It’s a fair question. I think a decade ago, I’m way more obsessed with helping people set world records, helping teams win national championships. I mean, that’s really where…I think it’s because it’s such a rich place in order to understand what’s going on, inputs and outputs.
If we use the allegory of the current state of the affairs on the Internet, if you have an iPhone and a commercial gym, you’re an expert and you can shout down anyone. You don’t have to show any of your work. You don’t have to show any of your associations. You don’t have to show any of your results.
In some ways, the strength conditioning, testing ground of professional sports still is really relevant to us because that’s where we know what we know. E.O. Wilson said the highest calling of science is to try to transform the humanities. I have come to believe that the highest calling of strength conditioning in sport is to actually transform community and transform society.
I believe that more than I ever did before. I think before I was like, “Yeah, your uncle who’s diabetic or so and so like they’re important.”
I didn’t realize that what we were coming up with was a set of values, a set of principles that had been stress tested by some of the gnarliest men and women on the planet working in the most austere conditions and under the most austere environmental loads.
I mean, go ahead and be a professional Olympic lifter. Let me know how that goes for you. [laughs] It’s a gnarly endeavor.
Back then, I think we were still trying to understand inputs and outputs, and we were having…Now, we see a lot of arguing about minutiae, what people would describe as artifacts of scholarship. Hey, the hip is doing this and this arc of range.
Those are important. Those are what we should be arguing about behind closed doors in an ivory tower, in a university, in a biomechanics lab. Until we transform and transmute the lessons we’re learning in strength conditioning…The reason I worked in this last year…Here are my bona fides real quick.
In the last few months, University of California Women’s Water Polo team, the All Blacks, the 49ers, a little team called England National Soccer team, handfuls of pro athletes across the globe, from professional surfers to mountain bikers. I see a lot of dirty laundry.
The point is I’m still testing the theory. Now it’s so much behavior change, not like, “I think this barbell squat is superior to this. You should be doing high pulls instead of trap bar jumps.”
I think we’re really good at getting people big and strong now. Now the conversation is, “How do we take those lessons and transmute them to this next generation, who is facing…” I just saw someone put up an infographic about the testosterone decreases in generations from nanomoles, across from the boomers all the way to Gen Z right now.
I didn’t go further in there. I didn’t do an evaluation, I didn’t [inaudible 06:37] . I don’t know if it’s valid, but it makes me think, “Man, we are adding complexity into systems that are looking for homeostasis.”
We’re adding really complex training variables and stress and best practices on top of people who aren’t sleeping, on top of people who don’t move, on top of people who didn’t grow up playing different sports. I wonder what we’re going to see.
The ACL injury rates in kids under 14, even in high school right now, is unchecked. We’re seeing crazy ACL injury rates. Is that the pandemic? Well, it accelerated during the pandemic. It was already on the rise but accelerated during the pandemic.
If I take your trillion dollar industrial fitness complex and say, “How’s it going? Are we actually doing what we say we’re doing, or are we just getting so hyper-specific for these elite people talking about which neural is ideal on the barbell?”
That’s where I feel we’re losing the opportunity to say, “We need to bring everyone along with us.” That’s a little bit of where my focus has changed.
Maybe that’s because I’m 50, and ultimately I don’t care how much I deadlift anymore. I can deadlift 500 cold, I’m good to go. [laughs] Now I’m interested in can my daughters deadlift. I think this is the conversation.
Sport has become, for me, even more important because it binds communities together. If you watched what happened in San Francisco when the Niners were on their run, people have common cause to talk to each other. Look what happened during the World Cup. Entire countries rally and have common cause.
We see that those elite environments dictate what happens at the lower level, so the All Blacks influence a local club, influence the high school club, influence the junior club.
It’s important that we can help those teens do better so they can do better by all the other people who are using those models. That’s what I’ve come to focus on, less on how much volume do you need to do in that third adaptation phase to what’s going on with how all of this matters to society.