no it's good i just there's a i've I've started to reach my upper limit about like having to spend so much time talking about this person. I was actually very hesitant about even just doing this episode because I don't want it to seem like we've got it out for this guy you know because we don't. I mean, I do think he should probably give these long-form podcasts a rest because he seems to always get it himself into an accidental trouble or whatever. But you know it might not seem like it. I actually have a tremendous amount of respect for him. And it's actually grown after I listened to this episode, because it's clear that he does understand that there are people who have non-mechanical back pain and require a different treatment approach than people who have mechanical back pain,
McGill's Contributions to Back Pain Research
00:05:20
Speaker
right?
00:05:20
Speaker
his body of work is unquestionably impressive and he's absolutely moved the field of back pain and spinal trauma forward. But for whatever reason, he keeps going on podcasts and saying these like outlandish and outrageous things. He does say at one point that he has ADD and I'm honestly wondering if he should just stop doing these kinds of long interviews where the odds are just that much higher that he's going to say something that's just plain incorrect. Yeah, it's also something people say as a joke. So I wonder if he actually has ADHD. I guess it's not ADD anymore. It's ADHD, according to the DSM.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, and you know ADHD now is actually, I didn't know this until recently, it's considered part of the autism spectrum. I learned that because my boyfriend has ADHD. And when I heard McGill say that that he thought there was a chance he had it, I thought it made a lot of sense in terms of how he gets into trouble in kind of and this kind of long rambling interview format. I am no psychologist, I'm not trying to diagnose him with anything, but one of the classic things that can happen when someone has ADHD is that when they are recounting a story, they might start with the end and then add a bit of details from the middle, kind of touch on the beginning, go back to the end again, and then not understand why you are confused.
00:06:37
Speaker
yeah spar That happens to me sometimes too. ah Although I don't think I have ADHD because according to what I understand based on a podcast I listen to with a psychiatrist all about ADHD and the way they diagnose it is, yeah I mean, I obviously am not a diagnostician and I can't self-diagnose myself with anything really, but I'm likely missing from my understanding a lot of the characteristic behavior patterns. ah that I need to receive that diagnosis, even though I do feel that I have a few very ADHD-like behaviors. Yeah. I mean, it's ah it's a spectrum. It's really a spectrum, for sure. But yeah in any event, I came away from listening to this interview actually liking McGill a lot more, perhaps because in comparison to Huberman,
00:07:26
Speaker
He's really thoughtful and refuses to get sucked into statements that he doesn't agree with. You texted me that you also have more respect for McGill after this. What brought it on for you? I have to praise McGill on refusing to answer any questions about what Huberman calls phenotype, but he's really talking about the pseudoscientific concept somatotype, which we are going to talk about more, but it's this idea that there are ectomorphs, endomorphs, and mesomorphs. um So I appreciated when McGill just didn't answer those questions. He didn't go there. And I also really loved the part where he pushed back against Huberman's and regurgitated intensity protocol that he said he learned from a guest that 85% of workouts should happen at 85% intensity. And I was like, that is a lot of intensity. I don't recommend that. McGill rightly challenged this in saying that is way too high of an intensity to be working at for way too
00:08:28
Speaker
long throughout a weekly training cycle. Additionally, I did appreciate that McGill repeatedly pushed back against Huberman's questions to remind him why he's there and what he's there to talk about, which is to talk about people who have back pain because Huberman continuously asked questions with improper contextualization. And if McGill were to just answer the questions that Huberman would lob at him, it would sound like he was answering the question to apply to everyone. But I think he did a pretty decent job. He was not consistent the whole time, but he did a pretty pretty decent job of saying, look, I work with people who have back pain, so here's what I have to say about that population specifically.
00:09:06
Speaker
yeah So I kind of, I got the feeling that Heberman had this agenda of what he wanted McGill to say. Like he wanted McGill to play straight into his optimization aspiration type messages and McGill often
Critique of McGill's Focus on Elite Athletes
00:09:23
Speaker
did not. And he's kind of stuck to his area of expertise. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so before we begin dissecting this interview, listener, if you are not familiar with McGill or what he said on the Peter Attia podcast that kicked all of this off, it will be immensely helpful to you to press pause on this episode and go listen to Episode 62 of the Movement Logic podcast, which is called Make McGill Make Sense. And that was our response to the Attia interview. In that episode, we go over McGill's big themes, the tenets he holds to
00:09:55
Speaker
So we're going to summarize these in a moment, but it's definitely worth listening to that episode before this one, if you haven't already. What we're doing differently this time is we're now looking at these themes through the lens of the good, the bad, and the ugly. In other words, is he on his same shit or has he changed his tune? And we're also going to look really closely ah at what I think was the absolute most egregious and messed up thing he said this time, which actually had nothing at all to do with back pain. And then at the end, we're going to touch on what the E3 rehab podcaster said.
00:10:28
Speaker
in a recent recap episode about what they wished they had done differently when they invited McGill on to talk about the Atiyah interview. So my biggest challenge when preparing for this was not going in so hot at a 10 out of 10 on the scale of like, I'm going to find something incriminating that McGill says, you know, I tried very hard just to listen to what he was saying. and objectively compare it to what he said on Atiyah or in his books or on other podcasts. Laurel, was it challenging for you as well to maintain some amount of objectivity? Oh, not at all. I'm always 100% objective and never biased. yeah no Honestly, it was much, much, much harder to listen to this interview than it was to listen to the McGill Atiyah interview, mostly because I had to listen to Andrew Huberman. and his line of questioning and how he just wanted to know about somatotypes in four different
00:11:22
Speaker
questions and like wouldn't let this idea of somatic type drop even though McGill refused to answer it. yeah I respect Atiyah and I respect McGill although I have problems with how they go about doing what they do and the messaging that they're putting out there from time to time. I would say Atiyah is maybe my favorite of the three. oh But I really don't think Huberman is up to any good um and have a real mistrust of his motives and what he's about. And I think that he's a manipulative abuser who likes to control what people believe so that he can get them to believe what he wants them to believe ultimately.
00:12:04
Speaker
Laurel, is there going to be a ah ah Huberman episode in our future potentially? I feel like think that's- I feel like for me, this is the Huberman episode. You're like, I don't want to do any more than this. You know, like, yeah, to that too, that too. Right. So Laurel, can you remind us of the themes that we identified in episode 62 and then give us a quick summary of each one? Yeah, absolutely. So theme number one is McGill, fearmongers movement. You'll hear McGill, consistently come back to this refrain of be careful with X or Y exercise because certain spines can't handle it at all ever in any context or just basically anything to do with flexion, anything to do with deadlifts pretty much. There's a lot of warning labels on. Yeah. McGill moralizes movement modalities. That's number two.
00:12:58
Speaker
So he kind of creates this good and bad line in the sand about ways of moving and he uses ah terms that place valuation on a certain way of moving as being unhygienic or hygienic, pristine or I don't know, like sloppy or dangerous. So he's he's frequently making some movements just seem inherently better, healthier, stuff that we should be doing all the time or more of and other movements as being the opposite of that. Number three, McGill misinterprets medical data.
00:13:37
Speaker
Well, he'll often misinterpret, for example, percentages in say stuff like some very high percentage of people who do some type of sport or some type of activity have this type of injury. but what he's actually sharing is the amount of people who come to him with that type of injury and so in that way like that's one example of how he might misinterpret medical data it's like he he says like this percentage of the population has this problem when it's really just the percentage of people coming to see him
00:14:08
Speaker
but It's not an accurate representation of the population. He does this in other ways as well. He very infrequently, and i've actually, I don't know if I've ever heard him cite research outside of the his own research that he's done in his lab to support some of the claims that he makes. He uses a lot of anecdote and analogy to talk about science, which is not a very scientific way to talk about science, and he's a scientist. Part four is McGill manipulates via melodrama. This is the thing that gets on my nerves the most about McGill, which is that he'll often, again, create this us versus them line in the sand, and then paint the other side as being arrogant, stupid, or irresponsible.
00:14:55
Speaker
deserving of their pain, where he, Miguel, stands on the good side of the line, where he's you know got the answers, can always find the mechanism, and his PTs can always find the mechanism, and the people who you know take his advice, who move in these hygienic ways for their spine are faring so much better because they're doing it the right way. And um that's kind of like a moralizing, but also manipulating via melodrama. He'll tell stories about you know his healer moments that he wants us to, you know, visualize him like healing someone or knowing something special about them that no one else could. So yeah, he's got all of these little quirks and characteristics that continuously show up in how he represents himself on podcast interviews and also in his book Back Mechanic.
00:15:41
Speaker
yeah Well, thank you for that summary. Okay, we're going to start with number one, McGill Fearmonger's movement. So Laurel, how did he do? Good, bad, or ugly? Is he still trying to stop me from deadlifting ever again? I don't think that he did good. And I don't think that he did bad as in better than with fata I think it's still pretty ugly. I think he still loves the fear-monger movement. My biggest issue with McGill in this episode, especially, it stood out to me so much more for some reason, is that he loves to talk about elite athletes.
00:16:13
Speaker
And he doesn't spend very much time at all talking about non-athletes or recreational athletes or just the late public coming to exercise to get a little fitter. The title of the episode is Build a Strong Injury Proof Back. I mean, injury proofing anything is not really a thing. could always possibly get injured despite all your proofing that you've done but that's the title of the episodes like build a strong injury proof back okay so if i'm a listener i'm like oh how can i how can i help my back right let me listen to this and i feel like the title of the episode should instead have been stating the obvious colon genetics play a role in elite athletic performance
00:16:52
Speaker
or wild guesses and warnings culling the shape of your body versus that of an elite athlete because really they only talked about elite athletes. Yeah. Meanwhile, most people aren't exercising nearly enough, let alone at the level and intensity of an elite athlete. Twenty percent of the U.S. population meets the physical activity guidelines set out by the CDC and the WHO, yet he focuses a lot on injuries in athletes and then fails to emphasize that elite athletes Number one, exercise for a living. The demands of operating at such a high level of physicality put them at a much higher risk for injury. And most everyone else doesn't even exercise the minimum amount. I think his message should be but never is. Go exercise. It's safe. It's good for you, not enough people exercise. I mean, he'll kind of say it as an aside, like people have been because they're too sedentary, but then he'll spend 90% of the time talking about elite athletes. So I just think that the way that he uses elite athletes to tell his stories that are often very fear mongering are really misleading and confusing and potentially cause harm and
00:18:06
Speaker
Scaring people who really need to be exercising away from exercising. I agree. It's it's ugly while I was listening I kept thinking you know who relates to these stories about NHL hockey players and professional golfers almost nobody listening right now, right? so He did a little bit walk back his statement the sort of power lifters shouldn't bend over yogi's shouldn't lift weights statement and which was from the Atiyah interview and caused such an uproar on social media. He's walked it back a little bit, but not by a lot. Here's what happens. In the first hour or so of the interview, Huberman is trying to get McGill to clarify what kind of exercise people should do based on the quote unquote model or type of body that they have. I mean, let's just, we're going to break in and say, this is a really dumb question. And so Huberman gives an example about how his sister is much more flexible on his her spine than he is.
00:18:59
Speaker
And he asks, should she avoid certain activities to remain pain-free? I mean, he is kind of, like, riffing off this idea that McGill said in a Tio, where it's like, you know, certain people shouldn't do certain things, right? But then McGill takes this opportunity to claim to know what her discs and her spine look like, a person who's never met. And then he, like, waxes on about how old Russian bench pressers would do their bench press with a huge arch in their back, but it's not appropriate for everyone, and they're going to crush the interspinous ligaments. Awesome. What was the question again? It was about Huberman's sister and he immediately wants to talk about elite old Russian bench pressers. Yeah. So so Huberman rephrases the question because he really is trying to get McGill to answer, what is the best training regime regimen for different types of people? He's asking if the willowy spine people, AKA the yogis, should try to stiffen their trunk and the thicker spine people, AKA the power lifters, should try to increase the bendiness of their spine
00:19:57
Speaker
in both cases to improve resilience. And we're going to talk a lot about these like spine concepts and phenotypes and other questionable concepts later in the episode. but Miguel says, finally, he says, you know yes, it would be helpful to train against type, but only to a point. He he he kind of emphasizes like if that's only a little bit helpful. And then he starts talking about triathletes and the specific adaptations that you need for the swim, the run, and the bike. And the lesson from the triathlete is that you can't be good at everything. But that's not the question.
00:20:29
Speaker
And none of this is answering what Huberman is asking, which is just, is there value in training against your natural body type? And it seems like Huberman is just kind of trying to get McGill to say, you know, any something, anything like, yes, cross training is a good idea when someone's goal is to be all around fit, not to be an elite athlete in a particular sport, because yes, of course, all the elite athletes in a particular sport look like each other. But for us regular folk, it does serve our bodies to take more of a jack of all trades approach like, I feel like that would be a very like neutral, kind of broad statement that would not get anybody in trouble.
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, but he definitely have said something along the lines of you can exercise any old way you want. ah Do what you want to do and what you will do, because exercise is important for longevity and health. But yeah, he he he just keeps going back to elite athletes. You know what I feel like Huberman and McGill are kind of a match made in heaven in many ways. Okay, because I want to highlight Huberman's consistent refrains throughout all of his episodes. to appeals to optimization. That's where his protocols come into play and all these special kind of hacks or tricks you can do to sort of you know make your body healthier in this special way that not very many people know about. And how all of this is a part of some aspirational message. Like, let's optimize so that we can be the best we can be. Let's optimize for our,
00:22:01
Speaker
phenotype so we can exercise the best for our phenotype or let's train with and against it and in exactly the right proportion so 70 with 30 against um aspirational messaging is usually about being better prettier richer healthier smarter more enlightened somehow like basically all the ways that you could help raise your social status.
Huberman's Marketing and Product Promotion
00:22:25
Speaker
It appeals to everyone's desire to improve their social status, their lifestyle, their self-image.
00:22:33
Speaker
Aspirational marketing uses aspirational messaging to sell us on products it promises will raise our social status in some way like makeup or clothing or expensive jewelry. His optimization protocols, though, not are not evidence-based. They're not scientific. And when they are, they're based usually on cherry-picked or weak evidence. He sells optimization products like supplements and cold plunge baths. This is expensive of stuff that does not move the needle much, if at all, on anyone's health. And supplements can actually make people less healthy. They can make you sick.
00:23:13
Speaker
he sells this stuff as if it will improve health and make you feel like you are doing something important for your health and that you're one of the smart ones who is making that smart decision for your health or you're one of the special ones who did their research to buck mainstream evidence-based medicine unlike all the ordinary unsophisticated sheeple getting vaccinated and wearing sunscreen and not exercising in accordance with their phenotype and this kind of plays right into where McGill kind of comes in with his back pain protocols and his moralization of movement where you want to be good, right? So you better move like a good person, right? And I just, I feel like McGill is the perfect guest for a host like Huberman. We'll get into it.
00:24:02
Speaker
I think maybe this was just our tiny Huberman episode in inside. yeah this i think I think we should be listening with this in mind that that Huberman is the interviewer and he's all about optimization and aspiration. yeah Why? Because he sells things and he's a master distractor from the stuff that actually makes us healthier. And he's a master distractor from scientific literacy. trust in science, all for his own benefit and profit. Yeah. so If we go back to this question that Huberman keeps trying to get McGill to answer about should people train with or against their phenotype, finally, McGill says he doesn't know, but he knows how to find, which is, I'm like, good. Yeah, say you don't know because that's it's a dumb question, but he says he knows how to find the answer in his assessment. so He's saying there is no general answer for this because it depends on the individual person, which is, that's a legit answer, but that he can uncover it in his three hour assessment. fine Great. So everyone on the planet needs a three hour assessment with McGill to know how they should train in addition to what they should do about their back pain. I mean, that sounds accessible. Yeah. And then he says,
00:25:22
Speaker
If you train too hard when you're young, McGill says this, you're going to mess up your joints. If you train too hard when you're younger, you're going to be the 70 year old who has such painful needs that you have to crawl up a chair to get up off the floor. Do you remember the part when he advised the younger folks who were maybe training too hard. He's like, don't think about your muscles. Don't just think about making those muscles bigger. Think about your joints, right? This is the moralization of movement thing. You might be making your muscles bigger with what you're doing with your exercise, your strength training, your hypertrophy, but you're damaging your joints. And then this is a direct quote. Joints are not adaptive and resilient, unquote.
McGill's Misleading Claims on Joint Resilience
00:26:07
Speaker
Okay. Can we discuss? Yes. and you know When Laurel and I were going through our notes about this, we were saying, we both understand what he means when he's saying that, but that's because we're both people who live and work in the movement world. Well, what do you think he means? What I think he means is that your cartilage does not regenerate itself and you will break down cartilage at your joints But the thing is, that's just sort of like naturally what happens. And it's not there are a lot of things that people think are bad for your joints that are not bad for your joints. Running is actually really good for your joints, for example, as it turns out. Impact is actually fantastic for your joints, as it turns out. That's the thing, too, is like definitely stressing cartilage can make the cartilage tougher and better at being cartilage. like I think there's some research showing that lifters
00:26:56
Speaker
have a thicker meniscus in their knees than nonlifters, and that runners also have thicker cartilage than nonrunners. It just totally makes sense. I mean, yeah cartilage is a vascular or largely a vascular, but it still is made up of living tissue that is turning over and regenerating, maybe just not at the same pace as other tissues. It's just totally untrue to say, joints are not adaptive and resilient. That's a false claim. And that's a real quick way to make people scared about doing anything. You know? It's like my joints are just going to wear down like an old shoe. Right. If I use them too much. Right. So I should just not use them. I should just not use them. That's the story. You know, that's the story that he's telling.
00:27:43
Speaker
And I'm so tired of it. i mean The people that I see at the at the clinic who are in the kind of shape where they would have to crawl up a chair to go from the floor to standing in their 70s, 80s, they are the the deconditioned, the muscle atrophied folks. And to Laurel's earlier point, this is the vast majority of the population who either never made training a part of their lives or they stopped 30, 40, 50 years ago, the moment they felt a twinge or maybe had an injury. And i'm just really I'm just really tired of this fear of injury, fear of pain model. It's such a bullshit. There's so many ways you can and will injure yourself in your life. And you know living in fear of a potential future pain that may or may not happen is such a goddamn waste of time and energy.
00:28:31
Speaker
i mean you can you can hurt yourself doing anything i hurt myself when i dropped my motorcycle on my foot and sprained my ankle i mean thank god mcgill wasn't around to tell me off that the you know the reason i wasn't prepared to manage a 450 pound motorcycle is because i did too much yoga in the past Well, do you have an example of a way that you hurt yourself that was unrelated to exercise or or weightlifting? ah To be honest, I can't think of any. I know I have. I just can't think of any. But I have sprained my ankle so many times playing volleyball all throughout you know middle school, high school. and
00:29:04
Speaker
I had to get it wrapped frequently mid-game and then I would just go back out there and continue playing on my sprained ankle. These weren't severe sprains obviously, but I frequently quote played through the pain. and Sarah, remember when I got into running and maybe bit off a little bit too much mileage and I strained my calf and you were helping me like with some exercise for it and I was like, so ah Sarah, can I just keep running on it? And you were like, well. you know You were like, you might want to make your runs easier. And in my mind, I was like, that's not happening. It actually it actually had to happen because I did have too much pain to keep running as intensely as I was. And I i learned how to you know manage intensity better.
00:29:52
Speaker
um And it's not to exercise at 85% intensity 85% of the time. That's for sure. ah a Side note, Huberman hints that he often he likes running and he considers himself decently you know good at endurance. but he's Often suffering from running related injuries and I was like my wonder if it's because you're running at 85% intensity seriously god Maybe you need to slow down your runs a little Yes, but anyway all this to say I get hurt sometimes I could probably chill out a bit more when I do get hurt But I usually do try to find some way to keep training around the injury when I can because I love to train I rely on exercise to feel good and mentally and emotionally, it's psychological you know exercise as well as physical exercise for me. When my hip hurt from doing yoga, it was devastating because at that time, yoga was literally all I did for my, quote, exercise. I know it's more than exercise, but I was also using it as exercise. So I was like, oh God, now what? What can I do now?
00:30:53
Speaker
And I had to stop yoga for a while. The pain was just too gnarly. And thankfully, I started strength training, which took my pain away. And I added the yoga back in and did both. And I still do both today. I got to say, I have not sustained any major injuries from training. And I train six days a week. And I train intensely some of the time and moderately other bits of the time. And I do easy days as well. The reason I don't think I've been injured is, number one, I've been lucky. And then number two who is that I've trained, I've been active, I've been exercising my whole freaking life. I've been very active. I can tolerate a lot. I can sprint, I can do box jumps, I can squat 150, I can deadlift close to 200 pounds.
00:31:38
Speaker
So I run 30 miles a week. I don't understand the logic of quote, be careful you don't train too hard for the vast majority of people out there. yeah Most people aren't training nearly hard enough. And I don't mean training hard for like how I train hard. Hard is relative to the person. you know They're not training enough. They're not training hard enough. I think that before we get all caught up in this idea of the importance of rest and recovery, that we should make sure we have something to recover from.
Yoga Community's View on Exercise
00:32:15
Speaker
And I once posted a real, I thought it was hilarious and a lot of other people that too have
00:32:20
Speaker
two groups meeting at like 2am in the morning was actual footage someone took. No, no, no, 5am in the morning. There's a group of girls out partying. They've been drinking all night and then there's this running club and they're like meeting each other when when the world's ah collide or something like that was the ah meme. And I shared it and a yoga therapist reposted it in her stories and she wrote Ugh, toxic burnout culture. I reject it or something along those lines. And I was like, wait, are you saying that waking up at six or five or six a.m. to run is a feature of toxic burnout culture? I'm like, no, it's when some people can exercise. So they go out and they do their exercise.
00:33:04
Speaker
I find a lot of folks actually in the yoga community turn their noses up at exercise as if yoga and deep breathing replaces strength training and cardiovascular conditioning. yeah Exercise is considered aggressive or toxic or, quote, burnout culture. It's such a misguided take on exercise. Here's something that I think is pretty controversial to say, but I fully believe it's true. And I think it really is relevant to this particular interview between Huberman and McGill. Here's my beliefs. I think if you've never been injured or had some pain from exercise, you're probably not training hard enough. Now, I know that that will probably make a lot of people mad to hear, but let's get real. You will likely overdo it with exercise. It's a part of the learning curve, the process of learning to exercise. People overdo sitting in a chair, okay? If you can overdo sitting in a chair, you're gonna overdo straight training or
00:34:01
Speaker
running or cardio or whatever you're doing yoga okay if you have pain from exercise and it's the only exercise you do maybe you should figure out what you're missing if you're only strength training maybe you need more cardio endurance training maybe you need to do some yoga if you're only runner maybe strength train only do yoga maybe try to meet the CDC physical activity guidelines and do some strength and some cardio When I first started my like serious heavy lifting, I got injured. It's happened to me when I was doing my back squats. I started getting this weird nerve pain wrapping around my glute to my inner thigh, which I never felt before. It was not coincidentally on my hip replaced hip and my understanding or my belief at the time was that I progressed the load too quickly without enough volume and without taking my specific anatomical needs into consideration. I, my body is very different side to side and I have to consider that. so
00:34:55
Speaker
I backed off the load. I increased the volume at the lower load. I made some changes to the position for my squats and now it's fine. It's completely fine. Yeah. When Eliana does gymnastics, I go, I watch her and she's you know five and she's a beginner and I can see how they're programming for that group of little girls mostly, they're preparing them to be able to do stiff-legged landings, and they're starting them on the floor, jumping off of the floor and landing stiff stiffly. Soon after she's adapted to that, she'll be landing stiffly from higher heights. They've got her doing pistol squats to a box, bear crawls to condition her knees and wrists. They've got her doing somersaults to get her neck ready for higher forces.
00:35:39
Speaker
they're going to progressively expose her to more and more as she gains the capacity to tolerate as she gets older. And it would be totally irresponsible and totally injurious potentially. If they instead took all these little five-year-olds and started training them on the high beam and the parallel bars are asking them to try flipping, there is such a thing as training too hard. I agree. But I think most of the time when people get hurt, they were just, I'm going to put it a little bit harshly, training like an idiot. you know You expose your body to forces you were not yet ready to handle. It's like when I wouldn't run for six months and then decide to go out and run five miles. like I paid for that the next day.
00:36:24
Speaker
Look, you should train hard some of the time. You should expose your body to forces it can handle and when they are now longer forces that are challenging particularly much, you increase those forces. You should train hard. Just don't train like an idiot. Totally. What if that could have been the message? Yeah. I have actually just recently started training six days a week. and Previously, I would do sort of like four, maybe five. A lot of it depended on my schedule. But i'm I'm prioritizing six days a week of training and it feels amazing. I do three days of strength training. I do three days of cardio, and or I mix it up in some capacity, some way that I get to all my volume that I try to hit. I've been doing it for a few weeks and I can feel the difference in my body. Now, of course, this is not the beginning of my exercise journey. I've spent a good deal of time ramping up to this volume.
00:37:17
Speaker
And I am right now, I think definitely I could say I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm not the thinnest. And that's a a whole separate episode about having to get over internalized ideas about what I am supposed to look like, but I am without a doubt the strongest and my cardio endurance is also really, really getting a lot better. So it's exciting. But then McGill says something like, it's okay to push when you're younger, older people, if you push, you will be in pain for a few days. So he's saying, you don't have the capacity to push if you're older, you should not be working at that 85% of your max capacity. But 85% of your max capacity is the kind of weightlifting that builds bone. yeah It's the kind of lifting that the women who were older, right, they're all postmenopausal in the LIFTMORE trial, who had osteoporosis were doing. And not only were they fine, they were for the most part uninjured and they improved their bone density.
00:38:11
Speaker
There is nothing anywhere in any research I've encountered saying people who are older shouldn't train at 85% or higher of their mass capacity. I studied the essential for strength and conditioning to get the CSCS certification. There's a whole chapter on working with older adults. And basically the message was, you have to first consider, just like everyone else, what is their training history? What is their training age? What have they adapted up to now, as of recently, to be able to tolerate? So there's nothing anywhere that I've ever seen that people shouldn't train at 85%. In fact, you see the contrary. So who the fuck? What the fuck do they think they are to feed us such a crock of shit that they just apparently totally made up? I feel like this is so arrogant and so dishonest. This is where I really start to lose my shit. but Do you remember, Sarah, the part where Huberman's like complimenting McGill?
00:39:13
Speaker
on him in such great shape for 60, 70. He's like, ooh, he moves. Look at his posture. And then Miguel goes, and this has sort of broke my heart. Miguel goes, yeah, but if I push a little too hard, I'm in pain for five days. Yeah. I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ, you know, perhaps McGill is not in as great a shape as Huberman believes he is based on his movement and posture assessment skills, which is not his specialty. And also you can't know how good of a shape someone is in based on how they move or how they sit. That doesn't tell you that or how they look. Yeah. how they look
00:39:48
Speaker
I mean, this is this is one of the things that really struck me this time around that there was there was a little bit less fear mongering about, you know, this one. I mean, it gets into it about the deadlift a little bit and we're going to talk about it. But less fear mongering about like this one specific exercise is bad for everyone. But there's more fear mongering around pain itself being the worst possible thing that could happen and i I Sort of get it from McGill's perspective because the people that he's seeing are these sort of you know worst case been to everyone else Nobody's been able to help them if that's all you're seeing then you're like, you know what? ah My message has to be don't end up like these people but that that is not the majority of the people out there These are people that that they're the outliers in a lot of ways outliers and so he's saying you know don't end up like these people when that when the most likely outcome is that you won't and I have more thoughts about this and about this fear of pain stuff I'm going to touch on later. I want to move on to our next category, which is McGill moralizes movement modalities.
McGill's Stance on Deadlifts
00:40:47
Speaker
so I would give him a good-ish on this one because he's still saying, don't do this if you are that. But he's not saying as much, you know your life is a result of your poor choices and God forbid, you need to lift a car off a baby and you can't because of all the yoga. Listen to our first part. I'm McGill for that one.
00:41:08
Speaker
But then about about two hours in, when everyone's tired, including me, Huberman asks him about deadlifts. And I thought, oh boy, here we go. So he's still trying to get him to answer this question. He says, are deadlifts and squats good or bad for different body types?
00:41:26
Speaker
You can't let it go. You can't let it go. So McGill says, he talks a lot about you know this research with people with disc bulges that have fragments of broken end plates in the ah some of the tissue from the disc bulge. And when you go into their history, it's because they did deadlifts. And there's an epidemic of people with herniated discs that are caused by deadlifts. Specifically, this quote unquote epidemic is based on the number of people he sees, again, at his highly specialized back pain clinic. So he does say, though, that the dead life itself is not a problem. It's the people who are progressing too fast and they hurt themselves. And he says that there's a lot of potential anatomical variety through the hips that could impact how you deadlift or squat. And when we're rehabbing, we're going to keep that person in an optimal range.
00:42:12
Speaker
before we progress them into more challenging ranges. And I think that's a totally reasonable statement. And he also says, you know, for people who are early in their rehab, doing deadlifts is maybe not the appropriate place to start. I agree with that as well. So regarding the deadlift specifically, I'm sort of okay. I'm sort of okay with what he said up to a point. But then he says this, and this is a direct quote, if I go back to some of the criticism after that original deadlift statement, There were a lot of older fellows who said, you know, I love the deadlift. When I stop deadlifting, my back pain actually increases and deadlifting keeps the boogeyman away. And he says, okay, but, and this is another quote, I can tell you about the characteristic of these people.
00:42:57
Speaker
they will be somewhat uni-dimensional in their athleticism. Ask them to throw a football, ask them to swing a club. I bet they won't do well in either of those activities. And then he and Hugh Roman go on to discuss why that might be. But I'm over here thinking, so so what? The more you deadlift, the less you will be able to throw a ball or hit a golf ball? I mean, maybe, but this is just conjecture. And it and again, resonates in this tone of moralizing about choosing one exercise to the detriment of some other other other exercise that is unrelated. I mean, does does everybody need to be able to throw a football or hit a golf ball? I don't do either because I'm famously shit at both.
00:43:35
Speaker
But I do include rotational and anti-rotation work in my training. I mean, is that is that enough? You know, it felt very like, well, OK, do those deadlifts, but I mean, you're going to be crap at ball sports like, you know, fine, ignore what I'm saying, but there will be consequences. So you're saying my life is a result of my choices. Yes, I'm aware, you know, there's this myth that in order to be successful athletes or to perform well as athletes, we need to strength train in this really sport-specific way. For example, instead of doing overhead presses to increase the general physical preparedness of my body in order to set a volleyball, for example, I should just set a medicine ball. And that would be a more sport-specific way to strengthen my shoulder overhead muscles, right my overhead shoulder strength. That's not true, and that's not how it works.
00:44:33
Speaker
So when athletes train in terms of just general strength training, they are in some cases working on specific types of attributes.
Strength Training Myths
00:44:46
Speaker
okay So they might train more for power rather than slow, heavy strength. Or they might do more speed and agility work that is more kind of relevant to the stuff they have to do on a field. right So strength and conditioning type drills. You do not need to do an exercise that looks like a sporting movement in order for that exercise to benefit you in that sporting movement. So I'm gonna tell you right now, there are a lot of throwing athletes. There are a lot of racket and so swinging athletes that are deadlifting. I guarantee you there are. And deadlifting does not interfere with their ability to move unilaterally and explosively.
00:45:31
Speaker
It's not that one-to-one type transfer. When we strength train, we increase our general physical preparedness. We elevate our capacity, right? When you play your sport, you're actually, that's where you're working on sport-specific maneuvers. So this conflating of deadlift as it interfering with some sport-specific movement. This is really old news. I'm surprised that someone with his background would draw that illogical parallel. The amount of analogies in this episode is also extremely problematic, so they they are used often as a vehicle for moralizing movement. Anecdotes as well are often used frequently in replacement almost for the science, but it's the analogies that I think
00:46:27
Speaker
are really problematic because, so analogies are stories that we tell to explain something else, okay? And so humans love stories, they love a narrative representation of something that feels really abstract like science. So they're often used to explain science, but the problem with analogies is they completely leave out the science. They're inaccurate, they're incomplete. They give people, though, that feeling that they understand the science, and they can be useful to a point. But you don't get an understanding of the science through analogy. You get an understanding of the science through an understanding of how science works, the scientific method.
00:47:08
Speaker
and details of what was studied and what was found and you know what is generally believed to be true or untrue based on the science. So one such analogy was when he compared to St. Bernard with a greyhound, and this is also another way that they conflate the role genetics plays in athletic performance with the role exercise plays in everyone's health regardless of genetics or whether they're an elite athlete. yeah So he goes, you know, a Saint Bernard will never be as fast as a Greyhound. And if you train a Saint Bernard like a Greyhound, you will ruin the dog. And I'm thinking, no, you fucking wouldn't.
00:47:52
Speaker
The Saint Bernard would just not do what you wanted it to do, and it would instead probably lie down and take a nap, okay? You're not gonna ruin the Saint Bernard. It just won't run around the track. I do sprint training about once a week, every week. I'm not as fast as Sha'Carri Richardson, and I never will be. Will sprinting destroy me because I'm not genetically gifted like her? No! It will help me maintain my power output as I age though, so I'm going to keep freaking sprinting.
00:48:24
Speaker
He also uses the analogy of a willow branch spine and how it supports bending as analogous to a willowy human spine, which is not a scientific term. You know, when you compress a willow branch, it snaps, kind of like your spine might. And then the analogy of the thick spine, I don't know, I think at one point Huberman went redwood, wrists like redwoods. I was like, oh God. The thick spine, according to McGill, supports compression, just like a thick tree trunk. But if you try bending it too much, you're going to run into trouble because it might snap. And then here's such a direct quote. So after he tells us about the St. Bernard and the Greyhound and the willowy spine and the thick spine or the willowy branch and the thick branch, he goes, quote, it's amazing when you take a look at the basic anatomical structure of the human spine.
00:49:18
Speaker
We just did that with dogs and trees. No! You didn't look at the human spine with dogs and trees! wait That's exactly not what you did. You crafted incomplete and misleading analogies to the spine with dogs and trees, though. Okay. And then, of course, he wants to talk about the world record holder for sit ups and how he had a fucking chair, right? And how he had a willowy spine. And then he he says something like he had to have had a willowy spine. There's no other option. And I'm like,
00:49:52
Speaker
Who fucking cares? Does that mean that only willowy spine people should ever do sit-ups? OK, and then he goes, quote, not everyone can be a gymnast, play offensive tackle, or sit in a chair as a computer operator. Yes, I can! ah
00:50:12
Speaker
Want to be a gymnast? Do gymnastics. Want to be on offensive tackle? Put some pads on, run around a field, and knock people over. Do you want to be a computer operator? Sit down and operate a computer. Want a bikini body? Put a bikini on your body. That's right. Oh, my God. OK, finally, finally, the risk to reward consideration for elite athletes. This he likes to talk about. And he name dropped himself into Nassim Talib's book, Antifragile. I'm sure Miguel gets a lot of shit for being kind of a fragileista. And so he's like, well, why didn't Nassim Talib put me in this book called Antifragile then?
00:50:51
Speaker
ah Sorry, sorry, I just have to break in because Fragilista is fucking genius So we're gonna make a t-shirt that says don't be a Fragilista. Okay, so Nassim Talib. I like his book anti-fragile I've read a couple of but you know of his other books parts of other books and he's also the king of analogies so Heads up. He's he's a ah finance expert And he has this concept of asymmetry, specifically the asymmetry of injury. In other words, for elite athletes, injuries can cause massive setbacks or end careers directly impacting their financial livelihood due to the demands of their training.
00:51:32
Speaker
Okay, yeah, it's true. Elite athletes face higher risks because their careers and wealth depend on their physical performance. So not only is their body at risk, but their livelihood is at risk when it comes to injury. Additionally, they train yeah at a very high frequency and intensity a lot of the times, and they play their sport, which often happens at the highest possible intensity because it's a competition. And the number one reason athletic careers end is due to injury because of that. However, this risk of asymmetry doesn't apply to most podcast listeners who are not elite athletes. They're recreational athletes. Recreational athletes exercise for health, not wealth. By the way, elite athletes are probably pretty healthy. They're not exercising for health. So these two groups of people are exercising for totally different reasons.
00:52:26
Speaker
If the layperson gets injured, they don't lose out financially to the extent that an elite athlete does. They they might have to you know pay some money for treatment or whatever. They might temporarily lose some health benefits from not being able to exercise. There are risks and consequences to injury for the layperson. But the real risk for non-athletes is avoiding exercise due in part to exaggerated concerns about injury or the complexity of getting it exactly right and making it all seem too complicated. can lead yeah This can lead to a decrease in physical activity resulting in a loss of health benefits. So, okay, elite athletes.
00:53:09
Speaker
The asymmetry of risk there is that if they get hurt, they might lose their jobs. They might lose their careers. But the asymmetry is actually going to work in the opposite direction, potentially for folks who are so afraid of injury or so afraid about the last time they got injured that they stop exercising. On one hand, yes, we have completely different set of risks, completely different set of rewards. And yet, of course, McGill only wants to talk about this population of elite athletes. So of course, now we're talking about injury in the context of there being a much higher risk, not only for injury, but because of injury. And we're somehow being led down this train of logic that the risk is the same for us in exercise. And it just isn't. The benefits are so, so very much greater.
00:54:05
Speaker
than the risks for the lay person in exercise. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's let's get into our third theme, McGill misinterprets medical data. And I'm also going to put into this category, McGill, well, and Huberman. Maybe it's Huberman misuses medical terminology. So Laurel, yeah It's come up a little bit so far. Can you can you explain to this this whole phenotype model, the ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph, and also can we talk about this thick spine, thin spine business? like what's What's going on here? Also, like if we're going to ask good, bad, or ugly on this, I don't think McGill did terribly bad on this one. you know He has a lot of his his analogies and anecdotes that
00:54:48
Speaker
definitely misinterpret the research. They're misleading. But I feel like Huberman with his like four separate questions about, but does body type play into it or should we train against or with phenotype, which is this pseudoscientific concept developed by American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon in the 1940s. It's based on embryology and something about three germ layers of an embryo, endoderm, mesoderm, ectoderm, he would associate each body type. So we've got the ectomorph, which is thinner, a little bonier in presentation, the mesomorph, which is more muscular in presentation, and the endomorph, which is more fatty tissue.
00:55:32
Speaker
ah presenting in their ah body morphology, right? He associated each body type with personality traits. So I like to think of somatotae of somatotypes like the humors of the 1940s. He thought ectomorphs were introverted, yet intelligent. Mesomorphs were active and competitive. Endomorphs were extroverted and cheerful. What?
00:56:00
Speaker
Right. none of these There's no way that any of these characteristics would ever overlap into one person. Or what if I change my my body type? right What if I put on a bunch of muscle or lose weight weight or gain weight? Does my whole personality change? Obviously, this is a discredited scientific theory or claim it's pseudoscience, okay? And then this whole fix finds the thin spine business. what's what's what's this What's going on here? so You know, McGill kind of plays into this.
00:56:33
Speaker
um emphasis of morphology of the spine being important for exercise tolerance, for certain athletic types of athletic prowess. But in in so many ways, again, because the audience listening is 99.99% not an elite athlete, what's implied here is that there's some certain way that you should Think about moving or exercising your spine based on its thinness or thickness and other ways that you really shouldn't because it could snap or it can't tolerate that type of bending or whatever. But the idea of tailoring exercise programs based on spine thickness is just complete and utter nonsense.
00:57:18
Speaker
okay Let's start with the fact that making blanket statements about what people with different morphologies of anything shouldn't shouldn't do and how it oversimplifies a very complex issue. like People are incredibly unique in their biomechanics, their overall health, their muscle strength, their flexibility, their injury history. Categorizing them based solely on spine thickness doesn't account for any of these other important variations. so It could potentially lead to terrible exercise recommendations. But the bigger thing that makes this total idiocy is that assessing spine thinness or thickness without advanced imaging techniques is impossible. It's unknowable for the vast majority of people. And then there's this. If the person decides to just guess what someone's spine thickness is and then misjudges their spine thickness, this could lead to inappropriate exercise advice.
00:58:15
Speaker
This could have also a negative psychological impact. If we tell someone with a thinner or thicker spine to be extra cautious with that certain type of movement, you've got a thick spine. Be careful with the sit-ups. Based on zero evidence, because it's just not a thing, it's not a thing. It might instill unnecessary fear. Lead them to avoid exercise in general. The effectiveness of exercise and the safety of exercise depends on proper progression and load management. can Consistently, research shows that adaptation to load through gradual exposure is possible for most folks, regardless of morphology. And this is key not only to preventing injuries from exercise, but also to improving strength, improving endurance, regardless of spine morphology.
Spine Thickness and Exercise Tolerance
00:59:00
Speaker
An evidence-based approach emphasizes considering the whole person
00:59:05
Speaker
their response to exercise rather than focusing on a single anatomical characteristic like spine thickness. You're I don't know, you're just as good off focusing on hair color. And at least know what the color of someone's hair is. You have no idea how thick their freaking spine is. Okay, so so Huberman's definitely problematic in this. McGill does his thing throughout the interview where he just kind of drops in these statements that not only have no research cited by him, but they're just not true. And there's no pushback from Huberman because this isn't his area of expertise. So right ah so here's some of the things that he says. He says a valgal knee collapse. So that's when your knees go in towards each other.
00:59:48
Speaker
During, you know, I think he's saying during lifting or exercising or jumping or whatever is a big indicator of future ACL injury risk. And this is just not true. There's two separate studies from 2022 and 2023 that test knee valgus in single leg squats and jump landings and find no increased risk for injury. He says bending over with flexion gives you a 10 times the risk factor for disc injury. This is also not true because there's plenty of studies that show no significant difference between lifting with a flex spine or lifting with a quote unquote neutral spine. This is one that makes me a little bit nuts that that you can, in some cases, if you have a disc herniation, you can lie on your stomach and then exhale, let that lordosis of your low back increase. And then that's going to vacuum the bulge back in. If you have.
01:00:39
Speaker
a posterior bulge with an open fissure." He says, it works for those. I started looking into research. I couldn't find anything more substantive than not even talking about whether or not a bulge is going back in or not. I couldn't find anything more substantive than lying on your belly, doing a cobra or or exhaling. It's no better or worse than any other intervention for pain reduction. And I've asked a few doctors here and there over over the years, like, hey, is it possible to vacuum back in a disc herniation? And the best answer I've ever gotten is maybe in some situation.
01:01:14
Speaker
But for some people, lying and prone and then going into spine extension like a cobra or baby cobra can actually make their low back pain worse. I don't know why he's harping on so much about this one maneuver that is for specific herniated disc positions and types that works sometimes according to him, but not according to research. Um, and then the other one, and this is a, this is a direct quote again. He says, there are some people who do not perform an assessment and say, if you have back pain, the symptom of back pain, do deadlifts. I mean, we've, we've said this before, there is evidence to show deadlifts among literally anything else can be helpful for low back pain. They're about as good as the McGill Big Three. That's right. Everything's basically equally effective. Here's our last category. McGill manipulates via melodrama. So this is where we get into the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad.
01:02:13
Speaker
to quote the children's book. There's a couple things in particular that I want to talk about. The first one is not as bad as the second one. So we're going to get the first one over with first, which is he's still on this virtual surgery concept that we heard about in the Atiyah episode where from his perspective, the people who need surgery actually only need rest. And so he says, I anoint them like a knight and I'm looking into their eyes and I'm giving them one of these. We're looking into each other's soul now.
01:02:40
Speaker
oh my god you don't right i mean like what ah to Huh? Is this really necessary? And so he he tells these patients, you're going to behave like you've had surgery. And so tomorrow is going to be your first day after surgery. You're going to lie in bed and relax. Just get up to go to the bathroom. The next day, you're just going to move a bit more and we will then progress you like that. And he says, his his reasoning is that surgery works in a lot of cases because it is forced rest.
01:03:13
Speaker
not because of the surgery. I know there was a lot of research around surgery not working for people and that plenty of people who have low back pain for various reasons get surgery and the surgery does not do anything to their low back pain. But I'm not aware, and maybe there is, but I'm not aware of any evidence to show that the reason why surgery works when it does is just because people are resting. He's like, you know, it works great for those exercise addicts. Okay, sure. But again, 80% of the population is doing nothing. His quote unquote evidence is that when they follow up with these people, 95% of them were glad they did it. Okay, fine. But glad they did it doesn't tell us if they were then out of pain. Maybe they're glad they did it because it helped them recognize that they had an unhealthy relationship with exercise. And that maybe they should start going to some therapy. There could be any number of reasons why you would be glad to have done something and none of them have to have anything to do with pain. Right, Laurel? Yeah, I'm right with you. Okay, let's talk about the 20% of people who are meeting the physical activity guidelines. How many of them do you think are exercise addicts? I mean, such a tiny amount. This is not science. I bet it's not even 1%. Okay, if I'm right, and you know, again, I'm just guessing, I don't actually know what portion of the US population are exercise addicts. If it's 1% of 20%, that's 0.2% of the population. Now, let's say it's half the people who are meeting the physical activity guideline. But let's say it's 50% of 20%. That's still only 10% of the population. So if 0.2% or 10%, depending on how you guess, are over-exercisers or exercise addicts,
01:04:50
Speaker
Let's now compare those amounts to the 80% who aren't even meeting the minimum. Okay, this would be like, here's an analogy. Okay, I got one. This would be like weather forecasters talking exclusively about the dangers of being struck by lightning during a tornado and completely leaving out the fact that it's the high winds that you should be most concerned about. You're focusing on the wrong thing!
01:05:17
Speaker
Oh God, okay. so So that was the sort of medium sized one just to kind of get us warmed up for this next part. So we're gonna get into this clip that you, the listener, if if you've heard anything or seen anything on social media about this podcast episode, this is probably what you've heard. And it is the I can just tell moment. And it seems to be triggered by him sort of you know dipping a toe into the biopsychosocial model. So here's what happens. And this is a direct quote If the mechanism of their pain was really part of the changed engram, they were traumatized at the time of the event, or maybe it was a history of sexual abuse, or whatever, but I can detect that person. Almost always, I'll start to put my hands on them to feel, oh, is there any antalgia? And they'll recoil. oh That's an abused person. That's a very characteristic response. So you start putting together some of the reactions
01:06:17
Speaker
And you know that there's something deeper than an injury to their spine," end quote. Laurel, one of the things this reminded me of is when we were in our last episode, Posture Panic Part 1, when you were talking about the man who worked at immigration and allowed people into the country. based on just looking at them, because he said he could tell if they were gonna be a good American citizen by just looking at them. It reminded me of that. Yeah, he was evaluating their posture and basing his evaluation of their posture on whether they should stay or go. So so a couple quick things before we get into like you know the the obvious part of why this is problematic. McGill reiterates throughout that the people who come to him are in pain. He also reiterates throughout that a a pain provocation test is the beginning of his physical test. So he's talked to them about what's going on, And now he's going to do the physical test and he starts by trying to recreate their pain. And he says, if I can provoke it, it's mechanical. And if I can't, it's not mechanical. Laurel, do you think there's any possibility that people are recoiling from being touched?
01:07:16
Speaker
because they are in pain and they are scared of what he's about to do because it's a pain provocation test. Do you think that's a possibility? I think that's a very, very logical possibility or conclusion we could draw from this ah yeah sequence of events. But it could also be that he has cold hands or they're self-conscious about where he's about to touch them or he startled them or they are already a little creeped out by him for some reason. I don't know.
01:07:47
Speaker
The thing is, is he has no idea and nor does anyone else why someone doesn't want to be touched or goes ah in any given moment. Him saying it's trauma, asexual means he just put himself pretty much on the same level as a fortune teller or a tarot card reader. it's just total magical thinking. Ultimately, I think it's arrogance. So the second small thing that I want to touch on is he doesn't mention this. So I don't know for sure. But he never says that he asks his patients if it's okay to touch them. Now we can argue back and forth as to whether or not that's going to elicit an honest answer.
01:08:26
Speaker
Sometimes somebody maybe who doesn't want to be touched just says yes because they're trying to do what you want. yeah They know the practitioner wants to touch them, so they're just giving permission. Who knows? But at least what I always come back to is at least you're asking permission, which puts the control of the situation back into the patient's hands instead of just plonking your hands on them. It creates a moment where they are in charge. And for people who are having you know chronic horrible pain, the kind of people that he's seeing, they're such at the mercy of what they're feeling and at the mercy of all these different practitioners who are either unable to help them or you know the system has failed them or whatever.
01:09:07
Speaker
Giving people back some control or a sense of control is incredibly valuable. And that's that's why I literally every single time ask people, you know, is it okay if I if i touch you? he We don't know if he does or does not. But you know what I'm tired of, Laurel? I'm tired of white men over the age of 60 who think it's okay to just touch someone wherever, however. I mean, I have had many. male patients in that age range who have put their hands on me without asking. Many. I have been patted on the head more than once. I'm serious by white men over the age of 60.
01:09:42
Speaker
padded on the head, like seriously, what the fuck? Can you even imagine? I want you to try to visualize everybody, a patient doing that to their male physical ever therapist, right? A male physical therapist, picture it, getting patted on the head by their male patient who looks like Stumagill or literally any other older white man. ah It's just, there's an outrageous amount of entitlement in this particular, I would say, segment of the population. And when it comes to the option of whether or not somebody wants to be touched. Yeah, we don't we don't know if Miguel obtains consent before touching his patients. We don't. But his whole story about how he knows if someone's been
01:10:22
Speaker
traumatized sexually or otherwise just based on how they respond to his touch, it reeks also of entitlement. So I can see why being patted on the head flashed before your eyes when hearing the story from McGill. like It's not the same thing, but it's kind of a symptom of the same problem. Can you can you do the heavy lifting and talk about why this is a really problem? I'm tired now. Okay, so I mean, there's no single one way that people respond after trauma.
01:10:54
Speaker
right like He seems to think that touch someone they recoil equals they've been traumatized. It's like, what? He's so far afield of his scope of practice in this moment. It is really incredible. And he doesn't seem to have any self-awareness of that, which is also even more incredible. Not only is he acting as a therapist when he's not one, yeah he's a scientist, he's a researcher, he's not he's not a physical therapist, but now he's trying to insinuate himself into the realms of a therapist who also understands sexual trauma.
01:11:30
Speaker
The great irony is that no therapist, no trauma-informed therapist worth their salt would be so arrogant as to assume that even with their training and experience, they would know why any given person recoiled from the touch of another, even if they were in the room and saw it happen. Okay, so McGill's line of reasoning is a classic example of the post-Hawk fallacy, which he actually commits a lot. Assuming that recoiling from touch, the second event, must be caused by a history of sexual trauma, the first event, simply because the two are observed in some linear sequence where one happened after the other, therefore one caused the other.
Touch Recoil Assumptions
01:12:13
Speaker
ah history of sexual trauma yeah caused this person to recoil from my touch." It's a hasty conclusion as well, to put it lightly. Drawing a conclusion about a person's entire history or experience based on a single reaction without considering other possible explanations is so illogical, but it's also a little bit like giving exercise advice based on a thicker thin spine. Why then? Does McGill jump to these conclusions and then broadcast them on a podcast that gets millions of listens based on almost no evidence? What explains his choice to characterize the situation in this way? Here's my opinion, because this explanation now positions McGill in people's minds as some kind of trauma-informed healer.
01:13:03
Speaker
He often characterizes interactions and tells stories in a way that elevates him to the healer status. So this is yet another way that he can be seen as this all-knowing healer. The unfortunate reality for McGill is, though, that in his suggesting that a person he went to touch recoiled due to sexual trauma, drawing that a conclusion, making that assumption that he's actually revealed himself to be incredibly trauma uninformed. and trying to appear otherwise is misleading, it's confusing, it's harmful to people who have actually experienced sexual trauma or who will in the future. Thank you. But wait, there's more.
01:13:50
Speaker
Oh God, so so Huberman you know is this talking about the biopsychosocial model. And he asks about the relevance of this to McGill's work. Here's what McGill says in response to the idea of the biopsychosocial model. And I quote, now we have that person, and I can think of many examples just to give a spectrum. Perhaps the person was in a car accident. They survived, but the person beside them who might've been their mother died. So now they are carrying a hell of a lot of emotional trauma, guilt trauma,
01:14:27
Speaker
Maybe they nodded off at the time of the accident and they were driving. Tremendous psychological stress. Maybe they were sexually abused or whatever. Anyway, that wear rewires their brain. So now they come in and the pain pattern doesn't fit. We do physical stressing of their various tissues and their reactions, they change. They are variable. They are not what they should be. i I just have to break in before we talk about this whole thing is why is it whenever he says the phrase sexually abused, he follows it with or whatever? Like, it's a little awkward. And why is this person who's been in a car accident, maybe with her mother, is also sexually abused? Or whatever? Like, what? Laurel, what is he? What is happening? Yeah, I think what what's happened is that they've latched on to grief and trauma as representative of psychosocial factors to consider when someone has pain.
01:15:24
Speaker
And that's because those types of stories I think are pretty dramatic, melodramatic sometimes. They they make for good podcasting material, maybe. But in reality, factors that fall under this umbrella description of psychosocial factors don't necessarily have to be the worst possible things that have happened to people in their lives. I think like everything, they're just sensationalizing. I think it's good to know that psychosocial factors can also include considering things like work stress. Having been no-seeboed or no-seebroed into a fearful state about your body, doubting your own self-efficacy and your ability to manage your own pain, instead of having to rely on three-hour exams from your healer. Your social safety net, whether you have healthcare, care if you live alone, or whether or not you have a network of friends and family around for support,
01:16:16
Speaker
your economic status or stability, your cultural beliefs and attitudes about pain, which we got into in our first Posture Panic episode, as well as the attitudes and beliefs your society has about pain. Whether your work or home environment is safe or dangerous, calm or chaotic, your history of injury, your medical history, your current activity levels, your sleep patterns, your substance use, But you'd think from this interview that psychosocial factors equal history of sexual trauma or whatever. Sorry, I just had to do that.
01:16:52
Speaker
Or working through grief, or working through both, like falling asleep at the wheel before your car wrecks and people die. I don't know. i mean in the In the pain science world, there there are lots this is sort of how they started to realize like you know people's experience of pain is not simply mechanical, because there's plenty of stories like this one. where, you know, and I remember hearing about some of them during school, but this is a wildly overdramatic example of from his perspective, the only people who could have the pain that doesn't respond to mechanical stress. And so he does then go into some method methods of desensitizing pain, which is
01:17:32
Speaker
very much what you would use with someone who has you know chronic pain like fibromyalgia or chronic regional pain syndrome. But hang on a second, where else have we heard him talk about pain that doesn't have a tissue source? Oh, that's right. It's nonspecific low back pain and McGill doesn't believe in it. He says at one point, I get labeled as the biomechanist and I ignore the biopsychosocial. But these are people who have never read our work and they don't know. Okay. I mean, we're we are two people who have read your work. I read the part in Back Mechanic where you advised all your readers without any qualifications that they should probably not seek out psychotherapy for back pain because you didn't you didn't see how it would... I'm familiar with your work, unfortunately or fortunately for us both.
01:18:18
Speaker
We are deeply familiar with your work. So I just, just to summarize the the mental gymnastics around this biopsychosocial, the way that he interacts with it. So this is according to McGill, people who have biopsychosocial informed pain. It's only the most dramatic slash traumatic life-changing event that can cause this. And it couldn't be, I mean, apparently, any of the typical stressors that Laurel listed. And these people could have back pain with no tissue source. But non-specific low back pain is not a thing because there is no tissue source.
01:18:52
Speaker
Make it make sense. I can't. I think that pretty much just but really very clearly showed the massive gap in logic in his in his paradigm. It's really confusing because there's a really big piece missing there. Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about here is E3 Rehab, which is a ah great podcast that we love that we're going on pretty
E3 Rehab's Experience with McGill
01:19:13
Speaker
soon. They recently posted a ah recap episode talking about past episodes, their thoughts about these episodes, what you know what they liked, what they didn't like. And so during that, they talk about their you know interactions with McGill. And so what E3 Rehab did is they they had an episode where they discussed the Atea interview.
01:19:33
Speaker
like we did. Then they had they invited McGill on to talk basically is to come sort of like defend himself basically and they had two episodes where he came on to talk. and What they said was that they felt they were very accommodating with his requests because he asked to present a PowerPoint uninterrupted. and when they When they're discussing this and they were discussing their reasoning, they're saying, look, we wanted to build a relationship and see if we can come to mutual understanding. They want guests to feel like they can come on and disagree. but Ultimately, this didn't really land the way that they wanted it to. And they got pushed back from Stu's followers who were critical of their first episode where they were critiquing him. But then also Stu's detractors were critical that they had him on their podcast and didn't push back against what McGill was saying. And so they said that it kind of felt like just a lose-lose situation. You know, I can't remember who said that but this, but one of them said, you know, it's it's hard to push back on something where
01:20:32
Speaker
You're saying, for example, like the prone instability test is not a valid test of the lumbar spine, but Stu says that he's able to feel these micromovements of the lumbar spine because he's been doing it a long time. So that's sort of the, you know, I just know model, right? There's there's no research that's going to change his mind and and arguing with him is going to decrease the trust. You can't disprove an anecdotal claim. right there's and There's no such thing as anecdotal evidence other than someone else's claim. And they said that you know if they had to do it again, they would not have allowed him to just do this long PowerPoint because it didn't allow for any discussion or debate. And then there's this one thing that they said that was kind of my favorite because i you know when somebody says something, you're like, that's what I would say. nice so So they said, you know when he came on in the beginning, he tried to use this excuse that
01:21:20
Speaker
on Atiyah's interview, that Atiyah was asking him questions on the spot. And then he regretted some of what he said. But their point and mine was that he's been doing this for decades. you know If you're an expert and you're brought on to discuss your area of expertise, you should be able to handle it, basically. right And that some of his statements were so off. And then, well, what are his real views when when he has to pull back so hard ah when he gets any kind of pushback? And you know they said, yeah, we understand misspeaking. right You and I do it all the time. But there's misspeaking, and then there's making wild claims, which is sort of what he really was doing. I think he changes his tone based on who he thinks he's speaking to. right like I think he decides to position his perspectives in a certain light
01:22:10
Speaker
depending on who he thinks his audience is. So he was completely different when he talked to the E3 rehab guys. like His tone, yeah he he was so much more humble. He used so many more you know qualifiers for things that he
McGill's Variable Interview Persona
01:22:25
Speaker
would say. He tried to give a lot of context. um He's always delightfully polite and wonderfully eloquent and articulate, but his whole stance was so much less adversarial. And he was just kind of apologetic, really, like, oh, let me try to explain what I meant. And oh so it's just the opposite of what we see on Huberman, complete opposite of what we saw on Atiyah. Like, I really do think that he adjusts the tone and his stance and his messages even to
01:22:58
Speaker
you know, run in accord with the people listening. and Or the people interviewing him, right? Because these are people who are musculoskeletal experts. You know, Atiyah is an MD. He at least has that medical background. So final thoughts, final comments. my My biggest thing, my biggest takeaway from this, the Huberman interview in particular, like I mentioned earlier, is that there is so much messaging to be afraid of pain. And so it maybe just start to think like, why is he so afraid of pain? Is it his own experiences? Like when you said the part where Huberman said, you know, he moves so well. And then McGill responds with, well if I if I overdo it, I pay for I have pain for five days, like, maybe he's just got a lot of injuries in his body. And so he has to be exceedingly careful at this point with what he does. And he seems very afraid of pain. So maybe it's that.
01:23:49
Speaker
Maybe it's that he sees a lot of patients who are in extreme amounts of pain. And from his perspective, the worst case scenario it would be to end up like one of these patients. So he's trying to like get the message out there like, don't end up like these people. But in the meantime, that's not most people's
Western Focus on Pain-Free Living
01:24:06
Speaker
problem. It made me think about that one of the in our posture panic part one episode where, you know, there's this idea that there's this natural pain free posture found in, you know, less developed regions of the world where people you know aren't burdened by the objects of civilization that screw us up. And there's one part where she says that a medical anthropologist working at a clinic in Nepal treated villagers there and claimed that no one complained of back pain. But then when he got a translator, he found out that they did have a great deal of back pain, but they just kind of accepted it and didn't feel the need to mention it.
01:24:39
Speaker
right I feel like it's a very Western and particularly a very American thing to be absorbed with our pain and that we feel the pursuit of happiness. It's our right to always be pain free. That's not how bodies work. That's not how life works. Pain happens. And in my opinion, the more effective thing to work on is not to try to avoid pain at all costs.
Building Resilience to Pain
01:25:05
Speaker
but to develop a little bit more resilience. Maybe it's mental resilience. Maybe it's physical resilience against your pain. so Then when it happens, it's like, hu this is annoying, but it'll be fine in a few days. Or, ah I sprained my ankle real bad. This is going to take six months, but it'll be better. But his hyper focus on avoiding pain of all costs, you know the kind of people that I see who are in this intolerable level of pain are people who are chronic pain patients.
01:25:33
Speaker
And they are are typically more in that psychosocial sphere of pain because there's been just sort of, you know, some wiring tripped at this point. And that's very different. than people who have recurrent mechanical pain episodes like, if I over train, I will hurt for five days. like those are Those are different things. I just kept thinking about, I used to have a patient who had thoracic outlet syndrome, which I don't know how much you know about it, but it's a very, pretty much every PT, if they get a patient coming in with thoracic outlet, they go, ohsh
01:26:07
Speaker
because it's very hard to treat. And it's essentially an issue where the nerves coming off the neck are getting trapped somewhere underneath the collarbone or the first rib, or there's there's some issue through there. I had a patient who had it because she was born with like extra little bitty, extra ribs on her cervical spine. And so she had to have multiple surgeries. She'd been through so much in her life. When she came in and worked with me, her whole approach, because she had been dealing with this for so long, her whole approach was, I'm doing a triathlon, I want to train for the triathlon. And I was like, great, let's find ways to get you stronger that don't trip you into, you know, the real bad, the bad, bad, where you can't train there. These will probably be uncomfortable, but you are, you have built this psychological resilience against that discomfort. And Peloton put her in an ad because she's such a badass, you know, like she's just like, well, yeah, this is going on, but I'm also going to live my life. I'm not going to let this be the entire focus of my life. And it would be such a more useful message.
Critique of McGill's Pain Messaging
01:27:04
Speaker
If McGill used this these platforms that you know millions of people listened to, it'd be such a more useful, helpful message to say, pain is a bummer, injuries are a bummer. Neither one of them is a reason not to exercise. Let's get out there and do stuff. Hell yeah. Yeah, my thoughts are we could change the McGill tendencies to read instead of McGill fearmongers movement, it could be McGill fearmongers pain. Instead of McGill moralizes movement, McGill moralizes pain. Remember the part where he was like, I know it seems unfair that people who are overweight and sit all day get back pain, but the people who exercise don't. I was like, oh, wow. So what you're saying is that people who are overweight and sit all day deserve their back pain, and the people who exercise don't are like, wow.
01:27:51
Speaker
We could also say McGill misinterprets pain and McGill melodramatizes pain and in doing so manipulates other people's pain experience. I think that's right. All right, Laurel. Well, I don't know about you, but I really don't want to talk about McGill anymore. I really don't. Same. So I really hope that whatever this podcast tour he is on is going to stop soon. And I will reiterate, if he goes on Rogan, we're not talking about it. Okay, I'll make a carousel. I'll make a carousel. I just I don't want to have to listen. Well, I guess if I make a carousel, I'm gonna have to listen. Okay, I'm not sure what the carousel is gonna have. I don't know. In my mind, something about that is like, maybe I'll just say, hey, go check out Adam Meekins. He probably has a response to this. Right? and then just we'll just yeah forward Forward message, Adam Meekins. All right. Well, thank
Listener Engagement Encouragement
01:28:40
Speaker
you so much, everyone for listening.
01:28:42
Speaker
and please check out our show notes for links to all the references we mentioned in this podcast. And it really, really helps us out if you like this episode to please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And then you can also rate and review it on Apple Podcasts. that would be That would be awesome. I don't think anyone says this anymore, but go ahead and smash that subscribe button.
01:29:11
Speaker
Did I get that right? Smash those five stars. That's right. Smash your fingers into the keyboard while you write us a review. smashmash something Smash your face against the wall while you are listening to the interview and then write us a review.
01:29:27
Speaker
All
Bone Density Course Promotion
01:29:28
Speaker
right. But what I really want you to do is you should get on the wait list for the only discount available for our upcoming bone density course. It's starting in October. It's starting October 15th, to be more specific, which is actually not that far away. It's just a couple months. And even if you're like, I don't know if I want to do it, you're still we we're giving that list so much cool free stuff. Don't you want cool free stuff? Sure you do. So that link is also in the show notes or literally everywhere. If you just follow us anywhere, you'll find that link. Are we going to try to do this? See you in a fortnight?
01:30:01
Speaker
Hell yeah. Why don't you say see you in a fortnight and then I'll say see you in a fortnight and then by the magic of editing I'll make it sound like we said it together. That's a great idea. Okay. See you in a fortnight! Great.
01:30:34
Speaker
You drift around this bar to walk along I've made up my mind I ain't graced a long time Here I go again on my own
01:31:28
Speaker
to walk along.