495: Look. Is Your "Check Engine" Light On? . With Human Performance Specialist, Rob Wilson.
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This is Jocko podcast number 495 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. So, in the teens, back in the day, we had a saying. The saying was, road hard and put away wet. Have you ever heard that before, Echo Charles? Is it just, did you hear it from me or is it something civilians would say is too? It's a horse...

Racing reference if I'm not mistaken. There you go. You're probably right Well, I never knew that until you just told me what I thought it meant was like as a team guy and that your gear and your equipment and as a human Just wrote hard and put away wet makes it just go hard not worried about the future We didn't care about anything long term. We didn't care about injuries. We didn't care about Diet we didn't care about downtime. We didn't care about rest or recovery. We didn't take breaks. We

We didn't stretch. We didn't warm up. We didn't cool down. We definitely didn't sauna an ice bath. We ate burgers and drank beer. And we kept going and kept going and getting after it. And that's fine when you're 20. But when you're 20 years old, you're really not that good at being a SEAL because you don't know enough yet. You don't have the experience. You don't have the understanding. You don't have the skills, the prime years yet.

You have to have both brawn and brains and you can't get broken along the way and the war Helped us figure that out. We couldn't have guys just being broken and getting broken We had to get smarter about our primary weapon system which is our bodies and then Incorporated in that primary weapon system is our minds and so progress was made and

And the next generation is taking much better care of themselves and their performance. They're stronger, faster, and smarter than we were. And it was good to see that transition. I saw that progression of maintenance and upkeep for our military members over the last few decades. And like I said, a lot of it I got to see firsthand. We started to bring in specialists. We got athletic trainers. We got nutrition experts. We got rehab doctors, doctors.

And we had charities, like not just from within the military and the government, but we had charities. The Navy SEAL Foundation took a bunch of this information that we had learned over the years and they turned it into the Warrior Fitness Program that takes SEALs who have been rode hard and put away wet for a long time, for decades, and get them back in the game.

Both active duty and retired which is just been a great program. I've had a bunch of friends that have gone through that It's awesome. Well with a background in human performance Rob Wilson has helped about 600 of these retired and active duty seals heal up and get back in the game and He just wrote a book then the book is called check engine light about his lessons learned from this experience

And it's great to have him with us here tonight to share some of those lessons with us. So, Rob, thanks for coming out, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Before we jump into the book, because we're going to jump into the book, the book is just knowledge. It's just a bunch of knowledge, and I can...

I would read each part of it. You know, I would I would thread my own memory of either myself or someone that I knew and how like I said that that idea of road hard and put away wet is a real thing and Guys used to get out of the teams and and they were just in really rough shape And so we're getting better at it. Thanks to guys like you that have been investing in in the team guys

But before we jump into the book, let's get some background on you. So where'd you grow up? What's the deal? Virginia Beach, Virginia. How'd you end up in Virginia Beach? Were your dad Navy or something? No, actually my parents are retired police officers. So I was born in Buffalo, New York. So coldest of the cold. There was work opportunities for police officers. My mom, my stepdad at the time decided to go down to Virginia Beach, went through the police academy,

Became police officers. So they were both cops and VB. Okay. And then was there veterans in your family? Like people that had served? For sure. Both my grandfathers were Korean War veterans. My mom's dad was an infantry medic in the Army. He went in young. The story...

from my family is that his home life was pretty terrible. He got a waiver signed and went to Korea when he was 16. - Jack. Hell yeah. - Yeah. - God. - As you might imagine, that changed him forever. I mean, I can remember talking to him about it all the way until he died. And then my dad's dad, who's also passed, was in the infantry, in the army.

And then his second deployment to Korea was a Ranger. Two Purple Hearts, one of which is hanging on my wall at home. - Check. - Legit. - And so as you're growing up, what are you into as you're growing up in Virginia Beach? - Surfing, skating, lots of martial arts. Played baseball by force until I was about 13. My mom was like, "You need a team sport. "You gotta learn how to get along "and work with other people." Retrospectively, she was correct.

But I didn't, it wasn't my thing. I respect it, but it's not my jam. I just wanted to do martial arts and surf. That's really all I wanted to do. What about Mount Trashmore, Virginia Beach? Yeah, I spent plenty of time there, running up and down stairs and flying an occasional kite, if I'm being honest. And so what was your surf? How old were you when you started surfing?

10 or 11 maybe. And how often would you surf in the wintertime? Yeah, until probably until the last few years. Once I turned 40, I was kind of like,

it's got to be real good for me to put on a hood and gloves and boots. And Virginia Beach, it's not like epic either. Like maybe once a year. Bro, I was stationed in Virginia Beach and I was stationed in Virginia Beach. I surf, you know, I've been surfing for a long, long time. I grew up surfing and I was in Virginia Beach for two years and I did two deployments in the two years, but so I wasn't around a lot.

But I had my boards and everything. I never went surfing one single time in Virginia Beach. I would like go check the waves and just be like, no, I think I'm not going to do this right now. But you were just committed as a kid. Yeah. And yeah, I was committed.

The thing about Virginia Beach and the surf there is if you want to be a surfer in Virginia Beach, you have to be an amateur meteorologist because it's so fickle because we're right up against the Chesapeake Bay. So the wind changes constantly. So you could wake up in the morning and the report says like three or four feet. Pretty good. You're like, great. And then the wind changes and it's basically like gone. Yeah.

- So what martial arts were you into? - Judo. Well, at first I was like a Chuck Norris karate kid. I was in that era. - With the flex jeans, whatever. Remember those things? - Yeah, hell yeah. - That was-- - So where did your parents take you? - For martial arts? - Yeah. - So there was a Tidewater Judo Club, which had, I believe, Mike Storm and Cindy Storm, which they were a US Judo Federation legit club.

Leo White, who was an Olympian. And then Sensei Don, whose name I can't, his last name I can't remember, but I can see him clear as day. Sensei Don the legend. Sensei Don the legend. He was a big dude. I remember him just being like, he was the instructor of all the instructors. It was no, unless you really got it. So he wouldn't like placate you with like a fun fall. He'd be like, you don't have it yet. So what year was this that you were training judo?

- This would have been started probably '88, '89 maybe. - Okay, so this is good. This is pre-UFC. There's no jiu-jitsu in America yet. - No. - Barely. - No. - Other than in the garage up in Torrance. But other than that, there's no jiu-jitsu. So if you were early in on the judo, then you're early in. - Yeah, I still have my US Judo Federation card. - Did you compete? So did you compete? - I did. As a kid, I competed. - And how'd you do?

Virginia State champion. - Heck yeah. That's freaking legit. And then did you see wrestling and be like, oh cool. - I tried it. I tried it for a little bit. I had trouble with the rule set and also the weight class that I was in. So I would have been in seventh grade when I was wrestling. So just in middle school, junior high.

And the guy in my weight class was, I didn't hit puberty yet. He did, but we're in the same weight class. So the strength differential between us was significant. And he used to just kick my ass all the time. That's weird. Even though you had all that judo under, I didn't know how to, I didn't know how to transfer it. I really didn't, I really didn't know how to move it over. Uh,

there was rules that were just different. Yeah. That I just didn't know how to deal with. How filled with regret are you now that you didn't wrestle? Horribly. Thanks for bringing it up. So, so then what'd you get?

Did you get into other things as well? Didn't you say you did Muay Thai and whatnot back then too? Yeah, so I did judo probably from maybe when I was seven or eight until I was 13. And then by then I was really obsessed with Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee's philosophy. So I was reading, I don't know how many times I've read the Tao of Jeet Kune Do at this point in my life, probably 50 times I read it through.

I was like, man, I want to get exposed to this where there's like, you just figure out what works for you. Did some asking around. There was only one place. I mean, there weren't that many places on the East coast that taught G Kundo at the time, but there was one in Virginia beach. That was a Frank Coochie who was a former seal. Yeah. Um, his place, which was called functional defensive concepts at the time. Now links Academy, um,

Jikundo, Kali, and Silat, and Muay Thai when I first started there. Oh, he wasn't in Jiu-Jitsu yet? It wasn't even around. So then 95 maybe, I remember he got his blue belt from Pedro Sauer. Yeah. And that was like, whoa.

Like I'd never even, I didn't even know what was going on. And then, yeah, when I moved to Virginia beach, I went and trained there. I went and trained at, and Frank Gucci, super cool. Um, and so I trained there for, again, I was gone a bunch when I was in Virginia beach, but I trained there and, and, and Gustavo Machado as well. But Gustavo Machado showed up while I was, he opened his Academy when I was there. Um,

But yeah, Frank and there was a bunch of studs at links to a bunch of really good guys. And this was in 98. Okay. So I forget what belt Frank Coochie was at that time. I don't really remember, but you know, he definitely had a lot of good knowledge and stuff like that. So it was a cool place to train. And it was cool because they were training, you know, Muay Thai,

They were like early in on MMA, which was cool. Yeah, I saw, I don't even know how this came to be. At that time in my life, I needed some male figures who were strong. I had a little bit of an anger problem. That place had a pecking order that was very clear that I was at the bottom of. But maybe when I was 15, I saw a Valley Tudor event that was at a school gymnasium in Richmond, Virginia.

I had no parent there that I remember. My mom let me tag along with the fighters. That was the first time I saw someone get knocked out in person. And that was the moment I realized anybody can get got because the guy who got knocked out was like the toughest human being I knew. And one mistake, one little moment of error and it was done. And I was like,

It might not even matter how good you are. You just might be in the wrong place at the wrong time So that was like a lesson for me like self-defense wise like okay. Yeah, you best not to be running in your mouth Yeah, you know don't be there. So what so are you doing this all through high school? Yeah, this was your focus 100% and what was your plan after high school? Did you want to become a fighter?

- No, actually in high school, me and a good buddy of mine were seriously considering buds because that's what we were around all the time. One of the young guys I trained martial arts with and we were like literally fighting with each other, swimming, running, lifting all the time. That's all probably until the end of my senior year is what I thought I was gonna do. - And what changed your mind?

- I had like this severe hippie phase and it was like a really hard turn. - What brought you there? Was it music or was it? - I don't know, I tend to have kind of a, my disposition is somewhat, I wouldn't say I have like a hippie-ish disposition, but I definitely, I have like fluid interests. So it was like once my interests shift, I'm 100 miles an hour in that direction.

some of it was like getting into meditation and more spiritual stuff. So did you, I'm trying to figure out your route. Did you go like martial arts? And then all of a sudden you're like, well, meditation is a part of martial arts. And then all of a sudden I'm listening to you like the little gong in the background. Um,

and then I'm doing incense in a room in a matter of words. Yeah. Like that's yes. I mean, so, I mean, it wasn't quite that severe in real time. Um, but I was always really interested in the psychological side of martial arts. So I was reading, you know, you know, book of five rings and, um,

reading about Zen Buddhism and you know I had a I have a book still called the spiritual dimension of the martial arts which is like on the other side of the warrior path what is all the spiritual aspects I burned that book no laughing

But I started studying that stuff. And I just was in a little bit of a phase of confusion. I really wasn't sure what I was going to pursue. I was being a bit of a bum, to be honest. I was being a little bit of a bum, just kind of floating. Did you smoke pot or anything like that? Yeah. Yeah. But that was late. That was not quite at that time yet.

Did music have anything to do with this? Did you start listening to the dead or something like that? No, I can't stand the Grateful Dead at all. Interesting. Yeah, so I was just unsure of my landscape. I was being a bit of a surf mom. Wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Had a lot of different interests.

My mom gave me the boot when I was 18, which was totally necessary and probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. She was like, "Oh, well, your choices are join the military or go to a university. You're not gonna just lay around on my watch. You're a grown man." You know? I was 18, she was like, "You're a grown man. You gotta figure your way out in the world."

take a hike. So where'd you go? I went to my buddy's house down the street. His parents were leaving him. I don't know. His parents left him in care of their family home and they went. And so it was like me and another 19-year-old dude with a two-story house to ourselves. So needless to say, we took perfect care of it. Never had a party. We were... It was just...

It was a mess. And did you go to university? I did end up going to Old Dominion University, which is in Norfolk. ODU. Good old ODU. Went there for a couple years. I almost went to ODU because I was in Virginia Beach and I needed to go to college. But the other school I go to was University of San Diego. And the jiu-jitsu out here at the time was kind of crazy. So I came back out here to train. Yeah. But otherwise it would have been ODU and...

Oh, well. Yeah. And what did you study? I studied psychology, but primarily foreign language. So I was a Russian language student. And I took four years of Russian all through high school and two years in college. So I still love language when I have the opportunity to speak Russian. I still like to do it. I'm way rusty compared to then. Have you thought about going over there to train? To Russia? Yeah.

Not presently. Might be a little funky right now. But I respect the work ethic of the people. Yeah. For sure. Freaking hard workers. So then what was it? So you go to school. Did you get a degree? No. So what'd you do? What was the next move? Well, the next move was to get my girlfriend at the time pregnant. Check. And go, oh man, I got to earn a living like right now. Check. And...

For me, unfortunately, historically, one thing that would have to happen for me to get my shit together when I was a kid was things around me would have to get busy, chaotic pressure, and then it would bring all my focus to bear and I would do well. So, and I realized this in retrospect that I would wait until the environment became chaotic and then I actually feel better.

when things are worse. Like, oh, I know exactly what has to be done now. Yeah, I like that too. Not a good long-term plan. They're like chaotic things. Yeah, it's not a great way to bring stability to your life, but I know this about myself now. So I was like, man, what do I really like to do? And I was brought up in a household where fitness was paramount. Health was like normal. We were eating like

chicken breast and broccoli and like we ate really clean in our house. It wasn't, it's not like we didn't have cookies in the cookie jar, but like our household was clean. And were you lifting and stuff as a kid? Oh yeah. Probably. I mean, I formal exercise of,

Probably like calisthenics and stuff as soon as I was in martial arts. I mean we're doing judo push-ups Like until the cows came and that was an environment that was in your house as well. Your parents were lifting Oh, yeah, my mom earned her pro card and bodybuilding when I was 15 and then nothing but chicken and broccoli She hated competing but loved training now she's like look my mom still lifts a ton and

And as like retrospect, she's like a CrossFit and that kind of stuff was around when I was young. I would have done that. She's like a hated walking on a stage. She's like a love lifting. Sure. So I was around that all the time. So you start, so you got a kid on the way. Yeah. You realize you got to make a living. You got to pay for your girlfriend. You got to pay for a kid. What do you do? Good. Go to massage therapy school. I was like, how can I get into the health field? Got it. In a trade school.

because I honestly hated academics. I don't much care for being told what to do. Still. I don't, I love learning. I read a ton, but I like to do it on my own terms. Again, sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. So I went to massage therapy school and I was like, I know this is an inroad to helping people with what I care about. So as long as I can remember, I had, I was like taking my buddies to the gym. Hey, wow, man, I want to

you know, when I get strong, I want to like look good in a t-shirt, whatever. I want to paddle better. I'm like, come to the gym with me. I was like, man, I want to, I want to get into something with physical fitness and health. Went to massage therapy school, learned a ton about anatomy and physiology. I love learning about anatomy and physiology. So I dove into that.

Got into pain relief work, myofascial release. I took it really seriously. Was it like an athletic type school or a hippie type school? It was a hippie type school for sure. But the thing, the great thing about the school I went to is the Casey Riley School of Massage Therapy. So Casey is Edgar Casey, who is like the very famous psychic from...

last century. I can't remember what years he lived, but pre-World War II for sure. And that part of it's not my jam, but there was a ton of holistic thinkers and health people. And in the spa, the health unit that was there, because that was a big part of his thing, there were all these manual therapists of all kinds who were in that space. And there were some people who had been putting their hands together

human beings, athletes, people with chronic disease, people with chronic pain for 20 or 30 years, which is pretty hard to find at that time, early, early 2000s.

And I got to be mentored by some really knowledgeable people on how to use your hands to relieve pain, increase range of motion, improve performance. And I chased that down as hard as I could. I read everything. I get my hands on. I take a mentorship from anybody who would let me talk to them and ask them questions. You know, I hounded my peers and my mentors constantly. How long is that school?

Nine months. Yeah, the basic, like put your hands on people. And then when you got done, what would you do? Like, what do you open a shop? Do you start going to people's houses to get work? What do you do? Yeah, you can do that kind of stuff. One of the buy-ins at that time when manual therapy wasn't quite as accepted as it is now, now it's like physical therapists are putting their hands on people way more than, you know, whatever that was 25 years ago.

it wasn't as common, especially for men. So you'd be like, well, I'm going to work in a spa environment, at least part-time and do like people on vacations massages, which I did. I don't want to say I hated it. I still learned a lot. I tried to take advantage of every opportunity that I had to learn. Even if I didn't totally like what I was doing, I still thought, or I tried to think there's something to be learned here. Like if this is what I have to do right now to make money,

What can I do to make this a learning opportunity? Right. So that was kind of a, a mindset that my, my mom especially always was like passing. Like, I'd be like, I hate doing this. Where's the opportunity? Where, where can you, what can you get from this? So I learned a lot about communicating with people, talking to people about health in ways that still serve me now, because you're in a massage therapist, right?

I mean, in a spa, for the most part, you're touching people who are naked. And the trust in that situation has to be extremely high. So, okay, how am I going to communicate with this person whose hand I just shook for the first time that they're going to go in a room with me and it's going to be safe? And so...

That started to help me understand, okay, how do I communicate with people? Not just with the words I'm saying, but how do I carry myself? How do I introduce myself to a stranger? And then maybe have to talk to them about something that's personal.

and potentially even like intimate, like I'm going to see more of their body than anybody else other than maybe their spouse. So if I find some health thing, I have to bring it up. You know, I'm obligated to say something. So learning how to deal with those kinds of situations and, and navigate discomfort and, and speak in those scenarios is,

Looking back, that was a really formative time for that specifically. Now, as far as the tactics of the job itself, there is nothing like putting your hands on another human being to learn how their body works. I mean, jujitsu, you find the same thing. You really get a sense of what the body can and cannot do because you're manipulating it.

In manual therapy, the intention is just different. So I want to know how can I get the system to change behavior based on how I'm manipulating it. And manual medicine is really, really old. It's probably some of the oldest medicine on earth.

So I dove into understanding things like gua sha and bone setting. Not that those things... What's gua sha? I've never even heard of that. Gua sha is a Chinese scraping technique. So they would use jade tools to scrape the skin. What's the... Grenling? Graston. Graston. That's the modern...

So instrument assisted soft tissue manipulation. - My oldest daughter was a ballerina and like she would, I don't know if you've ever known anyone that was a ballerina, but that is a psycho endeavor. Like it's crazy. And she had more injuries from ballet than my other daughter had from gymnastics and wrestling.

So like, yeah, but that's where I, we had to, these little like tools, she would have these tools and she would just be like freaking grinding out her shins and her feet and everything else. Yeah. So that, that Graston stuff is like the modern incarnation. There's a little more science behind it now and we can be a little bit more specific and like the beveling, the angle of the beveling on the tool is very precise and the dosage. So,

the tactics of it, I became obsessed with relieving pain, understanding pain, how to restore movement, the psychology behind pain. And then I had the chance to work with everything from guys in the teams at the time, all the way to having clients who had like Parkinson's and were terminally ill and go into their home on a regular basis, almost until they died. And then all

having that kind of breadth of interaction with human physiology, but direct interaction, not just a book, but to go touch somebody twice a week for three years who has progressive Parkinson's. It's like you really learn what the nervous system is about. So massage therapy as odd of an introductory point as it was and as unexpected as it was, gave me a lot of insight that is still really valuable to

like to today. So when you're heel hooking somebody, sorry, I couldn't resist. I mean, when I started jujitsu, other than having been exposed to martial arts before, you know, when people are new to jujitsu, one of the first barriers is they're not used to touching and being touched for one. I was really accustomed to, to touching people, one from martial arts, but I was also doing manual therapy all the time. So like being really close to people, I was,

I could move right through that and just kind of get to business. So how did your career progress? Did you eventually do your own thing or did you continue to work in like a spostner and then do stuff on the side? Um,

I continue to do some just because I did what I needed to do to make a living. But one early realization I had was that manual intervention is not enough. You have to change movement behavior. So people have to have something that they can take away and change their behavior. Otherwise, you'd be the best therapist in the world. If you see a client one hour a week, basically they have 167 hours left in the week to screw up what you just did. So if there's no plan...

they don't know how to move differently then you're just chasing your tail so i started looking into movement therapeutics and coaching and more serious exercise training i got a personal training certificate so i could start teaching people and then i got into the crossfit world

in about '06. And then in Virginia Beach there wasn't even a CrossFit gym yet in '06. Then '07, my now wife, Tommy Gill, Tommy opened up CrossFit Virginia Beach with Pat Sherwood, former SEAL. And I started coaching there. One thing led to another. I started coaching full time at CrossFit Virginia Beach.

I moved my therapy practice full time into an office in the gym. Oh, that's squared away. Yeah. So then I was really early in the therapeutics side of CrossFit. And along with that, you know, if you're in a CrossFit gym coaching and doing manual therapy in Virginia beach in 2007, eight, a lot of your clientele are military, right?

And of that military, lots are SEALs. Lots of guys were picking up CrossFit at that time. And what ended up happening was you'd have conversations. Guys would have a little scratch, a little nick, a little something bothering them. Like, why don't you come in? And I'm outside the wire. So we can have fully open conversations about what's actually happening.

And there's no one. I'm fine. Yeah, exactly. Right. That's the mantra. Yeah. Right. But there's no one for me to report to. Yeah. And if somebody does want to know, well, I'm, I have, I'm under a medical board, so I have to be brought in by a federal judge. Right. They have to petition me. So everything's completely closed and protected. So guys could be like,

actually, dude, I think my labrum and my hip is torn, but I'm going to go. I have a deployment that I am going on. Yeah. And you know what, man, other than all of the sort of obvious sides of it, like warrior culture, wanting to be with the team. I don't want to be the guy who doesn't do his job. There's also, if I don't go, my next promotion gets delayed and that's going to affect the financial health of my family. If it was me,

I'd do the same. I have to be honest. So I get it. If I knew it was like, okay, I'm going to go. I know I can grind through this. And on the other side is a pay raise that changes my family's life for the next five years. I'd go. So instead of going in, reporting, and having that delay, guys could come to me, find solutions. Now, during all that time, coaching CrossFit,

started coaching other athletes who were using CrossFit often improperly to train for their sport. And so I started deep diving into strength and conditioning, um, more seriously outside of the realm of CrossFit, but having a CrossFit gym gave me a constant living lab where I could see what worked, try things on lots of different types of athletes. Um, and then probably, Oh, eight, um,

I wrote a cold email to Kelly Starrett before he was, you know, New York times bestseller, most famous physical therapists in the world. Uh, I read a, an article he wrote in the CrossFit journal about tight hamstrings called hamstrung. I think I read that article too. Yeah. And he put his email and I was like, huh?

man, this guy knows a lot about moving around and CrossFit and sports and putting his hands on people. Well, that's what I'm doing. Maybe I should connect with this dude. So I sent him an email like, hey, man, I have this client that I'm bumping into a little problem with. What do you think? And he just sent me back his phone number and was like, call me. And that was whatever that was. Freaking awesome. 17, 16 years ago, something like that. Ever since. And so then where did it progress from there just to get us up to like where you are now? Yeah. What came next?

Um, traveled around teaching breath control for quite a long time. So I got into the breathing side of things again, because peak of GWAT, I was working with a lot of guys in very rapid training and deployment cycles. Guys would come home, have a lot of trouble down regulating. Honestly, transitioning in time zones was a major challenge on,

during training cycles. So I started to look into breath work because I'd studied yoga in college and was like, Oh man, this stuff calms you down. I know about some of the physiology. So I started using that to help guys basically chill out, get to bed more easily, regulate the nervous system, saw some gaps and how it was being taught in the performance environment. Um, built a

a curriculum with Brian McKenzie at that time. So I partnered with Brian McKenzie. I traveled around the world a couple of times, Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe, all over the States presented at the UFC performance Institute a couple of times worked with some pro fighters, people, lots of people in different, different sports kind of bringing breath control science and application into the

Modern terminology. And then parted ways with those guys that I was working with doing that. That breath control work, it was just time for me to move to something different. And I wanted to zoom out a little bit. That brings me to my current post, basically, where I'm probably the last three years who I've worked with most recently.

How did Alex Ollie get started in it?

Like what was, how did he end up like a look? I opened a gym too. I actually opened a CrossFit gym in 2007, you know? Um, but what was his, you know, and mine was more because we had an MMA gym and I was a jujitsu junkie. I kind of still am. But, um, but you know, that was kind of my, how I ended up with a gym. How did he get, how did he end up with a gym? My understanding, and I'm going to get this, hopefully get this really right. Um, is that when he was in the teams, um,

he noticed that he was beat up, getting broken. His teammates were getting beat up, getting broken. We hadn't done 20 years of this intense of conflict. So nobody really knew how much it was going to cost

He saw, you know, basically in his words, saw his brothers getting smoked, just getting crushed by the demands of the job and helped stand up most of the modern practices in Naval Special Warfare human performance. So those changes of bringing people in, a lot of that, if you pull on the thread long enough, you get back to him. So that's why he was active duty, was starting to work with organizations both within the Department of Defense and

professional human performance organizations privately to figure out best practices for guys who are still going down range. And then notice like, man, nobody gets a hard reset. There's never a time when guys can step away, but still be among peers and just have a real hard reset of the system. And so he created the continue mission program, right? Which is, and this is while he was still in,

Continue missions after. So we got out, I want to say 15 or 16. I couldn't be sure. But it got out 15, 16 and then opened Virginia high performance soon thereafter founded continue mission with the sole purpose of providing a holistic hard reset to operators. And that facility is about 150 meters from the front door of my house. And they opened and,

a parking lot where I walk my dogs every day. And I was literally walking my dog and saw the gym door open. It was like, huh, what's this place? And walked in and shook hands and was like, Oh, Hey, cool. I'm a coach. What do you guys do here? Oh, you're coaching sweet. And then at the time I was still, so that was just random. That was just random. Damn serendipity. Very nice. Yeah. Some, some would call it fate. Yeah. Um,

And yeah, that was probably seven, eight years ago. And then he and I just developed a friendship. I mentored the strength and conditioning staff there for some time. That was a pretty young, the first team there was pretty young strength coaches, not a ton of experience working with guys in the community. Didn't really know how to bridge culture gaps from sport to dealing with guys in the, in the teams. And,

And I kind of helped. I mean, we had like a monthly whiteboard probably for two years. What's the big difference there? Like if I trained some college football team, strength and conditioning, and I roll in and I'm going to start working with SEALs, what are you telling them to help calibrate them properly? Well, first of all, you're always on the other side of the fence.

So it doesn't matter how many high fives you get, how many good works you get and how many hugs when they see you. Guys that have gone through selection together and especially if they've word together, love each other in a way that you can't possibly know other than your family. Simple as that. You're not in the club. It's okay that you're not in the club. You don't have to be in the club. Don't act like you're in the club. Don't dress like you're in the club. Just be you.

Offer what knowledge you have that can help them get better at what they care about. And otherwise, shut up. And that seems to work out pretty well. And in addition to that, you'd better look like, at least look like you challenge yourself on a regular basis. And even better, actually challenge yourself on a regular basis. Otherwise...

Nobody will be outwardly rude to you, but probably the buy-in and the respect you get will be lower. And that stuff matters. Is there anything specific from like the, and I guess it would depend what type of sport athlete you were dealing with, but is there anything specific when you start talking to somebody that coached strength and conditioning in football or strength and conditioning in wrestling or strength and conditioning in, what, basketball? Yeah.

And now we're doing strength and conditioning for the teams. Is there any major like glaring, hey, listen, you treat, you aim for this in the athletic world, but you aim for this. It's a little bit different. Is there anything specific like that from like the actual exercise that you're going to do? Well, the first thing is that most of the guys, if we're talking active duty, especially most of the guys are injured. Mm-hmm.

may not even consider their injury an injury and you might not know about it until it presents itself. So it's not like going to the Premier League where or the NFL where there's a lot of known, oh, that's so-and-so. He's sprained his left ankle four times and we have all the history of it. It'll be like,

the fourth session with a guy who's been in the teams for 12 years. And then you have them do an exercise. He's like, Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you I had a really bad PLF and there was a compound fracture of my fibula on that side. And, uh, I can't flex my last three toes anymore. And you're like, okay, well that probably would have been good to know before I wrote plyometrics in your workout. Yeah. So the way that you, the, the philosophy or the general framework is like you can't just throw weights.

throw guys in, Oh, we're going to run, I'm going to write this eight week program that looks perfect on paper. And we're just gonna, I'm going to brush my hands and go at the end of it. You have to know that there's lots of unknowns under the surface and be really adaptable day to day a lot of times. And that the, again, we're talking about active duty. The demands of the job are so high that,

Not as reported by the operator, but on paper, the demands of the job are so high that guys don't need you to kick the shit out of them in the gym. It's like I was talking to a coach yesterday and he's pretty new. He's a couple years into working with guys. And I'm like, do you know the force profile of like a hard opening on the spine? And he was like, no. And I'm like, four to 11 Gs? That's like no bundle training.

That's just just standard, just standard. That's four to 11 G's. I'm like, do you think this guy needs to back squat? Probably, probably doesn't like pride doesn't need more stress on his spine. So it's like, okay, you get somebody who does a tandem bundles course for eight days. If you don't understand the force profile and the amount of fatigue and the amount of alertness and vigilance that stacks up,

And then you're like, oh man, you've been gone 10 days. Let's kick it into gear. You need to pay the man. Yeah. And what's an operator going to say? Okay. Let's go. Let's go. Like not going to back down. All right, fine. Because nobody's going to quit or say they can't do it. So you have to be an advocate when you're a strength coach in a special operations environment. You have to be an advocate for them. Go, okay, man. So just so you know,

You started that training cycle with, we'll call it $5,000. You've spent $4,600. This workout that you want to do costs $1,000. You don't have $1,000. We need to save money until your bank account is a little more flush. And then you get to spend again.

yeah that's good those are the kinds of thing i was wondering and that one that one actually makes sense because no one it's almost like being a you know fighters before a fight you won't hear them say like oh i got a bad left knee right now like they're not going to say that well as a team guy you're just not going to say that ever ever you know like i'm not just going to advertise this weakness to everyone it's not happening so we're just going to gut through it like you said

And yeah, if you have so many programming, some psycho stuff, you'll just gut through it and get a worse injury from the whole thing. So at some point you decided, how long ago did you decide you were going to write this book? You know, it's kind of funny. The book told me. That's how I feel. Like I didn't wake up one day and be like, ah. I mean, I've wanted to write a book. I like writing. I really enjoy writing and I've written for some periodicals. But I was teaching this curriculum.

And then it started to occur to me. I started to have this like little nagging feeling. Like there's a little voice, like this is a book. And I was like, nah, no. Like the resistance, like that, that Steven Pressfield talks about. I was like, nah, this isn't good enough to be a book. You know? And then it was like, this is a book. And it just kind of kept nagging at me. And I was like, all right. So I sat down one day and wrote the first, first chapter almost in its entirety in one sentence.

One broad brush just like it came out like vomited out. And I was like, oh, maybe this is a book. So I wrote the first chunk, like the first section of the book in less than a week for sure. Oh, yeah. Almost as it stands now.

And then my daughter actually went to college for proof, not proofreading. She's an English major with a technical writing major. So I asked her to proofread. I was like, hey, can you proofread this? I think I'm going to send it out. And she was like, first of all, she called me and she was like, I'm so glad this doesn't suck because I was really scared because I haven't really written anything that you've read anything you've written before. I was like, please.

because my daughter's really honest and she would tell me like, this is bad. Go put this away somewhere, you know? But yeah, I was like, maybe this is a book. So I, I shopped it around and you know, that's a whole, a whole thing under itself. But took two and a half years for it to be from the time I sat down and wrote the first words to this moment, which the book comes out today, two and a half years. Yeah.

Well, let's get into the book a little bit. I'm going to start off with this. I'm going to start reading a little bit of it. And I'm going to read a section from the Ford, which was written by Kelly Starrett, who we already mentioned, who's a great dude. And that's just such a cool story that you were just like a random dude that emailed him. And he like, yeah, here's my phone number. Give me a call. We'll talk through this issue. So that's the kind of dude he is. I've...

Bumped into him and and shared stuff with him over the past and he's always been just a super cool guy And here's what he writes part of the forward here He says we're now in the third wave of human performance If you're Jen if you're a gen X kid like me you remember the first wave defined by malt nut power bars and first gen heart rate monitors back when we still believed you could outwork the competition spoiler you can't

The second wave came crashing in with the rise of YouTube fitness. Suddenly, you didn't need to buy Olympic lifting shoes out of someone's car like it was a drug deal. Training sophistication exploded, so did fitness tribalism, tech fetishism, and unfortunately, diminishing returns.

We leveled up but got lost in the weeds. The question became, how the hell are we supposed to do all of this? The third wave is about integration, simplification, recalibration. It's the return to context, nuance, and sustainability. It's the long game. And Rob Wilson is its poster child. It's a freaking pretty epic intro. I would like to...

We could probably spend a whole show talking about before the first wave.

Just go back to Joe Weider's super weight gain formula. Go back to Peck Deck. Metarex. Metrix. Was it Metrix or Metarex? I think it was Metrix. I think it was Metrix. It was the most disgusting. Dude, I had Metrix when it came in two bottles. Like one was called base and one was called something else. And you mixed them together, one scoop of each. It was base and...

I forget what it was, but you had to, it was like a, you had to combine them. Like the activator. Yeah, it was like, you know. Originally designed for cancer patients and it tasted like it. Oh, Metrix was? Yeah. I used to put mint oil, like what, mint extract. I used to drip mint extract and straight sugar into it. Yeah. Straight, just straight sugar. I mean, I was like,

20 years old what yeah sugar gonna kill me dude tastes good gotta solve that problem yeah problem solved mint mint freaking metrics back in the day uh yeah you could go through all those things and the other thing cool thing is if you go back far enough you go right back to where we are you know you still see guys lifting heavy swinging kettlebells back in the day like the whole thing like you could go back far enough where you get back to current time oh yeah yeah

All right, so getting into this a little bit prologue lessons from high performance in a fascinating study research And I'm only reading like little sections above in a fascinating study researchers compared personality differences among non athletes professional athletes and champions using the big five personnel personality inventory the big five is reliable cross-cultural statistical analysis that includes five personality domains openness conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism

An easy way to remember them is the acronym OCEAN. The highest predictor of championship performance according to this analysis

Low neuroticism. This trait refers to an individual's tendency to have negative emotions. People who score high in trait neuroticism tend to be more emotionally volatile, are more likely to experience anxiety and depression, and have trouble dealing with stress, especially if it's unexpected. The highest performers showed low neuroticism even when compared to other professionals in the same sport who already have lower averages, average levels of this trait than the general public.

This means the highest performers were the least affected psychologically by negative information from their environment, or if they were affected, they bounced back rapidly. Being extraordinarily low in trait neuroticism is what allows the best of the best to hit the mark in stressful, high-stakes situations instead of being ruled by panic and doubt.

It is a superpower for sure, but not without its downfalls. So I read all that. I was kind of like, oh, yeah, hell yeah. And then I got to this line. It is a superpower for sure, but it's not without its downfalls. Often...

Lower threshold issues slip under the radar and don't set off any alarm at all This is great when it comes to saving lives and winning gold medals But does not alert these individuals to cumulative threats to health and performance longevity in other words It's not a single decapitating swipe of the blade that shuts things downs down. It's it's

death by a thousand cuts. No community better displays the incredible upsides and downsides of being forward focused than the special warfare group I've had the opportunity to work with over the last few years. No group of people on the planet are tougher and more tenacious. However, there's often a steep price to pay for them on the other side. Many of these men and women have medical rap sheets, a mile long career, long habits of going till it's broken

and then going some more, taking an indelible toll on the body and mind. And that's exactly what I opened up with, like that idea of, hey, we're just gonna keep going. And actually, the really funny thing is medical rap sheets a mile long is a good thing.

The bad thing is when I was in and you'd look at someone's medical record after 20 years and it'd be like four pages and, and like just standard medical stuff. Cause they didn't tell anybody about anything. So I think we're getting better about that there. Um, but then, but then, um, this idea of the check engine light, how'd that come to your brain?

Yeah. So actually, so the first... Because that's the name of the book, by the way. That's the name of the book. Yeah. So check engine light is this. It's a simple analogy that describes in one fell swoop that there's indicators that let you know something requires further investigation. That's it. And I think when I work with...

Guys who are in the special operations community, one of the shortcomings of communicating the idea of self-care is that culturally it's completely oppositional to the idea of mission, service, team. Mission, service, team. Where's me in there? Me taking care of me first is the opposite of those things. So how do you reconcile the need for self-care with self-care?

Those core principles and that is there are appropriate situations to ignore the check engine light and keep driving. No question about it, but it's not free. If you don't tend to the things that require maintenance, eventually performance will decline or you will experience catastrophic systems failure. Yeah. Just to give you a like quantifiable example,

fact about what you're saying in the teams when you get done with like a Training mission or a mission you take care of team gear first Then platoon gear then your personal gear and then you and if you get caught like we're over here cleaning boats and Getting them maintained and echoes like over there taking a shower like we will beat the shit out of him That is a mortal sin to put yourself

You're your person above the team and the platoon and the mission. That's just the way it is So you are taught that and it is beaten beaten into your head So you're even more right, you know on that one and then the other interesting thing so I've been I've been using this analogy of a of a check engine light for years and where I've only used it on the on the mental health side

Basically what I would say is listen when a guy needs a break It's just like a check engine light if you're driving down the road and the check engine light comes on and you keep driving What happens you destroy the engine? You can't drive that car anymore if you're driving down the road and the check engine light comes on and you pull over to the side and you get maintenance and you Fix the problem you can get right back out on the road and you're gonna have a long-term use vehicle But if you ignore the problem, it's gonna be

And this comes from like actual combat trauma of guys that are breaking in the field. And, you know, I learned this from, well, I learned it from, from David Hackworth and Dick Winters, who was, you know, Dick Winters, World War II band of brothers and,

David Hackworth is Korean Vietnam and I read their books and they both in different ways explain that if you had a guy that was like going to break and one of the things is so classic because people say how do you tell when the guy's gonna break and Dick Winters in one of his books he says if I saw a guy with his head in his hands

Knew I needed to get him off the front lines You know you see a guy doing this like get him off the front lines if you get him off the front lines quickly You give him a couple days back in the rear, you know Hey We need you to do logistics run go back through and pick up our food and spend the night back there and make sure we have everything And then come back out they'll be good to go. But if you keep them out there, you're gonna break them and then the analogy that David Hackworth used was he said everyone's got a cup that they're filling up with with stress and

And different size cups. And some people have bigger cups. But when their cup overfills, if you let it get overfilled, they're done. And so you have to like get them in a situation where they can empty that cup. So I really like the idea of this check engine light that you put into this book. And I think it's something that will awaken people on what they need to pay attention to.

You say this in the book fast forward a little bit in my two plus decades of as a health and performance professional One thing has become exceedingly clear We are often disconnected from the things that drive our health and performance until they reach critical mass of dysfunction Just like ignoring the check engine lights exactly what I just said we we beat up our bodies neglect them to give them proper attention to maintenance and then when the systems malfunction we blame our

bad joints our weak hearts and our unlucky genetics or whatever else comes to mind rather than our own Failure to cure care for ourselves boy. I had to put a star by that one because this is you know I wrote a book called extreme ownership Which is like it's my fault and this is such a perfect example of an echo and I were talking about this earlier today of like oh well I you know, I'm

I can't do this move anymore in jujitsu because my knee hurts. Well, is that really your knee? Or is it just that you haven't strengthened the knee? You haven't become more flexible? You haven't drilled that move so you can get the repetitions in to get the body used to that? Or is it just your knee's fault? It's like all day long, man, we blame it. And the classic thing is we're getting old. People use that. And this is something I've talked about is

I've been in situations where I felt like I might lose a movement. One of them was muscle-ups. I moved to a house where I didn't have a big garage and I just couldn't do muscle-ups. I didn't have the headroom to do muscle-ups. And I was living there for about 18 months. And I still did a bunch of pull-ups, still did dips, did ring dips, did ring pull-ups, but I couldn't do muscle-ups.

And then I finally got back to my real house with a big garage and I had my rings up and it was time to do muscle ups. And I was like, oh, I could do like one. And part of my mind was like, well, you know, well, hey, well, you know, you're getting a little older now. No, I don't accept that. Or, hey, you know, maybe you're just not strong enough. No, it's just like you need to do them. And so you just go and start. You got to be humble enough to go, oh, okay.

Can't do muscle-ups right now. Cool. Need to bring them back. I had the same thing happen. I had an arm injury. Couldn't straighten my arm out and I couldn't do overhead squats for like a year. And when I went, when I finally, my arm got healed up enough, it's time to start doing overhead squats again. PVC pipe was hard.

And it's like a part of your brain goes, well, you know, how important is it really to do overhead squats anyways? I mean, do I really need to? I've never done one in the field before. I've never done one on the jujitsu mats before. I've never done an overhead squat. Have you ever done an overhead squat before? Like when you weren't in the gym doing overhead squats? Well, probably not. Well, so it's really easy to surrender that position, especially when your ego is saying, well, you know, overhead squat is stupid.

You know what I mean? Your ego will tell you that instead of being like, no, you're actually just weak at it and you need to rebuild because you haven't been able to do them for a long time. And so that the idea that you hit on here, which is we will just make excuses to stop doing what we're supposed to be doing is ridiculous. Yeah. And I mean, I have really there are some things that are.

Not within our control genetics. We're genetically who we are. If you got long arms, they're probably going to be long. You got short arms. They're going to be short. Right. And that bench is going to be fire. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have pecs for days. It's amazing. Right. Burpees. Got them. Right. But, but focusing on the uncontrollables does nothing good.

to help you in any domain and health is not an exception. So let's say you do have whatever genetic marker, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's like, okay, well, what lever do you have to pull on that will change that? Oh, none, but you can eat vegetables. Can you not? Why don't you do that? And what's interesting is even if that's not the answer, starting on that path is

Helps you gain experience that will minimally let you know what doesn't work You'll start to learn you will develop the skill the skill domain or developing skill in any domain Is actually the doing of the thing? It's not any different in practices that we need for health You have to do them all the stuff that works must be done Gotta do the thing

Here's another again. This is just such an important thing for people but people to understand Small problems left unattended to be get larger problems if you don't rotate your tires your tires will wear unevenly unevenly when your tires wear unevenly Your steering starts to pull as your steering pulls more your struts shocks and brakes wear out faster Compensation moves its way through the whole system before you know it more things seem to be going wrong than right. I

Now it's an additional burden to get to work and pick up the kids from school. What was once a small crack in the ice spreads throughout the whole pond. Of course, not every small problem becomes catastrophic, but the purpose of maintaining your vehicle isn't just to prevent it from breaking down.

Staying tuned in to how your vehicle is running also means it'll work if and when you need it to perform and this is something we've probably all heard a thousand times Oh, you know, I had a I sprained my ankle and I didn't get it fixed But now I was like walking funny and then it spread to my knee and now my left hip is all jacked up and And that stuff happens on the regular if you don't pay attention to it Absolutely, and you know

One of the things I realized probably mostly in the last like five or six years is when it comes to health related or performance related things, that there was some tacit understanding that I had from the environment that I grew up in or the environments I was exposed to. What are the things that you should pay attention to? And often, yeah.

many of the shortcomings around recognizing the indicators wasn't because necessarily people were lazy some are or it wasn't because they were dumb although some are right but it was mostly because people never had the opportunity to systematically develop the skill set that helps them look they just don't even know how to begin looking and so we're fed lots of data but

Do you even know how to look? Yeah. That's another good point is another reason why people miss it. And you pointed out in the book, I'm not sure what I'm going to say it now, but you also have a little bit of a boiling frog scenario where, you know, you got some little nagging thing that you don't really pay attention to it. You just grow accustomed to it instead of going, Oh wait, my shoulder shouldn't feel like this. Echo Charles, you get your wings a little bit, you know, jammed up a little jammed up right now. We're working through it though. We're working through it. But, but,

There's sometimes people go. Oh, well, you know, it's it's really minor and so they don't pay attention to it And then it gets worse now when they go to repair it and put in the effort It's it might be too late or at least it's going to take a lot more work. So you got to pay attention to These little things and and if you're not aware of what your body's doing Next thing, you know, you look up and you're like, wait a second. I can't you know lift this over my head anymore Yeah, well, you know, um

One person whose philosophy has had some serious influence on me for sure. The last 10 years is Jordan Peterson, right? One thing he says is conflict delayed is conflict multiplied. That's a truism across all domains. So it's the same with your body. If we just try to put it in a shelf somewhere, it doesn't mean it goes away. It just means we're not dealing with it right now. And that thing will fester forever.

And probably become worse. Yeah. Fast forward a little bit as we walk down the road toward disease, dysfunction and reduced well-being. I'm not sure I love that statement. Kind of factual, though, as we walk down the road toward disease, dysfunction, reduced well-being, they're often signs posted all over the place, but we just don't realize it. A tiny loss of movement capacity here and a little more breathlessness there doesn't seem like a big deal and probably won't capture our attention. We just get used to it.

Just as we can expand our tolerance of stress and discomfort, such as through exercise, we can reduce it through a lack of awareness and exposure. What becomes comfortable and typical for us from day to day may not be what's best for us over the long haul, and very often it isn't. And I think, Echo, you were talking about this, and you addressed this in the book as well, that you have a great line. I forget what the line is, but I have it marked out. We'll get to it. But whatever you're doing becomes what you're doing.

And if you keep doing dumb or not just dumb things, but if you, if you have this habit, almost sit there and slouch and look at my screen all day and your head is forward. Like that is what your body will become. Yeah. That thing. That's what it's designed to do. Become what you choose. Yeah. And if you choose to stand up straight with your shoulders back and be strong, your body will be strong.

Yeah. But you have to you have to give it the freaking guidance. Yes. It will follow your guidance. It will. You're to bring up Kelly again. He says your body is like an obedient dog. Just go where you tell it. Be careful what you're telling it. While the automotive analogy is one that helps you more clearly understand what happens if you fail to address issues. There is a key difference. If you don't take care of your car, you can get a new one.

You have but one body. You're stuck with the consequences of your driving for life. It behooves you then to become a better driver of body and mind. You are obligated to know the basics of your own maintenance. Learning to properly tune yourself so that you can fire on all cylinders for as long as possible is potentially the most important skill set that a person can develop.

Although health and biology are far more complex than any automobile, caring for them doesn't have to be complicated. In the coming pages, I am going to outline a concise framework that will help you learn to pay attention to your body by showing you how to build a performance longevity dashboard made of key performance indicators. This will help you continually collaborate or calibrate your perception of your internal stare over time so that you can use your indicators to become a better driver.

Sorry, your internal state over time. You'll learn to build a toolkit as well so that you can address issues when gauges on the dashboard get your attention. Ultimately, you will gain skills that help you tune your body and mind so that all of the component parts that influence performance longevity can work in harmony

To help you feel and perform your best for as long as possible. We had a harmony hippie sneaking out. He's still there sometimes he's still there He still is one with the universe And again, I'm not gonna read the whole book but you you have this the way the book is laid out It's a resource and you actually explained in the book how you could use the resource But you have questions that you ask at the end of each chapter. Um

Self-reflection questions for instance here. It says can you think of a time when you were forced to ignore a warning light from your body? What was it? Why did you ignore it? Did you get back to it later? If so, what did you do? So there's a lot of very introspective parts of this book that it that is asking someone to like hey take a look at yourself and ask these questions and

And those things are really important. One thing that I do is, you know, I, I log down what I do for a workout every day, but when something's wrong, I just write it down. Like it'll say back tweaked, you know, and that way I can go or shoulder tweaked or right arm tweaked or whatever, or like, Hey, hurt really bad right arm. You know? So I have those things because otherwise you don't know how long you've been injured for. At least I don't. I'm like, when did that happen?

And also I can look at my numbers and be like, dude, what is wrong with me? Like, for instance, I have a little bit of a little bit of a tweak back for a little bit. And, you know, I can't like all of a sudden like, wait, wait, what? Your squat just dropped off. Like, no, you were in. OK, back tweaked. I should take more detailed notes. But forcing yourself to write down what's going on, it allows you to understand better what's happening. It helps for sure.

For sure. One of the things, one of the words you use is key performance indicators and you've got these two different, so, you know, tracking, this is the, I work with a lot of companies. I have a consulting company and, you know, KPIs is a huge part of it. Key performance indicators, two types of KPIs, lagging indicators and leading indicators. What are those to you?

Well, lagging indicators come after the fact. Leading indicators come before the fact. And so, you know, that's kind of like, you know, in military terminology, right? Left of blast, right of blast. So do we what are the things that happen before a given event where we can create relationships with the likelihood that this thing will or will not happen?

So that's leading indicators. What are the things that come often come before this? So like for you, if you're, if you tweak your back and you have a history of that, then you go, Oh man. Um, when we play a lot of closed guard before for two weeks, that's when my back starts to get tight. Then if I couple that with a lot of back squatting,

Man, that's what my back tends to fry out. Oh, now I have a relationship. So now I know that close guard, heavy close guard volume. It could be a leading indicator for my back hurting. It doesn't mean don't do either one of those. It could mean now that I know that they're potentially connected, maybe there are some stretches that I do after that training. Maybe there's some additional warmup I do before I back squat. Maybe I change how heavy I go.

When I do this, it just changes the approach. It doesn't mean do don't do it's not zeros and ones. And then lagging indicators after the fact, write a blast. You can use that. Sometimes they're negative. Like, oh man, I didn't know these were connected. My back just hurts now. That's a lagging indicator. That's a negative example. It can also be, I changed something and now was there an impact there?

on the thing I tried to change. That's also a lagging indicator, right? In the company, it could be bottom line. It could be keeping personnel, right? There's lots of different ways lagging indicators can be used. When they become negative is when it's the only relationship we have with the event. It already happened. And now I'm in the moment of, oh shit, something I didn't want happened. And I don't even know why. Is it lagging indicator if I am weaker?

Is that considered a lagging indicator? It could be. It could be. So if you're weaker, dumb on the specific example. Yeah. Like, or, or I'm, you know, I can normally do this many pull-ups and I went and worked out and I didn't do as many as I normally do. And I'm like, Oh, cause to me, I'm like, Oh, you know what? You need some rest, bro. Like, do you need to take tomorrow and eat some steak? And then,

you know, like do some mobility work or something. For sure. It could be. Sometimes the type of indicator it is, is just where it is in time and what you may or may not want. Right? So lagging indicators aren't necessarily negative by nature. So let's say you made a conscious decision for, to use less energy

For the pull-up strength, you're like i'm gonna just i'm gonna use this cash for something else I only have so much time in the gym I'm gonna let my pull-up numbers slide a little bit because i'm focused on something else and you get you get weaker Quote unquote right? This doesn't mean it's bad. It just means the expected outcome Occurred that's it. Um

You know, you got a bunch of stuff in here about the ability for us now to collect data on ourselves, whether it's wearable heart rate monitors, whether it's apps about what, you know, you can take a picture of your food and it'll give you all the macros that you have and all this stuff. And there's a lot of data that you can get.

which is obviously part of our KPIs, part of our measuring of what's happening in our world. You do say this though, and again, I'm fast forwarding through that section, but beware the data trap.

More reliable and valid indicators are important for describing the mechanisms underlying aspects of health. The tracking of sleep and heart rate variability are two common examples. On the other hand, too much focus on data can not only cause you to mistake the forest for the trees, but can lead to a kind of performance neurosis, broadly speaking, especially in those who may be more vulnerable. So I had friends that were wearing a whoop strap and that thing would tell them that they were tired in the morning and then they would be tired.

Yeah. I was going to make a whoop strap that just said, you're ready to destroy the world. Sounds right. The Jocko strap always ready. There's no digital readout, right? It's just like embroidered letters in red. It's just a red, a black bracelet with red letters. Yeah. It is crazy how like, you know, that will happen to people. They'll think they'll be told that they're tired. They'll be told that this is,

and they will take that on board and it will impact their performance for sure. Yeah. Those like whoop and aura, those things can be helpful, but they're some of the most misused tools and all of fitness. And it's kind of a bugaboo with me, the way that they get used and sometimes the way that they advertise what it is that they actually do, like no whoop or any of that stuff can tell you if you should exercise today or not.

There's way too much context. I can tell you if you should exercise today or not. Yes, you should. But the question is in what way, at what intensity, with what tools, for how long? So there's a lot of room for play in the way you exercise where you still don't get a zero for the day. For sure. And so that concept, which is later in the book, which is this idea of tuning is important.

about what are the nuances that are in between zeros and ones. But this happens a lot with special operations that I work with. Guys will look at their HRV. They'll start looking at their HRV and they'll be like, my HRV is low. Well, I feel awesome.

That happens two days in a row. I feel awesome. This says I'm not ready. Fuck this thing. It doesn't work. And they toss it, which is a shame because that data could potentially help them if used correctly. But if you use it to tell you how you feel, that is not the right way to use it at all. I determine how I'm going to feel. How do you like that? Yeah. Yeah.

Fast forward a little bit and this is kind of the key idea of the book the performance longevity dashboard Organizing indicators and this is where you get into the m3 model The purpose of the m3 model is to help you organize the innumerable signals from your body that you have to contend with at any given time Into digestible categories the m3 model has three categories mind movement and matter Let's talk mind movement matter. Yes, so mind movement and matter are

Simply buckets from which you can draw indicators to put on the dashboard. So I have this primary way of organizing information, which is the performance longevity dashboard. So performance longevity is being awesome for as long as possible at whatever it is that you care about. That's performance longevity. That sounds way better to me, by the way, than just being around people

on earth existing. I want to do awesome shit and enjoy life. I want to be able to participate. That's performance longevity. Then a dashboard is, you know, it's an instrument panel, right? It's a instrument cluster. It's an array of gauges and indicators that give you both right now information and what might need attention in the future in order to keep the vessel running. Yeah.

So is there one indicator on a dashboard? Negative. There's a bunch and you play all of that information against each other in order to get a broad picture of what's happening. Same thing for your mind-body system. You don't want to have one like HRV tells me or my heart rate tells me, but what is the big picture that's being painted by all of these?

Those valid, reliable, accessible indicators that make up that dashboard are innumerable. There's so many, especially now with all the wearables and all the data we can get.

It's a constant state of overwhelm for people. High performers, especially when overwhelmed with information, will by default disregard and focus on task because that's what creates performance. Not because they're dumb or they're meatheads, but because focusing on task outcomes is what wins. So in order to make this palatable,

actually relevant usable meaningful you categorize these into mind movement and matter which are just buckets from which you could draw indicators and or tools that would go on your dashboard or your toolkit I give some examples yeah but the specifics of those depend on the person

And that's kind of how the, well, that is how the book is broken down. And the quick definitions you give mind is the collection of our internal thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Movement is the navigation of your body in space and time. Matter refers to your biochemistry, your molecular health as measured through biomarkers found in blood work. So those are the three big buckets. And yeah, again, not to go too crazy with the...

with the metaphor of a dashboard, but it's like you had, you know, three different screens you could choose from what you were going to look at. And these are the, these are the subject headings that you have. And then of course, once you've got your dashboard and you're getting readings out from your dashboard, you've got to have tools to work on wherever there might be issues. And that's the next section. Um,

And a couple examples here, whether it is prayer and meditation for the mind stretches to keep pain and stiffness at bay or a reliable way to improve your nutrition, upkeep and repair of your body and mind is your responsibility, just like it is with your car. Then you talk about tools and and what is important about tools. One of the things that you lay out, they have to be robust, reliable and repeatable. Those are the three R's for your tools.

Explain on those a little bit. Yeah, so that concept, that R3 robust, reliable, repeatable, that's originally from my good friend, Mickey Shook. So Mickey runs Carry Trainer, which is a personal defense course, right? He teaches pistol, rifle to civilians, right? So the right way to use those items in defense of your life. And Mickey uses this to talk about

How should, how you should select the tools you carry on your person or the systems that you build around those. And I train and work with Mick a lot. And, um, I, the more I was around him and I heard this, I was like, man, this is applicable to health. This is just, um,

how you select stuff you work with, right? This is a great way to break this down. And so robustness means things that are hard to break, right? That's what robust means like a Hooli, for example, right? Like impossible. So robustness can refer to the material. And when we think about picking a tool that you're going to use to upkeep your health,

Often we might go, oh, this scientist really likes this and recommends it. This one is affordable at Walmart. But we don't think about like, will this stand up to my household? Right. I heard that there was a double randomized placebo backflip trial from Harvard about this leg massager 9000. But we don't ask like.

Will it work in a household with like three dogs and four kids or will it get destroyed on the third day? So that's part of robustness. But robustness also means the system that you use to deploy it. Are the systems that you have in place easy to break down? Like if you have a sleep routine, is it 14 steps long? And then if you travel anywhere,

it completely breaks down and you can't sleep for shit. Are you precious and fragile? Right. Or do you have a four step sleep routine that you can do at your house, but also anywhere and will produce reliable outcomes? Right. So that's robustness.

Reliable means consistency over time. So if I can identify the outcomes that I'm trying to achieve, do I have KPIs in place that let me know, am I actually getting what I want out of this tool? Is it producing for me or am I just doing stuff? Now, when I had a gym and still now, when I see people like rolling out on foam rollers and stuff, and I got nothing against foam rollers, but I can tell most people have foam

no idea what it is they're trying to achieve with the time that they're using for that item. In which case they will think foam rollers don't work, which they don't. If you don't know what you're trying to achieve and how to measure it or you're

It's doing this thing and then suddenly be surprised by sort of not getting the result they want, right? So reliability, consistency over time and outcomes, right? So robust, reliable, and then repeatability has to do with the user. So do I know how to reproduce? Do I have the skill to use this tool that I've selected, right? If we have tool first,

And skill second. That's a real problem. Right. So I have to know how to use this thing. So again, the leg massager 9000 sounds awesome. It's got a one inch thick user manual. What's the likelihood that I'm going to be able to repeat that? You know, I've done some consulting with like tech companies.

companies like health tech companies and they would want to know things like, okay, if we take our, this sort of relaxation meditation device into the collegiate setting, is it viable?

And one of the things we figured out with a particular device is a seven minute meditation actually takes about 13 minutes because you have to make sure it's plugged in. You have to get to the app. You have to decide which meditation you're going to do. It explains to you what the meditation will do. You have to make sure your Bluetooth is on. If your Bluetooth is on, you have to make sure not too much other shit is on at the same time or else it won't connect.

So it's all these steps. It's not repeatable. So how would you expect a 19 or 20 year old to use this scientifically proven device? Which sounds awesome when you read the study because the studies they produced were like miraculous, but functionally the skill was not repeatable enough to get the outcome. So these are, if you're an expert in a domain, robust, reliable, repeatable is tacit.

You will pick things that don't break. You will pick things that get the outcome that you want and you will develop a repeatable skill set. When you're not inside your domain of expertise though, it's easy to fall prey to outsource information and biases and cognitive fallacies because you don't know where to look. If you have a framework for picking tools, then you can use it anywhere. And another thing that you talk about in here is proximal distal skills.

which is a long way of saying like, hey, having the tool at close range when you need it. And you have the, like, you know how many, speaking of foam rollers, I probably have seven foam rollers. I got one in my office, I got one in my bedroom, I got one in my gym, I got one in the living room. Okay, so that's four. But like, that's the reality because if I'm,

doing something and my back is feeling weird or my my legs are freaking domed out which is highly likely then you're like oh like like rolling out for 30 seconds or a minute right now is actually gonna feel pretty freaking good and I'm right here and I have it or I have I have like dumbbells in my bedroom

Why do you have dumbbells in your bedroom? Well, as we know, you know, sometimes you got to get that pump, you know, get that little something. Do a couple thrusters with, you know, light dumbbells. I have 25s in my bedroom. They're just there. They're just there. I keep a kettlebell in my kitchen. There you go. So having these tools that are close by is advisable. And proximal to distal or, you know, near to far is also about...

what tools you're going to decide to rely on the most in your toolkit, right? So proximal tools are the things you're actually going to have access to with enough frequency to make a difference. So if you have the best massage therapist in the world because you need help with your back getting stiff, but you can only see them

once a quarter, that's distal. It doesn't mean it doesn't help you. It doesn't mean don't have them. It doesn't mean they're not good. It just means it's far away. So for the other 89 days of the quarter, what's the tool that's close that's going to help you manage that? You better have one. Otherwise, you'll go there, get a great massage, and then it will just be a downhill ride until the next time you see them. Yeah.

Fast forward. We get into the bones now here. Mind. Not too long ago, I asked my friend and legendary track and field coach, damn, Pfaff. Am I saying that right? Pfaff. Pfaff. What he believes is the greatest limiter of performance on game day. His answer, emotional challenges, especially those intertwined with family or relationship stress. That's right. It wasn't nutritional imperfection, faulty training sessions, or even injury. It was emotional disruption brought on by relationships. That's right.

Tells you the importance of the mind. I mean, how many good athletes have you seen fall apart because they didn't know how to pick a girlfriend? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, I know I've seen it. I've seen the most talented, freakish people who just couldn't get their shit together inside. And it didn't matter how strong they were, how freakishly talented they were.

they couldn't get their mind right. Freaking head case. Yeah. It sucks to watch. It does. You just want to shake people like they like, you're so talented. Stop this.

You talk about the tri, the triune brain. Am I saying that right? Yes, sir. Triune brain. And this is the autonomic, emotional and cognitive layers of the brain. Yeah. Um, the autonomic nervous system is further subdivided into sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. And you gave, you've,

Gas and brakes, which is a pretty cool way of you breaking it down. I've never seen it breaking down that way. And boy, was I appreciative when I saw it. The parasympathetic nervous system is rest, digest, and recover. That's your brakes. And these are things that are happening, right? The other side, the sympathetic nervous system is fight, flight, freeze, and fornicate.

which i was not aware of yeah so we're talking about brief me on that one so what you got to do is have dumbbells yeah so these two aspects of the autonomic nervous system are working all the time this fight flight freeze we everybody probably has heard fight or flight freeze is also there and then fornicate is there because what we're talking about is brain stem deep feedback loops in chemistry we're not talking about

what makes you feel good, you know, when you're flipping through the back channels of Instagram, we're talking about,

what's happening on like the circulatory level. So that's the autonomic nervous system, brainstem, deep subconscious physiological feedback loops. That's the autonomic. Yeah, dude, I have a dog and like the dog's just gonna, he's gonna get after it. Yeah. Like as far as the fornicate thing goes, I mean, that's just, but like there's no emotions. No. He's not like, wow, she's pretty. He's like, no, that's a girl dog and I'm going. Yeah. You know, this is like, and that's what is meant by

physiological arousal is upregulation of the autonomic nervous system into the sympathetic. So sympathetic and parasympathetic aren't like toggle switches, right? We, we tend to use these phrases or these descriptors like rest, digest, or fight flight, which are the ends of the spectrum of that behavior. But there's a whole, there's a whole gamut

arousal states that are in between there. So it's not like a toggle. It's more like a dimmer switch that's sliding back and forth. And those gas pedal, brake pedal conditions are relative to each other. Like not every time you push on the gas pedal, does it go all the way to the floor? Sometimes it does, but sometimes it just...

Eases from nothing to 10 miles an hour every time you touch the brake pedal you don't slam on it You might pump it you might squeeze it. It'll depend on the conditions, right? and then it gets into the the emotional layer and Just throwing this out there fear probably the most powerful emotion there is helps you avoid bodily injury and death

but can be extrapolated to truly scary things like public speaking. And I never made that connection before of like, hey, like that is the same emotion is fear. Like it keeps you alive, but it also makes you afraid of things that you shouldn't be afraid of. Well, at least in my opinion, you shouldn't be afraid of them, right? You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to be afraid. There's no true threat to your life, right?

And then you say, again, fast forward a little bit, feelings aren't free feelings. They have energetic costs in the most literal metabolic chemical sense of the word.

A chronic emotional distress has known negative effects on physiology, such as elevated blood pressure and dysregulation of that stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Anger, for example, is a mobilizing emotion. Feelings of anger can drive you to alter something in the environment with swift action. Anger hits the gas pedal to get you moving. That can be a powerful asset if you see something as unfair, unjust, or ethically wrong and use anger in the form of outrage to attempt to change it.

It can be detrimental, however, when you smash down the physiological gas pedal because the person in front of you is driving slower than you think they should. Anger is necessary and powerful, as is compassion, as is hunger. But when misappropriated, these powerful states cost you dearly. If you can become more aware of how you relate to your internal state and have indicators for when things aren't firing in a way that serves you, you can change it.

So these things can cause problems like being emotional, freaking a hundred percent. Yeah. Well, I mean, you talk about the idea of detaching, right? And so what is that? That's stepping back from the bubble and going, hold on a second.

Is this what I want? Is this necessary? Is this helpful? So anger is real, powerful, necessary. There are for sure times in my life where anger, I used it very appropriately to stop something that was harmful to others, right? Where you have like righteous outrage, like, no, that will not happen in my presence. And I'm already doing something about it, right? That's a good use of anger, right?

It can also be horribly misappropriated. And a story that I tell a lot is this event. This was a couple years ago. I went to the laundromat. My wife has these vacuum seal things for storing blankets over the winter. So we can use them like little filing cabinets.

So winter came, she was like, Hey, I need you to break these open, take them to the laundromat because I don't want the washer getting all beat up with these comforters. No problem. I'm going to go with a book and be by myself for three hours at the laundromat. No problem. So I go washing stuff. Everything's good to go.

I'm on the phone with a buddy talking jujitsu, snapping blankets out, folding stuff. And then I'm on maybe like the last blanket or so. And I snapped the blanket open and men's underwear falls out onto the folding table, which is not mine.

And I don't know if you've ever felt the heat that comes from in between your shoulder blades. And it immediately came up over my whole face. I couldn't hear my buddy on the phone anymore. Like his, he might as well have been underwater. And I was basically looking at the whole world through a toilet paper tube. Like I was just thinking like, whose head am I going to remove today? You know, luckily I recognized what was happening, took a breath and this self deprecating thought came, which was, Hey dummy,

You're at a laundromat. This is probably the guy who used the dryer before you. Not only were there no other indications that anything unsavory was occurring in my household, my wife is the most uncomfortably direct human being I've ever met. So if it was over, there would have been... You know about it. There would be no ninja trickery. It would be like...

You now suck. We are done. Have a good life. It would be like a meat cleaver coming down. So I had a good laugh about it. But in that moment, I told myself a story. I had an emotional response to it, which was rage. And all of my physiological capacity came to bear in probably less than a second. Like I was about to fight a bear, except I was in a laundromat.

looking at essentially a piece of fabric, some other dude's underwear, some other dude's underwear. And, and that is an example of physiological costs of an emotional experience. Now, not every emotional experience we have is that intense, but imagine if you don't have the gas pedal smashed down to the floor, but if you just have like high idle anger for like 10 years, like,

We know this is not Rob Wilson's opinion that things like that are directly related to things like high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems. Does it mean if you get angry too much, you're going to die of a heart attack? No, but it means if you do, you make it more likely. So, and you probably don't even know that you act like that until there's a systems failure. Like you have a relationship failure. Yeah.

Or it turns into a coping mechanism that costs you even more and you're far down the line. And then you go, oh shit, I got to start doing something about this. Instead of that, you can have markers in place, right? And some of those are internal markers, right? Things like breath work and meditation, those kinds of things can help. But social markers, right? Like the old joke, like how do you know if you're in a bad mood? Your wife tells you. Like social markers are important. You start noticing that people react differently towards you

Does it mean that the story they tell themselves about you is true? Not necessarily, but it could be an indication for you to do some introspection and go, how am I? Hold on. Detach. How am I actually acting? What do I really feel like? And is this what I want?

Last but not least, you got the cognitive layer hitched on top of the more primal driving forces, the cognitive layer of the brain cognition. Technically speaking is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought experience and senses. It includes functions like attention, language, learning, memory, and perception. Cognition is taking information from the rest of the physiological system and making sense of it.

And you get into the executive functions here, working memory, delayed gratification, inhibitory control, creative cognitive flexibility and problem solving and task switching. So this is like, you know, our brain that what we think of as our brain. Exactly. Exactly. And then there's a dance of how the layers of the mind interact. No one component of a system network operates independently.

There's a vast interconnectivity, overlapping function, and even redundancy. So these things are all freaking playing off of each other too. All the time. So not only does bottom-up influence, but top-down. So there's circular causality. These feedback loops are constantly influencing each other. And that's why...

Habit forming and taking ownership is so important because if you become conscious of these types of things and their relationships within you and how they affect your relationships with other people and the environment, then you can change. You can literally change your stress physiology by changing your behavior and what you're thinking all at the same time.

but you have to choose it and then you have to act it out. It won't just like magically land on you one day like a fairy and then life is better. You have to become aware of it, which is part of the cognitive layer and then take action, which is literally like,

making your body do different stuff in situations. - Yeah, a huge one on this when I teach detachment is like it's the leading indicators that you really have to become familiar with because if you've already lost your temper, like you don't go mid-stride of temper loss and pull yourself back in most of the time. Sometimes I guess people could do that, but you really need to pay attention.

attention to leading indicators also because if I lose my temper and freaking stab echo in the neck cause I'm mad. Well, and then I go up, you know what? This is just my temper. Like that doesn't really help me out too late. Right. Well, and you know, when people are in, um,

for addiction. This is one of the things is identifying triggers and then rewinding those triggers sooner and sooner and sooner and sooner until you don't even put yourself in the environment where the triggers exist anymore. Yep. Right. So that's another thing I talk about is this is the exact same thing, but like if,

If I got a problem with Rob and every time I talk to Rob, he gets me irritated and he's always bringing up things that we should, a different direction than I want to go and it's frustrating to me. So when I'm going into a meeting with you where we're going to talk about some project that we're working on, I've got to preemptively say, all right, dude, this is Rob. You know he's going to say some shit that's out of line. You've got to keep it in check. Don't overreact. I've got to go into the meeting with that attitude. So it's the same thing, like paying attention to what?

Situation you're going into you know, I found interesting is people who have sustained High performance either in a single domain or across multiple domains Figure that stuff out naturally, right? You look at like a really good example I think from MMA is GSP where he's really good at identifying the fear response way early and then having this conversation with himself, which was This is what happens

This means I'm getting ready. And he started to change the label of that fear response way before stepping in the cage. And so when you can realize that, now you have time to take action on your own behalf. Like, ah, and then here's the ritual. Here's the routine that I put in place that lets me...

deal with that well. - I was at UFC, I was coaching someone, cornering someone and GSP was fighting and he's cutting weight, so everyone's cutting weight and everyone's in the same kind of sauna and the same, we're in a spa of some big hotel, right?

you know, everyone cutting weight is just completely miserable. And do GSP just look like the most professional champion that was doing his job that had no emotion about it. That was, you know what I mean? It, you know, it sucks. Like, you know, they're weighing him like, okay, back in the sauna and no one wants to go back in the sauna. Like not one single person wants to go back in the sauna. And he's just like, they're like, got to go back in. They're like eight more minutes. And he just gets up. Like they just told him, Hey, uh,

you know, go have another scoop of ice cream. He just walked, you know, no factor comes back out, lays down. Just he, that guy was a champion for a reason. That's the things that you're talking about. And I mean, now you look at him and I don't know him, but he seems like a pretty happy dude. Yeah. Like he's on the other side of that life. And for the most part, at least from what you can tell publicly seems pretty fulfilled and is like enjoying life. So,

Pretty awesome. Yeah. Back to the book. No topic is more evident of crosstalk or more relevant to modern life than stress. As biological organisms, human beings are designed to experience and respond to stress and ideally be better prepared for it the next time. That can mean muscles getting stronger because you lift weights or it can be better coping strategies when a family member dies. The long-term cost of stress is referred to as stress

Allostatic load, am I saying that right? You got it.

The accumulation of stressors in the mind and body is not simply a psychological event. Chronic stress perpetuates activation of the hormonal and autonomic stress physiology, and if not given the opportunity to reset, can result in predisposition to illness, increased mortality, and most certainly reduced performance and quality of life. Again, this is just a huge part of this book is this idea of

paying attention to your dashboard and seeing what the stress is doing to you. - Exactly. - 'Cause some stress is good and too much stress is gonna be bad. - Yeah, yeah. It's like a bank account, right? I mean, you gotta spend. - Yep. - But you got enough cash.

You go through some of the indicators, how to pay attention to those indicators. Then you get to the tools, right? Mindfulness, meditations, and therapies involve turning attention inward to foster awareness of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that you maintain and how they may be affecting feeling states of your body. Do you do meditation? Breath work. Yeah. I've tried lots of meditations. But you're not addicted to it? You don't do it every day?

I use it as needed now. It's, I have an integrative practice. So I'm doing breath work when I'm working out. It's some, in some way, a part of jujitsu. It doesn't mean I'm not doing like the Hickson, like necessarily while I'm trying to cross collar choke somebody, but it's a, it's something I spent a lot of time studying and teaching. And so it's completely integrated into my approach for health.

Now with that said, there will be periods of time, whether it's a day or a month when I have some specific outcome that I'm looking for where I'll sit quietly and do some specific breath work or some specific meditative practice. But currently it's, I don't, um,

Yeah. There's only so much time in a day. Yeah. Yeah. A good quote in here. You got rest is not idleness. It turns out that setting aside time to allow your mind to wander can help you reconcile experiences and emotions to make better sense of what the heck is going on in this existential mess called living and breathing. Echo Charles is a big proponent of rest.

You know, just a quick comment on that. So that rest is not idleness. That's actually a concept point by Mary Helen Emerdino Yang, who is a neuroscientist. Yeah. And you give her the props in here. Yeah. I didn't give her the props, but you did. Yeah. I just want to make sure. And that is,

That idea of taking time away for psychological and physical rest and it not being idleness I think is important, especially when we talk about high-performing people again. And an interesting anecdote that I'll offer is –

There was a guy I was working with who was going through the program that we talked about earlier through the continued mission program. A lot of trouble with sleep. Couldn't really get a handle on sleep hygiene because he was having trouble negotiating the specifics with his spouse. And I just recommended, Hey man, he just gotten promoted. So he's active duty, a lot of new stress overseeing a team. And I was like, take your dog for a walk.

for like half an hour and let your dog lead the charge. Don't make it a work dog and like heal next to you until release. Let your dog smell whatever it wants to smell and you just follow it around. No phone other than family or work can get through, but put it in your back pocket and just walk and do it for the next week. And when I see you again, let me know what happens. And he was like, he pulled me aside and was like,

what the fuck is this voodoo? And I was like, dude, your brain just needs some time to organize all the stuff you're trying to reconcile right now. Like you have a family and you just got promoted and you're active duty and you know, you have all this strategic stuff you're thinking about. Like why don't you just give your brain some time to like,

Build the spider web, you know, so it's not just a fun adage. The actual practice of it will move the needle for sure. Yeah. Take that dog for a walk. When I used to train jujitsu seven days a week, which I can't really do right now, but, um, cause I'm traveling or whatever. But when I used to train all the time, then all of a sudden I'd go on a trip and I'd be gone for like two weeks and I would come back and I'd be better.

And I used to say that my mind would gel like the ideas the concepts whatever I was working on what kind of gel So the mind needs a little bit of a break sometimes echo gives it plenty of time plenty chilling

Speaker 1: Beginners mind, as cliche as it may seem, old dogs learn new tricks, keeps those dogs young in mind, exposing yourself to novel situations, especially in environments in which you are unsure of the outcome, forces you to stretch your knowledge, your emotions. And as it turns out, the physical structure and chemistry of your brain to hearing a lot about this, you got to keep learning stuff. Speaker 2: You got to keep learning. And you know, of course my bias here is to jujitsu.

I don't know if there's like another single thing a person could decide to do as long as the training environment is well looked after that could hit as many of the high notes for the stuff we're talking about. I don't know if there's another practice that can do it where you always have to be learning. You have to deal with your stress. You have to learn how to emotionally regulate yourself. You have to know when it's time to push the gas pedal and when to hit the brake pedal. You have to be able to organize your body, um,

if there was one thing I'd be like, go find a good jujitsu school where the instructor is knowledgeable and responsible training partners look after each other because you're going to make a ton of friends. You're going to get fit. You're going to use your brain. How long have you been training for? Eight years. Fully. I'm fully. It was your first day. Like, were you like, Oh,

What was it? Eureka. I found it the first day. As soon as my feet touched the mat again, I had the feeling like when I was a kid, I was like, Oh, I didn't realize how much I miss this. I love this. I was like, Oh, cause I had a decision point where I had to either pick doing CrossFit or do martial arts. And I was like, well, this is in my early twenties. I was like, well, I did martial arts a lot. Let me try something. Why did you have to make that decision?

Cause I was young with a young kid and I was like, you could only afford to do one or the other at the time. And I was like, well, I've done a lot of martial arts. Let me explore this fitness side of things.

That's kind of interesting because I've always found that you can work out. You don't need no money to work out. You know what I mean? You don't need any money. And the other thing about working out is you don't need anybody. You just need you. Yeah. Whereas jiu-jitsu, you need a place and you got to have like a training partner. Yeah. For me, it was about being in the environment. Like I wanted to be in the training environment because I wanted to train. I wanted to move towards training people. Sometimes I look back and go, man.

Should have started that you know that would have been 18 18 years ago Another 10 years on the mat, but yeah as soon as I stepped on the mat again I was like it's home white walking in I could smell the um the shin guards like the sweaty shin guards smell Yes, like I I'm one of the few people probably like actually I'm like okay. I'm comfortable here here's one of the

The one of the one things I don't like about jujitsu, you got a section here, outdoor activity. Actually, you do need sunny skies. Some studies show as little as 50 minutes of outdoor time per day can improve cognitive function, especially for those who are already vulnerable. There's some times where I'm going to train jujitsu.

And I'm like, damn, it's a nice day outside. I wish I could just train outside, you know, but you got to get outside in other ways. That's why we run. Surf. Surf. Absolutely. That's why we surf. But yeah, being outside. My wife actually noted the last couple of years, she was like, man, you're in a really good mood way more often than a surf season. Like when it's in season and you're surfing a couple of times a week. I was like, ooh.

Maybe I should be going for a walk every day. Yeah, it's a real thing. It's a real thing. Next chapter is movement. And, you know, clearly movement is pretty obvious, right?

But there's some things that aren't so obvious markers and just to go to the book here markers like grip strength foot speed and the ability to get up and down off the ground without using your hands all leading indicators of fall risk are well known links to all cause mortality and can be helpful indicators on your movement dashboard. I think those are things that we know but this was an interesting point that you brought out. Why do we move?

Why does any organism move? Biologically, there are two reasons. To move away from threats, things that are potentially harmful and may limit its chances to produce offspring, and to pursue opportunities, things that keep it alive and improve its chances to produce offspring. That's a pretty fundamental breakdown of why we got to move. Mm-hmm.

When it comes to preservation of movement, many people aim to simply continue to perform to the narrow task demands of the life they are accustomed to.

but it's not the expected and the well-practiced that gets us. It's the slow degradation of capacity that makes us vulnerable to challenges we did not anticipate. If you have exactly enough money coming in to pay your bills every month with nothing left over, no savings, is that financial robustness? Of course not. If your car suddenly needs repairs or you need a new washing machine, you will go broke.

It works the same way when it comes to managing the movement capacity of your body. Moreover, most people don't have a real sense of how much is in the account until there's no more money. Better to build a reserve of capacity, a savings account, so if you are called upon for more, whether for emergency or enjoyment, you can meet those demands with vigor. And this is the quote that I said I had lined out. The human body is an incredible machine capable of continued adaptation and

For better or for worse. This is the well-trained dog. Your body's a well-trained dog It's gonna do what you kind of told it to do. Yeah, and this is a point that comes up a lot with Guys on the teams right as if you spend five ten fifteen twenty or more years Essentially turning your torso into a turret then guess what? It gets good at being a turret and

That's not free. Your rib cage is supposed to move quite a bit. And often with guys, they don't even know that it doesn't move because they can still execute the demands of the job. Well, very well. But then when something unexpected happens, my shoulder doesn't do that anymore. Right. And then you realize like, oh, man, I can't put my hand behind my back.

And it's like, how are you deploying a parachute? It's like, well, I'm taking my other hand. This is a real story. I'm taking my other hand and grabbing my wrist and I'm shoving it back there until it gets close. And then I turn and I fling it and I grab. And that's how I'm deploying my shoe. And I was like, check. Okay, well, that's not okay. So let's reel that in. But

Those narrow task demands, getting good at them could be that kind of example, but it could also be somebody's slow progress towards decrepitude where they can move a little less and a little less and a little less. And even when we do things right, Sisyphus is still pushing the ball up the hill all the time. So know what's happening. That's the theme, right? Know what's happening. And then...

Make sure that you exercise your body in ways that expose you You got a section here called check the rig when I was first developing the curriculum for my check engine like class I bounced some of the core concepts off my friend and veteran New York City firefighter Felix Manjaras Manjaras in addition to his regular duties Felix is that and and

FDNY health and fitness unit instructor and a training coordinator in the office of professional development. We were discussing the standard operating procedures for caring for the many pieces of equipment that firefighters use in the course of their job, helmet, flashlight, portable radio, hand tools, and so on. This gear check or checking the rig ensures that things work

How they must, when they must. What I found interesting is that the firefighters check their gear every day but have no system in place for checking in with their own bodies. A fact that Felix and others in the department are working to change. Like most of us, these firefighters have an implicit assumption that their bodies will just work how they think they should until they don't. So...

Yeah, we don't have our own little maintenance protocol. Yeah, we don't have anything to way to check it We don't and you know when I talk about this particular topic and that's actually what I'm discussing with the guys this week is I use the example of a function check right rifle right and it's a that's the basic everybody does it it's on autopilot so when I ask guys like

Hey, everybody in here knows what a function check is. Right. And I usually get the like, Oh, this fucking guy look, you know, and then I'm like, great. What is it? And the guy's like, Oh, put it on safe. You know, bolt to the rear. And I get like this, like I roll and I'm like, okay, cool. Everybody knows the steps. I'm like, do you do it?

When you're already downrange and it's time to go live, guys are like, no. You don't? When do you do it? Oh, beforehand. I'm like, you do? Why? Well, because we want to make sure it works. When we're down there, I'm like, hmm. Do you do that with your spine, your shoulder? No, it's just an assumption that that thing will fire because it's so adaptable. If you develop a function check for your body, it doesn't have to be complicated, but you should have one. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and you go through some of these things that you got shoulder flexion hip flexion overhead pressing squatting And and look you go and I'm breezing through them But you give kind of points of performance what to watch out for kind of you go through the what these function checks would be For your body and again, I'm going through like the house the book. I

Can you try new things the greatest sign of movement literacy and longevity isn't necessarily being good at things in a narrow groove? You're worn you're into your nervous system. No matter how well you purse purse persevered Specific capabilities or ranges or capacities or ranges it isn't passing a range of motion balance or agility test either Perhaps the greatest science whether or not you can try and learn new things and I thought this was just cool something that I need to

to do more often because I'm a creature of habit. And so I just do the same things over and over again. In fact, I've always had that problem. Like with working out, like my workouts will just be like repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat for months. And that's not good. I know it's not good. And then, so I'm trying to now incorporate and, and also to not feel like the goal of today is to beat my last workout.

Cause that's kind of a, you got, you just walk into the, you walk in, there's like one target on the wall. Like you're going to shoot at that target. So the last workout is the last target. I'm going to shoot that target again. Classic, classic, right? Like classic mistake. Instead of being like, like, Oh no, you know what I'm gonna do today? Dude, you know, the most random thing and we're going to go for it. And I need to do more of that because I get in the habit and I follow my own habits. And you know, I do audits. So I'll do like, um,

where I will try a specific program that's totally new. So for about 18 months, I was doing Greg Walsh's stuff, the Wolf Brigade. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like the mace work, heavy kettlebells. I did that for about... I've got Wolf Brigade maces. They're awesome. They are, yeah. They're great. And mace work is fun. Yeah, they're... Man, those things are... And boy, well, those guys, man, those guys, they're... Like when you watch him in his videos, like he moves so mechanically that...

And I always feel like I do not move that mechanically. Yeah. There's some ups and downsides to moving that mechanically. I think it can be right under some circumstances, but really good performing athletes often exhibit high variability, but

consistent outcome so that they get the same outcome over and over and over again. But there's slight changes based on their level of fatigue and the environment and those kinds of things. But I did Greg's work for a while cause I wanted to explore that and I got some good results and then I needed something different and I wanted to change it up. A year is the minimum I'll give to explore a program though.

I did about 18 months and then lately I've been doing more like track and field based work. So sprint prep work and med balls and reflexive eccentric work. And some of that's inspired by, you know, friends I have in track and field. And so, you know, just Warner Gunther videos.

Just watch those and just figure out what you're going to do with your life. Yeah. That dude is an animal. I mean, if you watch javelin, like if you look at any javelin training, you want to talk about super athletes, javelin throwers are insane. I felt pretty good about myself. I work with an organization called Altus quite a lot, which is probably...

the best track and field training organization in North America, for sure. It's run by a friend of mine, Stu McMillan. But the first time I went to their facility in Phoenix, I saw some Olympians and some world champion, 100 meter, 200 meter, 400 meters, long jumpers. And the sound of them on the track is like, the only thing I could think was like,

at everything. I mean, these guys, they hit, they're punching the track with their feet and punching their feet hard in fractions of a second over and over and it's so consistent and smooth but when you hear their feet, you're like, oh my God, like you watch it on TV and it just looks all flowing and nice but you're on the track and it's like, like someone's smacking the track with a paddle or something. It's crazy but

I've been drawing from their work a lot and in a year and a half, I'll probably change it again. Some of the tools you talk about, stretching obviously, that's a huge part of it. And then you get into some of these, like the formal movement market again. Like these are just people that have programs out there. Yeah.

- The Feldenkrais method? - Yeah, Feldenkrais. Oh man, Moshe Feldenkrais is somebody who you would really dig. So Moshe was a Israeli-Ukrainian engineer, first non-Japanese black belt in judo. Stud, he wrote a book that I'm reading, rereading right now called Higher Judo Ground Techniques. And it's from early part of the last century.

You go in there and you're like, oh, triangle. Mm-hmm. Pretty old. Scarf hold. Pretty old. Right? Ezekiel choke. Hmm. That's been around for a minute. Well, there's people doing heel hooks in like the pancreation times. Oh, yeah. Like straight up. Yeah. Breaking legs ain't new. Mm-hmm.

But Moshe Feldenkrais was also a rehabilitative expert. So he was, and you find this a lot old school, like strength and conditioning, fixing the body, combat sports is a trifecta that you see over and over and over again. But Feldenkrais method is one. You got Pilates, you got the functional movement screen from Gray Cook. Yeah.

And you got Becoming a Supple Leopard, of course, by Dr. Kelly Starrett, which was a book that I have. And Functional Range Systems by Andrea Spina. Yeah, Andrea Spina. And then Ido Portal. So you offer commentary on these things, just options that you got. And to keep people...

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Formal movement systems are just standardizations for movement patterns that you can use to organize indicators and create tools. Yeah. There's gotta be some, I think they do a better job now in the teams of like how flexible was this guy when he was 20 years old and okay, now he's 24. Now he's 28. Now he's 32. Like what, what does he need to work on?

Because otherwise, you know, like you said, we're just acting like a turret. You're not touching your toes. No. And we don't want to touch our toes. So we're not going to touch our toes. But then guess what? At some point, you've got to bend down and grab something and you hurt your back or you whatever, blow out your hamstring. So...

All right. Last section of the book or the last one of these things that you the last last of the dashboard is is matter. The third and final category of the M3 model model is matter deep beneath the surface layers of our bodily experience. Our biochemical compounds that give the human body form and structure. These chemicals and molecules combine to produce cells, tissues, organs and structures that produce the symphony of life. The hippie just posted up again.

The symphony of life, behavior, performance, and disease that we experience. Everybody knows the first step to becoming a professional athlete is to choose the right parents. It's not the only thing that counts, but as big wave surfing legend Laird Hamilton says, there's chickens and there's hawks. You might not be able to turn a chicken into a hawk, but you can make a super chicken. Freaking accurate from Laird. Direct quote. Yeah.

So this is really, you start talking about some of the readings that we're going to get and this is, you talk about the biomarkers, you talk about getting people's blood drawn. I mean, when I joined the Navy in

getting blood work wasn't even a thing. I don't think I'd never even heard of it. And now you can get it really easily done. It's a lot easier. What gets done and for who and when is still a little tricky. But outside the wire, guys go and get deeper looks. And some of that stuff's important, man, because you can catch things early. Like

people don't think about in that field, you expose a lot of heavy metals. There's a lot of lead exposure. Oh yeah. You know, even if didn't even, and they're in talking about downrange, talking about training, like tens of thousands of rounds, like sometimes per week. Oh yeah. Right. It's a lot of lead exposure. Insane. It's insane. Yeah. Yeah.

And once you get this blood work, I'm going to fast forward a little bit to some of these tools that we have. Sleep, the foundation of biological health. We have outpaced our biology with a flood of artificial stimuli, the most obvious being light.

It's not that people in the past never stayed up late. Fires and candlelight allowed for nighttime activity, but today we live in perpetual daylight of our own making, one that disrupts the very system designed to regulate our sleep. Meanwhile, the digital world keeps us engaged long past the point of fatigue. I really like that sentence. You're tired, but you stay awake.

Whether through doom scrolling late-night emails or the endless availability of entertainment, we are no longer just ignoring our biological signals. We are actively overriding them. That's pretty scary. And you also go on to say that sleep deprivation is torture. The title of this section is not hyperbole. Prolonged sleep deprivation is so severe that it has been used as an interrogation technique.

It's difficult to study the long-term effects of sleep deprivation because there are ethical limits on deliberately keeping people awake to observe when their systems begin to fail. Obviously, we do like five and a half or six days in basic SEAL training. It's pretty tiring. That's the word.

And different people have like different reactions to it. You know, I was always a person that didn't need a lot of sleep. Very, very lucky. This is probably the only genetic you want to talk about, like a chicken versus a hawk. Like I'm chicken all day long, but I was like an owl when it came to not needing sleep, which was a huge advantage because I could kind of make up for some of my other shortfalls. Like I know you were talking earlier about the guy that's now running the Virginia, uh,

Virginia High Performance, I don't know if we're saying his name, but anyways, I went through buds with him. Dude, that dude was a hawk. He was just an absolute stud at everything.

And so the only way I could keep up with guys like that was just like, oh, I just could go to work earlier and work harder. That's kind of what I did. But talking about sleep here, you talk about a bunch of things that will help people sleep. You also talk about this was something I'd never heard before. Sleep latency. The time it takes to transition from wakefulness to sleep is a critical but often overlooked measure of sleep health. Ideally, falling asleep should take

10 to 20 minutes, reflecting a well-regulated sleep drive and circadian alignment. Extremely fast sleep onset under five minutes may indicate chronic sleep deprivation, while prolonged sleep latency over 30 minutes can suggest poor sleep hygiene, stress, or circadian misalignment. Understanding sleep latency offers insight into overall sleep efficiency and

and nervous system regulation, making it useful tool for assessing sleep quality. I've never thought about that before. I never really heard of it. Yeah. I mean, so sleep latency is, you know, like you just said, it's this transitionary period where the brain is going from the state of wakefulness into, um,

Light sleep first, which there's two, there's light sleep one and light sleep two, and then into the first cycle of deep sleep, which is our longest opportunity for like tissue healing and basically cleaning the brain. Well, those transitionary phases affect our

the quality of the sleep architecture in that deep sleep cycle. So sometimes we assume that because we've had loss of consciousness, then everything that comes after that is just golden. And it's not like that at all, that those, the step down, basically dropping the gears in the system is,

is really important for being in the right gear of sleep for the right amount of time and getting contiguous exposure, especially to that first cycle of deep sleep. Now, does it mean if you have like one night of one or two nights of, I was really, really tired. So I fell asleep and my latency was really short that everything's broken. No, it doesn't mean that. But if you find that

you've tracked your sleep for nine months and no matter what the conditions are, you drop into sleep in two minutes. Something is awry that requires, that may require further investigation. Um, same thing on the other end of the spectrum. Got to check that dashboard is what I'm thinking. Exactly. Well, and I mean, that's, you know, when you have a dashboard and an indicator light is flashing, all it means is look over here. Mm-hmm.

That's it. Doing a freaking assessment. Exactly. That's all we can surmise. We don't know the whole picture just because the check engine light is flashing. It just means it's flashing. So look, then you can decide, is it just a sensor problem? I'm getting a false positive or do I require further investigation? The only way you can make that distinction is by looking. So that's everything in the book wraps around that idea. Look, you got a bunch of sleep problems.

you know, advice on what's going to help you sleep better. Uh, whether it's the light that you're exposed to, the temperature, the nutrition, you know, when you're eating those kinds of things, you got the ups and downs of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. Do you drink rarely? Have you ever drank a lot? No, it's not my, wasn't your jam.

And so just a lot of really good advice on sleep. And then of course, exercise, exercise does not solve all of life problems, but it sure helps to, but it sure seems to help with most of them, including sleep. Yeah. I, you know, if I don't get to work out for whatever reason, it's like, I can always feel like I don't want to sleep as much as I, I got a good training session in this morning before I came here, like a 90 minute, I was like,

The bike at the hotel had puddles under it. And I was like, this is going to be a good day. Like I'm, everything's going to go well and I'm going to sleep well tonight. And I knew like I knew based on how that went, I was like, I'm good now. That's what we like to hear, man. Talk a little bit about naps. The classic power nap. I'm a fan of, I'm a fan of the power nap. You, you advise a 30 minute power nap. I've always liked a shorter power nap than that.

That's just like the average of the data. I like shorter to 15 for me personally is the sweet spot. It's called a, we call it a puppy nap in my house and I get harassed and harangued for a puppy naps. Your wife is like, Oh, sleeping again. Are you? Oh yeah. What does it matter? My wife is a hilarious person. She,

could roast anybody you could possibly think of. And so she calls it puppy naps because I religiously fall asleep on the couch in the afternoon and my dog is like alert to all the preconditions. And she's like, I'll watch him. He'll be like, oh. The puppy rolls in with you? Yeah, he sleeps with my feet. Yeah, he's going to come in. I mean, he's not a puppy anymore. He's like six. But she was like, he knows.

So are you going full like kind of preplanned siesta scenario? Sometimes. Sometimes I will. That hasn't always been a realistic part of my life, but I work from home most of the time unless I'm on travel. So especially if I have like a high psychological workload, I'm working on some IP or developing a contract or something like that, I'll set a timer.

And for 15 minutes and just, and I can shut down, I have a gift. So I could go to sleep during this podcast. If I really wanted to, I could sit back and close my eyes with the headphones on and everything and just be like, I'm out. And then you'd be like, yo, you need to leave. Like we got to get out of here. Um,

Serves me sometimes. Others not so much. Again, that was another thing. I can sleep anywhere and if I don't have anything to think about, I can be like, boom, shut down and get it done. Fast forward a little bit. Muscle mass. Stronger people are harder to kill and are just more useful in general. That's

Coach Rip, Rip A Toe. Starting strength. Gotta love him. Absolutely. Body composition isn't just... I see Echo's like perking up over there. He's all fired up. He's like, wait, what? Oh, we're talking about freaking muscle mass? Someone say deadlifts. Did somebody say deadlifts? Someone say curls. Did someone say easy curl bar? Uh...

Body composition isn't just about maintaining a healthy range of body fat. Equally important is having strong, healthy muscle tissue. Sarcopenia. Am I saying that right? Yeah. Sarcopenia.

Or age-related muscle loss is a normal part of staying alive for a long time. Doesn't seem like much of a reward for staying alive, does it? Not only does skeletal muscle offer the more obvious physical benefits of being able to move around the world with more strength and vigor, but it also yields new and surprising benefits to our biochemistry that are important if we want to feel and perform our best for the long haul.

While it is normal to see muscle mass steadily decline with age. Gonna protest that? Echo Charles? Let's just say it's debatable sometimes. Check. Working hard to keep as much as possible is a Sisyphean burden worth pursuing. You got Dr. Gabriel Lyon calling muscle our health insurance policy. So we're lifting. Lifting. Gotta do resistance training. Yeah.

While lifting weights is the most efficient and effective way to gain strength and muscle. There's a muscle building activity for everybody, whether it's body weight, calisthenics, barbells, kettlebells, Pilates, or jujitsu class. We're in the game. Resistance. That is resistance. And you go through how each of one of those can be utilized, whether it's calisthenics, whether it's kettlebells and dumbbells, barbells.

You talk about eating for muscle mass and body composition, protein intake. The rule of thumb for daily protein intake is one gram per kilogram of body weight, although women and anybody in their 50s or beyond who wants to maintain or build muscle mass may require more. That's the word on the street. That's my first time hearing that. Yeah, that's from Dr. Lyons' work. So she just said straight up, if you're a little older...

You need more protein than these young folks do. Oh, because he got less testosterone or something? That's, to be honest, the specifics of that biochemistry is outside my wheelhouse. My best understanding at present is because there is less anabolic activity. So having a higher volume of protein coming into the system.

boosts anabolics. My understanding of the biochemistry on that particular topic is milk and steak. Yo, let's go. I knew steak was going to come. You got aerobic, aerobic, a section here on aerobic health, you know, energy, the different energy pathways, and then measuring how we're measuring these oxygen delivery, resting heart rate, heart rate recovery,

And then the tools that we're going to use, steady state zone two training. Zone two training is performed by exercising at an intensity that maintains your heart rate at approximately 60 to 75% of its max. Now it says the common recommendation for general population is an hour to an hour and a half or to two hours per week. While aerobically adapted might need more. What do you think about that? Is that enough? You got Peter T in here as well. Yeah, I think... So this is my...

experience or my understanding based on the data that I've seen the people who know more about it than than I do and then my own personal experiences the amounts that are given are based on broad Generalities in the general population I think if you really want to know how much you should do you should measure and you should see where do you stand in the first place and then

Implement a plan and then remeasure and decide if any more than that is worth the squeeze. So for me, I did a VO2 max test at Old Dominion University. You can pay like 125 bucks or something like that. A lot of exercise phys labs at universities can do this.

You go in, you pay some money. They put you on a metabolic cart, right? So you have a gas exchange monitor going on while you're either cycling or running on a treadmill. You go through usually some kind of ramp test where you're increasing wattage. They look at gas exchange, heart rate, rate of perceived exertion, and then you get a score. And then the score puts you in a percentile for your gender and age group. Mine was...

So mine was 46 and they said 46 for a guy who's six, three, 240 pounds to be moving. That kind of air is pretty damn good for my age. And I was like, okay, I feel good about that. Now I'm doing a little bit. I'm only doing two days of zone two a week, which is probably 60 minutes, but I'm, I'm trucking. I'm putting work out probably in the fall. I'll test again for me to do.

180 minutes a week. The ROI is not there. Yeah. What do I care? Like I'm good. I'm in the, like when I'm in the 80, I'm in 85th percentile for a 44 year old man. Hmm.

There's so much other stuff I would rather do. So for me, with the time I have in my life, it's like, do I want to not train jujitsu in the morning to go do, to ride on a bicycle? Yeah. Hell no. You know, uh, you talk about hit training and then you talk about low intensity. Again, there's so much information in here. Get the book so that you can, um, just so that you can, you can actually understand the stuff. Um,

Rather than just the introduction I'm giving. Section three, tuning the human. Health is not a state. It's a practice. And that's MC Schraffel. That's right. Got one right. That's a miracle. Nice. Tools can be indicators. Indicators can be tools. You may have noticed that some of the items I talked about in section two can be used as both indicators and tools. If...

If and when you find one of those things, you've got yourself a keeper. One example could be sun salutation from chapter five in the function check section. I talked about how sun salutation be used as a litmus test for daily movement. You might find that if you practice it with diligence, it will be a way for you to gain access to new ranges of motion too. I like that idea. And Echo Charles and I were talking about it before you got here because I mentioned that you have this sun salutation, which is kind of like a burpee.

in a way. Cause I started off by saying, we were talking about different, like getting down on the floor and getting back up again. When you were a kid, you didn't even think twice about it. You'll just lay down and get up, like lay down and get up. It didn't matter. And then Echo was saying like, yeah, I know if there was a pen underneath this table and you were like, hey, can you grab that pen underneath the table? And he knew he was going to have to like get down on his hands and then like lay down and reach underneath. Yeah.

There was, you know, it was a thing he had to think about. It was one of those things. And when you're a kid, you just don't care. Like, oh, get that pen. You're there. So I was saying that some of the things that's good as like a life thing

thing to always be doing is getting on the ground and getting back up again. And so I started with a burpee. I was like, yeah, you know, just doing a burpee, you're getting down on the ground, you're getting back up again. But then I was like, yeah, but if you actually go down there and now you do a couple movements while you're down there to stretch out and then you come back up, you're basically doing this sun salutation, which is a yoga move. Yeah.

and then you use that not just to say, well, how do I feel when I get down and get back up again, but also I can expand my range of motion because it's a stretch that you're actively doing. Yeah, well, so two things. One, this is one of the things that another...

thing that I think makes jujitsu in particular so valuable is you're getting up and down from the ground so much when I said the exact same thing we're like that's I said that's one thing about jujitsu like you're you're on the mat you get up you get up down up down up down and while you're doing it you have to manage other stuff right it's not at your it's not at your own pace it's like something will happen to you if you don't do it so I think that's really a major benefit of jujitsu being comfortable on the floor

But as far as sun salutation goes, not only are you getting up and down from the ground, but you're dealing with some cardinal shapes of the human body, right? So you're reaching overhead, you're looking up while you reach overhead. So you have full global extension of the body. Then you have to fold forward, you compress yourself. So touch your toes or your knees or whatever, right? But you're folding forward. So can you flex your spine?

Can you do a lunge, which is hip extension, which hip extension is like one of the cardinal predictors of low back pain.

So hip extension, then you have down dog, right? Which is, can you support weight with your arms over your head? So down dog is like the top of a dive bomber push up. Then you have up dog, which is the opposite. It's the bottom of a dive bomber, right? So your hips are on the floor and you're extending, extending your hips and your spine. So can you open the front of your body? Then you have a lunge again. So you repeat the other half on the other side of the body.

And you combine that with the rhythm of breathing. And not only do you get a sense of those ranges, what you also get is your ability to connect those shapes together smoothly. So when I transition from down dog to up dog, or I transition from a lunge to an up dog, as I change these shapes and I connect them together, how smooth does that happen? Does it feel fluid and graceful? Or does it feel like I'm digging through mud?

And that might change over time. And it also might change based on what is your experiencing in life currently. One thing, so for me, this has been a personal practice for probably 25 years. I rarely miss a day of sun salutation. How many do you do? Two to four. And how long do you spend in each stretch position? One to five breaths. Depends on what I'm feeling going on there. Like, do I need to have a better sleep? No.

Do I, should I believe that? That, that thing's protesting. I'm going to spend two more breaths here and go, what's the total time allotted per day for sun salutation in the morning? Seven minutes. My general habit is brew coffee while coffee is brewing. I do sun salutation, so it's totally accessible. Um,

But I found that it's a great monitoring system. So I figured out when I was tracking my sleep for a while that I have a direct connection between the quality of my deep sleep and how stiff my low back is. Regardless of any other input, travel, type of exercise, hydration, deep sleep for me is directly connected to lower back stiffness.

Um, you go through a section here, spring cleaning challenge as an audit, and you talk about using a formal challenge as a sort of spring cleaning for your body and mind can provide you with interesting types of critical feedback. And then you talk about

how to come up with a, you know, with a challenge that you're going to do. Um, decide what the challenge is, make it an actual challenge, say it out loud to at least two or three people who care enough about you to hold you accountable, plan a time and a date when this challenge will occur, stick to it. That's actually the part of the challenge. Um, and then choose what to choose for challenge. What am I avoiding? I really like the, the prompt of like, what do you not like doing and make that part of the challenge. Um,

what don't I want to do? What causes internal friction for me or where do I really need to grow? That is awesome. So that means echo Charles, you're not allowed to do bicep curls for challenges. Oh, and you know, I had to read this section. Systems are greater than discipline. All of this dashboard and toolkit stuff sounds nice, but are you supposed to put together a,

But how are you supposed to put together feasible units of action in the real world? If you browse social media or watch YouTube, you may have noticed a trend towards discipline. There's no shortage of characters telling people to tighten up and get disciplined. On one hand, I get it. This is a natural balancing of the scales.

and wayward behavior that accompanies some perceptions of modern Western culture. Instant gratification has not been good for us at large, and personal responsibility must be a core part of the answer. This same philosophy gets misdirected towards failures in health behavior. That is a wholesale misunderstanding of the problem in my experience. Doing it because you're supposed to

the attitude of people who already did it discipline strictly speaking is obedience to rules whether those rules were self-imposed or administrated or administered by an authority

The life cycle of discipline requires mental energy to not break the rules. And that energy is like all energy used by people finite. When I talk to, when I talk to individuals who seem disciplined, I usually find two things behind the curtain. First, most first, the most rigid among them are engineers and

They have proclivities that drive them toward higher degrees of conscientiousness. Second, and more important for our broader discussion, they have systems in place. The fittest, healthiest people I know organize their lives so that they are pushed toward habits that create outcomes they want. They wake up in the morning, their running shoes are by the door with the socks they're going to wear already stuck inside them. They don't buy a family-sized jar of peanut butter and then stare at it hoping they don't eat the whole thing. They just don't buy the peanut butter in the first place.

Building systems to help keep you on track works on a micro level, like putting a foam roller near the bed, but it works on a macro level too. Coordinating strategies for mind, movement, and matter on a larger scale starts to build a lifestyle of performance longevity. So there you go. There's a lot of these characters out there. I've seen them.

They're out there talking about this one. So, Jocko, it was nice talking to you. No, good stuff. And, you know, clearly, peel back the, what do you say, peel back the curtain on me, and I've already talked about some of the systems that I have in place in my life, which is really, if you really break it down, my whole life is one big system of, you know, making things work.

for me to be disciplined. I have a gym in my house. I have mats in my house. I have a gym at my gym. I have, you know, I have mats. I mean, I obviously have a jujitsu. I have family members that all train jujitsu. I have an ice bath. I have a sauna. I have a foam roller in every room. I have dumbbells. You know, so I've done all these things that you're talking about. And yes, all those things make balance

discipline, almost unavoidable. Exactly. In many cases, it's almost unavoidable for me. And you know, I was saying this the other day, like I don't, I like working out. I like doing jujitsu. Now look, do I feel like going to train every single day? No, I don't feel like training every single day. Of course, there's days where you're like, dude, I do not want to go train today. But I know,

100% I will feel better when I'm done. And I have experienced that enough that it compels me to just go, oh yeah, I don't feel like training right now, but I know in an hour and a half when I'm driving home from jujitsu, I'm going to be so freaking stoked. Or I know when I get done, like I'm taking a shower after going surfing, like I know I'm going to be so stoked that I went surfing. Same thing with working out, same thing with everything. But yes, developing systems is a good way to,

overcome your lack of discipline. Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, having systems in place doesn't exclude the necessity of discipline, but starting to think about how to organize your environment, like you were just saying, in a way that moves you towards discipline behavior, it won't even feel like discipline. I think often when people hear discipline, what they think is like

this rigid fight with myself that I constantly have where there's always internal friction that I must be at odds with when I pursue health and the health realm. This is how it gets presented often. Like you don't want to do this. You got to go, you know, you better do it. And it's like to some degree, yes, but also, you know, like I've been helping my, my sister reclaim some of her health and it's like,

Buy a kettlebell. Put it in your living room. When you see it, lift it up. And then it doesn't have to become a thing with a special time. And before you know it, you're doing 100 swings a day. Now you're doing 200 swings a day. Now you're doing 500 swings a day. And that kettlebell is not even heavy anymore. And then this happened with her over the last year. And then yesterday she texted me. I just went and got a gym membership. Yeah.

And it wasn't like she did some, she didn't like join a fitness monastery. She, I helped her build systems to make it easy for her to become disciplined. And what are the things that I can manipulate in my environment? And that can be with obvious things like physical exercise, but it can also be, you know, like when I decided like, I'm going to write this book.

Started to tell people who I knew would expect it from me who like it were close to me that I would trust it and I cared what they thought So that when they go, oh, hey man, how's that book coming along? I don't want to look those people in the eye that I respect and go. Oh, I haven't really been working on it I want to go I wrote another chapter. I'm working through this section I'm doing research on this

So that's the system that I put in place so that every time one of those people would ask me, I had something honest to say. And it would keep me on those really rough times where like some days you write and it's like a waterfall and it's just coming. And then some days you type five words and you hate them and you erase them and you do that over and over for about 90 minutes.

And then the next day you come and you're not, you're not always sure which one is going to show up, but it doesn't matter. You do it. You do it. And I put a system in place. Hey honey, eight o'clock every night when we're done with dinner for the night, I'm going into my office and I'm going to write for 60 to 90 minutes. And that then it's setting up a system with your family, setting up a system with your work, with your physical environment at home. And then like you said, it doesn't even feel right.

like discipline because you've staged the relationships, you've staged the gear. Then all you have to do is your part, which is to take action. Yeah. Do the manual labor. Yeah. And I say that because like for me, writing is very, I'm not in some, uh,

Intellectual state when I'm writing no, I already know the words and I just have to put them on the freaking piece of paper in front of me It's just typing. It's work a typing. Yeah, it's work and that's the same thing with like, you know working out on some days You know not I'm just doing the thing that I don't going through the repetitions because I am supposed to be in there doing the repetitions That's not ideal. But that's the way it is. Sometimes sometimes I'm doing jujitsu. It's like I

Labor. All right. I hope freaking this dude does. Oh yeah. Here he comes. One of those roles. When you peel back the layers on anything, eventually what shows up is work. Yeah. A good friend of mine. He was, he worked in the factory. He worked for Andy Warhol in the eighties. So he mixed paint for Andy Warhol and,

And he told me when he got there, you know, he'd done a bunch of art stuff and wrote some songs and stuff. And he got there to work in the factory and he was like, oh shit, it's just labor. And he said, that's the hardest he ever worked in his life was for a painter. Yeah. And that he's like, literally we're just like mixing chemicals and like in,

in like full coveralls and boots all day and he was like and this is art it's just work that's he must have some freaking wild stories oh man he lived in uh his name is robert waldrop he was in uh lived in manhattan in the early 80s when it was yeah like when it was a real cowboy town and he was like yeah you i'd walk home at night and be like oh there's another car fire just like

normal chaos there. Yeah, when I was a kid, I would go to, I grew up in Connecticut and Maine, but I would take the train to New York and it was like total chaos in the 80s, like insanity. And yeah, luckily it's a lot nicer now. I say that some people go, I wish it would have stayed the way it was. But man, it was not that great. It was pretty bad. Now look, is it getting overly, you know, maybe a little too nice? Possibly.

But yeah cycles. Yeah, I guess it'll do something um chapter 8 Developing a personal health system and co so we talked about you know Discipline coming from or be systems being better than discipline Well, how are we gonna put that system in place tuning the human? It would be nearly and this is what this is like the kind of what you were getting into and

Raising your eyebrows as you were talking earlier tuning the human it would be nearly impossible to count How many times over the course of my career I've been asked questions like these which stretches are the best ones for me to do What breathing technique should I use? What is the best way to put on muscle to which my answer answer would often be let's find out together

Fast forward a little bit. Developing an experimental mindset is about having the willingness to try things out and see what happens. And this is going back to the research of MC Schraffel.

and they did an experiment showing that an experimental framework supports user autonomy and competence, and that participants develop health practices from the interventions that are still in use long after the intervention is finished. That means an experimental approach to health and performance yielded better long-term results than the insertion of a standard protocol. So instead of just being told this is what you're going to do,

Having this experimental framework was better. Why Shrafel found that that more Participants took ownership over their own process and developed knowledge skill and practices that made them feel capable of interpreting information regarding the exploration of their own health and

When we go through the process of exploration, we find more meaning in the things we learn. This is true for all of life, so why would performance, longevity be any different? So basically, just giving someone a program and saying do this was a lot less effective than saying, all right, let's find out the best way to make this stuff happen. And just like any plan, when you're working with a team and you let the team come up with a plan, they're going to have ownership of that plan and they're going to be more engaged in it.

And that's the same thing that happens here. Yeah. And, you know, to use jujitsu again, let's do it. If if you just had like the old 1980s, like Kata and jujitsu and you never rolled, you never had to prove what you knew against a live training partner. Like how confident would you think you would be in real life? And what we found out was that

not very that if you don't train with live resisting human beings you don't actually know what you're doing and that's because you have to figure out what works for you under those conditions and the only way to do that is to try stuff reflect on what worked and what didn't now

Does that mean you can't talk to people who know more than you? Of course not. You can say, hey, what was your experience? And then you integrate that with your own experience. And then what do you do? You try again. And what will happen over time is you will fail smaller times.

And you will fail faster. But there's no not failing with this stuff. I think with health in particular, people want a moment of utopia where they're all of a sudden healthy. I'm healthy now and there's no more work to be done. Nothing works like that.

You have to keep sharpening a knife if you use it. Now, if you let it get super dull and deformed, a lot more work has to be done. But if you run it over a strop every day, then once in a while, you got to touch a stone. Same thing with skill with health. You have to try things on a regular basis. You have to tinker. You have to see what works for you. And then you will take ownership over your own process.

- Yeah, and just to reiterate what you just said, you know, you said don't take your experience or anybody else's as gospel. In fact, a good habit is to look for ways in which your initial impression might be wrong or incomplete.

And then I'll close out the book with this, what you say in this section here. You say, "My hope for you after you engage with the material in this book is that it will become an integrated philosophy for how you think about maintaining your health. That these concepts and ideas become so second nature to you that you nearly forget what they are called unless someone wanting to know how you stay so darn consistent with your health practices asks you about them."

Don't become too anchored on any one example that we've explored. Ask yourself, what is under the surface here? If there's a specific indicator or tool that works well for you and continues to do so over time, fantastic. But I do hope you'll keep, as Bruce Lee said, researching your own experience.

So that's what we got. Check engine light. And then it goes from there. It goes into a workbook. Now is the book that just came out? Cause I have a printed copy from a PDF that you sent me, but the book comes out today. Today is the workbook included with the book. Is it a second document? Is it the same document? How is it set up? They're bound together. Okay. So it's one big, yeah. So they're bound together. And those are experiments that are,

specifically anchored to each one of those categories of mind movement and matter. So there's three experiments for each one. So you can try some specific tools from the book, but more importantly, to learn how to experiment so that if you listen to Andy Galpin or Andrew Huberman or Rhonda Patrick or whoever else, and they recommend a protocol, you can go,

How do I figure out if that works for me? What KPIs will I look at? How will I look at trends? Is this really...

reliable and consistent method for me in my life is this tool robust and then you might go well I do want to work on cardiovascular health but the way that they recommended it might not work for me under these conditions what's the next thing I can explore and now what you're doing is developing skill instead of going oh man she's supposed to be really smart and I tried it and it didn't work so I don't need to be aerobically fit which is what happens

Oh, I tried this sleep thing that Huberman told me and it didn't work for me this time. And so not only do I not think that this part of sleep is not important, but he's not as credible to me now. And that's silly because none of those people, none of us people know the individuals who are listening. And so I'll bring up my friend Stu McMillan again. He says an individual is not the average of individuals.

So when we collect data, we're looking at statistical averages and means across time. But you are an individual and what works for you when it comes to the specifics is going to be different. And the only way to know is to try. Again, jujitsu is another great example. Like

Maybe you like a certain sweep from closed guard. The exact way that you set it up might be different than me, even if we both like it because we're not made the same. You're more experienced. We have different limb lengths. So I don't know. Here's a cool thing to take home from that in jujitsu. I always, when I'm trying to explain to people like a move and I'll say there's 10 things that you have to do right to make this move work. And I can only teach you five.

Now there's certain moves. I can teach you six of those things. There's some moves. I can only teach you three of those things, but the rest of those, you got to figure out on your own and you got to figure it out by drilling it, trying it, and then upping the resistance and eventually going live because you know that you can't, I can't, the most articulate person in the world, there's some part of a move that they, no one can explain it.

And plus, like you said, it's different for you because you got longer arms than me and you got less experience with this thing and more experience with that other thing. And you got this weird pain in your thing over here. So there's all these little adjustments that you got to make. And oh, by the way, you have a whole different series of moves that set something up nicely, which you can use here. And so I can teach you five things, but then you got to work it. You got to experiment with it. And that's what I called it in your workbook. I was like calling it guided experiments. And then also you have

like a systematic grading criteria and systematic surveys of how did the experiment work

What was the outcome of the experiment? Because it's cool to like, oh, Rhonda Patrick said to sleep like this. And I tried it. I didn't really like it, but I have no idea why. Because then you can't make an adjustment. Because it's probably because, oh, yeah, well, Rhonda Patrick said to do this at night. Well, you know, she doesn't know that my wife is doing the wordle thing at night. So even though I'm like want to have the screen off, you know, my wife's over there. Okay, well, I didn't count. Rhonda Patrick didn't know that about my wife. Of course. That she did wordle at night. So now I'm going to throw out her whole protocol. Yeah.

No, it's like oh, oh my wife does wordle at night. So okay. Here's the thing thing I can do I can ask her hey when you do that Can you can you do that on the couch before you come to bed? Oh, okay cool like what are the things that we can do to make these little adjustments and that's what the surveys and the log basically is a logbook that you've got in the workbook that allow people to understand and track

what these experiments revealed and then hone and adjust the protocols so that they're functional for you because everybody is different and The just like jiu-jitsu arm lock for you is different for jiu-jitsu arm lock for me and the defense is different for you different for me well the food that you eat and the zone to training that you do it's all gonna be slightly varied and we have to experiment to figure out how to

Modify and modulate our protocols so that they work and are idealized for us as individuals Exactly, and this is a damn good place to start with this book called check engine light tuning your body and mind for performance longevity So what's next? What do you got next? You're already working on the next book. Yeah, I'm so I have a manuscript that I wrote about

about breath control. Okay. That's probably two years old. Now, actually when I was stalled on this book, I was, I was stalled for a bit and then I was like, well, I don't know if anything's going to happen with this, but I was so in the writing headspace that I just sat down and, and wrote,

started writing this other book out, probably I'll revisit and change it. But a specific area of expertise that I have is breath control for stress management and for sports performance. And so it's been a long time coming. I've been teaching this probably 10 years in lots of different places, both in special operations communities and

and in martial arts communities. And I think that there's a real opportunity in the performance and health environment for a lot of this very usable information to be made far simpler. There's even with the most educated people, often too much esoteric language used.

too much jargon and it makes it hard for people to begin and then experiment. So another cornerstone of this book will be how to experiment with the things that are suggested for yourself. And that's a core component of my entire philosophy and health and performance is I am not the arbiter of answers for people. My job is to,

to help you make sense of what's happening, and then to help ask better questions, to help design better and better experiments. I'm a guide, but I don't have a special tablet somewhere that lets me know the best way. I still do strength and conditioning for some athletes, mainly high-level professional grapplers, and every program I write is an experiment. Now, I'm careful because some of these guys have money,

serious money on the line. So I don't do things that where they will get hurt or at least reduce the likelihood, but this is a biological organism. I don't know what the outcome is going to be in eight weeks or 12 weeks. We start trying things and then we communicate and change and having flexibility and adaptability and it being about learning is really the goal for me.

the biggest sign of success with an athlete I'm working with is they need me less and less. And the problems they come to me with are more and more complex. And I'm like, Oh, and more specific, more specific. We're going in the right direction. This guy's asking me something that I got to like, hold on a second. I need to look that up in this textbook. I haven't seen him for five years. What's the, what's like the curve look like for grapplers? Yeah.

or you want them a certain amount of strength? Is it aerobic capacity? Like what is your focus on? - So I organize it pretty uniquely. I think of course, foundationally is conditioning. I mean, I think strength is important, but nobody wants to die tired. And just in terms of confidence, if when you're talking about MMA or you're talking about grappling, conditioning is king.

You can have like the guy with the best bench press, but if you can weather that storm and he gets tired smoke, are you breaking conditioning up into like five minute rounds type thing? Or it will depend on the athlete's experience to some degree. If it's an older athlete with a long training history and they have a good aerobic base to begin with, I'll only prescribe them enough to maintain what they have. That's pretty rare. Um,

we're looking at zone two. And for us, we actually call that sale. So I work with standard jujitsu quite a lot. So that's Greg Souders. He's the most hated man in jujitsu right now, but a dear friend of mine. And he's, he's hated because of the ecological approach. Yeah. He's in the car. He's an iconoclast. So I, I, I'm tracking. No. And I've been, I just was talking about this the other day cause my daughter competed at, um,

or not a tournament, but WNO. Who's number one on flow grappling? And she's been doing a lot of ecological training. And so they were asking me about it. And, you know, I was, you know, I was saying that this is,

This is not an entirely new concept by any stretch of the imagination. No. And we have been doing, what do they call it? Constrained learning forever. Echo Charles and I were doing, hey, get out of my guard. Hey, if you pass my guard, restart here. Hey, you can only do the arm lock. Hey, you know, we've been doing this stuff for literally decades. For decades, we've been doing this.

So I think, you know, like anything, it's kind of gotten a little bit crazy. And you can take it to an extreme. There's an extreme version of it where I'm not going to show you any moves at all. That's like the extreme version would be, hey, we're just going to do jujitsu and I'm just going to play this game and I'm never going to tell you how to do anything. That's an extreme version.

I will tell you that I taught kids for a very long time and that is a very, it's a fairly effective way to teach kids. Hey, you're in between their legs. You got to get out from between their legs. They will experiment and they will try things and they'll do it very rapidly and they don't have any ego. They don't care if they get beat. They don't care if they get swept. So it's no big deal. And they learn very quickly that way. And plus they don't have the,

Probably the cognitive capacity to remember put your left foot on the hip turn your spin your right Like calf towards the their back press down on your calf Vic that's a lot for a little kid to remember Where if you're like grab their arm and put your legs around it they can do they'll remember that Or even better let hey if you can get your legs around just their head in one arm, you're gonna win Okay, they can try and figure that out but

So I the the ecological approach to learning is not something that is brand new. I'm surprised it's so controversial I think it's controversial just because people like to argue about things or yeah for sure and have you had a chance to talk with with Greg in person like at an event or anything I have not he's like the nicest person and loves jujitsu and

as much as anybody I've ever met, like he loves it. We'll talk about it forever. Super generous with his knowledge is completely open to be proven wrong. You got to come correct though. Cause the dude is insanely intelligent and super well read and watches a lot of tape. Like he knows his shit. Um, but I've been working with his team for the last three years. Um,

Deandre Corby, who just won the Sapatero, has been a strength and conditioning client of mine for five years probably. Certainly one of the most disciplined human beings I've ever met in my life. I mean, he's going to IEGA Worlds in a couple days. Nice. And I'm like, hey, man, how's the travel? What's the travel rundown? And he's like...

B, C, D, like dialed in. He's super dialed. But when I work with those guys and we look at conditioning, you know, one of the projects that I'm sort of, that's like a side hustle because I don't have enough to work on. I like to have a side project is trying to develop a framework for needs analysis for grappling. And I think that's something that really hasn't been done for the sport

I think there's some good strength and conditioning coaches that are doing a pretty good job, like Steven Sahoon, this Australian guy who does a really phenomenal job with mixed martial arts, obviously UFC, PI, but when we're talking about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which is very quickly becoming a real professional sport, I don't see a lot of people in human performance doing a legitimate needs analysis for the athletes,

And for the sport and breaking it down to like, what are the demands of the sport really like posting, clinching, level changes? How do you communicate those demands to the athlete and the strength and conditioning environment in a way that helps them connect that capacity with their skill? So like for us, we use things like force, flow, sail, momentum.

squeeze, grind, regenerate, and we'll have blocks of training or days of training where that's the intention of the day. So if it says sail, sails use wind. So you know that's aerobic capacity is coming. And sometimes we have high wind and sometimes we have low wind. And that will express the intention of the session to the athlete because whether it's combat sports or combat sports,

The personality types attracted to those things tend to be very similar, which is whatever's in front of me, I will work as hard as possible at this thing and give 100% effort and grind it out every time. Now, personally, I would much rather work with that type of person and then reign it in. I don't want to be the cheerleader who's like, come on, do another rep. I'm not interested in that. But speaking to the athlete about the intention, right?

of a block of exercise helps them know where to focus their effort. So when it's like, "Hey, I really need you to stay in zone two," because that actually gets a specific training adaptation. It's not you being a wimp today to keep your heart rate between 145 and 155 beats a minute. It's because this gives us a specific outcome. And so then it's like, your job today is sale.

If you don't do your job today, then I know you're not doing your best. So your best is staying in this zone. And I was like, oh, check. So that's how we break up their training. And then we're also, Greg and I are working together on some case studies and we're doing like using sports metrics. So bringing in like really, really basic sports science to look at how it can influence your

skills training for high level grapplers. So how do we use things like HRV and sleep and levels of soreness and mobility? So subjective and objective metrics to inform how you organize practice and how does that make sense practically? Not just what do the numbers say, but what

How does a coach who has to stand on the floor and make sure this athlete is ready, how can they use this to influence training decisions? So that's what we're working on right now. And that's like my fun side project is, is sports science and strength and conditioning for grappling because I personally love the sport. Like it's probably the only thing I really watch other than the UFC or, you know, whatever one. And, um,

It's a really hard puzzle because it changes all the time. Yeah. And plus, cause I've trained a lot of grapplers over the years and like different, I mean, just like who, what is that person? Like,

there's some people that have the natural cardio and the natural, or this other person has the natural explosiveness, this other person. And so you got to kind of compliment their, their strengths, focus on their weaknesses a little bit, but you don't want to abandon their strengths because that's what, that's their go-to. Yeah. So it's a, it's a different puzzle for each person and, and figuring out what the best way to maximize. And something I've always said is like, I can't grapple with you hard enough that you're going to get

the benefits beyond just grappling. Like you could, you're not going to, you need to do something else. Well, one of the other things that happens to in grappling is when you're new, you're inefficient. And so there's a lot of conditioning, but as you get more and more experienced, especially as you widen the gap of skill to most of the people relative to you, this might be different in a professional training room, but often what happens is you get very efficient. You

You know your game. So you're not going to reach the same physiological thresholds that you will to get a training outcome as sitting on a bike. So being fit and being conditioned are not the same thing. Being conditioned means I can handle the demands of this environment so I can keep participating.

grapplers who grapple often are very well conditioned. But then you put them on a stationary bike and you slowly increase the amount of wattage and I blow guys up at like six minutes and they don't understand. They didn't realize like, oh man, I wasn't using a very efficient energy source. Right. And so, and it's comfortable. My, uh, my buddy Sloan just went to Thailand for like a few months to train Muay Thai and

And he's like a competitive grappler. And he got over there and he's like, yeah, when I first showed up there, like, I know I'm in awesome. I'm fit. I'm in awesome shape. But you start even hitting mitts or sparring and it's just like exhaustion. And then he came back, you know, his first like couple of days back. He's like, yo, like, you know, he's a great grappler and he's strong as hell and he's obviously in condition, but he's

He's like, oh, I felt tired because I haven't been grappling as much as I did. So you get that. What you train in is what you're training in. Yeah. And the other consideration with combat sports athletes that's really similar to working with special operations community is the bottom of the pyramid that supports all of that is being healthy. And health is...

Health emerges when you're robust enough to keep doing all the other stuff on top of the pyramid So it's like plenty of athletes are what I've started to call Operationally robust but biologically brittle so like I can get in there shut off all the noise and do the work But getting sick a lot boy. I sure did get staff again. I got another fungus thing having trouble going to sleep My temper is coming back

My weight's a little volatile. And so underlying that is this fragility. And what does that do? Does it mean you can't go out and win? No, it doesn't mean that. What it means is your opportunities to keep winning are reduced. Right. And that's performance longevity. There we go. Bring it back to the title of the book. Does that get us up to speed? Yes, sir. If we're in Virginia Beach, where should we get ice cream?

Oh, be free. Okay. Go to be free. Be free. What is it? Craft ice cream. Be free craft ice cream owned by retired Navy SEAL Chris Fetis. That's like the best thing I've heard in a long time. Like, hey, I'm going to pursue my dream of making ice cream. So Chris and I are...

jiu-jitsu training partners that's how we know each other we've been training together for eight years we walked in almost the same first day i swear to god we shook hands and i heard about ice cream immediately and ever since he's like making ice cream out of his garage then had a little shop then had a kitchen and now has this like beautiful storefront they have an amazing bakery

like he's doing really well he's been doing a lot of you know he's talking in public so probably people who listen to this will be familiar with who he is and what a great dude and to get out of the teams after all the shit he's done and been through and then to make ice cream is pretty

That's pretty, pretty fucking awesome. Yeah. Uh, and people can find you, um, Wilson health and performance.com. Yep. Uh, you're on the Instagram at the check engine light and you've got a sub stack. Yeah. Check engine light. Um, and then what about, what about,

Virginia Health and Performance. Virginia High Performance. Virginia High Performance. What's their site? VHPMission.com. But that's not open to the public? The gym is not, no. But if you are an active duty or veteran special operations from any branch...

And you're interested, you go to the website and you're interested in the program. You can reach out to Ollie and his team through the website. Or if you're having trouble and you're from the community, you can reach out to me directly and I will make sure you get in touch with people who can help you. Freaking awesome. And thanks to the Navy SEAL Foundation.

Man, the Navy SEAL Foundation has done all kinds of stuff for me and my friends over the years, and they are the driving force behind making these things happen, I guess paying for these things to happen. 100%. Great organization. Yeah, great, great bunch of people, the Navy SEAL Foundation. That's NavySEALfoundation.org. All just awesome, awesome to hear about. Echo Charles, you got any questions? Two questions. Oh, two questions. First one is kind of for both of you guys. What is...

Mount Trashmore? Mount Trashmore in Virginia. In Virginia Beach, there's like a trash dump and they covered it with grass and there's a skateboard half pipe there, which in the 80s was kind of an iconic thing, Mount Trashmore.

But the trash is underneath. The trash is underneath, yeah. This looks like a weird looking mountain. Virginia Beach, the topography is as flat as this table we're sitting at. There's nothing. There's no hills. It's one of the highest points in the whole city is like a 75-meter hill made out of trash.

And it's called Mount Trashmore. A little tongue-in-cheek. But it looks nice still. Yeah. It's great. It's a great park. Lots of families. Are people still skating there? Oh, yeah. They redid the skate park. And it's really cool. I think they have a pool there. A couple different half pipes. Street skate. Yeah. My nephew. When the future primitive...

the Bones Brigade video came out and it was at Mount Trashmore. Lance Mountain tearing it up. It was very iconic in the 80s. That's old school. Yeah, Lance Mountain at Mount Trashmore. That's about as skaties as it gets. Yeah, well, you're talking skaties kid right here. He's over here getting after it. What's your second question, Echo Charles? How do you feel about chiropractic in general?

Depends on the chiropractor. All right. So the, I'm sorry. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess that's what I'm starting with in general. Cause yeah, I think you're right. Where, cause they, the initial or primary thing that I'm familiar with as far as chiropractic goes is them cracking your neck and your back and sometimes your shoulders and your hips, maybe your ankles or something like this.

But then I'll crack them ankles, boy. Yeah. Talk to the chiropractor. Yeah. And then also then you go into other stuff like soft tissue, you know, like there's like myofascia release therapy, which I actually really like. Yep. I actually like the back crack stuff too. When I was young, I played football and every once in a while I'd get like a hit. And then when I do jumping jacks, I would have to cough because it felt like my spine was like, I don't know.

Hitting my lungs or something like this. And then I go to the chiropractor and it helps or it cures it essentially. So I was like, a chiropractor, pretty good. And then, you know, this is when I was maybe 12 years old. And then, you know, life time goes on or whatever, you look more into it. And then certain people are saying, oh yeah, it's nothing. Oh yeah, it helps. And you just don't know. So...

The founder of chiropractic, Andrew Taylor, still was a pretty nefarious character, actually. And so some of the foundational ideas of chiropractic, which is vertebral adjustment for central nervous system function, are pretty well debunked. However...

there are some skilled manual therapists who go through chiropractic because it allows them to obtain a license to manipulate people. And some of those individuals are extremely skilled. Like I've met people who were like really, really good at neuromuscular therapy and like truly helped me. And I've also met some people that basically hang out of a,

a drive-through window and do like a whack and crack on anybody who says like, you know, I got any little ache, you know, whatever a house fly landed on the left side of my neck. And they're like, Oh, vertebra or I have cancer. Let me adjust your vertebra or obesity. Oh, it's your sacrum out. Or it's like the answer for everything.

I don't care what profession you're in. If the thing you do is the answer for all that ails the world, then I don't trust you as like an immediate point. But, um,

Chiropractic as a whole, like the foundational idea is pretty well debunked, but there are practitioners within that umbrella who do have valuable skill sets. Yeah. Yeah. I go to a guy named, I haven't been in a while, Chad Wells. He kind of knows all of our people. Yeah. It's called, I think it's called like the league chiropractic, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, he's the one who,

introduced me to like real myofascia release stuff and i went in with my lower back jammed it up like i was out wait that's recent no no this was like the how you say the the introduction to the the real deal see what i'm saying and this is maybe like 15 years ago maybe 10 15 years ago anyway i was out i was like bro this is like a good six month oh scenario oh yeah big time

So I went in and he was like, yeah, we'll do a bunch of stuff. He's like, you know, doing the cracks and stuff like that. I'm like, cool. And then he did the myofascial release and it was like, boom. It was like, I wouldn't say it was uncomfortable, but you could, it was like work. It wasn't like some presto, you're cured. You know, it was like some stuff, some therapy, deep therapy. So I'm like, all right. And he's like, how does it feel now? I was like, oh dang, it's actually getting better in front of my very eyes. He's like, all right, well, let's do it again. Do it again.

It took maybe like, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, which is kind of long for doing that stuff. He did both sides. And, bro, he cured it that day. I said, bro, when can I go back to training? He's like, well, see how it feels tomorrow. I was like, bro, tomorrow? I'm thinking like freaking two months from now, you know, after eight more visits. He's like, no, no, no, just see how it feels or whatever. And, bro, that thing was cured.

I was like, okay, this is like legit. So every time I get injured to the point where I'm like, oh yeah, this is gonna be a long evolution. As far as recovery goes, I go to him. - Yeah. - I hear it every time. - I've definitely had good, well Dr. Mick, unfortunately he died. He got cancer, but he was a chiropractor and a jujitsu black belt and just a freaking great dude. But he would adjust everyone for free at my gym. Like he was freaking awesome.

But he would always just hook it up and I would, you know, I'd be like have some weird neck thing or some weird back thing and he would handle it. It would always feel good. And then there was another guy. Remember that guy named Robert Garcia? He was early in and I got my arm straightened out.

excessively one time. And dude, like he, same thing, like before my very eyes was healing it, you know, 70% healed in one session. Yeah.

And he would do he would do somewhere he would like hold here and then like yeah sit down. I guess it's my old fashioned damn that shit work good and he he worked for I want to say it was Oscar de la Hoya he was like Oscar de la Hoya's guy and by the way like he was part of that camp and part of that crew and so like he didn't need to do anything else besides take care of that dude and

but that's how good he was. He was so good that he could just heal you on the spot. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff is good, but right on, man. Good info. Right on. Good to meet you. Those are your two questions. My two questions. Cool. Right on. Awesome. Rob, any, any final thoughts, bro?

uh no thanks for having me really appreciate it good chatting with you guys right on man well thanks for coming out thanks for uh thanks for writing this book and sharing these lessons with everybody and and really most important for me is thanks for all that you do to help out the boys so i really appreciate it man my pleasure good talking to you too and with that rob wilson has left the building

Leaving us with some good knowledge. Keep an eye on the dashboard of your longevity, your performance longevity. Keep your eye on the dashboard. Make sure you keep your mind right. Keep moving and keep the good fuel coming on board. One thing I can recommend really strong when it comes to fuel. Sure.

This is Jocko Fuel. Hey, check it out, jockofuel.com. We've got everything that you need. We've got protein. We've got ready-to-drink protein. We've got powder protein. We've got new flavors. We've got root beer. It just came out. Root beer float. We've got coffee and donuts, which, by the way, my wife, big H, she says coffee and donuts is her favorite flavor. Okay. So, you know, we're just saying. We've got protein. We've got energy drinks. We've got hydration drinks.

We got joint warfare for your joints. We got super krill for your whole damn system. Time war. That's what we're doing. We got everything that you need. JockoFuel.com. Check out JockoFuel.com. Somebody posted the other day a fake. They had a fake greens. Fake Jocko greens. I know it sounds crazy, but there's people making fake Jocko Fuel out there. Check out JockoFuel.com. Get the real goods. Get some deals that we have on JockoFuel.com.

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Wawa, Vitamin Shop, GNC, Military Commissaries, Afees, Hannaford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakefern, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas. You might see a wall of Jocko Fuel down there. Meijer up in the Midwest, you might see a wall of Jocko Fuel there. Wegmans, you might see a pallet on the floor. Harris Teeter. Publix, you're going to see a wall. Grab something. Hmm.

Lifetime Fitness, Shields, and Small Gyms Everywhere. If you want to bring this amazing product into your facility, email jfsalz at jocofuel.com and we got you covered. Also, we talked about jujitsu today. And like simply put, Rob Wilson said, if there's one thing you're going to do in your life, let it be jujitsu. Did he say that?

Not exactly, but he hinted at it. That's the message I got. The message I got too. So we're training jujitsu. That means you're going to need a gi. It means you're going to need a rash guard. It means you're going to need some training shorts. Go to originusa.com and get a gi and training shorts and a rash guard that is made with freedom here in the United States of America from 100% American made materials. Also, you can get jeans. You can get boots. You can get hoodies, t-shirts, boots. I already said that.

Belts belt wallets wallets boots or socks just kind of everything. Yeah, those Chelsea Boots. Yeah, you gave yours. Oh, yeah, I gave you know, give mine to carry. Yeah good for him I guess yeah, well then now they got black ones. I might have to re-engage There's a black Chelsea because you know a red or whatever. What what colors that? Yeah, those like rust or something Yeah, kind of a reddish brownish. Yeah reddish brownish and

That draws a lot of attention. You know what I mean? For me, I'm not used to that kind of attention based on clothing. So that's not really my thing. But now that they have the black Chelsea boots, might be able to hook it up. OriginUSA.com. Check it out. Speaking of freedom, discipline equals freedom. Look, we wearing discipline equals freedom. We're representing where you can get the shirts and hoodies and socks. A bunch of other stuff is JockoStore.com.

New Discipline Equals Freedom shirt. New one coming out probably in another four weeks, I'll give it. But it's in motion. Also, 4th of July, Independence Day shirt. It's coming out in a day or two. Boom, check that out. Anyway, jockelstore.com. Also, the shirt locker subscription scenario. We like subscriptions. See what I'm saying? We like scenarios. We love scenarios.

New design every month. You can sign up for that on jockelstore.com as well. Also, coloradocraftbeefandprimalbeef.com. Check them out. You need steak. You hear me say that today? Yeah. We need protein. We know that. We got two forms of protein, steak and milk. Go to jockelfield.com, get milk. Go to primalbeef.com or coloradocraftbeef.com and get steak.

There you go. You got all the protein. You should be drinking. What do you say? You should have 12 grams of protein for every one gram of body weight you have. That's what we're doing, man. Look, we got beef sticks. We got jerky. We got...

Just flank steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs. It's all in there and it's all freaking awesome. Awesome steaks from awesome people. Primalbeef.com, ColoradoCraftBeef.com. Also, subscribe to the podcast. Also, check out Jocko Underground where we can go off the rails a little bit because no one can keep us on the rails there. Yeah. It's true. So it's just there. It's $8.18 a month. If you can't afford that, we still want you.

to join us in the underground email assistance at jock underground.com also we have youtube channels also books obviously the book of the day rob wilson it's it came out today today which is what's the date today june 17th it came out today june 17th 2025 check engine light real good guidebook for your health

your mind, your body. So check it out. Check Engine Light by Rob Wilson. Also, I've written a bunch of books. Hey, Dave Burke has a book coming out. Good deal, Dave. Did you pre-order it yet? Okay, well. I'm assuming that he's going to hand deliver it to my house. Signed, by the way. So, you know, I don't have to pre-order nothing. Okay, I guess that's how we support our friends.

Tell them to drive to our house and deliver us the thing that we're trying to get into the world. You think I'm off base on that one? I think you're way off base. Order a case of them for you and your family. Good tip. Need to Lead by Dave Burke. Also, I've written a bunch of books. Kids books, by the way.

Some people are surprised that I've written kids books. Why is that? Because I look like a Neanderthal? Maybe. Kind of. I think it's more than kind of. Can a Neanderthal write about children? Well, let's think about it. Technically, Neanderthals had to have children. Yep. Cro-Magnon man had to have children. And maybe, just maybe, they had some understanding of how those children could be moved forward in the correct way in the world. So maybe if you get the book Way of the Warrior Kid...

or any of the books from that series, you'll be able to help your kid move forward properly in the world. Check those out. Also, Mikey and the Dragons. A lot of people say it's the best kid's book ever written. Yeah, I could see why they would say that, for sure. I know some people cried when they read it. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, hey, you know, I could see how that could happen to you. Yeah, yeah. Then again, some people cry easier than others.

Yes, they do. So check out those books if you want. Also, Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. We have the Muster in Orlando, but it's not until December. These events sell out. So if you want to come to the Muster, go to echelonfront.com. Also, if you want to come to council, if you want to come to Battlefield, if you want to go to the Women's Assembly, go to echelonfront.com. Also, if you want to have...

leadership training inside your organization to help you overcome whatever problems you might have through leadership, go to aslanfront.com. We will handle it for you. Also, we have an online training academy. It's called the Extreme Ownership Academy to learn the skills of leadership.

which will help you in every aspect of your life. Go to ExtremeOwnership.com for that. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. Mom only, she's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also check out Micah Fink's organization, HeroesAndHorses.org. Also Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. And also I talked about today the Navy SEAL Foundation.

They've done a ton to support me and my brothers over the years. And they continue to do that to this day through things like you heard about today. So that is NavySealFoundation.org if you want to support them. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, Rob Wilson. He's at WilsonHealthAndPerformance.com. He's also got Instagram at CheckEngineLight. And he's got a sub stack.

which is check engine light. And for me, you can check out Jocko.com and then on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink. Echo's at Echo Charles. Just be careful because that is a system that has been engineered to steal away your sleep from you. You know? Just steal it away. So be careful. Thanks once again to Rob Wilson for joining us tonight. Thanks for sharing your lessons and thanks for taking care of my brothers in the teams. Thanks to all the uniformed personnel out there that sacrifice sometimes their lives, sometimes their limbs.

They always sacrifice their time and they often sacrifice their health to keep us safe. So thank you to all of our personnel out there in uniform making those sacrifices. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, Secret Service, and all other first responders. Thank you for your sacrifices to protect us here at home and to everyone else out there. Just listen, your body ain't a rental car.

It's not on lease. You can't turn it in when it gets old. You can't just run up the mileage and upgrade to a new model. It doesn't work that way. You have one. So pay attention to the dashboard, read the check engine lights, and keep that thing maintained. That's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.