23. Max Shank - Part I of II: Why Movement Matters & "The High Opportunity Cost of Zero"

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Darsha, and I'm Dr. Altamash Raja, and welcome to Medicine Redefined. A podcast where we will explore the often overlooked but necessary components of health, what we consider to be the fundamentals. We will investigate topics and practices that can give you and your patients the best chance to optimize a healthy lifestyle. It's time to move the needle forward and put the health back in health care. Hi, I'm Dr. Erin Weisman, and I'm here today to talk about physician coaching alliance, otherwise known as PCA. This is a space dedicated to providing stellar coaching for our colleagues so you can do your best work in the world. We believe that in order to change the culture of health care as we know it today, all physicians and others working in health care need access to coaching. So we can help you find a coach, become a coach, or join our community of coaches to strengthen the work that you're doing. One value that I want to mention that we share in PCA is community overcompetition because gone are the days that we see each other as enemy, instead we believe working together is the key to success of the individual and the whole. So if you're coaching curious or a coach yourself, come on over to PCA. We'd love to see you there. Our guest today is Max Schenk, who is probably the most interesting man in the world. He's somebody who has tried everything under the sun when it comes to fitness. He describes himself as a simple man who just likes to move. And he's now turned his passion of movement into guiding and coaching others so that they can live pain-free with better aesthetics and just better mobility and movement. He's created programs like primal athleticism, ultimate athleticism, the simple shoulder solution, and now he's a YouTube series called The Five Minute Flow. So he has various nicknames. Some of them you can call him a ninja. He can do probably a backflip into a deadlift into a summer salt. And my favorite nickname of his is The Five Minute Guy. But this discussion we have, and again, this is going to be part one of a two-part series. Max is a philosopher. He truly is. And he has a great perspective in terms of life just because he's gone through so much and he's been a mad scientist. And so we really delve into almost everything in terms of movement. And we kind of left it as an open book. So we really get into a lot of perspective, a lot of philosophy. And we truly understand where Max's mindset comes from. And this was an awesome episode for me and Altamash to kind of delve into our own perspectives as well, and really just think about movement in a different way. So I really hope you enjoy this show. Max, man, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. I'm really excited to chop it up with you. Man, the pleasure is all ours. As I mentioned before, man, I've been following your work for quite some time. So I am stoked to learn more about your journey. We even connected, I guess a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, whenever it was, and you finally came back connected with the world. So we're going to talk more about what happened there as well, because I'm definitely interested in learning more about your perspective. But for a lot of people who might not be invested in this space, like I have been for quite some time, they might not know you. Some people know you as the athletic ninja, others have referred to you as the five minute guy. I know that one's your favorite. That's my favorite. Yeah. But I want to start at the beginning, man. You know, a lot of people have probably seen your YouTube videos, Max Shank, some crazy things you've done. Tell me about your athletic background as a child. Did you play a lot of sports growing up? I played exclusively soccer, which meant I got very good at running, and I got very good at tolerating British guys yelling at me. What about flopping? I'm not a flapper. I'm more of a smasher myself. We lost a lot of points right there, by the way. That's like the most disgusting part about soccer, probably, is the flopping. And I played a little bit of rugby in college, hardly much at all, but if I had to go back and do it all over, I'd probably play many different sports and not really try to get so damn competitive with it. I mean, youth sports is a pretty sick little subculture. There's a lot of pressure toward trying to get a college scholarship or something, but it's such a small percentage of people who get, and I was like really elite level. I mean, I was in the Olympic development program. I was on national teams and things like that, but there's a lot of misrepresentation. It kind of reminds me of Michael Jackson, his parents are making all these business decisions for him, and that's kind of how youth sports feels to me. It's like, okay, Johnny, you're going to live out my dreams while I yell at you from the sideline, okay? And it's like, let this kid play like 10 different sports and see if he likes them. Don't try to put all the eggs in the sport basket. It's really weird. So did you play a year round, you know, you're playing summer, you're playing fall, you're playing club? Not a stop. Yeah, I guess. And, you know, as wise as you are in your years, you're not an old lad. So you definitely were at that time where sports specialization was taken off. And did martial arts enter your world? I took Tai Chi when I was young, like, I guess I'm still kind of young, but when I was like 10, I want to say, I really wanted to do Kung Fu, but my dad decided that I needed to do six months of Tai Chi first. I think that might have had something to do with the Kung Fu master also. And that was miserable. I absolutely hated it. As an adult, I really appreciate it now. But the last thing you want to do when you're a kid is like move super slow and not punch anybody. So I was just like dying to hit something, but of course it was like the slow movement. That's what I'm wondering. I see 10-year-old Max in a bunch of 60 to 80-year-olds in the class. Is that what I'm seeing, is that what it was? Yeah, basically. Nice. Basically. That's why you're too wise. There it is. I think if I give off the illusion of being wise, it's because I've tried so many different things. And I was just rushing to the finish line on everything that I picked up. You know, I did boxing and kickboxing and pancreation and jujitsu and Olympic lifting and CrossFit and kettlebell. I just tried to do everything and try to do everything as hard as possible. I was telling Anders who works with me at the gym that I own that my schedule was I would work like 40 to 60 hours a week and then I would still find time to train like five hours a day. And I would do gymnastics and Olympic lifting and some kettlebells. And then I would do a Moitai class and a jujitsu class and then at 9 p.m. I would do Tabata burpees before I went home. I mean, I was a total maniac. And I just wanted to be the best at everything because that's what got me such positive attention. People really give you a lot of, if not love, at least attention and that feels good. So you start to become kind of addicted to that feedback loop. And of course, if you're not a professional athlete, the last thing you want to do is sacrifice your health for more performance because it's really just not very practical. So if I appear wise, it's just because I've literally tried like every exercise strategy under the sun and I've had the presence of mind to notice where the deficits are and where the cults are blind, so to speak. Now I'm willing to bet that's, that's, I mean, that's a valuable lesson. But again, I'm willing to bet that that's not something that you just, I mean, you probably learned that after I'm sure I'm making some dumb mistakes and hurting yourself, right? So I know you've written some, some, some great work on, you know, simple shoulder solution and kind of rehab type stuff. You have kind of a whole section on your website where, you know, quote unquote, if somebody's a little broken and, you know, how to address their health in that regard. But maybe let's take a step back. Is this all in Southern California? Is that where you were born to race? Oh, yeah. Okay. Cool. So when did you get into the fitness realm, like officially as a profession? Yeah, I answered a Craigslist ad to be a personal trainer and it said, no experience necessary, $15 an hour. And that was all I needed to know from the ad. So I showed up wearing a tie and I went to pay less and I bought some slick shoes and I dressed up and I was 18 years old or maybe like just about to turn 18. And I was the only one who showed up professional looking and I got a job with no certifications like right there on the spot. He, the guy gave me a tour through his little personal training studio. And I just totally made stuff up. I mean, I never exercised in a gym really before that. I had just done like really stupid soccer workouts with no emphasis on like upper body strength or flexibility. I mean, we really just, we ran for conditioning. We ran to play the game and then we also ran as punishment for doing something wrong. So that was the soccer fitness strategy. But that's how I got, that's how I got started is Craigslist ad. You know, it's funny that because I think I've heard you to mention that I, I wonder, I'll, I've wondered this offline is what is the appropriate dress code, right? For, for a profession where you basically do wear sweats all day, because I remember and I worked at a pretty speed school, I'm sure you've heard of them. They're really big on the East Coast and I, for my interview for a performance coach, I went in wearing a suit actually. And everybody, like, you know, the people who were working there and athletes were training and stuff like that. And I kind of felt out of place. But I mean, I'm in hell and this is the job that I wanted actually, I was, it was right after college. So what, what is the appropriate, like, is there, is like a tie too much is, I don't even, I understand your question. And I would hope that people can make their evaluation on whether you're not a, whether you're a good candidate or not based on more than your attire after a conversation. I think you show respect to the person that you are going to be interviewed by, by looking professional and I was 15 minutes early and I waited outside and I think that counts for something. I think it counts for a lot. Yeah, I think that was a good call. Did you get the job? I did. So did I. I missed something to it. Must be. So dude, I mean, you, like I said, you've, you've had a lot of experiences and you said, you know, you accumulated some injuries that kind of led you down to this path and almost all of them. Oh, what do you mean? Like I've all the injuries, you've had all the injuries, I've, I've like hurt almost every joint or muscle in my body, it was the truth. Any surgeries? Yeah, I had two inguinal hernias repaired. That was, that was really fun. I bet. But maybe the word, did you have bilateral surgery or did you have, oh, yeah, both, both sides. Okay, take care of it. So basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. Oh, yes, it's like a weird sensation and, you know, it's, it's interesting because unfortunately people are so at odds with each other a lot of the time people would be like, surgery is bad or surgery is always the solution. And, you know, I tried to, like, I wore a brace for six months, like a double inguinal hernia brace and I did core exercises with it on and I did all this stuff and took extra vitamins and minerals and it just didn't work. The whole was, was too damn big. Like every time I tried to do a core exercise, my guts would pop out through my abdominal wall. So, I think just really being open to the combination of like, you don't want someone who's scalpel happy, but if the obvious solution is there and available thanks to the advances we made, then I mean, you might as well go do, I feel way better since that one. That's the only surgery I've had, but I mean, I've torn, sprained, broken bones, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I did go to medical school, but usually you want to keep your guts inside your body. That's usually a good thing. I thought so in my like very amateur experience. I love this. So, Max, I mean, what I'm interested in knowing here and I kind of want to dive into the ethos and logos of all these things, right, is like, how does Max become Max Shank, right? Like, what was your biggest motivation? Was it mastery? Was it momentum? What kind of will you to get to where you are right now? This is a couple of different things, I guess. I always wanted to be respected for my skill, and it didn't matter what that was. When I was a child, I thought I wanted to be like a mathematician. I don't know why I thought that would be a fun thing to do, but, you know, I wanted people to think I was smart, and then turned out, I put a lot of energy into getting really strong, and people gave me a lot of positive feedback for getting strong, and it's that feedback loop, typically, and of course, you know, there's the obvious motivation, which is, you know, girls like guys who are successful, I mean, guys don't get Ferraris to show off to their friends, they're guy friends, you know what I mean? So you want to have some level, hey, you know, like, there's like the standard story for me, we grew up really poor, and got evicted a few times, so I wanted to at least get very rich as quickly as possible, so I didn't have that same cloud hanging over my head where, you know, things are just a little sketchy. So there are a lot of different motivations. I mean, now I want, now my motivation is to give what only I can give, and that's part of the reason I got away from doing the maximum strength kind of stuff, because like, there's some like 12-year-old Chinese girl who's better than me at deadlifts and handstand pushups, and like, maybe I'm just not the guy, but there are other things that I think I have a useful and unique perspective about, and so I try to focus on those things, and I try to focus on building the community at the gym, and you know, I recognize now that's such a huge piece of the puzzle, right, when you're younger, you're looking for the best training program, right, where it's like, oh, that's right, I should have been doing sets of seven deadlifts instead of sets of six, and you realize over time, like that hardly matters at all, even if you are competing in the deadlift, it's totally ridiculous how much energy is spent like trying to carve up those little details, when in reality, it's way better if you have a community that shares the same mentality, right, you know, it doesn't matter if you do seven deadlifts or 20 or three, it matters if you are surrounded by people that you care about, and they care about you if you're in a place that is a like safe and nurturing and growing environment, and if you have a kind of zoomed out perspective for what you're trying to get out of training in the first place, and then a zoomed in perspective for honing the details of what it is you're doing, like practicing, you know, juggling or music or something like that, and so I think, you know, whereas before I was like autistic brain, how do I get someone as strong and athletic as possible in the minimum amount of time, now it's more like having a more in-depth conversation where I ask, well like what are you trying to achieve out of this, and trying to explain to people that, you know, exercise is not, it's not about like losing weight, like weight loss is going to happen by guarding your mouth from food a little bit more regularly. I mean, the fact of the matter is like eating one chocolate chip requires about 80 steps of walking caloricly. I could eat a whole bag of chocolate chips before you make it around the block, so it's just not an effective strategy, and so you're giving up so much when you try to use exercise, so it's opportunity cost, right, you know, whatever you are doing, you're sacrificing everything else you could be doing, so it's sad to see people like basically harm themselves, like flailing around just to use energy when they could be improving the strength and springiness in their feet, they could be climbing around, or they could just be like going for a hike and getting some fresh air and sunshine, so the odd reality is that a lot of exercise is taking people a little bit further from any kind of piece within themselves, you know what I mean, or any kind of skill that they might acquire instead of, you know, just following the random BS, use a lot of energy or try to build a lot of muscles, it's just not worth it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it seems like, you know, when I, when I asked you that question, the response I got kind of just reminded me of a coming of age story, almost, right, and do you know, do you know Ty Lopez, by any chance? I don't know if you follow up. He's like that YouTuber. He has that ad that's like here are my Ferraris in the garage, and then here's all my books. I don't know if you've seen that one, but he's actually pretty legit, but he talks about the four M's of motivation, and you kind of touch on all of them, right? So money, mating, mastery, momentum, and right, like as our teenagers, we kind of have this like ego, right, building up, trying to make a name for ourselves as we like see our future selves, right? And you kind of go through this attention seeing phase as I think we all do. And now you kind of have this different approach, right, to where you thought fitness was, you know, labeled as one thing, and now you kind of have a different label to it. I would assume just based off your answer. What is fitness performance function to you? Is there a way to define it? Is there a way that you can tell clients, you know, like the best definition for it? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think is really important for understanding is the concept of semantic precision. So when you're having a conversation, making sure that both people understand what you mean by the terminology, and the dictionary definition of fitness just means that you're able to procreate. So if we use that, then it's just that. But I think we can, I think we can sort of answer the question by saying fit for what? So from that standpoint, we get more into a general attributes type of situation. So what functionality do you want to retain? In the most recent program I published called primal athleticism, I actually go through a daily checklist where I teach a bunch of different variations and progressions for what I consider to be the more practical movements and then some primers to set them up. So you kind of have like natural movement, which would be like climbing and deadlifting and rolling and basically things that are practical that you might actually do carrying a load. And then you have artificial movements like a leg curl or some sort of, teacup mobility exercise where you're, and with an artificial movement, you're always trying to elicit a specific stimulus. With a natural movement, you may just be trying to improve your skill at that movement. And you'll get a stimulus to the muscle and tendon ligament and bone and all that stuff doing the natural movements. But part of the reason, especially in like physical therapy, that we use artificial movements is because there are such glaring deficits in the population that we're treating. So trying to start as general as possible and we can make some assumptions to try to figure out what is useful from a fitness standpoint. Like, do people sit too much? Yes, definitely. Do people reach their arms over their head enough? Probably not. Do they hang from things or climb from things? Also, probably not. So it's impossible to answer your question, but we can at least have a conversation about what attributes are important. And I think some of the most important ones, which I talk about in my program are the ability to bounce. There are so many different reasons. You can look at ancient Chinese proverbs that say we age from the roots up, or ancient Greek, where I think Hippocrates said, if your feet hurt, you hurt all over. And then you also just have the fact that the lymphatic system doesn't have its own pump. So one of the best ways to get that stuff moving around is actually to bounce. So then you start to pick some of those specific things that have the biggest bang for your buck. And I talk about it in primal athleticism a lot. It's the high cost of zero. So with some things, there's very minimal cost to eliciting the stimulus that you're looking for, like bouncing or balancing on one leg or rolling on the floor, like doing shoulder rolls or soft rolls or different things like that. One or two minutes can be like magic, but zero minutes can really be quite harmful for you. So I think of it in terms of that. And that's why I put a big checklist in there. And you know, the reality is if a person would spend between 15 minutes and an hour every day just kind of gently doing those things, they would be more than strong enough, more than healthy enough. And they would probably just feel better. So they would be able to train very frequently or move very frequently. And they would also keep their body weight low, which is also probably one of the most important things there is in terms of like, you know, longevity at least. Absolutely. Yeah. And we stress the importance of that. I mean, at length, probably not enough, and we can keep talking about that. But so just to kind of recap, you said you talk about bouncing, climbing, hanging. I imagine you have some type of pushing, pulling in different directions. You've got some mobility, teacup mobility, and there's kind of described that for obviously people can't see us. What does that mean exactly? And then you mentioned rolling, like, what are the benefits of that? Because I've heard you talk about that quite quite a lot. So yeah, I mean, one of the most important things a person can do is to not crack their head open on the ground when they fall. I concur. And you know, have you guys ever seen the one wheel? You guys know what a one wheel is? So I have something called a one wheel. It's a single, like go-cart tire that's probably about 10 inches in diameter in the very middle of a skateboard. And it has a big motor in it. And it can go 20 miles an hour. And you stand on this thing. And it's a single anyway. So I'm flying around on this like hoverboard. And it decides to just nose dive. Wow. And I'm on asphalt. But I didn't harm myself. I got cut up. It was interesting. I got cut up a little bit on the back of my shoulder and then the back of the opposite hip. So it was like a perfect it was like a perfect roll that's basically saved me. And that's not the first time that that has happened. So getting comfortable interacting with the ground is one of the best things for longevity there is. It gives people confidence when they're moving around. I think rolling, lunging, and balancing on one leg are probably some of the most important things. And then you know you can super charge it up by getting the visual and vestibular systems involved doing some eyes closed, some dynamic head movements and things like that. But real quick to go back to this one wheel, helmet or no helmet. Always a helmet. Okay. All right. Just just making sure. Good. All right. That's good. Yeah. You know, I think that it was you who mentioned this a couple of years ago. I heard you talk about just you know, kind of balancing on one leg while you're brushing your teeth. I mean, what do they say? Like, you know, two minutes that you're spending. So I, I mean, typically, I mean, I've been doing that. And I, I will say, I mean, you know, you got to give yourself challenge over time because it gets easier. I do a minute on one leg and another minute, and then over time you kind of switch to the left hand because I'm a righty. So now you give yourself a different stimulus. Now it's a game changer. Then over time you close, close eyes. And you know, you could keep making it more and more challenging. Just kind of keep yourself, given yourself that stimulus, keep yourself sharp. The other thing I'll say about the rolling thing. I mean, as we get wiser in our years, you know, it gets more challenge to get up off the floor. And one of the biggest issues for morbidity for that gets individuals actually, both Darshan and I, we sometimes work on the acute rehab hospital as people have hip fractures all the time, the elderly population. And so I mean, that's another reason I imagine when you have people roll, they're coming out and coming up into their feet as well. So that's another reason. You know, the other interesting thing is when I used to work at Parisi, we would do these animal type movements with our adolescent athletes a lot. And it's so crazy that you can kind of do like we do crab blocks and you kind of just do rolls for like 10 yards. When I try to translate that to my adult population, after two rolls, there's just dizzy. And it's so wild that, you know, your system, again, you're going back to the West state of their training. It can't tolerate that. It's kind of that user to lose it type principle. You don't really appreciate that. Isn't everything? Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. There are so many types of rolls you can do. I mean, part of the benefit is just that it gets you a little bit tougher. You know, you roll around on the ground and you know, people spend so much time on a foam roller. And I've spent my fair share of time on a foam roller. But once again, opportunity cost, if I could choose to have someone roll and move around on the floor for five minutes or roll around on a foam roller for five minutes, unless I was doing something like very specific with them where they needed that focus pressure, I'd rather have them do hollow rolls and butterfly rolls and shoulder rolls and kneeling rolls. And there are all these different ways that you can give someone that pressure and stimulus. And there's that saying, right, force is the language of the cells. So I think about, you know, how much benefit it is for someone to just apply some pressure. And people who feel lots of aches and pains, part of the reason is just that they are so hypersensitive to any kind of pressure because pain is often, I mean, pains, I don't think we even have time to talk about how complex that really is today. But it's a hierarchy. So if you are totally sensitive to any sensitive to any discomfort or pressure, a dosage of pressure might be exactly what you need. And if you get some pressure all over and you get more comfortable moving around, you become a little less tentative and sensitive to those minor discomforts. Yeah, no, I mean, I certainly appreciate that. And so kind of what I'm hearing, you say, is you kind of have to dabble and you have to maybe not master, but you have to be able to appreciate all these different positions and kind of be ready and flexible and train all these qualities because you never know when you're going to need them in life, right? You mentioned earlier that you were doing these things in your younger days. And you know, you have all these videos. I think the first time I kind of saw you just do something, you pulled, I don't know, like 450 straight bar, then you did a snatch for like probably like 300 pounds or something ridiculous. And then you went into a backflip and I was like, wow, I want to be able to do all the things that guy's doing. Here's the thing, right? It's, if you've trained, if you've been in the game long enough, like you have, you go back to when Darcy asked you, you know, what does fitness mean? And it's like, okay, it depends. You know, you have to see what are you training for? Are you training for hypertrophy or training for strength? Sometimes they're competing demands, right? If there are any athletes, like, you know, if you're going to train for endurance and you want to be able to run 26 miles under a certain amount of time, you're going to lose a lot of muscle mass. That's just the nature of the game, right? So what I always appreciated, and this is kind of the reason, you know, I was attracted to your work is you have to train multiple disciplines in what time, right? Maybe this goes back to the time when you were training five hours a day, you were putting in time gymnastics. Is that, is that accurate? You're doing all those things? I mean, I was definitely doing that for a while. Yeah. So is this around the time when ultimately athleticism was kind of born in? Is that when you wrote that up? Or would you say that was athleticism was after the really insane training? And it was ultimate athleticism with all the handstands and front lovers and deadlifts was actually way more reasonable than what I was doing. Okay. Wow. Yeah. What I loved about that, obviously, was because it was simple and it was effective. And as I mentioned to you earlier, you know, when I was in school, it was like cognitively wasn't burdensome, right? And then you've had some some great products. And what you're describing to me now with primal athleticism, it seems to be a significantly more evolved version of that. So I guess the question, oh, go ahead. Yeah. No, go ahead and ask your question. I think you want to understand like the process from ultimate to primal. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Basically, like I joked before, ultimate athleticism was just a high functioning autism, taking charge and cutting through all of the weird barriers between gymnastics and powerlifting and athletic training. Like, I didn't understand why powerlifters wouldn't do gymnastics. And I didn't understand why gymnasts were so afraid of barbells. And it just made no sense to me. Why you wouldn't take a little bit of the best of both worlds and try to put them together in a way that was what I called non-competing super sets. You know, so you do an upper body, you do a lower body, you do a mobility or an activation to assist with both those movements. And you just do a 15-minute practice block and you don't attach yourself too much to how many repetitions you did or even how many sets you did. But it was all about, it was all about efficiency and all about trying to have the greatest amount of carryover. And the concept was that if I set people up with a progression that grandma Betty can do to get to an Elsa to handstand and a front lever and a deadlift and an airborne lunge. Like, you know what, that's probably going to give someone the best carryover that I can think of for some of the main patterns that I'm looking for. Through a wide range of motion, tons of body awareness. And I'm still really happy with that. I get a lot of messages about that program all the time, which is really cool. Primal athleticism was where I completely disregarded how programs are put together. And I instead just looked at how humans grow and develop. And I consider things like, you know, how often are muscle remodels and how are muscle and tendon and ligament and bone remodels. I mean, I'm sure you guys are more than familiar with Wolf's Law and Davis's Law and all that stuff about how your tissue remodels along lines of stress. And just thinking about the true demands on the organism and also taking a little bit of what I learned from five minute flow, which is the behavioral psychology component. It's just so much more powerful to do something every day instead of sometimes. And it doesn't need to always be exactly the same thing. But if you have a checklist of these core patterns, roll bounce balance, crawl climb carry, rub squeeze shake, it just makes it so much easier because you basically are doing three things with the training session. You're fixing, you are maintaining, and you are upgrading. And that's pretty much all you're doing. And so primal athleticism was looking at the human, the whole self, and there's ohms and there's breathing and there's practicing the muscle control in your stomach. And there's all kinds of interesting stuff in there that I would have never even felt comfortable teaching people within the framework of exercise. But you know, that checklist took me 15 years to decide what goes on it. And then putting together what I considered were the best like progressions and regressions and variations within that framework is part of the reason it took several years between ultimate athleticism and primal athleticism. So it's it's looking at the whole organism and paying special attention to what the average person really needs in terms of fix, maintain and upgrade and putting it into a package that is easy enough for anyone to do and also challenging enough for any athlete to get a challenge out of it. That wouldn't definitely restness with me in terms of, you know, what you're talking about is kind of taking more of a holistic approach, right? Whereas not being myopic in the sense that okay, we're going to do gymnastics only and kind of focus on performance and just mobility. And it's kind of this the word that I that I think about is kind of this agnostic style of training. The issue that that I see with that and you know, again, just I know where near an expert, but as we talked about offline, now that I have the doctrine in front of my name, so automatically people think I'm an expert in health, but also someone you're not an expert. Yeah, I know, right? Because I am an expert. I know everything. But you know, people will ask and as you alluded to earlier, what are the reasons why people want to get into quote unquote fitness training, right? Weight loss. We're talking for aesthetic purposes, performance purposes. I want to get bigger and more muscles for all the reasons that we mentioned earlier. So when somebody comes to you, maybe to your gym to ambition athletics, or maybe they're just asking for advice to train maybe one or one or whatever it is, and they're not cool with some things on that checklist. How do you handle that situation? You don't have to do anything. I mean, if you have love in your life and you go for walks outside, you probably live a long time as long as you don't eat too much. Like you don't need to do any of the fitness stuff. And like if you spend your whole life trying to convince people of things, you'll just be very irritated and tired. And you know, the reality is like it's just not worth my time. So I'm happy to offer some suggestions. But the reality is like some people really like swinging kettlebells and some people don't. And just because we have like four tons of kettlebells at my gym doesn't mean that everybody has to swing them. Like I'm not going to be offended if someone doesn't want to. I'll let them pick up a sandbag instead. Like I don't care basically. So as a professional, I want someone to enjoy what they're doing. And I want them to work within their current capacity. Because it's not like there's a good movement and a bad movement. You just have an unprepared person or a prepared person. And you know, when I hurt, I mean, I've heard everything. Like I said, but when I got a bone bruise on my knee and the doctor said, you know, don't don't do anything with it. Just rest it. And of course that made it way, way worse. And ironically, what made it feel better was doing bad squats, lots and lots of bad squats. So like letting my knees cave in, letting my knees cave out, standing on the outside edges of my feet, standing on the inside edges of my feet. God forbid, I let my knees go past my toes. I'm surprised that you still have knees. Yeah, I mean, I was told that your patellas would go flying off if they cross your knees. I'm still so shocked by that. So whatever I tell anybody who says you should never let your knees go past your toes is I ask them, how do I walk down the stairs? It's impossible to walk down stairs. Unless you do this very odd, like hip hiking bent over robot, but just try going down a step. It's impossible. I usually drag my ass down them. I just slide down on my butt one step at a time. Yeah. Yeah, no, don't make anyone do anything. They're like I said, it's very valuable to be able to command your own body and space. So I really enjoy having people work with a metronome and just move around in a small area. Side to side, front to back. It looks like a jingah from Kapuera, you know, left back forward, right back forward, and you kind of make this like little pattern and you ratchet it up by using a metronome. But that is not going to help you carry something heavy. So it's about trying to fit in all of those necessary pieces because if you can't carry something, you feel very powerless. I mean, I've worked with a lot of people 80 plus years old and I've watched what happens when they can't carry stuff anymore. It's very disempowering to not be able to carry something. So there are certain things like that, rolling, getting up off the floor, crawling on the floor, climbing up onto something, carrying something in a variety of positions, unilateral, bilateral, that give you a feeling of power. And if you don't have those, it just shrinks your whole world. So it's about not just the quantity of years, but the quality of years. Because I mean truthfully, I'll say it again, if you have loving relationships and you go for walks and you don't eat too much, you can live a really long time. Like you don't need to do any deadlifts. It's ridiculous. And of course, marketers don't do people any favors. It's like every month in the women's magazine is about how resveratrol is good for you. And it's like giving all these ladies and just don't happen. Yeah, of course, it's like why red wine and chocolate is good for you again. And everybody learns the word resveratrol. And I don't know. It's like 99% of it is don't be fat. Go for walks and have loving relationships. Like the rest of it, like almost doesn't matter at all. But that's just for pure longevity. If you want to have lots of options, then it's good to be able to run and jump and carry things and climb on stuff. So you can go climb a mountain. You can try stand up paddleboard and you can try tennis or something like that. So I refer back to the concept of physical freedom, which I talk about a lot. And so I just try to get people as response able as possible. Yeah, no, I love that man. And to the statement of longevity, I'll say for just for those who don't know what we're talking about when we talk about carries, that's typically going to be like farmers walks, right? I mean, when you have basically, you can have any type of implement sandbag, kettlebell, whatever you could carry on your sides, you could carry in a bear hug position, you can carry overhead, all kinds of things. And a lot of times people, when they think carrying, oh, why would that be important? Oh, I got to carry a bunch of my groceries from out, you know, from to the car up the stairs or whatever. For the elderly population, there's actually good literature supporting the correlation between grip strength and morbidity, you know, as they age later in life. And if you think about it, a lot of times we're going back to, hey, if they lose their balance, another reason why training balance, they sustain a fall, God willing, they don't break a bone, they are, you got to get back up. And if you have weak grip strength, you can't pull yourself up. So that's another huge reason why training that kind of stuff is super important. I agree completely. That's why climb is on the checklist. I have everybody do the squat hang. It's a, I wrote an article called the best exercise for human mobility. And it's a squat, you set up some rings at about shoulder height and you drop down into a hang squat combo. And you can swivel your hips around, you can do a little rock back and forth on the feet, you can twist, you can do assisted pull ups. And actually, it's, you're going to get a much better vertical pull exercise from that position than with a standard pull up. And this is from experiences of coach, but also as an athlete. I was at the point where I was doing 100 pound weighted pull ups, but I never really felt my lats when I did pull ups. And I think this is a pretty, this is a very common complaint in my experience. I don't know, um, Darsh, I see you had it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really interesting. And I think that it kind of, it reminds me of one of the, the biggest mistakes that people, uh, and also me made, which is focusing on the, the shape instead of the connection. Yeah. So it's way more important to have a solid connection through the kinetic chain than to simply like lift the weight or make the shape. And where it, we're such of visual people, right? We see that there. Oh, I want it to look like that. I want to squat, ask to grass. I want to do heavy pull ups. Oh, if I do, if I do 20 pull ups, then I'm a real man. But, you know, the reality is I never felt my lats doing vertical pulling exercises until I sat down in a squat. I, I ate my humble pie and I said, okay, I'm doing assisted pull ups now. When, you know, I had worked up to the point where I could do a one arm pull up. And I'm doing assisted pull ups. And now I'm moving my arms. And I'm really trying to make sure that I don't lose that connection. And, you know, the truth is, most people are not willing to do that to take those, what feels like 10 steps backward to go back and refine that motor pathway, that pattern. So I think that's a really good example of getting so focused on the shape or the external result, rather than the kinetic link, which is, I mean, it's 10 times more important. 100 times more important. Like I wouldn't even put them in the same ballpark. And there are so many good examples of that where people put themselves into positions that they just, they flat out, can't really control it. And it's because ego gets in the way wanting to make a shape or lift a certain amount of weight. And it's, it's totally counterproductive and it may not mess them up that day. But, you know, we know it's not helping them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, when I started getting to weightlifting, the hardest thing for me to develop was my chest. You know, I thought the answer was like, you said, just keep going heavy, keep going heavy. And it wasn't until I was able to, you know, balance my packs up and down and, you know, start to get that connection and do that little dance that the shape of it and the aesthetics and then the strength as well all came together, right? And then for the audience out there listening about the hangs, if you just YouTube, Max Shang, you'll find a video of that. That's actually I did see that video of you doing that. Well, that's what what I'm interested in here too is like I think some of the audience members and me as well, right? I sometimes get so OCD with I need a program or like, so I was a break dancer growing up and it I still am a little bit. It helps at weddings. And so I totally resonate, totally resonate with you when you talk about spatial awareness and, you know, being on the ground because if I don't play tennis or basketball in like after a while, I can still go back and still be good because a lot of those sports just require awareness, right? So it translates very well. But there's still some roadblock in my head sometimes, right? Like during COVID, gyms were closed. I knew I should have worked out at home and done the things you're talking about hanging or just getting some movement and having fun. But yet I still feel like so many people struggle with that. Is there a conversation though that you have? Is there any advice that you truly give to people to say, hey, these are the kind of the mental roadblocks you have and that you need to get rid of? For for extra. Yeah, just to like get in that understanding of functionality of movement and it doesn't have to be a strict program, right? Like your like that your muscles will respond regardless, right? It's you don't need a 200 pound stimulus just to get muscle growth. Right. I mean, there are so many examples. I talk about the quantum effect of five minutes and the reason I say it's quantum is because whenever you hear the words five minutes, there's usually the word just right in front of them. It's just five minutes and if you're fast, five minutes is long enough to run one mile and if you're not that fast, it's long enough to run like half of one mile and if you're really slow and you could also like walk a quarter of a mile or something like that or push-ups for example. You know, I don't do a lot of I don't do a ton of push-ups right now. I'm working on other stuff but if you did five minutes of push-ups, that would be a crazy stimulus and I bet 99% of your listeners cannot do five minutes consecutive of push-ups but there are so many, there are so many invested parties who say things like, oh well high reps don't build muscle, right? But that's just a total lie. I mean, there's examples all throughout history of people who have built tons of muscles doing hundreds of push-ups and there's also examples of people who did mostly sets of one and two and it's not like there's a better way but I mean God like this idea that you have to do like one hour for it to be worth it, it is just kind of loser thinking that's based on people trying to sell you an hour-long package of fitness because if you're wise what you'll do is you'll think about the different attributes that you want to build and you'll put together five-minute blocks of ways to get the stimulus for those attributes so I think it's mostly from a lack of understanding of how the body adapts to stimulus which the most important factors are frequency, intensity and duration but notice like the first one is frequency so you know it would be and the example you give is okay if you were going to go practice golf would you rather practice five minutes every day or one hour on Sundays which who would get better practicing every day is going to definitely get you better results so I laugh too because there are so many self-help books out there about habits right now it's very hot right now and five-minute flows is the same thing it's the same thing it's basically saying that your joints need to have the zamboni go over them it's really good it makes you feel good you get these like happy drugs and if you do it early in the morning it makes every step that you take a little bit better but there's a whole genre of book that basically says something is better than nothing and take baby steps and it's true it's true you know part of the reason I suggest people do a daily practice is so they make it part of their life it shouldn't be like a sometimes thing and I can go one step further and say everybody knows that running and push-ups can work nobody doesn't know that and in fact over the past year obesity should have been erased right because people have more time and it's not like people don't know what to do like everybody knows that going for a walk is better than not going for a walk everybody knows that doing a push-up is better than not doing a push-up we would all look like her shall walk her right now if if that was the case but that's that's just not how it works you know not everybody likes it and a lot of the time it matters more about the reason that you're doing it and the people that you're doing it with you know my brothers a good example he has a friend of his and they just started working out in his friends garage and it's the most consistent my brothers been now I've given my brother tons of exercise equipment I got tons of exercise equipment at home I got probably a whole extra gym and a half worth at home but I still go and take classes at the gym not teach classes but I take classes and the reason is there's an energy there that you can't really you can't replicate it on your own you know I really like training on my own but I don't I'm not so naive that I try to recommend the way I do things to the average person because I'm I'm uniquely and supremely interested in this stuff I go into the garage and I make fitness equipment that I like dream up I I balance on one leg for five minutes at a time and I do all kinds of weird stuff with my other limbs just to kind of as a meditation more than anything else and there's a feedback loop between your brain and your body you know you you can't imagine what an effect it will have until you're done so it's not just about am I going to use calories or or build muscle with this little chunk of time that I've invested there's something even more important than that which is changing your state of being from one that is maybe fearful and scarcity mindset to abundant and invigorated and maybe excited or enthusiastic about something I mean you can you can work out every single body part with a towel in the floor there's you know you don't need anything fancy but you do need to it's kind of a self-love thing in my opinion you know self-love is not just about the words you say it's about what you do it's like if you've been given this gift of a body and you say wow I really appreciate this gift of a body and then you just like plop it down in the chair all day long and you like stuff your gullet until you're full and then you stuff it some more I would have to say that you're you're not really practicing what you preach there you don't really appreciate that gift you're not really honoring the gift that you've been given so these are sometimes really difficult conversations to have with people because there's usually a a personal reason underneath that like oh I don't deserve to give myself five or ten minutes right now I have to give it to somebody else and when I work with moms and also coaches who specialize in coaching moms there's that nurturing caretaker aspect to where they just constantly put themselves last and you know when people say they don't have time what they're really saying is they don't want to and that's a tough pill to swallow because you have to take responsibility but the alternative is that you don't take responsibility but you also simultaneously give up 100% of your power over your life every time you say that you're just admitting I don't have control of my life it's outside of my control so life happens to me instead of for me right and I mean I could go on and on about this but I'll I'll probably just stop there for right now yeah I absolutely love that right it's about worshipping our body and then and the temple that that we're born with right and then also just filling up your own cup first before you can fill up the others but I don't know if you've seen that Joe Rogan video that went viral about how to work out smarter with Faraz Zahabi right he talks about you know you not only flow in terms of the mechanistic things but actual flow in the mind and how Russian wrestlers would train you know dip for for joy every day and just have fun and not push themselves to limit but they were able to do that over and over and over again every day right whereas here in the US apparently we have this system of MMA and things where it's like go zero to 100 all the way every day the grind and that burns people out and then you don't get that joy so just want to make that quick comment in there yeah I think it's because people crave two really awful trophies which I refer to as the certificate of suffering and the badge of busyness and it's kind of a way that you get free extra credit for whatever you did so like say you did a thing and someone says like oh how are you doing oh man it was so brutally difficult and they're like oh wow that's so that's so nice for you or hey how are you doing oh dude I'm so busy hey that's good busy is good we like busy so it's it's funny because I don't even I don't even like it when other people are busy I feel I feel like we should be I feel like we should be past that we should have some freaking leisure time we have the best technology ever I think we can cooperate and and get the job done and still have some time left over to go for a walk in the forest and turn off the telephone 100% but if if you're constantly and that's like one of the sicknesses within our culture right now is people respond quite favorably to someone who is suffering and if they say oh I've suffered it's like they get extra social credit if they say oh I'm so busy it's like oh wow that's that's like a really good thing but yeah you got it you got to check out these really you got to check out this article called lazy a manifesto I forget who wrote it but it's short and sweet but it talks just about that how like busy is just like BS term that we throw around just make ourselves feel great and it's it's really good writing so yeah if you are focused on like whether or not you suffered or how busy you are you're probably going to self fulfill that prophecy but if you're focused on what you can what value you can deliver I mean this is one of the things that I have talked about so much in my training groups over the years which is like nobody cares nobody cares if you suffered no one cares of your busy stop trying to be busy stop thinking that suffering is a good idea you don't need to suffer for gains you don't need to suffer for money you don't need to the only thing that matters is whether you delivered value or not and you don't have to worry about the state of the economy or what the heck is going on if you can deliver value that's the only constant over you know millennia is can you deliver value and it doesn't matter if you're trading seashells or gold or fiat or bitcoins like it doesn't matter like if you can deliver value Max I want to stay with this thread of suffering as being a badge of honor right I mean I think that obviously in the fitness industry in the strengthen conditioning world it's kind of been a pervasive thing for a long time where people think I'll tell you what somebody recently in my inner circle actually was working with the with a trainer right now but like two months ago and told me yeah you know I asked him hey just checked in hey how are things going how's your new workout program losing a lot of weight happy about what it's in the mirror okay try to support that and he's like yeah you know I did this workout and did this made deadlifts and then I was working and afterwards I couldn't even walk and then immediately I was like okay and he's like yeah but that that must be good right I mean that must be a good thing and I was like huh well I don't know and I don't know how familiar are with with the medical profession but you know I have these conversations with some of the older folks older doctors who kind of kind of facing out they're like oh yeah back in my day we used to work 130 140 hours a week and you guys now you have the rules where you can't do more than 80 hours and it's just like and and then also you know people procrastinating right you got a project due tomorrow gonna pull an all-nighter I mean hey listen I'm like I said on my high horse when I was in college I was putting all lighters before the exams so I made these mistakes and we all pull this is badge of honor it's like oh I'm suffering this must be good I'm curious to get your thoughts because I think in especially I mean I'm curious to get your thoughts in just all those aspects in life but also specifically in fitness right like where did that come from and why is that so hard to break that you have to be dead for the program to be effective you know what I mean we like it okay number one it works it works when when when your guys say oh we were 130 hour it works you're like whoa yeah that's that's pretty and we also like a story with an arc like no guy goes on Oprah and says hi I'm John Smith and I went to school and I got beat I graduated I got married and I bought one house and I have a a 401k it could be bigger 401k but uh it's pretty good and I go bowling with the guys on Friday and I've you know I won't stole a candy bar when I was 10 and I felt really bad about it and I had it like no one cares people care about the guy who's like selling his mother's pearls for crack like and then and then one day he's not you know and then oh even Goggins right it's that Goggins mentality I don't think that's I think um you know props to him for uh achieving what he has achieved but I don't think that's a like a good role model to emulate like that guy isn't a non-stop battle with himself and life like that just doesn't seem healthy to me uh like I said not to take anything away from it but like a normal person if their feet were broken and they were running they would they would stop running and let their feet heal like yeah no one should care about that no but but people do people like uh people like a story of rising above for for some kind of triumph I mean what what kind of story would know as arc be without a flood like no it'd be boring no it would have no arc there would be no arc to the story like no one would care so I think it's it's mostly just because it works it's the same reason people complain it's the same as a squawking baby bird in the nest and so as you know my locust of control pretty much stops at my skin like I don't have any control over what's going on outside other than like what I say and do but one of the things I've gotten really good at is I don't give any credence to complaining because if you don't give any credence to it you won't get more of it you won't reinforce that behavior in somebody but unfortunately when people like kind of victimize themselves with language it's kind of like the closest thing to an energetic free lunch you go uh uh uh and people go oh you poor thing let me give you some attention and there are three there are three main things that people want because I don't know if you guys have noticed by now but I like to think about things I like to just say and kind of think about that I like to read history uh or as I call it mythology because who fucking knows which is uh which is true or not can I say fuck anyway uh so people want three things in this order they want love power attention if someone has love they're not going to go looking for power there's no need for it there's no point because it also is just more responsibility for you like why would you care about trying to get power but if you can't get love you'll try to get power authority respect and if you don't see a path to that you'll just settle for attention because it's better than living in a vacuum and that's basically how you explain the way people act on the internet uh and I don't uh I don't I use YouTube and I have something called a newsfeed eradicator so it just gets rid of the whole YouTube home screen it's a great it's an awesome app I don't use any of the apps on my phone because it's just too easy to get stuck but you know when you look at the way people post online or reply to each other it's all for those three things they want to get like love and attention like your guys saying that they walked you know 130 miles in the snow uphill both ways to get to the the doctor's office or whatever or or they want to show people how smart they are and try to build up their power and authority or they just want to talk shit and get attention because attention is better than no attention and that explains like trolling you know there's not something useful to add but they just want some feedback but you shouldn't you shouldn't give them any feedback of course otherwise you're just gonna encourage that behavior but that applies to having a conversation with someone in person too and there are there are ways to diffuse those things if someone's just looking to provoke a response or someone's just trying to get power over somebody else we don't really have time to like get into the nitty-gritty of the rules of engagement both verbally and physically but anyway that kind of explains the motivation for people when they engage but just to finish up the thought i think uh i think youtube is an excellent tool but it's it's so easy to get stuck so you get this app called newsfeed eradicator or maybe it's distraction for youtube i got a couple but basically you can get rid of all of the trending you can get rid of the suggested videos you can get rid of the cut like you can basically just have it be a search bar like the google home page and then you can use it much more intentionally okay i am looking for this and then there's not an auto play that just frictionless leads me down a three hour rabbit hole uh which i think is really quite valuable i think that's probably the biggest risk to people now psychologically because it's so easy to get sucked in all right like i said everyone this discussion was really whipped out from thin air a lot of perspective a lot of philosophy so if this was your cup of tea just it keeps going until next week so definitely come back next monday we are going to be joined again with max and the conversation will continue um and as we wrap up today if you are coaching curious or a coach yourself i encourage you to go check out physician coaching alliance at doctor podcast network.com for slash physician coaching alliance and type of that quick disclaimer everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only it does not constitute the price of medicine and we are not providing medical advice no physician patient relationship is formed and anything discussed in this podcast does not represent the views of our employers we recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician regarding any specific health related issues and as always please rate, review, share and subscribe