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S2: EP 5 - Tom Swales : Advanced Movement Therapist - "As a species, we are regressing in our ability to move well"
68 Plays1 year ago
Tom Swales is a highly respected Physiotherapist and coach with over 20 years of experience in human movement, injury prevention, rehabilitation , and performance optimisation. He is the founder of COMPHYSIO+ performance wellness in Ontario, and helps coach the likes of 2023 World's Strongest Man Mitchell Hooper, and the Canadian olympic ski team.
In this episode, Tom explains how to counteract the effects of desk work to keep you moving well; How everyday conveniences could actually be causing us more harm than good, Why we are regressing as a species in our ability to move despite technological advances; What you can do to keep your loved ones active as they get older; How elite level athletes come in all shapes and sizes, why there is no perfect way to do anything, and much more.
You can find out more about the work Tom does here:
https://www.amtcertified.ca/
Instagram: @swales.tom
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Transcript
Introduction of Thomas Wales and AMT
00:00:00
Speaker
Thomas Wales, a very, very warm welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Rhys. So I like to ask my guests to start by introducing themselves for anyone who's not familiar.
00:00:11
Speaker
um So who are you and and what do you do? So my name is Thomas Wales. I am the owner of Consult and Movement Comp Physio here in Barrie with my wife, Kylie. We've been running that for 13 plus years, 28 staff. I have 20 plus years of experience and I am trying to teach and coach clinicians how to simplify their practice using fundamental principles, frameworks, and systems so that they can help their clients achieve their goals faster. So in a nutshell,
00:00:41
Speaker
um you know with with the education side of things, as well as the practical experience side of things, I've learned how to blend not only just in my own personal practice, but how to distill down what we do as clinicians and coaches and how we work with human beings and the individual person.
00:00:58
Speaker
So I feel like we've done a pretty simple job of doing that, but we'll see where it's up and coming and, you know, it's a work in progress.
The AMT Method's Foundation in Science
00:01:08
Speaker
um So you're the AMT method as well.
00:01:10
Speaker
So do you want to talk to us a little bit about what's what the kind of principles are behind that? What's that? but Yeah. So it's built on five fundamental principles of psychology, neurology, biology, chemistry, and physics.
00:01:21
Speaker
So, you know, as much as we learn through our entire careers and the longer I've been doing this, the more I realized what we do as clinicians, it's not, we're not creating a piece of art, of art, adding more paint to the board. I realized it's more of a sculpture. We're actually taking more away.
00:01:41
Speaker
So once we find commonalities across techniques and concepts, then we can find that through line of understanding of how, you know, whether you're looking at things from a rehabilitation lens, from concussions to orthopedic injuries, to high performance, to, you know, anything along those lines, it's, they're all on the same spectrum. It's just, they're on different ends of it.
00:02:06
Speaker
So the AMT is really distilled down everything I've learned over the last 20 years into those five fundamental principles of understanding. I'm not saying that you have to be an expert in psychology, neurology, biology, chemistry, and physics, but if we understand how the individual human being relates to all five of those things, well, we can better explain what we do, why we do it, and how we do it better.
The Role of Psychology in Healing
00:02:27
Speaker
So for example, so Psychology is at top of that list. Anytime we have a first interaction with a with a person, they're coming to us, they're either in pain, they have these goals, we're have a conversation.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, immediately, the words we use, and the more important, the words we don't use, is going to help them determine, is this a safe, can I trust this person?
00:02:49
Speaker
Do I feel connected? Are they doing a good job communicating? Are they listening? And do I feel safe? If the nervous system and their subconscious is saying yes to all those things, okay, well, great.
00:03:01
Speaker
Now we've taken care of the like the psychological component, which is mind and beliefs. And if we can break down... predisposing beliefs or limited limited beliefs that they're coming in with, well, that's also going to help them achieve their goals because oftentimes people come in, oh, well, I have this condition and I can never do this and I can never do that because another expert told me I couldn't do it.
00:03:21
Speaker
And oftentimes it's horseshit. So now we have to break down those beliefs. Well, now that we've given them hope, now their nervous system starts to shift. They go from this sympathetic fight or flight phase to this more parasympathetic, which is where change can happen.
00:03:36
Speaker
Okay, great. We've broken down their psychological barriers. The nervous system's now in um a state of change.
Neurology and Biology in Treatment
00:03:42
Speaker
Now what we do is now we're looking at the neurological system. Okay, well, how do we do that? Let's just all look at movement.
00:03:48
Speaker
Let's look at, can you lift your arm above head? Yes or no. if you have Can you touch your toes? Can you single leg balance? What is your motor output? what is the What is the movement system telling us? And when the nervous system doesn't feel safe, its primary job is survival. It's guard, protect, and stabilize.
00:04:05
Speaker
When it feels safe, it relaxes. It's more coordinated. It's more organized. All of sudden, it takes the brakes off. All of sudden, movement is more fluid. Things are more organized. So we can use movement and muscle testing more specifically as a feedback loop as to are we moving in the right direction? Am I saying the right things? And does this person feel safe in my presence?
00:04:24
Speaker
And then we move into the biology component, and that's just going to be, well, how does the physical body, the tissues, the muscles, the cells, you know, everything, how is everything interacting? How do how do tissues heal? How do they respond to touch?
00:04:38
Speaker
How do these modalities work? How, you know, when we apply an exercise, is it creating a stress to the system that's adaptive or is it maladaptive? Right. So when we understand kind of the the concept of, you know, applying inputs and the nervous system interpreting those inputs and the person believing those inputs are safe.
00:04:56
Speaker
Well, now we've broken down those first three
Chemistry and Physics in Health
00:04:58
Speaker
barriers. The next one would be chemistry. Well, what's happening on a molecular level? Everything's molecules. The food we eat is broken down into mo likec molecules. If we consume the wrong ones or if we're missing vital pieces or vital molecules, the systems don't work as well as they should.
00:05:13
Speaker
Body can't detox. Body can't rebuild. Body can't use energy. So when we start to understand everything is molecular, so we've kind of gone down a little bit deeper along the level of biology to a molecular level.
00:05:24
Speaker
Well, our DNA is composed of five molecules, carbon, hydrogen, not nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus. Okay, cool. So now we have this five you know fire structure molecule. And then everything we consume is molecules after that.
00:05:36
Speaker
And then you go a little deeper down into physics. Well, what is physics? Okay. What are the rules that our three-dimensional body has to adhere to in the three-dimensional world? ah There's friction, there's gravity, right there's energy expenditure, you know ground reaction forces, the the the physics of movement and movement efficiency.
00:05:56
Speaker
But we have to adhere to those, and those apply across every single human being. And then the the last level of physics is quantum. Well, what's quantum? Vibration, frequency, and energy. Well, now we're going down past the molecules at the quantum level and looking at, well, what are quarks doing? What are the protons and the electrons and the neutrons?
00:06:15
Speaker
And they're all spinning and they're all vibrating at specific frequencies. Cool. Well, now we know that matter is organized energy that's being able to be perceived by our senses in the three-dimensional physical world.
Vibration, Energy, and Injury Causes
00:06:30
Speaker
Nothing's really touching each other, but there's enough vibration that we can pick up that it feels like one matter is pushing into another. Why is that important? Well, if we know that everything is vibration, frequency, and energy, everything we do, everything we apply to the body becomes a form of energy.
00:06:48
Speaker
And if it's too much energy, becomes an injury. injury If it's not enough, the body starts to degrade, right? Think of an overuse injury. You know, someone comes in, you know, I got a partial tear in my rotator cuff. It's an overuse injury. I said, well, that's interesting.
00:07:02
Speaker
You know, you're you're a swimmer and you're doing the same amount of strokes on the right and the left. Well, what makes that side different? Ah, your neck doesn't rotate to the right. Oh, you can't extend and rotate your thorax.
00:07:14
Speaker
So those joints that... ah that contribute to the shoulder or should work with the shoulder, they're not distributing forces effectively. So now forces accumulate into the shoulder and now we have an overuse problem, right?
00:07:25
Speaker
Meanwhile, it's a force accumulation problem. Same thing with like an Achilles tendonitis or some kind of tennis elbow or anything. You look up and down the kinetic chain, oftentimes, You'll find that joints above and below are either weak or not moving like they're supposed to.
00:07:39
Speaker
Or force generation isn't occurring effectively. So what do we do? Let's over grip the racket. My elbows really want it. Well, that's the part you're overusing. But why? So now physics helps explain the why. Because if we look at how the body's moving as a system first, you can be like, well, that's not moving right.
00:07:55
Speaker
That could be why you're overusing that body part to accomplish the task that you're trying to do. So now it loops back up. And don't worry, I'll close this long-winded explanation.
Importance of Movement for Health
00:08:07
Speaker
Now we go back up into the psychology component because our beliefs are vibrations and frequencies that affect matter. So how often do ah does the placebo effect work?
00:08:19
Speaker
Very often. Why do most drugs not make it to market? Because the belief... that what they consumed is going to have a reaction in the body to create the response they want. And their body makes the exact chemicals that it needed because of the belief system.
00:08:33
Speaker
Right. So this is where our thoughts and beliefs ah affect the physical body at an atomic level and works its way all the way up to the physical level. So that's why it starts with psychology, because if I can change your beliefs, I can it change your abilities.
00:08:49
Speaker
That's crazy. i am it's i had had Tom Foxley on a couple of episodes ago, and he's a mental fitness coach. yeah So we were talking about, i i was asking the the question about, you know, breaking commitments to yourself, long-term implications of, let's say you want to get up in the morning and you can don't get up, or you say you're going to go to the gym, you go gym.
00:09:11
Speaker
I was curious to know what is the kind of impact of that and and he was saying that well we are kind of the stories we tell ourselves but it's it's really interesting how that has such a crossover into our physical kind of like well-being as well and you hear it a lot with uh the term sort of mind body connection and yeah I'll get that a little bit later but it's There's so much that's coming out now, which is showing us that everything, a lot of things that are in your head are very much connected to your body as well. So your, your gut health has, you know, stress levels and massive effects on your gut health and things like that.
00:09:47
Speaker
Um, I just think it's really interesting that the way you've kind of, you've taken it down to that real level of granularity, which is so different to anything I've really understood about most practitioners where they obviously look at the physical. So it's, it's really interesting what you're doing. And I think, um, yeah, it's very, it's very cool when you're thinking that you, you gotta, but have a few different skill sets to be tapping into the the biology and the chemistry
Incorporating AMT Principles in New Techniques
00:10:11
Speaker
side as well. Well, not really. Like it's, I just bring those up because any new methods or any new techniques that you learn, you build them into it.
00:10:21
Speaker
So you have a better understanding of what they actually do. You know, we come up with these models of, okay, well, when we manipulate a joint, there's a cavitation and there's a, uh, uh, air pocket or a decreased, uh, pressurization in the joint and creates that pop like a, you know, like a suction cup.
00:10:38
Speaker
Okay, cool. What is that doing? Well, we don't know. It has a neurophysiological effect. I said, okay, well, what does that actually mean? We just changed the input.
00:10:50
Speaker
And what determines whether that's good or not? The belief system of the person. Because if someone had a bad experience with getting a manipulation of the neck or back or whatever, They're never going to let that happen again, right?
00:11:03
Speaker
But yet others who had a positive experience are like, yeah, this is the only thing that can fix me. This is the only thing that makes me feel good. What's the difference between the two people so long as there's no contraindications, so long as they're healthy structures?
00:11:15
Speaker
It's their belief system. So their psychology is affecting their neurology and the nervous system saying, no, no, I don't like this. This doesn't feel safe. And if that happens to me, I'm going to set off the alarms and cause pain and and discomfort.
00:11:27
Speaker
And then the other person's just like, oh, I can relax when I get this done. I'm going to feel so good. Right. So, it you know, past experience is important and their belief systems, you know, run that, which then affects the nervous system and how it interprets the information, a.k.a. the manipulation or whatever coming into the body.
00:11:48
Speaker
So it's just, it's I just tried to make it easier because, you know, being lifelong learners, we're going to go learn dry needling and acupuncture and manipulation and soft tissue work and kettlebells and all this stuff.
00:11:59
Speaker
I'm like, well, how do we better use these tools? Because they're all great. They all solve specific problems. But when you start to figure out what is the underlying principles behind them and what do they do with the body at a very fundamental level,
00:12:14
Speaker
it It distills down into those five concepts. yeah and you And like I said, you don't have to be an expert at any of those. But when you have a basic understanding of those five principles, you can better explain, you know, when you're working on a client, this is what's happening at the body, at a neurological level, at a chemistry level, at a biological level, psychological and a physical level.
00:12:36
Speaker
Right. And then you find that through line and then you find the commonality between all of them.
Impact of Modern Convenience on Health
00:12:41
Speaker
Okay. yeah So you mentioned about kind of fundamental principles then, and and if i just want to strip it back and take it right back to kind of basics, we talked about, you talked about movement before.
00:12:53
Speaker
I guess the first question is, you know, it might seem obvious, but just love to get your your kind of your own take on this. what why do Why is movement so important for us as humans? What what is it ah kind of we need to move? what The end result.
00:13:06
Speaker
It's the end game. right? You know, baby's on the ground moving its arms and legs. If it's in an environment in which it's encouraged to move, it will learn to move faster. If it's in a sterile environment and there's no motivation to move, it will delay movement.
00:13:23
Speaker
At the end of the day again, when we look at the the neurological system, it's a threat detection system. And if we don't have the ability to move quickly, we we won't be here as a species very long, right?
00:13:36
Speaker
if we If we hear rustle in the bush, you know, we don't want to be like, oh, move slowly. Like we're not, we're we're we're eating. We need to be like, do I need to mobilize really quickly? And most of the time, you know, the nervous system is always going to shift to that fight or flight response because that is primarily what it needs to do.
00:13:53
Speaker
But when we have the time and you're like, oh, that's, that's and you know, that's just a squirrel or something in the bush. Okay. We can immediately kind of calm down. But And people, you know, as practitioners, we can get too caught on the sexy manual therapy side of things and the needling and that stuff's all great.
00:14:15
Speaker
Those are all quick input modifiers, what I call input modifiers, meaning you stick a needle in a toned up pack and all sudden, ah, sweet, the shoulder rotates. Great. Well, you better add some movement on top of that because if you let them walk out of your office, it'll be back in 48 hours because you've got a small window in which you can make that change because that that input is not going to last, right? Which is why people like, went for massage, right? I went Chiron. Then two days later, comes back, my pain's back.
00:14:44
Speaker
said, well, did you get any new movement or exercise? Oh, no, they gave me some stretches. I'm like, well, what was the wrong ones. Yeah, because it didn't last. It should stick. If you apply the right inputs to the body and then you change the output in the form of movement, pain goes away because your nervous systems learn something different. It's not overusing those muscles again.
00:15:05
Speaker
And that's what drives me bonkers is people, they assess, they intervene and they don't recheck their work. Well, how do you know what changed? Well, they said it felt better. Yeah, but you didn't measure a change and they don't know. They're like, just because they said they feel better doesn't mean they actually are moving better.
00:15:21
Speaker
If they're moving better, great. Keep it locked in. Go get them deadlifting something. Go get them carrying something. Go get them crawling, right? Put them on a balance beam and walk. Hang on to a medicine ball and watch their QL, their tight QL go away forever.
00:15:36
Speaker
Like that's the point, right? To get them off your table and moving, not keep them on your table twice a week for the next five years.
Understanding Pain and Body Interconnectedness
00:15:44
Speaker
Makes no sense. I mean, good business model by, yeah, like, I mean, that just pisses me off about a lot of business practices is just, yeah, keep coming back, you know?
00:15:53
Speaker
All right. Yeah. Well, no one's getting better. Have you seen these um these meme videos that are going around with people pretending to be like your local chiropractor and they're like snapping doors in half and stuff like that?
00:16:05
Speaker
Have you seen those? They're so good. ah um But it is, yeah, it it just made me smile there because I've seen that so many times. I was so talking to ah another sort of practitioner recently and um he we were talking about back pain and There was that practitioner in the States. I don't want shade at anyone here. but oh No, It's amazing.
00:16:30
Speaker
there's i'm not I don't poke fun at any. like I'm a physiotherapist by my yeah legal title. I do manipulation. have amazing chiropractors that work with us that I know. Amazing ATs, massage therapists. It doesn't matter what your profession is. It matters your methodology and your yeah in your approach.
00:16:49
Speaker
It's the same with any industry. It's good and bad. So yeah um ah so this put particular person there and they were talking about this, this, these particular set of exercises that has become quite popular for back pain.
00:17:00
Speaker
And he was saying like, oh, yeah, I've been doing this for like, you know, over a year now. Now my back pain's gone. And they the chap I was talking to just kind of turned around to me and he was like, well, surely if you've been doing it for that long, it's like probably not worked that well. Like if you've been doing it for over, it had to do for like over a year, a year and a half. Right.
00:17:17
Speaker
ah you know I mean, it's obviously very specific to what injury you have, but it just reminded me of that and it made me ah maybe giggle. a lot of a lot of pains, like back pains, have kind of been there. As long as there's no underlying disc pathology or adiculopathy or bone spurs or something anatomical in the way, most of them, they're movement mechanical based.
00:17:37
Speaker
And if you treat the right areas, and you stabilize the right areas and you apply the right movements, it goes away pretty quickly. Like two or three appointments, all sudden dramatic change.
00:17:48
Speaker
And that's where, you know, as clinicians, if you're not making change within a couple of sessions, you need to rethink your approach. Maybe I'm treating the wrong area. You know, this is why reassessment, like reassess them every single time they come in.
00:18:03
Speaker
And even with movement coaches, even with, ah you know, ah strength conditioning coaches, have a have a baseline of movement. As your athletes come in, hey, what do you feel like? With all my athletes, I teach them how to self-assess.
00:18:14
Speaker
Three-minute scan, three cerebellar tests, seven um or six just movement basic movements. If everything feels good, great. Go do your general warm-up. If things feel a little bit off, yeah, we should probably balance the body out first before we start doing your generals.
00:18:28
Speaker
So um having some form of movement scan as a baseline of fundamental movements is super helpful because or the coach and the clinician, at least then you have something to measure your your and you know you're outcomes with, right? Measure what you're doing. Is it effective?
00:18:46
Speaker
And if you're not measuring your effectiveness, how do you know what you're doing is moving the person in the right direction? what gets measured gets managed, isn't it? Managed, yeah. And what gets managed, you can improve upon. it It always amazes me with the body how I've had a ah previous injury in the past where I thought it's been like up here, yeah like my chest area or something or, you know, in the shoulder. But actually the real root cause the problem once they, you know, distilled it down was, you know, down in like either my hip flex or or something something like that. And it's just, it's crazy how everything's linked in such a way that, you know,
00:19:25
Speaker
it's almost like the opposite side and the furthest down point that the point you'd least expect is kind of where the problem area is at half the you're like oh I never even I've been so focused on like making sure my shoulder gets all the good warm-up when really this whole time I need to do something else it's um it's pretty crazy the body's can the body's a system and everything affects everything else rarely And I'm more, brack the longer I've been doing this, the more bullish I am.
00:19:51
Speaker
I'm going to say 99% of the time where your pain and symptom is, is not the problem. yeah There's symptom and then there's cause. There's the what, but then the why is someplace else.
00:20:02
Speaker
right Think of the pain. That's just a signal saying, pay attention to me. that's as That's a signal saying, hey, you know what? Something is off in the system. Not saying that this is the problem or the cause, But i'm goingnna I'm going to turn up the volume on this area that you're using right now to kind of slow you down to make sure that you pay attention or find out why this is here.
00:20:22
Speaker
And oftentimes, it's opposite side of the body, maybe further up or down the kinetic chain. Maybe it's down. Like i had a volleyball player, professional volleyball player, and treated her for
Case Study: Volleyball Player's Knee Pain
00:20:33
Speaker
her meniscus, post-op meniscus prior.
00:20:36
Speaker
She retires. She's coaching. She's just standing. All she did was stand and turn, right? She wasn't playing, coaching. All of sudden, she felt a little pop on her right knee. So immediately she thinks, I tore my meniscus. So the fear goes off thinking, oh, I got to go through surgery again, this, that, and the other. And she comes in and I assess her. I said, well, you know, and i look at her neck.
00:20:55
Speaker
Well, her neck rotates a ton to the right and she hinges. So that's interesting. And then her back does the same thing. So she leans back and she compresses her lower back. I said, do you have anything going out with your neck and back?
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's just tight. It's been there for a long time. Well, she was an outside hitter. So she is always extending that right side of her body. So she's very hypermobile. And when I tested her hip, I looked at her did deep hip rotators and her glutes.
00:21:22
Speaker
Anytime I dropped her head into extension, they turned off. Ah, her balance was also not great on that side either. So there was some kind of disconnection all the way down the right side. checked her knee, meniscus test, everything's fine.
00:21:35
Speaker
I'm like, you haven't damaged anything, but yeah, you pinched something. Well, she couldn't stabilize her hip because she was kinking the neck and everything's a tube and everything's a wire. So all we did was we stabilized her neck in some quadrant quadruped positions. We gave her back some rotation control at the back and the pelvis, switched the stabilizers on in in her hip.
00:21:56
Speaker
And then 48 hours, she's like, yeah, my knee pain's gone. And she's back to playing. So was like, you know, yeah, the knee was a symptom, but because she has this propensity and this this ease to rotate to the right, she was destabilizing the entire right side of her body, starting from the top down. Okay. Okay.
00:22:14
Speaker
Right. So it's noisy. It's a tube. You kink the tube, like, right. And all sudden you get less water, less spurts, less, and less, less signaling going down. Well, you do that enough times and it's going to cause fatigue on that side.
00:22:27
Speaker
So now the whole system starts to shut down on that right side of her body. So she just turned into her knee. Not saying that that was a primary cause, but it definitely was a contributor to it. But the point of that story is, you know, just because, yeah, yeah she could have been easily, yeah, this is a meniscus injury, this, that, and the other, and start treating the knee.
00:22:45
Speaker
If you didn't look at the hip and you didn't look higher up into the neck, well, you missed some of the main drivers that probably would have driven that knee back into pain again over time. Yeah, that's interesting.
Combatting Sedentary Lifestyles
00:22:57
Speaker
I wanted to ask, looking around, so you know looking around most of the most of the day like most of everyday things that we encounter are geared towards being convenient now and so you've got your car you take from a to b you go to the shops you might have a an escalator or lift to take you to the other floor you've got things like groceries now that can be delivered you know straight to your door um you know i when i consider myself like i'm you know i'm under 30 And ah get aches and pains at my age where I'm, you know, I'm still pretty young and I'm like, I'm a bit worried about kind of the price that I'm going to pay for having this kind of abundance of easy, convenient things I've got at the moment.
00:23:38
Speaker
um You know, i wonder if this is what it's like now, like what's going to be like in 20 to 30 years time if I don't really pay more attention to it? And do something to actively counteract the effect um you know particularly when the vast road what do revolves around sitting at a desk or being in a car yeah um you you look around you know most cities or your day-to-day life i look around the office there's people that like you know they're sitting really awkwardly you go around day-to-day life people are on the tube the tram they're you know, the they head down, look at the phones, but I think rounded kind of neck. yeah
00:24:12
Speaker
Um, everyone takes the lift. Now I've got a rule always take the stairs when i the stairs, why I'm doing, because I just, I'm like, I've always just had that ingrained in me to try and do that. Um,
00:24:24
Speaker
But it's it's very much like a, I see it as being a real big problem, um especially for me if I don't do something about it. So i guess there's a part A and a part B to this question, but part A is given what I've just said and given the level of convenience now, do you think as a kind of, as a species, do you think we're kind of evolving the field of movement or do you think we're kind of regressing as ah as a byproduct of this?
00:24:51
Speaker
Overall, I see a regression because life is so easy. it's been It's so easy to do nothing. Yeah. I mean, to get that snack now, that treat, you're like, oh let's go for ice cream.
00:25:06
Speaker
you know You don't have to get into the car and walk down the street to get it. You can just have it delivered. I mean, and there's no excuse. The education's out there.
00:25:20
Speaker
Everybody knows. Everyone's got the world's information in their pocket. So there's no excuse for ignorance. um It's just, as human beings, we will we will always take the path of these resistance because from a survival perspective,
00:25:35
Speaker
you can, search you it's ideal to conserve energy, right? For in case of famine. I mean, we are not that much more evolved over the last hundred years. When food was more scarce,
00:25:47
Speaker
our we Our biology is not caught up. Right. And plus foods are so hyper palatable and hyperchloric. um We don't ah we we just don't burn off. We're not moving enough.
00:25:58
Speaker
And it's not even as though we have to, you know, go to the gym. It's just walking. It's just getting those steps in. It's just getting up and down. Right. Going up and down stairs. We just don't have to do that anymore.
00:26:10
Speaker
Right. and it's easy to get caught into comfort, and which is why I think a lot of these systems out there put that excessive stress on the body, like the cold plunges and the saunas and the they the the ah CrossFit, and like anything that kind of builds that community and and applies that little bit stress, which are all great.
00:26:35
Speaker
theyre they're all They're all great to do. And I think that's why there's this... primal urge to, for many of us to want to lean into some of those, right? Feeling that little bit of stress response, you get the dopamines and you get the serotonins and you get the cortisol spike and it's all good stuff. It can be very addictive.
00:26:52
Speaker
Um, which again, we can do too much of, right? We get too much in the cold punch and all of a sudden it's not causing the positive stress that we're looking for. But as a society as a whole, i see it going down.
00:27:06
Speaker
Now, is it shifting because people are more aware? i see that a little bit more with, I guess, our generation. I'm probably, you're what, 30?
00:27:17
Speaker
I'm not just under here, just under 30. I'm going to be 46 this year. So um I see more and more, at least with the group I hang out with, we're more conscious of being healthy and fit and want to still play with our kids. And, but again, it it also, we're a subset ah of individuals that, you know, those who, ah it better those of the feather flock together.
00:27:41
Speaker
ah If you have that mindset, you're going to attract those people. That's who you're going to hang out with. But when you look outside of your circle, um people are trying, but it's there's so much stacked against us as as a species with foods and convenience and comfort that it can be very easy to get sucked into the other way around because we don't have to farm anymore. there's less you know We're not working construction. We're not doing labor.
00:28:09
Speaker
You know, when when consuming sugar back then was not a problem because you eat your lunch, you have this peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Well, it's burnt up in 30 minutes because you're doing physical labor. Like it doesn't have enough time to sit in the body and accumulate around the liver causing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
00:28:25
Speaker
You actually had to drink alcohol back then to get alcoholic fatty liver disease, right? and So... Yeah. Like as we can look at the athletic side of things, are we running faster and we're lifting heavier, but it's a very sub, it's a small subset of human beings.
00:28:44
Speaker
When you look at old photos back in the 50s and 60s, everyone was pretty fit. There was very few heavy people. Just they didn't occur. But now it's 50-50 almost depending on where you live in the world.
00:29:01
Speaker
Like that's scary. And then the even with children, it's more and more. Yeah.
Simple Exercises for Health Improvement
00:29:06
Speaker
yeah I saw an article of the World who Health Organization put together and it was like, it was written in i think this this study was from like 22, but they found it was like one in eight is obese now.
00:29:20
Speaker
One in eight people, that's like a billion billion people are now obese. And the other interesting part from that report was kind of the the WHO have put together like ah an intervention plan, as they've called it.
00:29:34
Speaker
And you see this a lot now. There's a big emphasis on, you know, the the food side of things, taxing the sugar and, you know, promoting these educating people on um what's good and what's not.
00:29:48
Speaker
ah Firstly, I think some of the systems and the methods we use are supremely outdated, like the BMI, for example, is just, it's so archaic and and yet it's like the standard to to go to for most sort of health organizations, especially here in the UK.
00:30:04
Speaker
And what I found interesting was how there was all this stuff around the food and the sugar and um and even go back to like prenatal um elements as well. But there's a very, very small section relating to actual physical movement. It was just...
00:30:19
Speaker
a promotion of physical education in school which typically my experience at school was never I never thought was massively undersold always thought it was quite good you had your time to get out and move we'd always go out and play football or a sport and then we do it after school as well and the the other one was just kind of promoting physical activities and it was It was interesting when this is such a fundamental thing, I think, for what we've just discussed where there's stuff that's, yes, there's high palatable foods, but also i don't think people are moving a lot more because of the and you know because of the convenience element as well.
00:30:57
Speaker
so So the part B to the original question really was, so for the average person, let's say, who fits into this category of maybe You know, they spend a lot of time sat down. They they're a desk all day.
00:31:11
Speaker
um You know, what what sort of the sort of long term effects they perhaps need to be aware of? And and also how how what can we do to kind of mitigate this this long term effect of this damage? Like what can we do now?
00:31:24
Speaker
and yeah Obviously, it's very generalized appreciate that. But ye what can we do? Go. I mean, going after to the low hanging fruit like you like you've already mentioned, You have the option to take the stairs.
00:31:36
Speaker
any Any opportunity to move more, people should just take it. Oh, there's an elevator there, there's stairs. Take the stairs. Oh, um you don't want to go for a treat?
00:31:48
Speaker
Get in your car or walk the mile to go to the store. like there It doesn't take a lot. um Plus, when we add those extra barriers, It makes you question, am I doing this unconsciously or do I really want to do this? Do I really want to go have that ice cream cone or whatever it is? so So, you know, looking at habits, whether they're conscious or unconscious and whether we're aware of, you know, you know what, you're making a conscious effort to to go do this thing rather than just order it unconsciously from your phone.
00:32:19
Speaker
um its It can be as simple as that. If you're working at a desk all day, set a timer, you know, an alarm for every 40 minutes and do 60 seconds of something, air squats, pushups, jumping jacks, burpees, whatever it is.
00:32:36
Speaker
The research has shown that it doesn't take much to counteract the sitting that we do all day. If you take a break every 30 to 40 minutes, let's say 45, you can counteract the eight hours of sitting in a day.
00:32:52
Speaker
So all of a sudden, let's just say for easy math, every hour you do 60 seconds in an eight hour day of something to get your heart rate up, to get you huffing and puffing a little bit. If you add that all up, that's only eight minutes of exercise.
00:33:06
Speaker
So I don't know if you've heard, you know, about um some of the researchers like, oh you only need to exercise eight minutes a day. That's the eight minutes. But it's broken up. It's not, oh, I sit for eight hours and I go to do eight-minute workout.
00:33:21
Speaker
No, no, no, no. It's interspersed through the days of sedentariness. So it doesn't take much to do that. So one is setting kind of those triggers and reminders to move and get your heart rate up.
00:33:34
Speaker
And the other thing I would say is the more muscle you have, the more metabolically healthy you're going to be. So everybody and the re and everyone's shifting their opinion.
00:33:47
Speaker
It used to be, oh you got to look after the heart. Yes, absolutely. But if we're in a state of metabolic disease, which a lot of the population is, I'd say probably 50% pre-diabetic um or just insulin insensitive.
00:34:01
Speaker
The more muscle you have, the more the better you can manage glucose and your metabolism. So therefore that's going to to improve your um hemoglobin A1C levels, your insulin sensitivity, all of those markers that help kind of determine metabolic health.
00:34:18
Speaker
So what do we do for that? Resistance training. What does that look like? It can be air squats. It can be pushups. It can be pull-ups. What do we need for equipment for that? Not much. You need your body and a little bit of space.
00:34:29
Speaker
If you can get kettlebells or something to add a little bit extra resistance, even better.
Embracing Healthy Habits Publically
00:34:35
Speaker
But if you sprint stairs, if you run those stairs instead of walk them, well, guess what you did? You increased ground reaction forces.
00:34:43
Speaker
Type two muscles are now going to be kicked into play, which then causes hypertrophy. That improves your speed and velocity. Well, now you're going to get better muscle growth. And you did that by running those stairs instead of walking them.
00:34:55
Speaker
So we don't even have to increase the resistance. We can just increase the velocity in which we move. And that can be running a stairs, running a hill, doing some quick push-ups, pull-ups, air squats.
00:35:08
Speaker
You'll put on muscle, but that's not sexy to sell. And you can't charge a lot of money for that either. no Right? So why would we want to share that free information that anybody can do anywhere?
00:35:20
Speaker
That went Tom. I know. I know. But it... ah For a lot of people, they get scared as to, I don't know where to start. I don't want to hurt myself. I've got these aches and pains. I don't.
00:35:31
Speaker
So great. We'll get a coach. And what does that mean? We'll find a personal trainer anywhere, get them familiar, like teach, have them teach you to be familiar with the equipment, have them set you up on a program specific to you.
00:35:44
Speaker
Great. You've gone through that a couple weeks. Good. Go off on your own for a month or two. When you get bored with it, you've hit a plateau, go back and see your coach again. Like, We spend a lot of time and money on useless shit we don't need.
00:35:58
Speaker
Meanwhile, we could easily reallocate those resources to somebody else who's a little bit more knowledgeable than us that to show us an entry point and where to start.
00:36:09
Speaker
um So if you've got ah little bit of time and money, hire somebody. If not, well, go to YouTube, do some pushups, pull-ups, rows, get a TRX band, something to move your body around.
00:36:21
Speaker
Just move. It doesn't have to be a lot. Get your heart rate up. Let the muscles burn a bit. I'm have so many. I can hear the hear the grumbles already from some of the people I would perhaps work with who are saying, I don't want to do 60 seconds of, ah don't to look like an idiot in the office. i don't want to i don't to be doing star jumps in the office. Well, wait, how cares? Because you know what? Well, that's it. He's rather kind of doing that. But you'll be the first one, right? Yeah.
00:36:46
Speaker
You'll be the first one and you look like the crazy person. And then how long will it take before the next person starts doing the same thing? And then the next person, it only takes one to kind of break that stigma, to break that insecurity.
00:36:59
Speaker
And, you know, the the the mentality of, you know what, I'm going to feel better and eventually look better than you. And people don't want to be left behind. They're like, shit, they're looking good. They've got more energy. I want that too.
00:37:12
Speaker
So it will catch on. yeah And yeah, you might look foolish at first because it's not the norm, but it only takes one person to change the norm. Yeah. ah rather I'd rather look foolish than be kind of debilitated yeah in 20 years. it's some Yeah.
00:37:29
Speaker
That's um ah a price I think I'm willing to pay. So watch out for me doing big push-ups in the office. now walk Walk around the office on your hands. Yeah. i used to do I used to be when I was younger, i was I'll still do it, but I just don't go to a gym anymore. I do it at home.
00:37:44
Speaker
I was always the the guy in the corner doing backflips and walking on my hands and then going over to my deadlifts and You know, I just, I add fun into it. I'm just like, what kind of agility skills can I add into my boring weight training program?
00:37:56
Speaker
And, you know, but it also helped me build a reputation for people to come to my clinic and be like, Hey, I've got this injury. I heard you're a physio and you're also a trainer. I'm like, yeah, yeah what do you want to know?
00:38:07
Speaker
So, uh, it's not always a bad thing. And people who, who want to shit on you, do you really want, do you really care about their opinion? but True, very true. and I am mean, he's nothing.
00:38:18
Speaker
ah used to I used to be have balancing as well. i did a course when i was at uni and then I used to just sort of enjoy it doing it at the gym. and So much so that I had a friend who used to say, like i I knew every time you were in the gym because be really bright neon trainers.
00:38:31
Speaker
And she said, all I could see when walked in the gym was just these pair of yeah fair bright pink feet at the end. Just pretend no one's around you and just have fun.
Returning to Basic Movements
00:38:41
Speaker
Like, make it fun.
00:38:42
Speaker
I think that's the kicker, isn't it? it's It's not being too serious. and It's something I'm trying to implement as well with my training. is Hence the conversation we earlier about yeah picking up tennis and trying something new. I don't mind being bad at something anymore because it's just like getting my body moving in a way that I probably haven't really moved before and yeah and go through that.
00:39:03
Speaker
So and that's interesting. The only other thing I want to say about that was the... demographic The demographic of this podcast is kind of the age range where they're probably caring about this stuff as well.
00:39:17
Speaker
yeah When we start moving towards the older generation, yeah and we've all got yeah know parents, grandparents that we want to have a you know longevity, things like that.
00:39:29
Speaker
When we're talking about resistance training, it may not be that they particularly approachable for that sort of thing. What would you alter with what you said, if anything? um about how they can kind of just keep moving, keep active and kind of change from that degenerative yeah being sat in a chair with Yeah. um for As we get older, things get a little stiffer. There becomes a little bit more fear of falling, right? I mean, that's the number one thing. um Somebody in their 80s or 90s, they break a hip.
00:40:02
Speaker
The mortality rate goes up, I think it's like 80%. They're dead within a year and a half because it's not just the break, it's the deconditioning that they lose, the muscle mass that they lose, how quickly they lose it.
00:40:14
Speaker
um So a fear of falling starts to creep in as we get older. But People don't realize they start losing their balance because they never check in with it. Like every single client I come in that comes in to see me, I look at their balance. Can you stay on the one leg with for 10 seconds with your eyes closed?
00:40:29
Speaker
Yes or no. And is one side different than the other? I don't care what sport you do. I don't care how old you are. I need to know, can you do it? Yes or no. And is there a huge difference on the right and the left? Because if there is a big difference right and left, your nervous system also knows that and it's going to cause more overuse injuries on that stronger side.
00:40:47
Speaker
So single leg balance is a non-negotiable test for me because people don't realize how much they rely on the visual system. And then when their visual system is busy or distracted, they need to feel how the body's responding with gravity in space so they can make those adjustments and they know where their foot is hitting in space. If not, all sudden they hit the ground.
00:41:09
Speaker
That being said, Balance training is important, yes, because we want to prevent falls. But what happens when you can't mitigate that fall, when you can't stop that fall from happening?
00:41:21
Speaker
You have to be able to mitigate your relationship with the ground. So when how do you collapse your body? How do you drop your center? over How do you distribute forces across the body effectively in a collapse instead of a so ah high reach and all sudden you shatter a wrist?
00:41:36
Speaker
So for the but people who are looking for that entry point, I say get on the ground. Sit on the ground, roll around, sit in different positions because that opens up the hips, right? You sit cross-legged for a bit. Oh, feels tight. Go into a shin box, go to a straddle, you know, long sit.
00:41:52
Speaker
And what what you also have to do is you have to work on posture. You can't slouch sitting on the ground. So, okay, you're watching your show. Great. Sit on the floor and watch it. yeah When that gets uncomfortable, sit in a different position.
00:42:04
Speaker
That gets uncomfortable, go onto your stomach right and prop yourself up. Now we're reversing and getting that nice spine curve back. Oh, that's uncomfortable. Do something different. create that relationship on the ground again, improve that body awareness, get the vestibular system to start moving and firing up in all three all three planes with gravity.
00:42:23
Speaker
And all a sudden, people have this better relationship, not just with the ground, but also with gravity. So that if they do stumble, because they practice different body positions on the ground, they know how to they know how to make contact with the ground because their relationship is better with it.
00:42:39
Speaker
Where did we learn to move as babies? From the ground. We learned, we are organized top down, center out, but we learned movement from the ground up. And I don't care what kind of athlete you are,
00:42:52
Speaker
If your balance sucks, I need to know why. We start breaking out that pattern. We go into half kneel. Oh, you can't do it there. we go into bridge positions. We go into push-up positions. Oh, you know what? You can't roll to the left.
00:43:03
Speaker
Your rolling pattern sucks. ah So we reestablish from rolling patterns all of a sudden things reorganize. Single leg balance is better. Great. We had a dissociation in the spine somewhere. You couldn't stabilize on that side of your body very effectively because single leg balance is, it's a roll. When we walk, it's rolling.
00:43:20
Speaker
Okay? There's not much twisting happening, but it's still a rule. You have to shift body weight onto that stance leg. The body is coiling, which is a rule pattern. If you can't balance on one leg, that means you're not loading that side effectively and things aren't stacked and the nervous system is not organized. So we've got to figure out what part of movement in the developmental sequence is broken.
00:43:42
Speaker
And very often it's a cross cord problem. It's a rolling problem. You get them crawling, you get them to half meal, you do your chops, you lift your power off, you figure out which direction that they can't connect in and then you rebuild it from the ground up.
00:43:55
Speaker
And all of a sudden, oh, balance is better. And they now, now they can lift heavier because things are more evenly firing up on right and left. ah Yeah. So for, for, to answer your question is get people back on the ground because it takes care of posture, mobility, and body awareness.
00:44:11
Speaker
Awesome. No, that's really insightful. You always think it's going to be something complicated and it's just normally just stripping back to the fundamentals. You said about its in building from the ground up as well because this is something I was thinking about earlier.
00:44:27
Speaker
You watch, you observe children when they play, and even it's quite prevalent in some sort of Eastern countries now as well, the sitting position, like sitting in that like very deep squat, it hails from you know back in Neanderthal, Sapien,
00:44:43
Speaker
you know, early sapiens where you were, you know, chilling with your mates in the, uh, in the social cave or the, uh, you know, whatever it is, yeah it was, that was the position, but you ask anyone now and the vast majority of people would not be able to do it without, knowing you know, lifting their heels up or, um, you compensating in some way.
Restoring Natural Movement Patterns
00:45:02
Speaker
that was um yeah That's a resting position. You go to, you look at tribes in Africa. That's how they, the only time they're standing is when they're walking and ambulating to a new location and then they go into a squat.
00:45:13
Speaker
That's how they rest. That's how they communicate. That's how we're actually designed to defecate. Yeah. And I think ah China, they have toilets just like a hole in the ground. There's a hole in the floor. me yeah Yeah.
00:45:24
Speaker
Because they don't lose their squat. But when we don't lose our squat, we have an ability to get up off the floor. If you can't squat, it's very difficult because what's the, what's the, what's the start position of a squat?
00:45:37
Speaker
Yeah. It's not standing. It's the bottom position. Yeah. Right. It's from the ground. And then we stand into the finished position. And then what do we train?
00:45:47
Speaker
We put a bar on people's back. We start them in the standing position and expect them to go down into a squat and wonder why they can't squat. Oh, you can't squat deep. Well, because they don't know how to own that bottom position because they don't work in that bottom position enough.
00:46:02
Speaker
If we loaded them from the bottom and allowed the body to reorganize and start to develop strength from the bottom up instead of the top down, probably fix a lot of problems in the squat pattern. So long as there's no, again, no anatomical restrictions that are getting in the way.
00:46:19
Speaker
That's interesting. Yeah. So i wanted to move on to sport specific stuff
Athletic Success and Unique Styles
00:46:24
Speaker
now. um So if I looked at any any sport, you can normally see immediate differences between people who are in that particular sport.
00:46:31
Speaker
So my my my sport is golf. I love my golf. So i'm going to use ah you know the top two players in the world, Scotty Shuffler and Rory McElroy as two examples. Rory McIlroy, incredible levels of athleticism. His mechanics are amazing. His swing is just out and out, pure, beautiful swing.
00:46:56
Speaker
Scheffler, very, very different kind of style of swing. yep um Perhaps not as pretty, but he's still the number one golfer in the world. So what a job done.
00:47:07
Speaker
Other sports will have the same, um you know, different techniques, different builds. Some athletes, you know, they might be moving with the perfect form, but that doesn't necessarily correlate to them winning every time, right? So, know, I appreciate this might be a slightly unfair question given the amount of like nuance and and variables that will go into this, but could you perhaps offer some insight as to, you know, how you can get those sort of wildly different builds and styles of, um you know, movement and ah you know, that that sort of thing, how they how they're competing at that top level, even though they're are wildly different.
00:47:41
Speaker
Yeah, that there there can be there's so much variability. I mean, aside from the individual athlete and their individual experiences, um they're going to be organized little bit. Everyone's anatomy is slightly different. Everyone's joints move slightly different. People's hips, you know, i've I've seen hips where one hip was antiverted, one's retroverted, meaning they had this bias towards this one specific rotation, which actually this was a young golfer and it actually worked perfect with a s swing.
00:48:07
Speaker
So his his his hips were not conducive for many different sports where there's symmetry, but for golf, he was designed perfectly for it because his hips just, it biased his rotation and he could get more rotation.
00:48:21
Speaker
So it's so nuanced and and also... It's going to come down to the psychology of the individual and how they prepare.
00:48:33
Speaker
You know, some athletes are very mechanical. They're methodical. They are linear. There's like they have to do these specific things and it works for them. Some, they have to take a mindset of play to get them to relax, to get them loose, to get them whatever. Right. Some go in with aggression.
00:48:50
Speaker
right But that works for them. So it really depends on it on the individual, their anatomical structure, and their neurological system on how it's organized, how their motor and sensory systems are all integrated, and what feels natural for them.
00:49:09
Speaker
because if you're, you know, if you're taking one golfer and trying to change their swing because it doesn't look pretty and all of sudden now you just screwed them up. But now you've, you've trying to push this unnatural mo motor pattern on top of them, on top of the one that worked for them because it, it didn't look traditional.
00:49:30
Speaker
Well, now they're, now they're competing with two motor programs and now you've screwed them. Like, yeah. Right. So it's,
00:49:41
Speaker
It's too nuanced to come in with any definitive answer. And at the end of the day, just because somebody doesn't look like an athlete doesn't mean they won't move like one.
00:49:52
Speaker
And just because somebody looks like an athlete doesn't mean they're going to be one. Because how often do you see these these athletes, they're all jacked in the gym they can lift heavy weight. They move like shit.
00:50:03
Speaker
They're like robots. They're not smooth. And then you see these kind of like very average looking, you know, athletes, they kind of dick around in the gym, but they move effortlessly on the field and they are flying past everybody. And they're so athletic.
00:50:16
Speaker
You're like, that doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't because humans don't really make sense a lot of the time. But is ah there's an Iranian, I think he's Iranian. He was like, he broke the record or something when he was like 19 years old.
00:50:29
Speaker
And he, if you saw him the street, he'd be like, oh, he's like well overweight. He doesn't look well at all. But then you see him get into this like overhead snatch tradition, like it's nothing. And he's got stacks of weight on the bar. It's just, it's nuts. is nuts.
00:50:44
Speaker
Yeah.
Human Creativity vs. Robotic Mechanics
00:50:46
Speaker
have yeah you seen um have you seen the like the robot golfers? I think this is quite interesting. So no yeah so they're um they use them a lot now to like when they're testing equipment, they'll be able to kind of take out the variables and oh got just test the equipment themselves.
00:51:02
Speaker
And I think it's quite an interesting insight into having perfect mechanics and also versus like human differences as well. yeah And you mentioned the psychological aspect there. And I think that was one thing that really stood out to me when I was looking at kind of, it was a video of Rory versus this robot. They were trying to get it in the same place. oh yeah, we're trying to land it in a washing machine. oh I did see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that. Yeah, that's cool.
00:51:26
Speaker
um And there was one at the Phoenix Open. It got a hole one or whatever it was. Right. um But I think that robots are programmed in a certain way where they're actually bounded by the desired shot.
00:51:37
Speaker
So you've got to hit it a certain distance. it's got a The club face has got be a certain orientation onto the ball. Yeah. you know, the, uh, the swing path going to be the same as well. Whereas I think the golfer has the, you know, the creative imagination to be able to think of everything that could possibly go wrong with the shot. Whereas throughou the robots not thinking in that way. Yeah.
00:51:58
Speaker
So, I think the mine's a really interesting one to talk about,
Mental States and Athletic Performance
00:52:02
Speaker
really. I know you've worked quite closely with ah Mitchell Hooper, help you know, Canadian's world's strongest man, the UK, sorry, the world's strongest man, was it last year?
00:52:12
Speaker
Last year, yeah. Oh, so he came to the acting last year, a year before, yeah. Year before. um And i I remember I was listening to an interview with one of the UK strongmen, Eddie Hall, deadlift, like broke the record for deadlifting, 1,000-pound hole, 500 kilos.
00:52:28
Speaker
ah five key um he was talking about some of the techniques he was using to lift the weights that he wouldn't normally do in training. So when they're going to these events, they're not typically going to, ah for like max lifts, they're not probably typically going to that, but they try and push themselves each time.
00:52:47
Speaker
He was talking about using, you know, incredibly dark thoughts to kind of give him this extra, and this extra power, this extra umph for him to get that.
00:52:58
Speaker
Yeah. Um, and you, uh, you see it a lot in gyms now as well. You're going have most conventional, you know, old school lifting gyms. You talked about the, you know, the big jack guys, there's always like heavy metal playing or, you know, a particular style. Everyone's kind of jacking themselves up. They got, got the smelling salts out, you know, know, jacking each other up for me.
00:53:24
Speaker
That looks like it to get in that state. I know when I've been in like a fight, you know, the fight state, that kind of sympathetic response, you're, it's quite draining. You can't really sustain it for a long time. No. And it's quite, quite taxing. So I had a guest on who, who trained under a guy called Bill Anthes. I think we spoke about this before and you said you, you're familiar with his work and he did some work with, um, another sort of few people called, uh, they run a thing called StrongFit.
00:53:51
Speaker
um and they were basically experimenting with their different training so they're trying to train in get themselves in a sympathetic mode where they were you know putting like really tight neoprene on just trying you know really hot and close just really getting that stress response right up while they're doing the training yep and then they were sort of contrasting it with very relaxed you know heard before where someone was listening like you know classical music when he was lifting or or they'll they'll they'll do something like that where it's very relaxed. They'll I can't remember something. I put like earplugs in and and just trying to tap into different states.
00:54:31
Speaker
What
00:54:34
Speaker
What could we expect to happen when we were going into this kind of sympathetic fight state all the time if it always getting to that point where jacking ourselves up? see it a lot in CrossFit where every workout is like balls to the wall.
00:54:47
Speaker
Let's go. there's there's there's in ah In short periods of time, there's no harm to that. And the research has shown that playing loud music, because you get that sympathetic drive, if it's certain music that you enjoy that you know speaks to you or really gets you excited, yeah, you're going to get that increased neural drive so you can lift heavier and push harder.
00:55:10
Speaker
the The downfall is staying in that state when you're done training. So if you leave the gym all jacked up and still, you're not recovering. You're still in a sympathetic state. Your body is still breaking down.
00:55:25
Speaker
This is where it's so important that as soon as training is finished, that you quickly shift into that parasympathetic rest, digest, recover phase. And that doesn't take a lot of time, but it does take a little bit of um thoughtfulness as to what state am I in right now?
00:55:43
Speaker
And that can be simply as sitting in a quiet room for five minutes doing slow, controlled breathing. that That alone will shift your state from that sympathetic to the parasympathetic because it's not always the training that is the stimulus for for performance. It's actually how fast can you recover.
00:56:03
Speaker
And the person who can recover faster gets to train more. If somebody jacks themself up so much and they're still jacked up for four to six hours after that training, their nervous system still thinks they're training.
00:56:16
Speaker
So they're still in that catabolic state. They're breaking down muscles. They're using amino acids for fuel and energy, right? They're not replenishing glucose. They're not doing any repair work.
00:56:28
Speaker
So therefore, they go to bed. Well, they're now six hours behind in their recovery. They might not be able to train as intensely the next day. But for the individual who took that five minutes to shift into that parasympathetic state, well, now they have an extra six hour advantage to train next the and they can hit it hard again.
00:56:48
Speaker
Right. And as we get older, our ability to recover actually starts to go down. We can still lift heavy. We can still move pretty quick. But our ability to recover gets less and less.
00:56:58
Speaker
So we have to be more methodical and we have to dial those things in. Sleep, nutrition, supplementation, whatever it is. Stress management, right? We get more responsibilities as we get older.
00:57:09
Speaker
You know, you get kids, they're not sleeping. You get pets, you get responsibilities. That's all stress. and Why doesn't really how do we do it ourselves? Because we're grownups and because, you know, it's a good thing.
00:57:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. yeah um There's more to life than just training at the gym and just looking good. Yeah, for sure. So um we just had to take those other factors into account that...
00:57:34
Speaker
a fight with her spouse, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, that's stress. And if that stress cup, if the stress is not managed, it's going to affect training the next day or your ability to recover.
00:57:45
Speaker
So more more emphasis on recovery is usually needed as opposed to the training. As long as the training is creating a stress response, and it doesn't take much to to do that, you lift heavy, and as long as it's not causing pain or harm,
00:58:03
Speaker
Training doesn't need to be super specific unless you're training for a specific thing, but it's really the recovery that a lot of people, a lot of athletes don't focus on because they'll come and train. They're like all right I'm going golf in 18 holes and then I'm going out socializing and then this and then and then they're gassed the next day.
00:58:19
Speaker
I'm like, well, what time do you go to bed? Well, 11 o'clock. Well, what did you do after training? Well, I ran over to the golf club and swang. Well, did you do any recovery stuff? Did you do mobility work? Did you eat?
00:58:31
Speaker
Right. Did you eat enough? Well, no, I missed. Well, you missed your feeding window. So now you're now you can't catch up with those calories and you can't use them for the next day. And also your your hormones are all out of whack because you're only working on six hours sleep instead of the full eight to nine that you need to get growth hormone and testosterone and all the other good things to help with recovery.
00:58:51
Speaker
So the recovery strategies are key because exercise is not difficult. You just have to huff and puff, lift heavy things and move quickly, right? In a non-painful, non-damaging way.
00:59:03
Speaker
And you're going to get you're kind of you're goingnna get fit It doesn't take much by the recovery, using doing mobility work to decompress the system, um you know using heat, cold, nutrition, all that stuff is key. like you know You look at some of the old you know Tom Brady, how was he able to do it for so long?
00:59:22
Speaker
He's got a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. He's got PMF mats. He's got chefs. like He's doing all the right things for recovery. Is he working out that hard? No. his His nervous system, his body, he just has to maintain his body, right? Maintain the muscle, maintain the strength, maintain what you've got.
00:59:39
Speaker
But you you have to focus on more recovery. Do you have to do the heavy back squats? No, probably some leg press. It's just fine. That's going to keep your knees nice and strong. Yeah. Right.
00:59:50
Speaker
That's interesting. I think people overlook that.
Balancing Training and Recovery
00:59:53
Speaker
I don't know. They, I think the way it's portrayed a lot and I feel like i'm slating social media in every episode I'm doing at the moment, but yeah sometimes it's well-deserved. It just, it it just is that because, you know, you get, you go back to what was saying earlier about the, you know, people doing wildly different things. You should still get the like keyboard worries again. You're dead lifting wrong. And like, wait, this guy's just lifted 500 kilos. Like,
01:00:18
Speaker
I don't think he needs like cue forms, from like your form cues from you even. but But yeah, people people just focus on one thing and they they go, okay, like I need to do this. Or or it's normally two things. that so Especially when it comes to like physical health, it's normally the nutrition and then the the physical training as well.
01:00:35
Speaker
But then they ignore all these other factors like how much sleep you're getting. in Yeah. um Yeah, your recovery time. Are you... g are you actually able to relax and yeah are you managing stress are you winding down are you phoning your face all night like it's it's all your other stresses like uh i learned about the principles of allostatic load which was yeah which was a quite a cool thing to cool concept in terms of you know even like your work stresses as well that all feed into your ability to physically perform and and So if you're going to the gym one day and you're not hitting the same weight you hit the week before, I go in now and if I don't do that, I'm like, well, okay, what's going on? Okay, I've had a pretty, maybe pretty stressful week this week at work or had a few poor nights sleep or maybe I haven't drunk like that much water today so I'm probably quite dehydrated and I'm by no means an expert but at least I'm a bit more kind of aware of it now that I'm give myself a bit more kind of self-love and that in that aspect and go actually...
01:01:37
Speaker
I'm not 100%, so I can't be performing 100% if I haven't ticked all the boxes. No, and you still get work done. You're like, okay, back squats don't feel great. If it feels heavy, if your warm-up weight feels heavy, maybe that's a movement you don't do that day. Maybe you go do something different, right? So there's lots of feedback loops. This is where the nervous system will tell us whether it's ready or not. You pick up your warm-up weight, you're like, holy, this is flying off the floor.
01:02:03
Speaker
Great, but hit that today. If it feels really heavy and a lot of effort and you've warmed up and you're doing all the right things and it still feels heavy, go do something else. Maybe it's a mobility day. Maybe it's calisthenics.
01:02:14
Speaker
Maybe it's just go do some light cardio and some mobility and then try again tomorrow. Like one of the things, you know, working with some of my my professional hockey players when they were coming to see me in training every day,
01:02:26
Speaker
They would come in and they would do what's called the dark cue, which is a daily athlete readiness questionnaire. And it was seven questions and it would be, and they'd do a score. How many hours of sleep did you have last night? Right.
01:02:37
Speaker
Eight. ah What's your energy? Zero to 10. Right. Oh, it's a six. What's your stress? ah Stress is a six. What's your sleep quality? It was like a five. Like you can get all these subjective measures and look at, and then you, then you measure it against blood pressure, heart rates, and then grip strength.
01:02:54
Speaker
And if your psychology isn't great and your or your self-awareness and of how you're feeling versus your biology and your neurological system, if those are both off, guess what?
01:03:05
Speaker
It's not a heavy day to today. We're going to go do some recovery stuff. so And if they're crushing their their grip strength, their heart rate and blood pressure is low, heart rate variability is good, like, yeah, my energy is good, my stress is low, my durability is high, cool, let's go crush it.
01:03:22
Speaker
So there's lots of things that you can do. And then eat again, for something as simple as lift your warmup weight on a scale of one to 10, how heavy does that feel? Right? How easy is it?
01:03:34
Speaker
Oh, shit. This is, yeah, this is easy. It's like, feels like a one. Great. Go do it. If it feels like a 10, maybe don't lift that that day, or maybe really reduce the ah volume or the intensity that you had planned for that.
01:03:49
Speaker
So then the body's not stupid. And if we're paying attention to our nervous system, and if we've done all the right things, maybe we didn't do enough of a warmup. Maybe if we did too much and we caused fatigue, or maybe we're just under-recovered.
01:04:02
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of neurological, biological, and psychological measurements we can take to see if we're ready or not.
01:04:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's normally, ah we' we've had this conversation before with a few other people um about like the reliance on you know, your your data from your watches and and your heart rate monitors and your bootstrap rather than actually what does your body feel like today?
01:04:28
Speaker
But that's a double-edged sword because some people will obsess over that those ah over that data. Shit, my aura ring said, I didn't sleep well last night. And yeah, I'm like, how do you feel? Because I've had something, I was like, that can be a 24, 48 hour delay.
01:04:44
Speaker
Because I'm like, if you feel good today, but your sleep was crap, let's still take advantage of that. We'll monitor to make sure that things aren't falling apart. But we're still going to take advantage because more often than not, the next day,
01:04:57
Speaker
because of that delay in that blast radius, that they feel kind of crappy. Even though the sleep score says good, you're like, how do you feel? I'm like, oh, I feel crushed today. Ah, so now the sleep caught up to you.
01:05:08
Speaker
yeah Even though the sleep score says good today, there's a delay in that. Yeah, it's getting getting that human a human back and being aware.
Accessing AMT Resources Online
01:05:17
Speaker
Tom, i could I could talk to you forever and a day, but um if people want to find out more about what you you do in your work, where is the best place to direct people?
01:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, so for clinicians and coaches who really want to dial in their their clinical practice, their movement practice, can outdo head over to amtcertified.ca. um We have the AMT certification there, level one and two, instant access.
01:05:38
Speaker
um We will be doing live coaching starting up in the fall. So there will be live coaching sessions along with that for increased Q&A. um Tom Swales on Facebook, Swales.Tom on Instagram, and Tommy Swales for longer formats ah videos on my YouTube.
01:05:55
Speaker
So lots of free stuff there as well. Yeah, awesome. I had look at some of your content. It's really cool. I'm going to have a look at, have a deep dive and find some stuff to take away as well. So awesome. Yeah, really love your approach, man. I think it's um it's refreshing to have someone who goes beyond just the kind of the physical stuff and and really tries to understand something from first principles and kind of build up from there.
01:06:18
Speaker
um So yeah, I love your work and thanks so much coming on today, man. Yeah, thanks for having Rhys. Nice one. Cheers. Cheers.
01:06:47
Speaker
you