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Dr. Jordan Shallow: Your Warmup Is Broken

Written by David Tao
Last updated on August 15th, 2023

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As we approach the holiday season, BarBend wants to celebrate by revisiting some of our most popular podcasts from the past 12 months. This episode with Jordan Shallow prompted a ton of discussion, and we’re excited to share this remastered version!

According to Dr. Jordan Shallow, the way we warm up — and the way most people think about movement —  is fundamentally broken. The chiropractor, internationally competitive powerlifter, and presenter joins us to talk about the root cause of injuries, how we can prep our bodies to move better, and why the human body wants to operate “like lightning.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUIVagYcYr4

In this episode of The BarBend Podcast, guest Jordan Shallow and hosts David Thomas Tao and Jake Boly discuss:

  • Jordan’s background and living the life of a strength nomad (2:20)
  • “If you can’t stand on one leg, you don’t deserve to be squatting on two” (4:00)
  • The fundamentals of stability (8:00)
  • The biggest mistake people make in strength training (9:36)
  • Why Jordan prioritizes mobility, then stability, then strength (11:45)
  • Gatekeeper drills for strength athletes (13:20)
  • Good things happen when we extend and internally rotate; bad things happen when we extend and externally rotate (17:40)
  • The narrative that is spun around injury, and why that’s so often misinterpreted (23:57)
  • Why the root cause of injuries is so often misdiagnosed or missed entirely (25:20)
  • Physics vs. biomechanics (26:30)
  • “Research is always 20-30 years behind” (28:20)
  • The athletes where Jordan sees the most rapid breakdown between mobility -> stability -> strength (28:40)
  • Cutting through the chaff in online fitness (30:40)

Relevant links and further reading:

Transcription

You’re going to load that convergence, all they do is just look at the physics of it. Physics and bio-mechanics are two separate fields. Our body is like, it’s lightning man, it’s a path of least resistance. Look at a picture of a neuron, and look at a picture of a lightning bolt hitting something. Tell me there’s literally any difference at all. Our body transmits force the same way lightning transmits force.

Welcome to the BarBend Podcast, where we talk to the smartest athletes, coaches and minds from around the world of strength. I’m your host, David Thomas Tao, and this podcast is presented by barbend.com.

Today I’m joined by BarBend’s fitness editor Jake Boly, and we’re talking to Dr. Jordan Shallow, a chiropractor and elite power lifter, best known online as the muscle doc. I’ll cut straight to the point, Jordan is hands down one of the most knowledgeable individuals I’ve ever talked to when it comes to movement and sport performance.

His understanding of movement patterns and advice for how to best prep your body to handle lifting in its variety of forms, is almost without peer. As an internationally competitive power lifter, Jordan also walks the walk and combines his clinical experience with in-gym knowledge.

When Jordan Shallow says he can deadlift 700 pounds on any given day, you know he’s telling the truth. This guy is the real deal. In our conversation, Jordan talks about moving smarter, what he loves and hates in strength sports and why your warm up is probably broken.

Also, I just want to say we’re incredibly thankful that you listen to this podcast, so if you haven’t already, be sure to leave a rating and review of the BarBend Podcast in your app of choice. Every month we give away a box full of BarBend swag to one of our listeners who leaves a rating and review.

We are very lucky today to have Jordan Shallow joining us in the BarBend office and I’m also joined on this recording by Jake Boly the BarBend fitness editor. I’m really, really excited to kind of have a ringside seat to their conversation as they get really in depth on some topics I know are near and dear to their hearts.

Jordan, thanks so much for joining us. Would you mind giving us a little background and listeners a little background on your career thus far and how you came to be where you are today?

 

Lucky and ringside I think is setting unrealistic expectations, so no, you’re over promising and I’m going to under deliver man. That’s like going to Michelin star in your first date. You got to come out soft. Anything off the value menu.

Going two Michelin tires on your first date.

OK, there you go. Now we’re talking.

Yeah. There you go. That’s more along the lines.

 That’s more of my wheelhouse. Yes, so, my name is Jordan Shallow, I’m a chiropractor, strength coach. I own a couple of businesses. I have a podcast. I travel around. I don’t have a home. I’m homeless. Bit of a nomad. I drift around, and I lift weights and talk about the weights I lift.

How long have you been interested in strength training, and how did your journey kind of get started there?

Sure. I grew up in Canada, small town in southwestern Ontario. I played hockey as a kid and got into weight training just to get better in season. It was kind of like offseason workouts with barbells, and I started skipping practice to go to the gym and started putting on weight and putting on muscle and putting on strength, and then the barbell took center stage to the rank.

When I aged out around 20, I went to grad school in California, that’s when the rubber really hit the road in training. I would say 15-ish, I think I read my first Polokwane article when I was 15. I don’t think I’ve ever been the same since.

 

I’m in the minority here, and I got to just go hand this over to the two former hockey players on the podcast right now.

Yes man. Thank you for coming in the office, I can’t wait to dive into some of the coaching mindset that you have, because I look to you as more of like an idol when it comes to a lot of information. To kind of get to that point, I want to jump right into the topics I want to cover.

One of those is a quote that you shared a while ago, really stuck with me. That quote is, if you can’t stand on one leg, you don’t deserve to be squatting on two.

 

Yeah, Instagram loves that one.

I would love for you to elaborate on that a little bit and discuss how that came to fruition if with you through your mindset.

Jake, I’m going to need you to stand on one leg throughout this entire answer.

Brilliant, that would be great. I think it can be a long-winded answer. I do like weekend courses of the ship. A lot of it stems from my clinical practice. I was in clinical practice as a chiropractor for about three and a half, four years before I went on the road and decided exclusive teaching.

It was more or less the biggest issue that I came across when dealing with hip and low back and even to some extent, knee and mostly knee and ankle pain. With barbell athletes was the lack of stability but also the lack of understanding of stability as a separate adaptation, right? We get sold a lot of gimmicky shit to strengthen muscles of stability, right?

If I could distill down what I teach about… fundamentally what I teach about is the difference between strength and stability as adaptations of the body. No one looks at me and goes, I bet you that guy’s a good runner. I just walked out a hallway with some suitcases, and I’m frankly out of breath. I can lift some for a few, like you put 700 on a bar.

It’s like, “Sweet. That will be no issues. I’ll wake up the next day. I’ll be able to do that again.” Where it’s like if you march Eliud Kipchoge in here who’s the first sub two-hour marathon runner, and you loaded a bar and you had him do like a 3 x 10, you’d be fucking smoked, right?

Just as endurance or strength are understood to be different adaptations, stability and strength are also different adaptations. We get sold hip circles, we get sold like these ab crunch things, we get sold bands and all those stuff but it’s like rotator cuff, core glutes. These are all muscles of stability, not strength, but yet we strengthen them with the wrong adaptation.

We speak the wrong physical language within the body which works for people who are like, let’s call them tourist of physical activity, but the population I was lucky enough to work with was all high level athletes. You need to be very physically literate in the adaptation that you’re trying to make.

If you can’t stand on one leg, don’t squat with two. It was just born of this idea that it lets prescreen and calibrate for your unilateral stability, the function of your hips because we actually go load the action of your hips. Our ability to exert force and strength is predicated directly and correlated directly to our ability to resist force. It’s the fundamental there for strength and stability.

As I look to improve and scale progressions of stability with my patients, I saw very expedited results in pain but more so, being in the sports realm, I saw great strides of performance. In dealing with advanced athletes you can take someone from a 100 lb squat to a 200 lb squat.

Clean up the technique, train higher frequency, early stage skill acquisition stuff and they’ll get there but the strategy you get from 1 – 2 is way different than getting from 8 – 9. An 800 [laughs] lb squat to a 900 squat you really got to be like, “I’m calling on all horses.” so to speak.

That’s where I really started to hang my hat on this idea. “OK. In order to progress forward, we need to realize that the anchor is because we are putting the cart before the horse. We’re worrying about exerting force rather than stabilizing and resisting force.”

That was how that started and that’s a fundamental thought process in the way I go about training and allocating mobility work and also how I let the reigns lose on allowing people to load by lateral strength.

I know you briefly touched on that in this but why do you think a vast majority of the population think that the way to improve is just by simply loading as opposed on focusing on what you just touched upon? Do you think that’s marketing?

That’s 100 percent, man. Any jackass with a YouTube account can sell you something like banded shit strengthen. The way I sell stability, man, is I book 47 weekends next year and I get on a plain and I fly to Kuwait or I’ll fly to Manchester or I’ll fly to Sydney and I’ll have to teach it.

Once I teach it to you, once you know the fundamental, stability is base of support and center of mass from a physics perspective. Also, all you need to progress is figure out, “OK. What is this hypothetical constantly varying center of mass I have? How do I deviate it and what is my base of support and how do I limit it?”

Introductions of one of those two adaptations is going to progress the instability as a stimulus. I think that’s where a lot of people get lost. It’s because you’re asking people to think. Where if I just buy this thing and put it around my whatever, my knees and start to monster walk my way across the gym, it’s like, “I don’t have to think.”

Progressions in stability as a separate adaptation a little bit more cerebral. It’s like, “OK. How do I now in this position maybe limit my base of support or how do I in this position deviate my center of mass to make this more unstable?”

There’s rabbit holes you can go down as far as playing specificity and certain patterns of stability that you can load purposely by using external load to deviate a combined center mass of you and the weight.

Fundamentally, it’s as easy as standing [laughs] on one leg and that’s why this is the simple, distilled version of, “If you can’t stand on one let, don’t squat with two.” That’s why it resonates with people because there’s a lot behind the scenes of that very simple statement.

When it comes to stability work, do you like to program that before following the workout? Do you like to have a full block dedicated to stability work and how do you structure that?

Yeah. I think the biggest mistake people make, “Oh I’m going to take six weeks and work on my imbalances.” “Oh, it’s going to be six weeks and waste your fucking time.” Stability work is always going to be what predisposes your ability to acquire skill in anything. In a bicep curl, in a bench press, in a snatch. Your skill is totally dependent on your stability.

There’s this camp right now coming like, “Oh you don’t need to do unilateral work.” It’s like, “That’s cute, bro. What period of your journal did you read that? Oh, and also, how much do you fucking squat? At 400 lbs, sure. You want to go off 400 pounds squat your body weight to warm up and do all that you need to squat. Come and talk to me when the bar is loaded over 700 then we’ll chat.”

Because that doesn’t hold up anymore. When it comes to programming stability, it almost becomes my gatekeeper to load, especially with the way I travel. It’s nothing for me to be on a plane for 12 or 15 hours at a time.

I will not load a bar until I’ve scaled my own ability to resist the force of my own body because I’m going to load extra physiological.

I’m going to load more than 275 pounds on a squat. Regardless of the session, if I can’t stabilize internally my own body weight, I’m not going to load a barbell heavier than my own bodyweight. It doesn’t make any sense.

The way I do it, I integrate with my actual loading, a lot of people do on the arbitrary warm-up. They find a little tough part of the gym. Then grab a foam roller and a cross ball. They fucking roll around manatees, and it’s like, what are you doing?

We spent much time. I’m weak on my lockout, on my bench. I’m going to do dips, and we have this fucking rain man, a beautiful mind, Goodwill hunting, writing programming on the bathroom mirror. It all of the sun when it matters about getting prepared for a workout.

We throw a shadow wall and see what sticks. It’s why does that process not permeate our mobility and stability training? Getting access to these unstable positions through mobility and then using mediums of instability to stabilize before strengthening, mobility stability, and strength.

That’s the sign on the door. It’s a fucking hashtag but at the same time, it is, in fact, the algorithm in which our body works. I can’t train stability with my arms at my sides. It’s too structurally stable. I need to have the mobility to get into the full overhead position on my shoulder.

Mobility first to get there, if you’re already there, then stabilize in that position, the medium is the message. You can’t stabilize with the barbell. It’s a very stable medium. Stabilize with something a kettlebell because it’s unstable.

It’s not rocket science, but people admit they missed the ball. it’s math. I don’t know. I stopped doing math 10th grade because I like lifting weights. What I do remember of math, correct me if I’m wrong, you have to do brackets exponents, division.

There’s the order of operations. There’s a physiological order of operations we need to follow on our body. That’s the way you should program. You don’t have access to a range of emotions of instability, mobilize into that position. Once you’re in that position, stabilize that position.

Progressive by either limiting the base support, deviating the center of mass, then put a fucking bar on your back and integrate it, like a stretcher, I don’t know. Let’s say you have a hard time getting the hip extension for a single leg RDL stretcher rec fab.

Do a couch stretch. Do a single leg RDL [inaudible 13:00] . Do that again. Put foot up in 135 on. Do it again. Boot 185, do it again. Do 225 and go workout now.

Got it. Do you ever have times when you hop off a plane, you do get ready for a squat session, you have red flags go off throughout your stability in. Let’s say, more mobility-focused pre-work before you get to load the bar? How do you work around that?

All the time. Those are usually some of my best sessions because I call these stability drills like gatekeeper drills. It’s like Gandalf with a stick. It’s like you’re not passing 100 percent. That’s it though. Dude, if I can’t go through say when a low bar squat.

I’m a huge believer in plain specific, stability through the range I’m going to load. My low bar squat is my widest variation of the squat. My hips are the most abducted and externally rotated. I want to make sure my femur relative to my pelvis has that stability.

I’ll go through a drill a hip airplane to make sure I can recreate that same angle that my femur is relative to my pelvis when I’m in the hole, but I’m standing on one leg. I know when I’m in the hole, I’m functionally stable, not structurally stable.

The structure is like discs in your spine, your SI joints, your labor of your hip, the meniscus of your knee, all things that tend to go wrong when we don’t pre-screen for stuff like that. The community that goes, Oh! They go to squat for a warm-up because these are the same people who ended up in my office.

“I don’t understand. I do the same thing every day.” “Exactly. You’re never calibrating for what its structure, what is function, and what are your functional contribution is to your stability.” Most people relied unstructured until the structure gets damaged.

When it comes to integrating it into workouts and when they start to see red flags, I will do it until I can do it. If I do a hip airplane, and I look like a baby giraffe. Then I’m going to go empty bar quarter. Empty bar quarter 135, 185, 225, 275, 315 I’ll do it.

I’m not going to turn the tops open. I’m not going to pull it. Working weights at higher percentages, 70 plus percent on the bar until I can do that. It allows me to in real-time have a lens in which to look through how stable I am. It’s a litmus test.

It’s an assessment every single time. Some days, if I’m in the same city, for three or four days. By day four, pretty sweet. I’m not sitting on planes. I’ve been up, I’ve been on my feet and been walking around. That could be like a three-minute warm up.

It’s almost you’re self-regulating every warm-up and then to give, I guess, readers and listeners, a few tips there when it comes to autoregulator or self-regulating that, do you have any cues that you specifically look for?

Is it a range of motion that you feel you need to achieve every time you’re getting ready? Or is it how you’re feeling under a bar one day? Do you have any more direct insights that people can start applying to their workouts now?

Stability, it’s subjective. I think of it this way. I’m sure you lifted a bar at one point. “God! I’m going to feel heavy,” and, “Hey man, that moved pretty fast.” If you’re unstable and your foot and knee are wobbling, have a hard time stabilizing your hip. For example. No one’s going to you like, Oh God! That felt unstable.

No one’s going to walk by, “Oh! They look great.” No. What you should tie it to is you should always tie it to the objective improvement on the backend may be more to your point or your question, when it comes to stability in the queue, it’s like you’re looking for your body trying to find structural stability.

That can be a little tricky. That’s where understanding the function of the shoulder hip and spine become important with the hip, say, you’re doing, sticking with a single leg RDL or the walking lunge or unilateral hip movement.

You’re going to looking for the foot. I’ve looked at the foot, trying almost to catch the hip when seeing the foot is wavering back and forth. Think of holding a broom handle in the palm of your hand. As a broom handle starts to deviate, you start to react and catch it. Now, you’re trying to keep this broom handle upright.

Now, at the top of that, the bottom of the broom handle of the hand is comparative to the foot. Top of the broom handle if left uncapped, and free in space, it’s the hip. The best way to keep that broom handle in your hand would be to grab it at the top. It’s not wavering around that tip stability.

The second I see, this foot stopping trying to react and catch the tibia and the femur, and it stays. Pull it, hip is now doing its job. That’s a pretty good indicator from a lower-body position of how it is that you could start to qualify as subjective stimulants or a subjective assessment.

 

When it comes to hip stability, what do folks usually lack when their hips are not stable underweight?

Easy, from a range of motion standpoint, extension, and internal rotation. Internal rotation is the position in which hip stability seems to generate its or its team to be demanded the highest-end gait cycle.

Two reasons. Good things happen when we extend an internally rotate and bad things happen when we extend an externally rotate. If you watch like Usain Bolt or a sprinter, like gait cycle mechanics, that’s function of the hip. It’s not fucking something it’s sold on late night TV.

Hip function is a buzzword, but it’s not a shake weight. It’s not a Bosu ball. It’s how we’ve adapted as biped ambulatory creatures to integrate the moving of our pelvis in the movement of the femur to prepare how we integrate that in system with the rest of our body.

Moving in gait cycle and understanding gait cycle mechanics allows us to [inaudible 18:32] . When our hips are in extension and in internal rotation, that’s when we get the greatest amount of output in proportion.

That is function. Stress squatting is to put up the little baby and he’s like, “Oh look it’s the thing.” That’s not proof of concept or like the Vietnamese guy hacking a dart and a full squat. Playing dice on the sidewalk and it’s like that also too not proof of concept, that squatting is “functional.”

Do it like taking a shit. I love that one. “Would you take a shit?” “Listen, how many steps do you take a day and how many shits do you take a day? Put one in one hand one on the other, see what fills up quicker. You got to take more steps.” Function is gait cycle.

When it comes to the hips, one thing you’ll see lacking is extension and internal rotation of the hips because that’s the range of motion. The mobility demanded the prerequisite range of motion in which we can then start to train stability. The mobility stability strengthening again. That’s the easiest thing you see is like the tight hip flexor but also the lack of internal rotation.

Got it. Something you mentioned — kind of touched on — are the feet. I wanted to ask you a question about weightlifting shoes. We do a lot of work here, the way lifting shoes are reviewed weightlifting shoes.

We recently put up a video on “Are Weightlifting Shoes Worth It?” One of my rationales was that if you do not have the fundamental movement patterns to even squat then I don’t think you should create a false stability with a shoe and some people had different opinions on that. I would love to hear your opinion on that and if you agree or disagree,

Yeah, my biggest squat I’ve done in flats, but I’ve squatted 730 in shoes and I’ve done in Olympic shoes, the [inaudible 20:07] and then I’ve done 749 in flats. Obviously, for Olympic weightlifting it helps just because the bar is loaded more anteriorly. We’re going to use a greater moment of knee flexion just based off maintaining that center of mass over the midfoot.

Here’s the caveat, and I’m going to circuitously get to the answer. If I’m wearing knee wraps when I squat, it makes a lot of sense to wear heel shoes, because it’s like, “All right, here I’m going to bolster my ability to extend my knee.” Really?

Almost take my knee extensor activity out of the equation because I have this three-meter elastic band. It’s cutting off circulation of my foot and all I want to do is…I don’t even care what the weight on my back is really fucking exhausting off my knees, but if that’s going to help me extend my knee and a heel shoes going to help me flex my knee, then I want to lean into that tailspin.

It makes sense for me “functional standpoint” of the sport of powerlifting. If you’re wearing classic Raw powerlifting with wraps, make sense that way. Again, it’s like here I have a low bar position which is going to force me to sit back, but I have a wedge under my heel, which is going to drive me into that knee.

You’re playing a physics and biomechanics game at the same time, like work being forced times distance. We have to effectively do less work because the distance of the bars traveling less because it’s lower and closer to that moment of force production at the hip.

I think most people shouldn’t, unless they’re prescreening for the function like barefoot, they can go through all this stuff. Then if they’re going to use that as an adjunct, because the way I look at Olympic weightlifting shoes, man, it’s a commodity.

[inaudible 21:46] 300 where numbers don’t count for nothing and all that shit. That’s what Olympic weightlifting shoes do, is they take three dimensions of potential dysfunction instability, and they converge it through one plane in essentially one joint.

It’s going through the fucking knee. The knee itself is propped up a lot on its structural stability. ACL, MCL, PCL, and all medial lateral meniscus. These are all things that cannot be contracted. Your hips better be functioning like top notch before we go converging everything through the other end and the femur.

If you’re lacking rotation on one side and that rotation it gets suggested in greater demand. On the other side, those seems like we’re fucking ski boots. Man, my Romaleos, I feel like I’m hitting the slopes, like I drilled to the floor, where it’s like my chucks are a little bit more malleable.

I can express dysfunction through rotation, my foot can slide on the platform. With all these shoes, it’s like there’s only one plane for that dysfunction to go to and it’s flexion extension of the knee.

If you’re calibrating, you’re assessing and you’re firing on all cylinders out at it, you can use it as an adjunct to overload a certain part of the musculature that’s better developed to keep you in a better torso position.

Yes, we minimize shear forces through the low back or whatever your reason is, I’m all for it. If you’re not doing that, you’re playing with fire in my opinion, because everything’s just going through an increasing and greater flexion extension moment at the knee.

That’s a great point. Two years ago, I ruptured my quad fully off the knee. A lot of that had to do with — in theory, I’m not exactly sure why. They kind of gave me a reason, obviously, but — that had to do with wearing lifting shoes for so long and not addressing some of my stability issues.

I think the sheer force of hitting a heavier squat…I was doing a four by four at 80 percent. Nothing crazy. It just, one day, popped. It finally came down to a point of not addressing these issues. It finally hit a point of…We stated earlier. I hit my cap on what I could not…It’s basically a misuse issue over time.

Injuries are funny. The narrative that gets spun around injuries that people don’t really understand…Right now, the common paradigm built around injuries…”An injury is applied force greater that tissue tolerance.”

That could be a laceration. If you get stabbed, the applied force of the knife was greater than the tissue tolerance of the skin. That’s getting stabbed. Applied force greater than tissue tolerance is how a lot of PTs and rehab and not licensed [inaudible 24:18] , whatever the fucks, are addressing injuries. “

All we’re going to do is we’re going to do load management, and then we’re going to do tempo work and isolation and all this stuff.” Can someone please ask the question of why we’re applying so much force to this particular area to begin with?

That’s when you start to ask biomechanical questions. That’s when you start to ask sophisticated questions and go, “OK, obviously we’re overloading that knee extensor moment and there’s too much knee flexion extension going through the quad.”

Would you have scathed on that if you were doing low bar and chucks or something like that, rather than your [inaudible 24:56] Olympic background higher front in heels?

Right now, there has to be a shift, or at least the other side of the equation. I know a lot of people who low bar squat and heels have torn their quad. I tore part of my right VMO. Half of my quad doing a three by three of 300 kilos. Not fun. Other than torn pack, it’s the worst pain ever.

It’s more proof of concept to me that the dysfunction likely wasn’t through the sagittal plane. It wasn’t through flexion extension. It was the convergence or maybe the cumulation of dysfunction through all three planes of movement. Frontal, transverse, sagittal, or X, Y, and Z, or however you want to look at it, getting funneled only through flexion extension.

What’s going to extend the knee? Quad. Applied force. It has nothing to do with the tissue tolerance of the quad. I could load up any fucking leg extension in the city of New York right now. We could both go and both top it out. The tissue tolerance of the quad is not on trial.

When people are doing rehab with these isometrics and they’re just going light, light, light, then heavier, heavier, heavier…Hold on a sec. That grim reaper of applied force is going to be somewhere at a number now.

It might be greater, because we’re worrying about the tissue tolerance, but if we’re not worrying about…Why did the other quad tear? There’s obviously a convergence of applied force going through this particular tissue for some reason.

No, you go ahead. You do your isometrics. You go do your nihilistic rehab crap where all you’re doing is attenuating load and just worrying about scaling exercise selection. You go ahead. You let me know what happens.

Because that quad’s going to reflect…It might be a bigger number, because the tissues are more tolerant, but you’re going to load that convergence. All they do is look at the physics of it. Physics and biomechanics are two separate fields. Our body, it’s like lightning. It’s a path of least resistance.

Look at a picture of a neuron and look at a picture of a lightning bolt hitting something. Tell me there’s literally any difference at all. Our body transmits force the same way lightning transmits force.

Every time I see some sagittal fucking plane squat analysis, “My angle of my hip is here because my femurs are so long so my chest has to be kind of on my knees.” It’s like, “Right. Then where in this equation are you herniating three discs in your lower back?”

We don’t factor in where stability exists through that rotational plane, because we’re just looking at two fucking dimensions in the sagittal plane. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s where biomechanics lives. That’s where stability lives.

Look at the fiber orientation of your rotator cuff. Look at the fiber orientation of your transverse abdominals. Look at the fiber orientation of your [inaudible 27:20] . Everything that stabilizes your body goes around the rotational plane.

It’s a one place we don’t look. That’s the side of the equation that’s going to indicate where force starts to go. Tissue tolerance is almost a moot point. [exhales] It makes me so mad. So mad.

 Injuries are fun. You really opened that with the perfect way to say it. That was fun. That was a fun explanation.

Dude, this is my whole life. I love it. It’s so good, because I just sit there and just go, “Wrong, wrong,” but they’re not wrong. It’s just that it’s other side of the story that I have to yell at 160 beats per minute to get the point across.

Especially in my mixing of worlds, coming from a clinical background but also having a strength and conditioning background, also being an athletic background and being still competitive in powerlifting, I see where everyone’s blind spot is.

I get to look through this really unique lens that’s poor performance in human performance. It’s like, “Guys, fucking pay attention to this shit, will you? You guys got half the battle, sweet.” But it’s such a nihilistic approach, because research is always 20, 30 years behind.

One day we’ll get there, but right now, just think about it. It’s so frustrating.

Where are some athletic avenues — and it could be beyond strength sports — where you’re seeing the clearest breakdown, or you seeing the most rapid breakdown between this mobility-stability-strength hierarchy?

That’s interesting I work for anything from professional tennis players to WWE wrestlers, so it’s quite the contrast. I don’t know if one particular realm of sport or one sport in particular is missing the boat, like these individuals who are doing amazing things.

One of my favorite strength coaches right now is an NBA strength coach. I fucking hate basketball, but I think what he’s doing is brilliant. His name’s Cory Schlesinger, he works with the Phoenix Suns. I think it’s like any profession, every sport has their problem, but the problem just exists in the individual.

It’s the indoctrination of antiquated education that comes out through, like write a CSCS tests, nothing against NASM, or write a chiropractic National NBCE, national board exam. I had to study for two tests, the shit I was going to say to the patients, and the shit I needed to say the NBCE to get my level four to actually become a practicing chiropractor.

It’s time to re-update the software with a lot of the stuff. The guys who are really on the cutting edge are the people who are saying things that are experience-based. That’s what’s going to lead research in the next 20, 30 years.

It’s like, “Let’s take a look at what’s he talking about with mobility. Maybe stretching isn’t a bad thing if we stabilize in those unstable positions. Maybe the methods of static stretching research were kind of fucked up in the past.”

Taking Cory, for example, maybe micro-dosing in season is actually a great way to go. Maybe having real-time metrics to assess output potential before a session is actually really smart, rather than re-testing it every six weeks.

You’re seeing a lot of innovation now that’s driving a wedge through the old-school and hopefully, where we’re headed. I don’t know if one sport in particular is more an egregious an offender than another.

How much do you think social media has to play in that right there?

Man, I could pull out my phone right now and I’m tagged in 30 different things, like, “What do you think about this?” I don’t any more. Consider the source, man. At the end of the day, it’s whoever the end user is.

I don’t think anyone’s malicious. There’s a quote, “Don’t explain with malice what can be explained with ignorance.” There is that thing that went viral with Oberst talking to Rogan about deadlifting. I’m like, “Yeah, so I’m [inaudible 31:13] 10,000 times.”

Rogan’s not a bad guy. Oberst, I have some good friends and who are close friends with him. I know he’s not a bad guy. He’s also not a DC or PhD, or anybody, but he’s got some experience with some of fucking strongest dudes in the world, man. I think people hear what they want to hear.

It’s about community, at the end of the day. It’s a weird frame shift that I’ve gone through in the last couple years. We’re so dogmatic around my training principles based off my own experience, but at the end of the day, it’s fucking reps and sets, so who gives a shit.

Keto dieting has nothing to do with carbohydrates. It’s everything to do with going to whole foods, finding the $30 bread or whatever the fuck, you know what I mean? Like talking your friends at the water cooler about you’re fucking cool $30 bread.

Social media is a double-edged sword, but I think it has been positive. It has brought a lot of awareness of these topics. If we can have intelligent debates and discussions, which unfortunately doesn’t really exist over the bows of social media.

I think mediums like this where we can go a little bit more in-depth, like I think podcasting is a growing medium, because it supports a stronger message, where it’s not 140 characters or less, and it’s not double-tap, and fuck this guy, and get a load of this.

I think it’s headed in the right direction. I do think it’s part of the problem, but also woven into that part of the solution.

I love that. We actually had the same talk about that with strength sports and social media. I love that you kind of touched on pretty much you summarized exactly what we said, in a way more educated and better-spoken way.

Yeah, man. I appreciate you coming on. I think that wraps up our time here. Before we jump off, since we are talking about social media in such a rosy complexion — I’m actually kidding on that — what’s the best way for people to keep up-to-date with your work, and to keep up-to-date with where you’re teaching around the world?

The Instagram is @the_muscle_doc. That’s the thing I’m on the most if I’m on anything. The podcasts keeps up, we post once a week. That gives you a look into where I am. Most of our programming stuff we do, most of the seminars and lectures are up there, that’s www.pre-script.com.

I should know this by now, I do this enough. So, pre-script.com. Our summer schedule and our course schedule for next year is up there. That where you can find me on.

Awesome, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much.

 Awesome. Good job.

About David Tao

BarBend's Co-Founder and CEO, David is a veteran of the health & fitness industry, with nearly a decade of experience building and running editorial teams in the space. He also serves as a color commentator for both National and International weightlifting competitions, many through USA Weightlifting.

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