Upstream Health: Preventing Injuries and Pain Before It Begins with Theron Hall

In this episode of the Y Health Podcast we welcome Theron Hall, he is a chiropractor with nearly 30 years of experience helping patients prevent and recover from common musculoskeletal injuries. In this episode, he shares practical, prevention-focused strategies for avoiding low back pain, headaches, disc injuries, and posture-related issues caused by today’s sedentary, screen-heavy lifestyles.

In this conversation, Theron emphasizes:

• Posture starts with the low back — Proper lumbar support and simple ergonomic changes can prevent headaches, neck pain, and chronic back issues.
• Strength prevents injury — Resistance training at least twice per week preserves muscle, protects joints, and reduces the risk of disc and stability injuries.
• Aging well is intentional — Grip strength, leg strength, and muscle mass are key predictors of longevity and independence.
• You get fit in the gym, but lean in the kitchen — Prioritize protein, don’t fear healthy fats, limit mindless snacking, and think of food as fuel.

Theron’s message is simple: most chronic pain is preventable, strength is accessible at any age, and small daily habits compound into lifelong resilience.

Recorded, Edited & Produced by Averee Bates, Christy Gonzalez, Harper Xinyu Zhang, Madison McArthur, Kailey Hopkins, and Tanya Gale

Transcript

Cougar Hall: [00:00:00] Welcome to Y Health, a podcast brought to you by the BYU Public Health Department. I'm Dr. Cougar Hall, a professor here at Brigham Young University where you are a student. Parent or BYU fan. This podcast will help you navigate the world of public health. Our podcast strives to help individuals receive accurate information regarding public health, so whether it's global or local, we will discuss how it pertains to you. 

Just kick back and relax as we talk about why health. All right, Dr. Theron Hall. Dude, welcome to the Y Health Podcast, my friend. 

Theron Hall: That was my first question. Can we use the term, dude? 

Cougar Hall: Yeah, absolutely. That's 

Theron Hall: on the table. 

Cougar Hall: We need to, 

Theron Hall: we'll definitely use that. 

Cougar Hall: So you are a doctor of chiropractic with 28 years of experience, but you're my brother. 

You've got 53 years of experience as my brother. [00:01:00] Yeah. So I've wanted to get you on the podcast for so long. And I appreciate you getting outta work early on a Friday and coming down and joining the podcast. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. It's fun to be here. 

Cougar Hall: So maybe I know you well, obviously, but maybe you give us just a brief introduction to your educational background and then your career path. 

That'd be great. 

Theron Hall: Okay. So we grew up in Seattle. Unlike a lot of L DST kids outside of Utah, you're just like, we wanna go to BYU. And that's, that was kinda what the family tradition was too, with our parents and our older sister. So I came here. I graduated with international relations 'cause that was a pre-law thing. 

It's like political science, thought I might wanna be a lawyer. Turns out, well, I'm glad I didn't do that. 'cause I think the career I did was more suited to my personality and what I wanted to do. So anyways, at the end of BYUI, I told my wife to sit down. I need to talk to you. I, and I decided to become a chiropractor instead. 

I remember in those days when you're thinking about your future career, you're like, I wanna do something that helps people. Yeah. You know, that's a big deal. And it's important to me now too. Especially in kind of those years when you're a little bit more idealistic about it, [00:02:00] and that certainly has been, this has been a great career for me as far as that's concerned. 

It's been really awesome as far as you get interaction with many people every day. People are like, how do you like your job, man? I'm like, it's great. I listen to classic rock and talk to my friends all day because. I really feel like my patients are my friends, even though maybe they don't feel that way about me, but it, but you do get nice relationships over time because people will use chiropractic periodically. 

So I might see somebody once a month or twice a year, but it's always good to see them. But I think the reason that chiropractic seemed like a good fit for me is because I didn't wanna sit at a desk. You and I grew up doing manual labor. I don't mind physical labor and chiropractic is like way more of a blue collar job than I thought it was gonna be. 

Yeah, like you're literally physically tired. At the end of the day, every day. 'cause there's a lot of pushing, pulling. It exerts you physically, but that's good. I've liked that part of it. We grew up in a household that, like you were saying, we were ahead of the curve as far as being aware of nutrition and exercise. 

Like both of our parents were great examples of working out. We even, I remember like when we would sit down to eat, dad would be like, oh [00:03:00] good, we've got anti-cancer, broccoli, and we've got. Lean protein from cougar's, deer. It was all these things you didn't really hear much about until later, and I didn't realize we were being exposed to that early on, and so we ate pretty clean because we ate a lot of stuff from our garden and we ate venison and elk. 

I remember the first time I had a steak, I'm like, what is this thing? This is so good. Yeah, we were used to chewing on elk steaks. But anyway, so we did have that family history and kind of a culture in our house about being physically active. And then to be honest, part of this fitness thing for me was I just wanted to be better at sports. 

And we're just naturally very thin. And so I just wanted to get bigger and stronger. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: So I could knock people down in football. And so that kind of started the workout thing. Both you and I worked out from like junior high all the way through. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: And there really hasn't been a time in my life where I haven't worked out or done a fairly regimented fitness routine where like I go. 

Two to five times a week or something like that to work out. So that's been a big part of my life and that's translated well professionally because like I'll tell you the other day a guy came in and it was his first time and he [00:04:00] said, I feel good being here just because of who you are. And I thought that was a strange thing to say 'cause we don't really know each other. 

But he was just looking at me and he determined this guy works out and he walks the talk. Yeah. And so that just being a fitness person or enthusiast has translated well as far as giving me some authority with my patients, trying to motivate them to, Hey, make this a part of your life. It's gonna be good for you long term, and, and it's gonna make you happier now. 

So 

Cougar Hall: that's awesome. And obviously we grew up in the same household, so Yeah, I agree with all the same things. I once told my students, I said, yeah, so I grew up in a household where literally everything on the table. We grew in my dad's garden or he shot on opening day of deer season, like, and that's, and there's a lot of people living that way now or trying to really prioritize that type of nutritional approach and then the physical activity approach. 

Absolutely. I started a regular workout routine in the fifth grade as far as running, and then when I really caught onto resistance training to weightlifting, that was early in the ninth grade. And I remember when soccer finished, which was my last kind of season. [00:05:00] Seasonal. I rode my bike down to, I think it was called Nautilus. 

Remember that? Nautilus 

Theron Hall: Uhhuh. 

Cougar Hall: I rode my bike down to Nautilus and I paid $99 for a three month membership, and there were so few people going. That I think I went for two years before they're like, Hey, you need to renew your membership. So it was the best $99 ever spent. I think I got about two and a half years of my club membership there, so it just became part of something I would do every single day. 

I'd get home and I'd just ride my bike down there and do that. And then, yeah, it's just a good way to live. I think a lot of things we've talked about with my students, if you're not fit. Or it physical activity is not a regular part of your lifestyle. Then there's a learning curve and there's also just a delayed onset muscle soreness curve too. 

You're like, I don't like the way that makes me feel, but if you can get to a place where you have a certain kind of baseline level of fitness. Then you just decide, I'm gonna commit to this lifestyle. Oh, it's so much easier, so to speak. I haven't been out of shape for a long [00:06:00] time. It's a great place to be. 

But for those that this is not a regular part of their life, I do think it's important to say, Hey, there's a learning curve. The on ramp might seem steeper than it should, but once you get up there and once you get on the highway and you get up to highway speeds, you're gonna be really thankful. And then it's gonna feel really weird when you miss a day or really weird when you, oh my goodness, can't wait for Monday. 

I wanna get back and get back to my routine. So I digress. I think what I want to ask you first, the, with almost 30 years of professional experience in chiropractic, are there some. I dunno. Common ailments, chronic conditions that you see. And in particular from a public health perspective, we like, we're less treatment, we're more prevention. 

Right? And we wanna get upstream. And I appreciate, 'cause chiropractic is very much that way too, but are there some things that you saw just day after day, week after week, year after year in your practice? 

Theron Hall: Yeah, definitely. Chiropractors are known for treating low back pain. Low back pain is. Such a common thing. 

They have stats on that of how many workdays are lost and how much it costs the [00:07:00] economy. And literally half of all adults will have a serious low back episode sometime in their life. So low back thing is a big deal. So your low back is where is the core of your stability for your extremities and your legs. 

That's what holds you together. So you can do things away from your center of gravity and with the workforce shifting from manual labor jobs or jobs that are more physical. To being at a computer, you just don't have people doing very many things up in gravity that requires them bearing a load. And so you just get deconditioned in your low back. 

Second to low back would be neck shoulders, and it's the same story when, when you've heard people talk about tech neck. That's a thing I hear frequently. Yeah. People always ask me, do I have tech neck? Will you check it out? And what they mean by that is that people's head starts to be carried forward in relation to their shoulders. 

In general, when you're standing up straight and somebody said, Hey, lemme see your good posture, you would have your head over your shoulders and your shoulders would be over your hips. Hips or over your ankles. And so if you wanted to have your [00:08:00] spouse check that out for you or your one of your friends or significant others, what you would do is you stand in your normal posture and you put your finger behind your ear. 

That little bone that you feel tucked in behind your ear, that's your mastoid bone. And the general rule is if you drop the plumb light down from the mastoid bone, it should fall through the middle of your shoulder or your del, and most people are probably an inch to two inches forward from that. 

Cougar Hall: Oh, wow. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. And that has a bunch of downstream effects. Like headaches is super common. I would say that most people know chiropractic care as being a treatment option for low back pain, but across the board we probably get better results with headaches. And the reason being is because so many headaches are. 

There is a consequence of a head forward posture, and so many people are locked into their computers. And the sad thing is really, and that used to be something that was only people who had desk jobs back when we were kids. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: And now so many people have a desk job. In addition to that, people have cell phones in their hands or iPads from a very young age forward. 

And so their head is tilted [00:09:00] forward many hours of the day where it ought not to be. And so you have strain on the upper muscles of the neck, the muscles that tie your skull into your, to your neck. Those muscles, man, when they get overworked, that's a major cause of headaches. So that's a big thing that we see. 

The other thing that happens too is that people get more of a hump in their upper midback. And I think now this is one of those things that's anecdotal, it's just my perception. Mm-hmm. But since I've been doing this for several years now, I don't think I saw so many like teenage girls and boys with hyper. 

What they call the hyper kyphosis, which is an increased curve in the upper thoracic spine 

Cougar Hall: Kyphotic curve. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. Okay. As I do now, it's man, dude, you're only 17 years old and you already have a hump in your back, like you're 65 or 70. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: And that's a consequence of just not being up, moving around as much, finding your entertainment and you're spending your down hours just looking with your head forward playing video games. 

Cougar Hall: Well, in almost everything I do, my hands are like in front of my chest or my face. Yeah. Again, whether you're texting or I'm on my laptop, if I'm driving, if I'm eating. And I mean driving, especially if I'm going [00:10:00] fast or um, traffic's bad. You instinctively lean forward in the seat, right? And you do, you push your head forward two or three inches to, to scan traffic and hazards and Yep. 

I do the same thing on my motorcycle too. So you're almost everything we do almost every waking minute. I think we're more and more in that posture. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: Okay. And that's related to headaches. Is there some stability? You mentioned kyphotic, a kyphotic curve in the upper spine as if you're working in a rice patty for 40 years. 

Yeah, but no, you're just texting for the first 18 years of your life. Yeah, 

Theron Hall: exactly. 

Cougar Hall: Oh man. Other elements that you see. 

Theron Hall: So there's those things, there's those elements that sneak up on us as a consequence of sitting posture, having the head forward, not being up, moving around enough. But then there's those thi now those things, by the way, those conditions, having a deconditioned low back, a neck that's forward. 

Um, those things will set you up for injuries. Then when you go to do something, and I can tell you that the vast majority of the low back sprain strains that I see are not like picking up a kettlebell [00:11:00] or putting something in the back of a truck. It'll be some, some of the stories, man, they're crazy and they're, they're not funny, but you're like, that's the most trivial thing. 

How did that happen? I've had people, like their pencil starts to roll off the desk and then they reach and grab for it and throw their back out. When you're going up the stair and you drop a sock from the laundry and they reach down to get the sock, boom, their back is out loading the dishwasher. It's almost always a trivial thing, and the reason that is, is if you know you're deconditioned and you go to. 

Pick up something heavy to throw it in the back of the SUV. You're ready. You're somewhat ready for it. But it's those trivial things we don't think about, which really shouldn't hurt you if you've been do putting some work in to keep yourself strong and stable. Those are the things that will tweak people. 

So there's that one other injury that's common that we're known for treating would be disc injuries. Where they're almost all in the, the lower part of your neck and at the very bottom of your spine, if you do have a disc injury, the things that you would notice, like if it was in your neck, would be that your hand might start to fall asleep. 

You'll have more pain in an arm when you tilt your head to the [00:12:00] same side or you look up, you can have an ache between your spine and your shoulder blade. It can contribute to headaches. So if you have any, just for the listeners, if you have any. Neck issues that are actually giving you symptoms into your arm of falling asleep or a gradual onset of a weakness. 

Don't take Advil for that 'cause you have a window of time to get the best results if you're gonna be able to treat that. The same thing with a low back, which would be similar to the neck, but if the pain goes into the leg. And so those people that have a cramp in their calf, their outside of their foot is numb, tingly, they bend to the side and a pain zings down their leg. 

Yeah, that's usually a disc bulge where the disc is bulged down and it's touching the exiting spinal nerve that goes down into your leg. That's what sciatica is. A pain in. The SCIA distribution, which is your posterior thigh and your calf. Those things are usually treatable and they usually will get better, but if they're not treated or the disc bulge is just really bad from a trauma, there's not a lot. 

Available to you to treat that between like the things that are the most conservative and then the things that are the most invasive. So [00:13:00] what I mean to say about that is if you start to develop a weakness in your leg, man, if it doesn't go away fast, if it's progressive, you're pretty much a surgical candidate. 

And that's both for the arm and the leg. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. So yeah, this is total public health. 'cause we're all about getting upstream and early prevention. 

Theron Hall: Yeah, 

Cougar Hall: and from what I'm learning so far, our posture is huge. In preventing headaches and just some chronic weakness in the either the neck or the lower back. 

Right. But then that situation then sets you up for maybe more long-term injury, whether that be muscle weakness, which once the muscle is not firing properly and you're not getting, whatever, the innervation to that. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: I'm showing you my ignorance. It seems like things then get progressively weaker and so to turn the tide on that. 

What are the things we can do? 

Theron Hall: Yeah, so since we were talking about how this, our society has shifted from a manual labor society or doing more things outside to one where we, I've had so many patients they have, they work at a computer, they go home and they sit in front of their computer or they [00:14:00] watch TV till bed. 

And you might think that's, I would never do that. I'd hate that. Let me tell you, dude, that's the, that's a lot of people. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah, 

Theron Hall: because they're fatigued. Because they've generally started to get deconditioned in over time. They're tired mentally from work. They wanna relax, they wanna blow off steam. The way I like to blow off steam is to play video games or to watch movies with my wife or whatever. 

And then you sit all day and then you sit at home. It doesn't take that long for a. Your spine to get deconditioned, and then you'll do a trivial thing and spray yourself. Or you'll do a weird thing where you're forwarding a rotate and the disc fibers aren't strong enough and they'll, let's say that, say it this way. 

The load that should be born by your muscles and proper joint alignment fails you. And so the load shifts from the muscles to the disc, and then the fibers on the outside of the disc bulge. And then there you are with a bulge disc, possibly into a nerve root, and then you've got the sciatica and you've had a serious problem to handle at that point. 

Yeah. So anyways, because of the sitting thing, because of the downstream effects of too much sitting. The first thing we probably should talk about is posture when you're sitting. And so if you [00:15:00] can imagine how your low back has a curve in it, when you're standing, they call that a lordosis or a lordotic curve. 

Mm-hmm. That's a curve that's concaved to the back and that's the normal curve that almost everybody has. There's very few people with a totally flat, low back. There's a lot of people with a flat neck curve, but, but the low back, most people have their lardo curve. When they sit though, they lose that. It bends out like they're bending forward and, and when you do that, that will stretch the ligaments that hold your bones in the right positional relationships with each other so that when you go then to do something later, you don't have that ligament of stability. 

And so that sets you up for the injury. The other thing that happens, and this is a little bit more complicated, but those small muscles that run along your spine, the spinal intrinsic muscles, and the bigger muscles that are two big bands that run from your skull all the way to your sacrum called your paravertebral. 

Muscles or erector spin a muscles. Those muscles actually lose their ability to protect you when you need them if they're in a straight stretch state all the time. Mm. And that's like a more technical thing about muscle physiology. But man, if your muscles are stretched all the time, it's not great to have 'em postural [00:16:00] muscles stretched it. 

It will put you at risk when those muscles are supposed to stabilize you in, in gravity when you're on your, your, 

yeah, 

Cougar Hall: they're 

Theron Hall: already fully 

Cougar Hall: stretched. 

Theron Hall: They're already stretched. Yeah. So they 

Cougar Hall: can't contract the way they need to. 

Theron Hall: Okay, so first of all, that curve that you have in your low back when you're standing, you wanna try to have that sitting. 

And so what I would suggest for those guys that have to spend time sitting all the students, people with tech jobs, is you have to crank out the lumbar support or throw a pillow behind you. And so I'm a person that supposed to know a lot about posture and how to avoid low back pain. But I can tell you this, when I sit down at the computer, I'll be like, I'm gonna sit good today in literally 10 seconds. 

I start to hunch forward. So it's really hard to mentally focus on that while you're doing some other work. So I would just suggest throw a pillow behind your low back, crank out the lumbar support so that when you forget about it and your back wants to bend outward, it holds you in place. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah, 

Theron Hall: that's a big deal. 

The other thing that I end up teaching people or talking to people about a lot is that. If you want your neck and upper mid back to age to not get that hump, that hyper kyphosis or the head forward carriage, then it [00:17:00] starts with the low back. So if your low back is bent out and you don't keep that, maintain that lordotic curve that you would have standing, then your mid back is going flex more forward. 

Okay? And then your head's gonna be carried forward. So as soon as you put that curve in your low back, it pushes your head back over your shoulders. So it's all about the low back support. 

Cougar Hall: Okay, 

Theron Hall: cool. Start with that. Don't sit there and go, I'm gonna hold my, I'm gonna hold my neck backwards. It doesn't really work that way. 

Cougar Hall: So the support is huge. What about the strengthening of Yeah. Of that lower back? 

Theron Hall: So what I've told people over the, over the years is if you were gonna just do one core activity, you would want to take your spine from neutral to extension, which is backwards over the years. So many patients come in, they're like, Hey Doc, I think my abs are just weak. 

And I'm like, maybe they are weak. But man, if you wanna avoid having this back injury happen over and over again. Instead of doing a move where you go neutral forward, like a sit up or a crunch, I would just do the move where you go neutral back like a trunk extension. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: It's way more important and that's what the setting bear out. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: You just, we're gonna do one thing in the gym for your low back or for your core. The last thing you do before you walk out the door. Is get on that machine where [00:18:00] you can either sit back and there's a padded bar across your back and you push your trunk into extension, or there's that machine called the Roman Chair where you hook your legs in. 

It's the one where you'll see people hanging onto a plate and they're coming from a bent position up. That's the move to do. I would do it last because you don't wanna make your low back tired and then try to rack your dumbbells. And I've seen talk to so many people that all I did is put my dumbbells back while they were really fatigued. 

That's what they did. So do it last. You don't need to do three sets or five sets, just do one set and don't go to failure. You don't. It's not like working your extremities where you can get to the point where you fell and you're shaking. If you do that to your back, you might screw up your back getting outta your car 10 minutes later. 

So. I would suggest, do you know you still have several laps reps left in the tank? 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: When you're done with your back extensions, 

Cougar Hall: so you told me this years ago, the benefit of having a brother, this chiropractor, and I bought a Roman chair. I wanna say I paid 150 bucks something in there. It's not a, it's not the most expensive piece of equipment. 

And I do that twice a week as part of my. [00:19:00] Resistance training. I have a back day. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: My pool day, so to speak. Right. Or I'm gonna do pull-ups, I'm gonna do some, some lat work, 

Theron Hall: uhhuh. 

Cougar Hall: And that's the day where I do my curls too, kinda pulling motion. And I do the Roman chair and I actually don't hold the weight. 

And that's what I see people at the gym doing. I just use my body weight and I have a rotation. So I wind up doing that three times. And I don't even count per se, but I know the feeling where I'm like, okay, yeah. I have two more in me, but I'm gonna stop right there. I've gone too far in the past a couple times. 

Yep. I think if I count, I'm probably without weight. Just 15 to 18 is right about that sweet spot. I'm like, okay. Good. 

Theron Hall: I agree. 

Cougar Hall: I think you probably gave me that advice maybe 10 years ago. My lower back. It's total game changer. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: And especially, I think one thing that you taught me back then, 'cause I was doing sit up every day and I'm like, yeah, I really want a six pack, or I want this or I want that. 

And you're like, yeah, but you're. That's the only part of your core that you're training. [00:20:00] So you're, you're actually creating this imbalance for yourself. And so at some point you're not helping yourself anymore. Yeah. You really need to work on that dorsal side of your body too. Yeah, so we're talking a lot of resistance training and I think it's important, and I think there's a lot of people who are intimidated to start their fitness journey to go and to sign up, whether it's at Lifetime or vasa or whatever they're gonna do, go to the rec center and it can be really intimidating. 

And there's some spaces in my life that are intimidating to me, 

Theron Hall: right? ' 

Cougar Hall: cause I don't have the background knowledge, I don't have the experience and, and that can be a real barrier to entry. So do you have any thoughts about someone who's, this hasn't been a part of my life. I don't go to the gym. Any advice for that person? 

Theron Hall: I would say the main thing is do not feel bad about, maybe you don't feel like you're as fit as the people that go to the gym. You don't categorize yourself as a fitness person or a gym person. Amen. The gym is forever. Who wants to go? And I will tell you that if you had reservations about going, because you feel like I don't have that body type, I don't have experience, [00:21:00] the one I've heard a hundred times, I don't understand how the machines work. 

I'm embarrassed. I look at a machine, I'm like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that. Man, people are so helpful at the gym. Seriously, and I can tell you that nobody's judging you. Everybody I've seen at the gym that maybe is not as fit as some other people, I'm just like, Hey, good job, man. I'm proud of you. 

That's respect. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: So 

Cougar Hall: now same thing. I'm married to a librarian. You'll never walk into a library and walk up to a librarian and be like, so I've never been here before. If you do that, they will seriously hug you. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: This is your first time to a library. Right. That's 

Theron Hall: a good point. 

Cougar Hall: Because they just want more people to read. 

They're just so excited about that. Totally. Yeah. And to help you start your journey towards literacy, same thing. I did have an experience. I'm glad you mentioned that. 'cause I had an experience not long ago, I was doing a little cycle or spin class, and you have about the same eight or 10 customers that are always in there. 

The same people that are there every morning at five 30. Right. But then you'll see a new person come in and, and that's the only person I want to talk to. And on the way out, I wanna get to know their name. I want to tell 'em I'm really [00:22:00] proud of 'em. You killed it. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: And they'll usually say something like, I looked at your resistance and your watts, and Oh my gosh, like you were killing it. 

I'm like, no. Nah man, I, you were working out harder than me. You were, and I'm proud of you. So I wanna see how Wednesday too. Yep. I think that's probably what you're gonna get at the gym. 

Theron Hall: You will. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. Uh, 

Theron Hall: everybody knows that it takes hard. The hardest thing about the gym is getting outta the car and walking in or driving your car there. 

You'll never walk outta the gym and be like, I wasted my time. That sucked. You're always happy you did it. That's a good way to start your day or end your day. Whatever time you do it. It's really important for your self-esteem 'cause you accomplish something hard so you esteem yourself in a higher way. 

That's what it means. And everybody is, is proud of you for showing up and putting the work in. Yeah. So don't worry about the judgment thing. Maybe there's one person here and there, but they're not the norm. 

Cougar Hall: And they haven't been doing it long either. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. And they got other problems if they're actually judging you. 

Cougar Hall: No. You can tell the guy who's been doing this for 15 minutes. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. And I can tell you too, at least I've noticed with my patient base is that when people come in and they're leaner or they're more fit, I am sincerely so stoked for [00:23:00] them. 'cause it, it took work. And so I'll make sure that I express that to them. 

And so just realize that if you are, if you're a little bit intimidated about it, you just gotta bite the bullet and everything's hard before it's easy, everything's uncomfortable before it's comfortable. Get through that first couple weeks and pretty soon you're gonna start to feel like you belong. 

Yeah. It just takes that couple weeks 

Cougar Hall: and know that everybody's cheering for you. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. So 

Cougar Hall: cool. Exactly. Cool, because we've been there. Oh, I love it. Is that the type of advice you give to other people or just your little brother? 

Theron Hall: No, that's exactly what I tell my patients. Make sure that you do your trunk extensions first, or your Roman chair, and then you could do rollouts for crunches. 

If you wanted to, there's two more moves technically for a core. Yeah. And that would be something where you do a lateral bending move. And that would be like holding a dumbbell in one hand and laterally bending both ways while you're only weighted on one side. The other thing would be like a trunk rotation where you can hang onto a cable, step out away from the machine. 

And then you wanna get in your position like you were gonna swing a baseball bat where your shoulders are over your hips, you have the lumbar curve, and then you can start to do rotation, you know? From one From A to B. [00:24:00] Yeah. Somewhat maximally rotated to the left and you'll finish somewhat maximally rotated to the right and do several reps that way. 

Just like you were talking about with your low back extension. Leave a few reps in the tank, you don't need to. It's not failing with a dumbbell curl. There's no consequences. Yeah, there's consequences when you overdo it with your core. Like you could tweak yourself later doing a trivial thing, but then you're doing a move where you go from neutral back, that's extension, neutral forward. 

You sit up your crunch, they call that trunk flexion. You're doing a lateral bending. That was the one dumbbell thing. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: And you're doing rotation. And then if you were gonna do one more thing that I would consider core move, it would be something where you kick your leg. Back into extension. So that would be like, if you can imagine hanging onto the island in your kitchen and you kick your hill straight back with a pretty much a straight leg. 

And as you kick that back, you'll fill your glute gauge. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: And then if you actually keep your head up as you do that, then you'll fill your low back and your glute gauge. So the reason glutes are so important is because one, now it's such a popular thing with females in the weight room, everybody just talks about glute workouts. 

Yeah. It's just hip thrust. It's, it's a big trend right now, but [00:25:00] outside of the recent years where it's been a big trend, and that's mostly for younger people, glutes are neglected, and when you sit, you have your hip flexed. So your glute is lengthened. So your glutes are turned off while you're sitting. 

When you're standing, your glutes aren't even really contracting unless you squeeze your cheeks. But the real action of your glute is too. Extend your hip, so it's moving your heel behind you with a straight leg. And then the other action of the glute is to externally rotate the femur, which means if you were to sit there and your toes were facing at 12 o'clock, if it was my right leg, I would wanna rotate my toe to three o'clock. 

So as I'm extending my heel, I'll rotate my toe out to about three o'clock. So by the end of the motion, when my hip is fully extended, my leg is rotated outward. Does that make sense? 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: So you'll notice when you do that, oh yeah. I feel my glute when I kick my heel back when I, but when I externally rotate at the same time, all of your glute contracts, 'cause that's your deep glutes. 

Now, the reason I bring that one up though is because about half a low back pain is actually sacred iliac and stability. Which is another consequence of sitting too much. So if you have a sitting job and you're not working your glutes, you're just waiting to have an SI sprain and you're just waiting to [00:26:00] have a, have your low back become sprained when you do a trivial thing. 

So on leg day, you either do it then or I would do it with your core stuff. If you're not doing leg specifically, you should still hit your glutes and people would be like, BA, but I walk for my legs. That's not really working. Your legs, you need to do something more than that. If you want to age better than your, some of your neighbors or your colleagues, you just gotta do. 

Keep your legs stronger. And that's been a thing that's been talked about a lot recently in light of certain studies that have come out where longevity is closely paralleled with leg strength. So keep those legs strong and there's reasons for that we might talk about later, but being able to catch yourself when you start to trip. 

Being able to have a certain amount of muscle mass for reservoir, for glucose, 

Cougar Hall: right? 

Theron Hall: Keeping up your metabolic rate to keep you overall lean. If you hit your legs a couple times a week, you are gonna be more of a calvary burning machine. You're metabolically much more active by hitting those leg muscles. 

Cougar Hall: And just the impact for health span, like you're saying. 'cause I think in one of my classes we talked about a loss of [00:27:00] approximately two to 3% of muscle mass a year after a certain age. That's an age that I'm, I've already exceeded. And the messaging to the students. Was simple. It's, Hey, you're 22 years old right now. 

You got about 10 or 12 years to get ahead of this. Like waking up when you're 55 and thinking, I'd like to be really active in retirement, that's great, but you needed to work on that 20 years ago to actually 25 years ago. So that was the messaging to my students. I don't know if you agree with that, but like early, build that muscle mass early and then maintain it because just genetically and with endocrine system and hormones, it's gonna drop off and you're gonna. 

Yep. It's a losing battle at that point. Right? But if you start out with more, then you lose a little bit, you'll still be okay. If you start out with relatively little muscle mass, you're gonna be in a world of hurt way earlier than you wanted to be. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: It sounds harsh when I say it that way. 

Theron Hall: No, but that's true. 

And I've seen it said a few different ways based on different studies. But generally by your fourth decade, your thirties, women are starting generally losing four [00:28:00] pounds of muscle per decade, and men are losing six. And so like you said, and now that's, if they're not really training much. People that that do resistance train and they make a habit of it, they'll be stronger in their forties than they're in their thirties. 

So it's not like your strength goes down. You will over time lose some. If you're not training specifically for it, you will lose some power. Like I used to just jump up and grab the rim. Now when I look at the rim, I'm like, dude, that looks horrible. You know? Or you know how we used to jump outta the back of a pickup? 

I don't jump outta the back off the tailgate anymore. Yeah. So those things that create a lot of impact, you'll stop doing those things because the joints give out, but you can maintain your muscle and continue to grow muscle. And that makes me think of something I used to always teach in this anti-aging class I would do at work, and you may have heard of this in public health, there was this study, it's way old from the eighties. 

It was at Tufts University. Where the researchers were sitting around, they're like, I wonder if we could get good results if we strength train people in their eighties and nineties. And the researchers are like, some of 'em are like, dude, you're gonna kill grandma if you do that. Yeah. You can't do that. 

It's just a bad idea. And they're like, why? And so anyways, most of the studies, as [00:29:00] you guys know at universities, it's a student body, so it's people that are like 20, 22 years old, but they always get your results for body composition. When they weight train, they decided to do it with the 80 and 90-year-old. 

And the results were pretty astounding. So even though your hormone profile's gone into the toilet, unfortunately you can still build strength at that age. And they had these cross-sectional MRIs of the thigh, and so it almost looked like those hams that you see. Yeah, I know that's gross to say that, but you could see the cortex, the femur thickening. 

You could see less fat and more. Lean mass, more muscle. And these are people that are 80 years old. They had a 9% increase or something like that in lean mass, and the strength was ridiculous. You would only increase your lean mass by nine 10%, but they literally double their strength. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: When they're that fragile. 

And so it, but it decreases. Trips and falls. Frailty in general increases cognitive function. So like you were saying a second ago, it is true that you wanna plan now for how you wanna be when you retire. Think about it when you're young. I know that we've heard other people's talk about reverse engineering. 

What [00:30:00] you, what do you wanna do? Do you wanna pick up grandkids when you're 75? If you do, this is what you need to do right now. This is the kind of grip strength you need to have. This is what you need to build to pick up off the ground. This is what you need to put over your head. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah, 

Theron Hall: so you wanna be thinking about early on, but at the same time you can still get really respectable gains and strength and function in your later decades. 

I will tell you that this is something that I, I think about quite a bit because I've just seen it so much over the years where especially men do this, but they'll be like in their sixties maybe, or fifties, and they'll tell me in a, it seems like a proud way. I weighed 180 5 in college. I still weigh 180 5. 

But I have to tell them, I'm like, yeah, you weigh the same. Your composition is wildly different. So you don't have very many quads. You don't have much going on with pecs and lats and arms. You have a bigger belly and skinny legs and arms. So you are, you're 180 5, that's great. You're not two 40, but you're not the same. 

You need to have the right composition, not just be a certain weight. And that's one of the dangers, and you guys probably talk about this in public health, is like some of the BMI stuff. It's just not that important. It's really. [00:31:00] What's your composition? Mm-hmm. What's your function? Mm-hmm. What's your metabolic health as a consequence of your composition? 

Cougar Hall: No, you're exactly right. I tell my students with BMI say, Hey, it's a very nice kind of low level introductory tool for a population, like a population assessment. Like you wanna assess 365 million Americans, you're just gonna ask their height and weight. 

Theron Hall: Yeah, 

Cougar Hall: I get it. But if you're talking about an individual like me, my life, the BMI is nice. 

And then from there, I want to triangulate that data. I want to go get a this scan or that scan or sit in a BOD pod, which is what we have here on campus and actually look at my percentage of body fat, which is my body composition like you're talking about. And that is a revelation 'cause some people are low on the BMI and then their body fat's actually pretty high. 

There's a lot of people though that are, they're high on A BMI. I've had BMIs of 26 and then my body fat's eight and they're like. Whoa, dude. Okay, so we, I'm not overweight then if I look at that composition. So that's exactly what we wanna say in public health is [00:32:00] triangulate that data, get a few other perspectives and really look at that. 

I think what we're talking about as far as the strength training, the resistance training, what that's gonna do for injury prevention and through the path of causeway there, it sounds like, is really being able to have alignment, have a proper posture, but to be able to strengthen that core. But I think we mentioned once a few minutes ago, just the metabolic impact of that too. 

So we haven't talked at all about nutrition, but as we talk about metabolic health, and you talked about how if you can increase the size of your glutes, wow, what a storage area for energy, right? Yeah. For glucose, and then what that muscle mass is burning as far as fuel throughout the day. Just really keeping you metabolically healthy. 

How do you look at nutrition from a chiropractic perspective as you've worked for almost 30 years with patients? I've told my students in the past, I'm like, I, I'm not sure that you can out train a poor diet. And I don't know if you agree with that, but I've told students that before. I've also told [00:33:00] students I exercise to take care of my skeletal system, my muscular system, so I can maintain proper posture. 

So I have energy, so I have stamina, endurance and power, have all these things while I work out, but I actually don't work out to lose weight. I dial in my nutrition when I wanna lose weight. So those are things that I've thought and I've taught for a long time, but to have a professional in front of me who works in this space, like, like you're the tip of the spear as far as healthcare. 

You're actually working with patients. Tell me how you see nutrition and how you combine those things. 

Theron Hall: Yeah, to dovetail the talk on resistance training into nutrition. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: I echo what you just said. Where you get fit the gym, you get fit with your physical activity, but you get lean in the kitchen. 

Cougar Hall: Okay. 

Theron Hall: And I agree with you a hundred percent, especially if you are, if you're one of those people that can like mindlessly throw stuff in your mouth, like a handful of m and ms chips. Man, you are not gonna be able to outwork that. And you've seen those charts before. Most people have where it's, how many calories are in three Hershey's kisses, dude, I can eat three [00:34:00] Hershey's kisses so fast. 

And then you see how long it takes on a treadmill or on a swimming pool or on a spin bike. You're like, oh dude, that was brutal. I don't think I can outwork that. So keep that in mind when, first of all, when you're eating stuff, think, man, this is these calories. It's gonna take a lot of work to burn them off. 

They have had a bunch of studies, you probably know more about this than I do, but I've read some articles on this once where. They had a, and it's common, it's more common actually among women, but what they would do is they would do a physical activity and they would feel like that justifies the muffin. 

I go on a walk with my friends and we stop by the coffee shop on the way home, but we got our work, we got our steps in you. If you're doing this, if one of the goals of that morning walk or to go into a step class with your friends was to get leaner, and then you stop and get a muffin and a hot cocoa or whatever it is, man. 

Cougar Hall: You just erased. 

Theron Hall: You just erase a lot of work. Yeah. So it doesn't mean that you're not fitter. And, and I've noticed that when I've been in a few races, like the 10 Ks and stuff like that, and marathons even, you'll see people and you're like, I would've never thought that guy could run a marathon. 'cause they will not have the right body composition, but they're certainly fit enough to do it. 

[00:35:00] Now you, there's always a break off point. If you actually get really good at marathoning, you don't see any heavy people doing it. But a lot of people can do it, especially like half marathons, 10 Ks. And they're way overweight. They're fit enough to do it. But you obviously, putting all that time in on the road is not making them thin. 

And that's because of that concept. We just talked about 

Cougar Hall: that. Yeah. The body composition, that ratio of lean mass, right to adipose tissue. It sounds like you're able to separate that from, say, cardiovascular fitness mm-hmm. On the ability to, yes, you can. To bring in oxygen sufficient enough to produce a TP and use that for fuel. 

Yep. But if a person's objective and in public health, the objective is clearly both of those things. We want to improve cardio, respiratory fitness. And we want to have healthy mitochondria and metabolic health, but we also care because there's such a strong correlation between body composition and chronic disease that we might not always be using terms like overweight or obese, but if we can look at are [00:36:00] you over nourished undernourished or is your body composition in a ratio that predisposes you to chronic disease? 

So it is something, I guess my point is. I like to tell people that, hey, public health doesn't care if you're swimsuit ready. Most people I know think they need to lose four to five pounds, but public health is not ultimately concerned with that. But we are concerned with general trends, and the general trends are not favoring public health and not favoring health outcomes and longevity and health span. 

So to be concerned at some point about our body composition, I think is vital. And that's where I feel like now we need to talk nutrition. Yeah. I guess is my point. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. A couple things is, the first thing that I would suggest people think about is that food is fuel. It's not just for enjoyment. People might think I'm neurotic. 

I don't think I'm that neurotic about it, but I have a constant accounting going on in the back of my head about the things I'm eating and, and I think I've just developed that over time. When you're 19, you can eat a whole pizza and go to bed and [00:37:00] wake. And these, especially young men, you'll see, they'll just be, they'll be like, dude, that guy is so lean and he just eats. 

A whole pizza for dinner and stuff like that. You can get away with that for a certain amount of time, but you can't once you get probably in your mid to later twenties, I would say for most people. Especially when you start, when you're not working a manual labor job and then going home and then going to the gym. 

I remember when we were in our twenties, we would paint houses or I worked at a loading dock and we came home and eat dinner and then we would go work out. And that's, that sounds horrible to me. Now I'm like, dude, at nine o'clock at night, I'm not gonna the gym. Like when you and I used to, you change some of those things around as you get older, but the point being is that food has to be. 

Fuel to you at some point. And that doesn't mean you can't go crazy once in a while. If it's a Super Bowl and you want to eat little Smokies wrapped in bacon, go for it. It happens once a year. I do wanna eat 

Cougar Hall: that. 

Theron Hall: I know you do, but for the most part, try to change your mindset first a little bit. Say what fuel does my body need? 

The other thing that I always will suggest to people is that make sure that you're prioritizing protein. So the first thing I think about with every meal is, okay, what's my lean protein source? If I have one here? [00:38:00] And then we all know what the protein sources are. The good protein are usually animal products, so eggs and different types of meat. 

And then I do live on a lot of like mixed nuts and those types of things, and they have good fats and protein. Second one we were talking about the other day is don't be fearful of fat. We were raised in the generation that was fearful of fat. I remember when I was in college, there was the snack products that came out and Snackwell was all about cookies that had less fat and more carbs. 

And that's not that long ago. We had things totally backwards just 25, 30 years ago, and now we know it's the carbohydrates that will drive. The process of making you gain weight and making you have more inflammation, not the fats. So don't fear saturated fats. And then the third thing would be is like if you're gonna eat your carbohydrates, try to eat 'em in a more natural form. 

Not as much white bread or cold cereal or cookies. Oh, these are just my carbs. These are my cookies. I would try to get 'em from. There's kind of two sources of carbs. There's what they call fibrous carbs and what they call starchy carbs. If you're eating fibrous carbs, that's the carbs you can pretty much eat a ton of and it's not gonna affect your waistline. 

[00:39:00] Broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, lettuce, all that stuff. Yeah, those are your fibrous carbs. Starchy carbs are more like grains, sweet potatoes, rice. Those are the main three sources. Those ones are more likely to spike your insulin, be easier to digest. So our spike, your blood sugar, which results in an insulin spike creates more inflammation. 

So a good way to think about it, and I take this from Barry Sears book, the Zone Diet. Yeah. The Zone Diet's not new, but I love the Zone Diet. And what the Zone Diet does is if you took a plate and you divide it into third, it's kind of like the peace sign in the middle of the plate. You want about 40% of your calories to come from fibrous carbs, about 30% to come from protein and about 30% to come from good fats. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: So it's not too far off from like a Mediterranean diet except for it's increasing the protein slightly. He was talking about was regulating your hormones. So he is talking about your glucagon, your insulin, and then a bunch of smaller hormones in a class called I Carcinoids. And those are important for inflammatory processes. 

And so when you look at your plate, that's what I would suggest you do is be like, okay, here's my lean protein. Okay, there's some [00:40:00] fiber stuff. I got my fiber, I got my. Broccoli or my salad or whatever, and then I've got like a starchy carb, and that would be like your sweet potato. For example, if you're wanting to lose weight, what you do is you shift from the starchy carb to more of the fibrous carb, and then where you're like, I thought I needed my carbohydrate for energy and stuff like that. 

Then what you'd wanna do is stack your carbohydrates around your workout sessions. 'cause right after your workout, that's when your muscle is thirsty for carbohydrates to replenish your glycogen in your muscles and your liver. It's important to have an insulin release to drive nib, animalism if you're trying to build muscle. 

So that's a great time to eat it. The really Dan, the danger with carbs is if they're simple carbs, which means they're digested quickly and you're snacking on them frequently. And I've been to offices where they have candy out. Like Mary, she always keeps a bowl of peanut m and ms are a desk or little Snickers, and she does not mind if you stop and talk to her and take a hand. 

Yeah. Every time you go by, you will never get into a fat burning zone. If you're snacking on candy, because a lot of people don't understand this, [00:41:00] but there's two pancreatic hormones. You'll have insulin release when you eat some carbohydrate, and that's important. It's one of your three anabolic hormones. 

You die if you didn't have it. And but that's an anabolic corn, which means it drives storing of calories and the utilization of those calories for quick returns. Like when you need it right away. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: When your blood sugar starts to go down, your body's, oh, we need more sugar, but you're not getting it. 

Then your pancreas will release glucagon, and glucagon does the opposite. It will pull. Start stored carbohydrates in the form of glycogen from your muscle and liver, and start the process where you break down fat and put that into your bloodstream for energy. So if you're going along in every hour or so, you get a handful of m and ms, or you're snacking on chips, or you have your soda soda's, the worst. 

If you're sipping sodas all day, especially sugary sodas, you're never gonna get in a fat burning zone. So you need to let yourself get slightly hungry. You're not gonna die. You're gonna actually have glucagon release and anything that's stored, you're gonna start to burn that. And that helps maintain your composition over the time. 

So 

Cougar Hall: I love it. It's so interesting 'cause I took a class in 1994 and [00:42:00] a legendary professor here at BYU and students would ask him about weight loss and he'd say, there's so much out there. And he goes, here's the only thing I'm gonna say. If you're not hungry, you're not losing weight. You need to be hungry. 

You need to get comfortable with being a little bit hungry. Mm-hmm. Doesn't mean you have a bad relationship with food. You have a good relationship with food. Food is your friend. But if you're trying to lose weight, you need to be, you need to be hungry. And I think that's 1994. So fast forward 30 plus years, all the things that have come and gone as far as different weight loss approaches and dietary approaches. 

And he's still dead on, man. You need to be a little hungry. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: And the other thing you mentioned that's been helpful for me. And you mentioned a little thing in the back of your head, which is just keeping track, almost a little calculator, like just some basic accounting, and I didn't hear you say you're counting calories, but I heard that you're just keeping track of your dietary behaviors throughout the day. 

From some of the things I've read, and I'm not an [00:43:00] expert when it comes to weight loss and nutrition, but some of the things I've read are like, Hey, that might be the most important behavior is you don't need to set some lofty goal about this particular macronutrient, but you need to be very much aware. 

Of everything that you're eating, track it. Just track it. 

Theron Hall: Yeah, 

Cougar Hall: and I think there's a couple things that happen, right as you're tracking. Just if you start doing your budget with your finances, you're like, oh, okay. I had no idea that we had these three or four subscriptions that were 

Theron Hall: mm-hmm. 

Cougar Hall: Adding up to 350 bucks a month. 

So just that awareness that impacts your behavior. So anyway, I'm going off on a tangent there, but a lot of what you've said really resonates with me and I hope it resonates with our listeners. 

Theron Hall: I was gonna say, if people were listening to this and they wanted to take something away from that little thing that you just said, it would be, don't be neurotic about it. 

You don't have to count calories that much, but just have a general accounting going on where there's, you're aware that you're not doing mindless eating, and then you know when you fill that time when you're getting [00:44:00] hungry, if you absolutely need to eat something. Then try to have a protein and fat mixed with it. 

So if you don't mind eating mixed nuts and uh, like a cheese stick or a meat stick or cut up chicken that you're keeping, you know those things are gonna be much better for you and they're gonna level out your blood sugar. You're not gonna bonk near as hard. There's times when I've. Just had like a energy bunk, big time at work, like when I'm just working really busy and it's like six o'clock at night and I still gotta see six people and I'm like, oh man. 

And I start to get a cold sweat. If I ate a handful of M and msm or I just eat some kind of candy that's available. I'm gonna feel better for five minutes and I'm gonna bonk even harder. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: So if you eat something that's simple like that, it's digested very quickly. Your insulin will spike, it'll throw energy into your cells, and you'll be fine for a second, but then they're gonna bonk right away. 

You need to have something that digests slightly more slowly and has some proteins and fats with it, and that's what helps it digest more slowly, by the way. And there's more of a steady energy release. So one thing about cravings is if you can get the fats and the proteins in there, and you get accustomed to eating that, you're gonna [00:45:00] find your cro, your, uh, your cravings go down. 

Yeah. And you're gonna, yeah. You're gonna be less likely to gain fat because it's just a hormonal thing. You're not, you're not having such an insulin spike that you're starting that storage process. 

Cougar Hall: Oh, I love it. 

Theron Hall: And that's like a quick way to say it. I'm leaving some stuff out. 

Cougar Hall: So let me do this 'cause I've taken a lot of your time. 

And we've talked about a lot of stuff from resistance training. We just added unexpectedly some nutrition there, which is really cool. And I think really helpful because I think these things really need to dovetail, as you said. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: But we talked a lot about posture and stability, stabilizing muscles. 

Maybe give us a couple. Do you have two or three of kind of your big take homes? If someone has listened to this and they're like, that's a lot of really good information, but I'm not sure what to do with that right now. Could you give us some actionable items on the way out the door? 

Theron Hall: Sure. So the first thing is if, especially if you're a student or you're somebody who has a job that requires you to sit in front of a computer, something like that. 

Make sure that your ergonomics are good 'cause it's gonna save your, save you some injuries and it will save you from those things that are more chronic, like low [00:46:00] back pain, hands falling asleep, headaches. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah, 

Theron Hall: getting a posture alteration over time. That's really hard to fix. So make sure the ergonomics are good. 

In general, like we talked about. Just to re do a recap, you wanna have your lumbar curve supported the same curve that you have when you're standing. You should have, when you're sitting, you wanna have the top of your monitor about the level with your eyes. And then there's a rule of nineties, which means to say that your arms are hanging down at your sides, your elbows are about 90 degrees. 

The degree of hip flexion, your femur going forward is about 90 degrees from your torso, and then your knees are about 90 degrees going down. So sit in that type of posture as much as you can. I'll have people come in and they'll have. Headaches or trigger points like in their traps, and they still don't have their workstation set up. 

I'm like, dude, you spend eight or 10 hours there. Just set that thing up. 

Cougar Hall: Are you a fan of standing desks? 

Theron Hall: I am a fan of standing desks. As long as the desk raises up with the monitor and at the top of the monitor is about eye level. 

Cougar Hall: Okay. 

Theron Hall: If you're standing up and you're looking forward and leaning on the desk, it's probably not gonna do much. 

Cougar Hall: Okay. 

Theron Hall: But what I would suggest to people is if you do have a sit stand desk, then. Set your timer like every 20 minutes, go up and down, half hour, something like that. [00:47:00] They do have some good studies. The ones I saw a right of Scandinavia, they seem to be slightly ahead of us for repetitive strain injuries, and they just have people change postures like every 20, 30 minutes and carpal tunnel just goes away, or chronic shoulder, neck pain goes away, trigger points in the neck and the traps reduce you. 

You just gotta change your posture. We're not meant to be doing the same thing and locked in for two hours in one position, right? And then you wonder why stuff hurts. Something that we didn't talk about so far today is the, the fact that musculoskeletal movement, moving your muscles and joints, having a certain quality of motion, but also certain frequency is really important for pain blocking studies show that the people are more flexible, have the least amount of pain. 

People that are the strongest have the least amount of injuries. So you wanna have a good marriage in your life between. I have decent mobility and I have decent stability or strength. 'cause then I'm not gonna get hurt and I'm not gonna have near as much pain. So those two things. So there's some sitting ergonomic things for sitting. 

Other things that I would take away would be, I'm gonna work out with resistance training at least two days. [00:48:00] So pick your days, man. Maybe it's like Tuesday, Friday. I do resistance training, and the general idea is that you wanna hit a body part twice a week. So if you went in and you're like, man, I gotta work my whole body in one session, you can do it. 

You don't have to train like a bodybuilder where they do like six or 10 sets just on arms. You go in there and you do two sets of arms. You might do two sets of curls and super superset that which means to do a set in between where you alternate body parts. So antagonistic muscles would be like biceps, triceps, pecs, lats, hamstrings. 

Quadriceps. So you're doing back and forth work. Mm-hmm. And that's hard at a gym that's crowded 'cause there's people sitting on the machines with looking at their phones. But if you're in a situation where you go back and forth quickly between those two and it, it makes it better because you don't need near as much time to rest because I don't need to rest my biceps for a minute or two. 

I'm going right to my triceps. And it's for hypertrophy to look good, to have lean muscles. You don't need tons of rest. If you wanted to get between your sets, if your goal is to get strong. Take a bunch of rest in between, like seriously, three minutes. I'm just way too impatient for that. I'd probably be stronger if I [00:49:00] waited a bunch between my sets, but I can't stand doing that. 

I just go to the next thing. I just walk to whatever's next. Take a couple breaths and start again. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah, but impatience aside, some people only have 20 minutes. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: I think we're trying. Right now the most recent data that I've seen is about 25% of Americans are hitting that, that bare minimum as far as resistance training, which is two training sessions a week. 

So one outta four Americans are doing that. And then, and. That's just the frequency. We have no clue about the quality of that training session. Yeah. But so that means three outta four aren't doing this. And so to come with them with a 60 and 90 minute workout that they're gonna do, we're, that's probably not gonna happen. 

That's a difficult ask for someone who's not doing anything at all, but to do a 20 minute training session, the way you've described super sets, I'm not resting 'em. I'm actually not. I don't even have my phone near me. Right. Just, I'm gonna do these antagonistic muscles. Go back forth. Yeah. Yeah. So you're doing it 'cause you're impatient. 

You don't wanna wait three minutes for a TP to, for the halflife of a [00:50:00] TP to come back and give you that full strength. But you're boom and you're, if you do that, you can be done in 18 minutes. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: And do a really good job training all, all your muscle groups. I think, 

Theron Hall: and let me give an example of a, a workout that I've liked when I don't have time, but I wanna. 

Get a little bit of work into, and so keep in mind one of the reasons you'll do that is to not have atrophy of your muscles. To make sure that your metabolic rate stays up, you're gonna burn calories for a longer period of time after resistance training versus walking on the treadmill. And that's probably something you've taught your students about that post oxy excessive post oxygen consumption thing, which means to say after resistance training, you're gonna continue to. 

Crave more oxygen to get yourself back up to oxygen saturation in your body. So you'll continue to burn calories for up to two days after you train, especially if you hit your legs, whereas you return quicker to metabolic normal, just doing like cardiovascular workout. So that's one of the things that makes resistance training magic for, for fat burning. 

And we used to think we were trained when we were growing up. Like you lift [00:51:00] weights to get to build muscle and get strong. But if you care about your heart. Don't mess with weight, just do your cardio. And we know that's not true now, 

Cougar Hall: especially the way you've just described working out. Yeah. Because the way you just described working out feels like a cardio training session. 

I mean, it's probably more anaerobic. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: But yeah, that's, you're working your heart. 

Theron Hall: You are. Yeah. So then to go back to what we were talking about, so you can get your pull muscles with a pull up or chin up. So that means your lats and your biceps with a pull up and your grip strength and grip strength is a big deal for anti-aging. 

But that's one of the things that. They also look at in people that live the longest, they got better grip strength, better in stronger legs. We mentioned those two things, so that's a big deal, but you're getting that with your pullups. And then I'll do like a set of a hip pinch, like a straight leg deadlift or modified deadlift. 

I don't do heavy deadlifts with. At this stage in the game, you're always keep in mind as you age, you're always trying to get the work that you can get without too much risk. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. 

Theron Hall: If the risk reward ratio's not there, it's just gonna knock you outta the game for a while. Don't hurt yourself. So [00:52:00] find the exercises that you can do that don't injure you. 

So then I would do like a hip H move, like maybe a straight leg deadlift, and then I'll go do my dips. So I'm hitting my triceps and my packs and you get some core in there 'cause you're suspending your body and air. And then I might go do a squat move. And so those. Four moves. I just do two or three circuits of that. 

Man. It hit your whole body. Yeah, you're totally fine. You're not gonna lose muscle if you didn't train for three days after that, you're gonna be fine. You're keeping it up, but it doesn't take long, and I hit everything now. It's not, oh man, what did you do for your delts? What did you do for your qua, your calfs? 

Or something like that. Maybe you're not hitting those every time, that's fine, but you're still getting the metabolic benefits of the resistance training, and you're also getting it done in 20 minutes. And it can, like you were saying, man, you're breathing hard. Yeah. You feel like you put some work in. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. So if you had a full hour on a Saturday, you would do some shoulder raises or some calf raises, or do some some trunk rotations. Yeah. But we're talking about if you need to do this twice a week and you haven't done this in the past, we can do this in about 20 minutes and, and you can start to get the [00:53:00] benefits that you've been talking about as far as posture, strength, stability. 

Theron Hall: Yeah, a hundred percent. And let's talk quickly about, there's people that go to the gym and. It hurts that they feel sore and they're like, I'm not doing that again. That was horrible. Anything you do that your body's not used to is gonna make you sore. Unfortunately, you have pain nerves woven through every tissue in your body. 

I couldn't poke you with a pin anywhere in your body when, where you wouldn't go, ow. There's pain neurons everywhere. You're gonna get sore from doing anything you're not used to. But keep in mind, you're gonna have that little bump in the very beginning where things get sore. But then within two weeks, if you're putting some decent work in. 

You're gonna get to the point where you can take your sets to near failure. Where there is a, the speed of the bar that you're moving is slowed way down. Maybe you could squeeze out two more reps or something, but you're gonna train fairly hard and seriously after two weeks. Yeah. And you're not gonna hurt yourself. 

Now, if you wanna actually gain strength and you want to have some hypertrophy, you're gonna have to get into that zone because you're not gonna have the stimulus to the muscle to wanna change. Your [00:54:00] body is just. Wants to survive. It's like, why would I wanna carry around 10 more pounds of muscle that just makes me hungrier? 

So you can see how our ancestors didn't really wanna do that and it's not worked into our biology. But this day and age, we know there's a lot of benefits from it. And if we have adequate amount of protein to eat and fuel to have, we live in a society where there's more fuel than the people need, obviously. 

And you have the time and effort and wherewithal to wanna do it. The man, take it close to failure. Be careful. Make sure you ramp up to it. But that's absolutely where you wanna be. Cool. And that study I mentioned too, from the eighties at Tufts University, that's what they had the old folks do, which that's what the researchers were like. 

Grandma's gonna have a rotator cuff tear. You cannot do that. Hey, give them two weeks and they'll build up to it. You do it slowly, but your body was incredibly resilient. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah, no, there's, and by the way, there's a, a more recent study they just did in Australia that I saw, and the same thing. There were a whole bunch of critics like, you can't do this with people that are over 80 years old. 

They're like, we did and look. Yeah. We'll get the positive results. Yeah. So fascinating, [00:55:00] huh? 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: Any other take homes? 

Theron Hall: Yeah. So one more thing. Well, there's, I always tell my patients there's three aspects to your fitness routine as far as physical activity. We're not talking about nutrition right now. You wanna do your resistance training. 

I'd prioritize that if you absolutely could only do one thing. Do your resistance training. Maybe train in a way though that we were describing where you don't rest that much so that you have some cardiovascular benefits to it as well. And then you want to, you do wanna do your cardiovascular training and then you wanna do something that's for agility and balance. 

So that's the three things. And agility imbalance you, if you wanted to go. If you're like, what does that mean? That's having good proprioception, which is the sense of knowing where your body is in space. And those things are important because that's how people get hurt. They wipe out going down the stairs. 

I do. So many times I've had patients come in that have fallen down the stairs. Yeah. Like I've never fallen down the stairs in my whole life. And that's not saying I'm special. I just have never done it. Like you have to have enough balance and coordination to navigate these normal things in life. 

Everybody has stairs you don't want, if you don't wanna wipe out, do things to keep up your balance and coordination and or agility. And so the [00:56:00] things that are good for that would be Zumba class step aerobics, where you're stepping up and down. You're doing like that grapevine thing? 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. Oh yeah. 

Theron Hall: I think the very best is dancing, and we've seen the older couple out on the dance floor and they're dancing well together and they hold their heads over their shoulders, good posture, and they're moving fairly graceful. 

They're not gonna win any ballroom dancing award, but they can do that in their seventies or eighties. It's so awesome. That's balance and coordination. And so the cool thing is when you can do an exercise that feels fun, the struggle is masked by the mental engagement. That's when you find something that's you'll stick with. 

And they always say that, what's the best workout? The one that you're gonna do. 

Cougar Hall: The one you're gonna do? 

Theron Hall: Yeah, the one you'll stick with. 

Cougar Hall: I love that agility and that connection to dancing. I'm talking to my students right now about Blue Zones, so we got places in Sardinia, little Island, part of Italy where these old couples, like it's just part of the town square. 

And on a Thursday night they have dancing going on. There's a live music and they're in their seventies and eighties and they're dancing. But you're right, the posture and just the balance, the stability, the coordination. [00:57:00] 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: Tremendous health benefits. Why in these areas people are living into their, into their nineties and hitting a hundred. 

And then the other thought I had, you just mentioned Zumba and step aerobics. And in the last two and a half, three years of my life, I've really tried to pay more attention to this and I've chosen yoga as my, like this one I'm gonna do for my core. This is what I'm gonna do for balance. Is that stability training then in your mind too? 

Theron Hall: Yeah, a hundred percent. So. A lot of people think of yoga as just, you gotta get flexible 'cause they see people doing these crazy poses. Yeah. And that's, 

Cougar Hall: I can't do that by the way. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. And most people can't. So there is the flexibility component. But yoga, and you would could speak to this better than I could 'cause you put more time in. 

But yoga is tiring. It's straining, it's hard. And the reason it's straining is because you're trying to maintain your body in a certain position. It might be static, but it requires balance. It requires you to have your head over your shoulders to have a rotation where your body's over your hips. It's really the balance aspect of [00:58:00] it. 

And when I find myself doing yoga and I'm like, all right, now she's doing something I can't do, it's usually not so much the flexibility part as it is the balance part. So I think that's the real benefit of it. So many people when they, they'll unfortunately have a fall or something where they, they get injured as a consequence of poor balance and they never get it back. 

They go downhill. Yeah. We've all heard about the broken hip example. 

Cougar Hall: Yeah. Oh, amazing. Holy cow. I don't know what you charge per hour, but I probably owe you two hours. Now. Let me just say thank you. Dr. Hall, and I do appreciate the fact that you walk the talk and I've had a couple of healthcare providers that do that, and I think you're right. 

I think you'd be like, wait a second, he's not asking me to do something he doesn't do. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: I think in my profession, in teaching, I think that's important too. I think as a health educator, people wanna see that. And it doesn't matter how fast I can run a race or how much I can bench press, but they wanna know that I'm trying, that I have goals, that I'm setting goals and I'm trying to walk the talk too. 

They wanna know if I'm an educator, they wanna know, oh, he actually still reads. [00:59:00] He doesn't think he knows everything. He's actually really curious about stuff and, and he approaches learning with humility and And certainty with caution. Yes. 'cause he is a lifelong learner. I think all of that, no matter what we do, wherever people are, work, whatever contributions they're making to society, to their community, supporting their families. 

To walk That talk I think is huge and so, yeah, so kudos to you my friend. I, what we didn't tell our listeners is that you're in the process of retiring. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. 

Cougar Hall: And you're moving on whatever the next thing is for you, we'll have you back. And my guess is it's something in this same vein. 

Theron Hall: Yeah. Sounds good. It was fun to be here. 

Thanks for inviting me. 

Cougar Hall: Cool stuff. Thanks so 

Theron Hall: much. 

Cougar Hall: Thank you for joining us today. Catch us on our next episode, and don't forget to subscribe to Future Y Health episode.