Art of Prevention
Our mission is to decrease the prevalence of preventable injuries and athletes therein optimizing performance by decreasing the time that our athletes spend benched due to injury. We are going to distill information and practices from experts in the field of injury prevention. High level coaches and top performing athletes. We believe this information should be accessible to everyone so that we can reduce the rates of preventable injuries.
Art of Prevention
Endurance Alchemy: Beau Beard on Mastering Injury Prevention and Performance in Running
Get ready to be captivated as Beau Beard, an expert with a zest for ultra-marathons, reveals the intricate dance of preventing injuries and improving performance, in a narrative that's as instructive as it is rousing. His insights bridge the gap between the heart-pumping world of competitive running and the meticulous care required in sports rehabilitation. Dr. Beau has extensive insights in both the treatment and prevention of injuries in runners, as well as a host of other athletic populations. He also teaches clinicians through his courses: Art of Assessment, and Rethinking Running Rehab
Ever wondered how elite athletes sustain their vigor, or how they bounce back from setbacks? This conversation with Beau Beard peels back the layers of running rehab and performance optimization, unveiling the art of individualized patient assessment and the pivotal role of strength training in fortifying runners. We navigate through the complexities of athlete's health, considering the long-term impacts of training on youth athletes and discussing strategies to enhance tissue resilience and motor control. It's an exploration that underscores the importance of tailored approaches and the necessity of breaking out of traditional training confines.
Tying together the threads of mental and physical endurance, we journey into the realms of training and performance calibration. Bo imparts wisdom on key data points critical for peak performance, advocating for personalized techniques rather than cookie-cutter remedies. The episode culminates with a look at the formidable power of psychological resilience, drawing striking parallels between the endurance required on the track and in life's varied challenges. Join us for a thought-provoking session that marries the qualitative with the quantitative, offering a comprehensive view on achieving top-tier health and athleticism.
Links:
educational website
https://anthroedu.com/
Upcoming seminars:
https://anthroedu.com/upcoming-seminars
Clinic website:
https://chirofarm.com/
Ted Talk:
https://youtu.be/7kP5n8N4jv4
Age of Movement Book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097NR349Z?ref_=pe_3052080_276849420
If you have listened to this podcast for any length of time you know that strength training is crucial for runners. However a major obstacle for many runners is not know what to do once they get to the weight room. This PDF seeks to change that. It will arm you with the tools you need to effectively strength train to get the most out of your runs.
use code PODCAST for a 20% discount at checkout at artofprevention.org/runners
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Art of Prevention podcast, and yet again I have another amazing guest, and today my guest has a very, very long CV. So I'm sitting down with Bo Beard, and I actually heard about you, bo, from one of our mutual friends, dan O'Quinn, when he and I were both at the Paraclod Clinic together, and then I heard more and more about you, and then we finally got to hang out when we both did the DNS, d course, in Prague. So amongst your accolades or accomplishments, doctor of Chiropractic from Logan University, did you also get the master's degree there too?
Speaker 2:And the sports science rehab yeah.
Speaker 1:And then from there, tons of continuing education, ranging from SFMA, fms, all the way to DNSP, dns practitioner, a load of other things. You've done a TED talk, you've written a book, age of Movement, and now you're sharing all of your knowledge with other clinicians with your continuing education, art of assessment and rethinking running rehab. Funnily enough, the thing that kind of sticks out to me is one I'll let you go from here and tell us a little bit more about your backstory, because you've got quite a varied backstory, but what got you into running? That's just the thing that sticks out to me. I mean high school football, college football, and now you're doing a good amount of lifting too, but it seems like you're really getting into the ultra marathon. So what made that transition happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let's go back a little bit In the book Age of Movement and I've told the story on our website forever because that's why I do what I do from a job standpoint. But I broke my femur when I was nine or 10 years old. I say nine or 10 because I'm old enough that I don't remember. So there you go. I fractured my femur, had a titanium rod put in. The story goes, I had no PT, didn't know that was a necessity at that time. Which, funny enough, quick side story, which I'm sure there'll be many I just treated a girl. That's a 16-year-old track and field athlete which we may talk about. Actually we just talked about her case on the last week. In her view she had a femur fracture, had no PT prescribed and her parents had to ask for PT. So quick side note on that. So I had this femur fracture, ended up as somebody with a big trauma, having a bunch of movement competency or compensations and issues that I wasn't aware of until I got to a higher level of sports. Then coaches made me apparently aware of me limping and not being able to move like they thought I should be able to, which then I was lucky to work with, especially at that time. We're talking 2000,. Super high level Cairo. That was a previous medalist in the Olympics and things like that I had.
Speaker 2:This initial introduction to chiropractic was from a high level sports rehab model. I say rehab, she owned a gym. She had practice in her own gym that she owned, so it wasn't just a sports doc. Let me tape you up and adjust you. So it's the back story with that.
Speaker 2:Getting into running. Running was not my jam. I was a sprint athlete. I didn't want to lift weights. I didn't want to move more than I had to for conditioning purposes. Then, when you get out of collegiate sports, my dream of being an NFL was dashed by me being a six foot, 200 pound white guy. That's not that fast.
Speaker 2:I moved to Alaska. My sister asked me to be part of a 5K it's called the Bear Claw Classic in Eagle Ridge, alaska. I was like, yeah, I'll do it, I'm not going to train, I'm an athlete. I go out and I get my ass whipped by a mom pushing a trike stroller with a kid in the stroller in the last 800 meters and I am all out. This is all I got and that was humbling and me being competitive was like that's not going to happen again. And, luckily for me, I was in Alaska.
Speaker 2:I lived, if anybody is familiar with, anchorage, alaska. Flat Top Mountain was less than a 5K away from my house. So I would numerous times a week run to the top of this 3,000 foot mountain and run back down and that's kind of how I got into trail running. And then I got jaded. Road running was boring after doing that multiple times a week in Alaska. So then I moved to St Louis and I was like, oh, this isn't quite the trail scene as Anchorage, alaska. So I started delving out if anybody is familiar with St Louis to Castlewood State Park in these places, started racing, more Going back.
Speaker 2:I thought I was hot shit like winning races. I was at the top of the bottom of the pile basically, but that motivated me to win some of these things and keep going. And then it was kind of a parallel fueling of passions that I got into running. I thought I was kind of good at it. I loved doing it. It was just a good like burn off of stress and energy during grad school while I was learning about biomechanics and treatment, rehab and all these things, and I think they just kind of melded together and funny enough, if you remember.
Speaker 2:Do you remember the Alpine shop that was out, and there's numerous ones the outdoor store climbing store that was locally owned, one at Kirkwood Think, where I taught my very first seminar while I was still going to school, at the Kirkwood location of the Alpine shop, on trail running injuries, which, looking back, was absolute dog shit, but it was what it was. I asked to do it, I wanted to feel uncomfortable, so, yeah, I got into running. But I also very quickly parlayed my kind of passion of running into a professional niche and that's what I did when I came here to Birmingham was say, hey, I want to be involved in the trail running scene, which also, luckily, was growing crazy when we first got into practice. Right, that's that year. It was in one of my slides that it grew 437% the amount of races from like 2014 to 2015.
Speaker 2:Right, this is the explosion of, like, trail running, ultra running. So, yeah, just kind of blew up and right time, right place, good fit, because I like doing, I like treating the people in it. Other than trail runners are terrible patients, just like a runner, right, they just want to be good enough to get back out there and do it, and then they're like see you later, man. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's kind of the. That's the intro story.
Speaker 1:Gosh, what a cool story. I'm kind of the opposite, you know, I was a runner all throughout high school and then college and then I got kind of like the opposite jaded. But it is probably kind of funny like going into those little, uh, rural five Ks and stuff like that or even those little five Ks around, and people think that you're on steroids when you're on like a 16, a 16 minute five K, you know, and it's like if only you knew what I used to be able to do Right and that's like I I didn't even know what I didn't know, right, Like I thought I was doing good.
Speaker 2:And now I mean I have two, you know, ex collegiate runners that are clinicians in here that would just wipe the floor with me at any given point and I'm like, oh yeah, like which funny though saying that the differentiators, he said, tends to be distance, right. So as you get up into the ultra world, being fast at a five K may not translate, and that's where you can kind of weaponize, like okay, I'm a little bit better at you know, the endurance thing, maybe at my age or just that's kind of my jam. But yeah, now I'm leaning into that a little bit, even though I've never done a hundred miler um, the longest race today it is 55 K and I just I don't know if that's ever going to be in the cards. It's just I don't know. And every time I think about it I talk to somebody else that I treat here and it's like the worst thing I've ever did in their life. And I'm like I don't know, we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they always say it's the worst thing they've ever done in their life, but then they're always like, oh yeah, I've got another one set up for in two months and I'm hella injured right now.
Speaker 2:And I need you to get me there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Can you get me there? And, uh, in one visit too, you know for sure, it's like all right, well, we've got a bit of an uphill battle ahead of us. So, um, now we're usually on the side of treating a lot of these injuries, but one thing that occurred to me was you know, I'm treating all these recurrent injuries or all of these things that a lot of times they're very much preventable. So what's some information that you've gleaned from the clinical side, as well as your personal experience, that I can tell people? These are some of the things to look out for. These are some of the things that we need to do to try and prevent this vicious cycle from occurring over and over and over again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, uh, I'll tell, tell a dumb dumb story on myself. So I was in very you know, I started grad school in 2009 and that's when born to run came out the Christopher McDougall book.
Speaker 1:Oh God, I think I know where this is going.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. So you put somebody that's pretty new to running, new to trail running, new in graduate school, where you're surrounded by biomechanics movement nerds, and what do you start doing? I literally remember going to the new balance shop again in Kirkwood, because that's the only place that had five fingers right, being like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm doing it, I'm going to run like this, buying those things running on the sidewalks, you know, and things roads around my apartment complex, and you know, at that time, was uh, I don't know if I was in Cheshfield proper, but wherever and what happened Absolutely blew everything up below the knee Half strains, achilles issues.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, and I'm hobbling into class like the next day after running like three miles, and people are like, what are you doing? Like, yeah, you know it'll get better. Um, you know, I did attend. You wait to that and this is the story. Right, you can accommodate or adapt to most things. I mean, that's literally the.
Speaker 2:The superpower of a human as a species is to be able to adapt. You can't adapt overnight and, uh, if you're familiar with Casey Lictig, she's a, uh, super popular ultra runner. She's also a PhD, pt, and her PhD thesis was on, like, should you run shot or unshot, right, like barefoot shoes, or should you run in regular shoes? The conclusion of her research was basically a giant meta analysis was, whatever you ran in coming up, high school, college, early adult life, that's probably what you should stick with, why? Cause it's hard to adapt to something else, even though it may get. You know, perpetuated is like it's better to be zero drop. Um, you know whatever we're talking about. Uh, so, yeah, I was the dumb dumb that had to learn from personal experience that, like God, I came from a sprint background with a fairly kind of you know, tight lower quarter and then to expect that to change into this kind of flexible, you know, elastic recoil machine that's going to run three to five miles and do that in a week is like bananas. So that we all kind of know inherently whether we call it the 10% rule don't do too much too fast from a volume standpoint. But also that goes for overall adaptation. Right, are you trying to do or you know you're already doing high intensity interval training or like I am going to train for a half marathon. Well, you're just adding more to even though, yeah, you're already running, you're still working out Like you have to balance the equation would be one big thing for, you know, clinicians, athletes, coaches and the from the ultra running, trail running side maybe I'm biased.
Speaker 2:I think one of the best ways to do that is, uh, change your KPIs. So what I mean by KPIs? A lot of people look at mileage. Right In our town or our track club it's you get your jacket If you're on 1200 miles every year, you know, from the Birmingham track club or whatever it is on Strava I would say if you look at somebody like Jason Coop, who's a highly respected ultra running coach, um and his, you know, cts Carmichael training systems you're going to see that every coach in that program looks at time versus mileage.
Speaker 2:So it's going to be the amount of time you spent training which is spread across all avenues of training cross training, weightlifting, you know, whatever it is Schimo, bike, swim. You know you have an uh, basically an allocated amount of time, both from like if you're a working staff, you have kids of how much you can put into training, but then also like how much the expectation is of like what's your training age right, versus chronological age, like how much adaptation we expect to occur. I think that's a really clever way for people to shift their thinking, but that is also really hard to get a runner to be like hey, I know you want to hit your 70 miles per week because that gives you this like mental buffer. If I'm going to be okay. But, like you know, you may like be better off.
Speaker 2:Eight hours of training, maybe, and sometimes it's more training, right, they're doing six hours, but it's just running. We're like dude, you could get eight hours have a bigger effect because you're spreading it across different disciplines or activities better effect, less running, better recovery, less injuries. The tough thing is what you're dealing with the mentality of a runner, which tends to be most of the time a stereotypical type, a control freak. I need to hit my my, you know, systematic kind of KPIs and that's if you could make that mind shift change with your athlete or patient. It's a game changer because they also look at stuff different overall and they're like God, I, you know, I am a little beat up. I'll just, I'll switch, like I can, you know, I don't have to run my miles, I can go row, I could go, you know, to the gym, something like that. Yeah, that'd be my biggest one.
Speaker 1:I so wish that that was a message that had been portrayed to me when I was such an injured runner in undergrad.
Speaker 1:Because you know, there you're just looking at mileage and you know, being with the team and trying to do as much as or more than all of the all Americans and things like that, because you know that's your goal is to be those guys and sometimes it's tough to really look at where you're at and the training loads that you can handle and then modify the training that you're doing to be commensurate to what you can handle, especially when you throw in other.
Speaker 1:I think the points that you made about monitoring variables and all of your training variables. It were just such amazing points because the big variable change for you was the footwear variable right, the amount of cushioning underfoot, and it's a dramatic change. There's a reason why you don't see five fingers anymore and part of that reason is because Vibram lost basically like a $75 million class action lawsuit because of people with your exact story, but actually had probably like quite a bit less resilience and got, you know, nerve damage and stress fractures and things like that I should have thinking back, I should have tried to get grad school paid for.
Speaker 2:What am I doing? You know you could have right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, to add to that point, though, something we talk about in RX3 is, you know, they've done studies on the phenotyping of runners, so it kind of breaks down into you have a neuro-mechanics based runner and a robotic runner. So there's a differentiator right there. Like some people do better with more, more volume. Well, again, does that volume have to mean running, not necessarily more aerobic work. Some people do better with less volume, but higher intensity work just from and this probably gets into genetic components, mental components, how you train, you know, growing up. So even there, right there, you're like, okay, there's differentiators, like people should be doing different things.
Speaker 2:And we think about, like soft tissue kind of spectrum, right, some people are just naturally more flexible from a collagen matrix than other people. That may be a differentiator. So, again, from the clinical side, like we want to be in equals one. From a coaching side, you do two, even though you may be in a team setting, you can't be so like individualistic, but you can group people together based on, you know, training, age, some phenotype or phenotype things. And, again, the best coaches in the world, even if it's not on purpose, right, it was a bit intuitive or whatever do that right, abc groups and, you know, within a squad or something like that, it just kind of happens because they just you can see the writing on the wall like not all these people are going to be doing the same stuff. It's just not going to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I will say I was really, really fortunate with the coaches that I had coached me when I was in high school and college, because we had those ABC groups and also differentiated mileage and intensity based on what those athletes were running. So we had, you know, when I was in high school, we had the longer distance crew and the shorter distance crew and we had ABC groups within that. Wow, same thing in college. And I'll tell you after you know, I got to run under coach Damon Martin, who's the guy that took over Adam State after the legendary coach Joe V Hill although Damon Martin's a living legend in his own right as well and there was a line of people to talk to him after every single like group meeting and when coach told us like what we were doing for the day and then coach would give individual advice to all of those people. Oftentimes I was in that line myself. I don't know if I just felt like I needed more special attention because I was not as fast as I wanted to be or I was just perpetually coming back off of an injury or something like that, but yeah, he really took that time with every single one of those people.
Speaker 1:To go into this is actually what you need to do for the day. This is what you need to do for the day. Here's some special training for you and what you need to do after the workout. All of these different things that you're talking about, and I think that you're right, and I think there's a reason that your art of assessment class is called the art of assessment. And then rethinking. Running rehab is rethinking and diving into those little details and those nuances, which is something I'm sure you also did with that high school runner that you talked about, that femur fracture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the art of assessment is kind of at the core of any seminar that I am teaching or will teach in the future, because I think it's just paramount to clinical outcomes are based on clinical competency. But competency then leads to confidence. So it's not only skills and what you can make happen with the patient, but how you convey that to them, how you can communicate it, build rapport as Brett would say, brett, winchester, report and reassurance through your two superpowers that you need to master. Well, that doesn't come, in my opinion, it doesn't come as a character trait that you work on. It comes from competency clinically that it just then like oozes out of you. So then it's an authentic communication or authentic message to the patient. So yeah, the art of assessment is just for me it's just a roadmap. It creates clarity of how I go from a history to the exam, to a clean audit system, to the best intervention point and I say best, I should air quote it because there's multiple intervention points with every patient. But I would hope as clinicians we're always over our lifespan of a career honing of like man. Could we get a lot closer if I referred somebody to you or you know, rich Olm or somebody that we're all like yeah, I kind of do the same thing because I think the same thing's going on. That would be ideal. Because we look at other fields, that's what happens most of the time. We're an outlier for a lot of reasons. But then, you know, kind of the end is like well, what's the patient's goal versus what I think they need to do? Those things need to coincide.
Speaker 2:But when you look at a runner, it's kind of interesting. We go back a little bit to what we were talking about before. Think of, like an NFL team or a college football team, specialty in positions. Right, I get that that's different. But even every position would have a different kind of coach. Every position would have different types of workouts. They're doing different types of stretching, yet, like you said, you had an individual. But, like in the running world, we just think, oh, distance runner, sprint athlete, like that's usually the case, distance runner, sprint athlete, like that's usually the biggest differentiator versus, you know, like the wild differences. So wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of system for a coach you know, this is a clinical system, the art of assessment but some sort of a system where, like hey, you can phenotype a runner based on some of the things we were talking about, and pretty soon it doesn't come down to just experience, like the coach is like, oh, I think you should be doing this because it's evidentiary, and then that can go across coaches, across the program. That would be kind of cool.
Speaker 2:Now, is that feasible, I don't know. I mean, you kind of see a fundamental capacity screen. You know an FMS land which is kind of trying to go after. That is a broad athletic endeavor, not sport specific. I think it could be done. We do a runner screen in RX3, which I've basically stolen.
Speaker 2:Some things from FCS, fms, some things from research, right, like a Pogo jump or a triple jump.
Speaker 2:That would kind of, you know, show your ability to handle ground reaction forces, yeah, and we just kind of I smashed those together. The reason why I found myself looking at how a runner would carry, you know, unilateral weight, how long they could do it, like before an FCS came out I wanted to see how they could do a deceleration jump, a rebound jump. Okay, we'll smash these things together and just create a checklist, not that you have to do them, but that if you didn't know what to do, that you'd be like hey, I could look at these things and I'd be better for it. Same thing with you. Know the clinical side, like, do I think you have to go step by step? Well, the further you get into clinical practice, you fall further away from the system because your own personal system is better. But in the beginning, in particular as a student brain, you grad. You need a world-class system to get world-class results, and then you can start tweaking and honing it on your own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's so important, especially when people are starting out, and I found that I needed to do this was systemize my like initial patient exam or intake and things like that, just so that I can look at and maybe see what's normal. What does normal look like for all these different things? And once we get what normal looks like, all of the discrepancies and all the differences that may or may not be associated with pathology just pop out at you. Oh well, this is the biggest thing right here, because I've seen, you know, this human body, you know, a hundred, a thousand times. And now here's the nuance that is leading to this issue and this is how we solve that issue to accomplish our goals Now, when the tough thing we're talking about running.
Speaker 2:So the one of the tougher things is if we talked about gait analysis, whether it's walking or running, yeah, if we talk about normal, there's an idealized right I would say, you know, thomas Schoed wrote the book on it. Has anybody in the world ever seen an idealized gait pattern? I don't think so. I mean, I think it's a possibility, even from the brand new infant walking, because nobody has perfect symmetry. You know, from an anthropometric standpoint, they have learned behaviors, they have developmental asymmetries, just from a movement perspective. So that is you know, we talk about this all the time is like we use the analogy of like. Why is water tasteless? Well, it's so. As a human, you know if it's poisoned or not. Other animals, you know, water isn't tasteless. Like different water sources would taste very different, like we would taste wine. But we have to tell if you know there was a dead cow upstream and we're like oh God, don't drink it. That's what you're trying to do With. A gait analysis is like learn what tasteless water is right, what is normal, while you're never going to see it, which can be frustrating. But that's the game right. And you hit the nail on the head as you're trying to do what, something jumps out at you.
Speaker 2:Now, tough thing in our world is different things tend to jump out to different people and then there becomes this kind of point of conjecture Again. That's why I teach. I think that's why we're all in this ever learning. You know journey is like. Can we get closer and closer together? Not because I'm right or you're right, but because that is more true and that's, you know. That's good. That gets very tough in a in a world that we live in. It's very great, especially in an interdisciplinary kind of approach where people could be, you know, kind of doctor shopping.
Speaker 1:I saw this PT and they said this, and then I saw my massage therapist who said this and then I went to orthopedic and they are thinking this and and then you're just sitting there sifting through all these different opinions and you may or may not have this glaring thing Like well, it hurts when you sit. And then when we did 10 press ups, your pain went away, so like that's all you need to do. You know, trying to make a fundamental like that's hard.
Speaker 2:Like often, oftentimes it's that that kiss principle keep it simple, stupid.
Speaker 1:Sometimes things you know can get really over complicated, especially in gate analysis and running biomechanics. And when I first went to school that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to know all the nuanced, complicated intricacies of pro-nation and foot strike patterning and all this stuff. And what I found is is if you just dial it back and you really look at the forest through the trees, you can get a lot of really big things that stick out at you in a lot of runners and it's like oh, your tissue capacity in your Achilles just isn't where it needs to be, or you've let that cycle, that continuum of tendon pathology, occur over and over and over and over again. It doesn't matter what I do to you manually today. You got to stop irritating the system. Yeah, the tolerance, yeah. And I think that goes to looking at running loads and a lot of variables associated with running loads that you obviously are going to talk about in your Rethinking and Running Rehab coursework.
Speaker 1:And I know that you've probably looked at many runners programming and you probably see some themes like recur right as far as. Like, oh, you know, maybe not anymore because we can't buy the shoes anymore. Like, oh, I switched to V-Brums and now my feet hurt like hell, you know. But what are some things that you see that maybe go awry with coaches programming these days, like what are some commonalities there that may be predisposing individuals to injuries? Not saying that we're, you know, not saying that coaches are causing injuries. Nobody's trying to make anybody get hurt. But sometimes we can look at somebody's programming and be like, oh, this is it right here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think the one I want to touch on for sure, I think there's two, I don't know if I'd tell them two different sides of spectrum, but two different kind of paradigms here, with the youth athlete. So we look at a youth cross-country runner, usually entering cross-country seventh, eighth grade, right, and I always call on the left behinds. For the most part You'll get a stud runner. I mean, if you're in California and you know you're running for Newberry Park or whatever, if we're somewhere that it's high level, it's a little more, a little more high school maybe Shout out.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying, you know, around here it's becoming more prestigious because the past three years Alabama's just been crushing it in terms of who they're putting out. I mean, you know Ethan Strand just broke the 800 record and collegiate, so all these things are kind of going down. But my thing would be most coaches around here, even though there's some really good coaches what do you see as a very common thing for the seventh eighth grader going into cross-country in the fall? We're going to run 30 miles a week starting from day one and you do that every week for the whole summer and then they're going to up it a little bit and then intensity is going to go up right. So you know, workouts and stuff, usually it's just kind of low volume, that's when we see the most injuries, right. Or accommodation, because it's a new activity. You've introduced novelty and volume in a kid that's probably also going through a growth spurt, more than likely, which adds just a whole other kind of conundrum. So my thing there would be again can we add tolerance to a system from a tissue perspective, from a movement perspective, without just stacking one? Well, it's called a skill, right, because the hierarchy that Greg Cook came up with, like running, is a skill and you just stack the skill on there without knowing movement competency, without knowing tissue tolerance, without knowing kinesthetic awareness, right Like athletic ability, which, again, if we talk about the left behinds now, we're talking about those kids that maybe aren't the most athletic, which it would be really hard for them to even do a skipping pattern, and we're asking them to run 30 miles a week, which is, in essence, skipping the whole time.
Speaker 2:So I think it's again, you need a very easy, like you said. You need to be like oh, you sit down and you have pain. I did 10 press ups. We need something for coaches where it's like you know, maybe it's a prepped running program for youth athletes, dear God, that should sell like hotcakes. Hey, we can hopefully not injure your kid as much and make them run better. I think that would be filled with things like jump rope and body weight lunges and you know deceleration jumps and you know coronal plane movements, and pretty soon you'd be like oh, we're not getting the bilateral shin splints Again, air quotes that you see with every new runner, or we're not, you know, bailing out mid season with some asymmetrical hip issue, just because, like everybody has an asymmetry. So that would be one side of it right Is that we just dump the same program on somebody that you know has never run, or you know hasn't run much, and then you're just going to get outliers that handle it well.
Speaker 2:The other side of the spectrum would be um, it's kind of the same, but bias coaching, just based on either how they were taught you come from an R RCA background you take a class and then you get that same kind of ubiquitous you know just everybody's doing the same, even though people may have wildly different goals. This is the thing that frustrates me. So I see everybody, from a five people that won around fast five case to a hundred milers and beyond hundred milers If they get in a certain coaching group it looks very similar, regardless of goal. And I'm like this is nuts, right, this is crazy. So that's kind of it bugs me. But what I try to always tell those people is what we talked about earlier is like I'm not going to rewrite your coaching, right, that's not my job. You're paying them. I don't want to burn a relationship, but let's talk about, like, health and longevity, right, cause if you're not getting most runners, even if they're really good, aren't getting pigs, it's hard to be a pro runner. If you're an amateur runner that's even running a sub three marathon as a guy or something like you're still, you're never going to get make money from it. So let's say I love that, you love doing it, but let's maximize your health and longevity while we're doing that. So who's to say I couldn't get you to run faster or as fast, with, again, maybe less volume, less intensity, mixing up what we're doing, improving how you move, dear God, as you run, which seems unheard of which.
Speaker 2:Again, if we talk about, like Peter Atea's centenary in Olympics, like how you move and how you do other things like, could you be improving that while you're getting better at running? Instead of what do we see? We see a divergent path with most people with running Right. We see loss of muscle masses. They get older, they lose mobility. Overall, they become very linear in their movement.
Speaker 2:That's not what I want when I'm 80. And I love these stories of you know the guy went in, you know the, you know elderly Olympics, whatever it's called, and you know a set in records and somebody that's run 500 marathons. That's fantastic. I want to be able to move, get up and down off the floor when I'm 80, not just run a half marathon, you know, at two hours or something. So I'm again, you and I are clinicians, so I think that comes at the heart of I want to be a performance person, you know, for that athlete or that patient. But I also want to make sure that, like, we're maximizing your health, or at least not detracting from it, which becomes a bit of an oxymoron even when you're talking about ultramarathons, because in essence it's not healthy. So we have to really kind of weigh that against what somebody's doing.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. I mean just, oh man, the amount of just knowledge bombs are just dumped. I just want to like, I feel like we just need to like tease apart some of those things. And I think when you talked about those youth athletes, the ones that just start out running seventh or eighth grade one, video games are not becoming less fun and we're now seeing like there's a lot more weakness in those seventh and eighth graders because there is more playing in the sedentary position versus going out and playing, you know, pick up stickball or the pickup game of soccer and things like that. So I think that's something that coaches need to be weary of and thinking about that seventh or eighth graders entire lifespan, health span and athletic career.
Speaker 1:I spent a lot of time running in the sagittal plane, you know, and I got okay at it, you know. And then, when I got into grad school, it's like, oh, now I have all of these other things that I can do, such as rock climbing and ultimate frisbee and all this other stuff. And, man, I'm still peeling back the layers of the injury onion that I created for myself and still like opening up my hips and all these different things, because all that I did was run in the sagittal plane and, going back to the factors that you talked about as far as, like, measuring variables, I think some variables that coaches need to look at is you know what variables am I inputting into this athlete to get, obviously, the outputs that I want, but also the outputs that are necessary for the health of that person over their entire lifespan? You know, we also need to get rid of this kind of like chew them up and spit them out mentality or the next up mentality that we see a lot. A high school coach will see an athlete for four years and then they're gone. A college coach will see an athlete for four, maybe five years if they registered their freshman year, and then they're gone.
Speaker 1:So if we don't do the things that you know are going to prepare them for their entire like athletic career or their entire lifespan, it doesn't matter, because they're going to be gone. They're going to have a next new batch of individuals that they can then just do the same thing. You can throw the eggs against the wall and the ones that don't break are going to be freaking stud athletes. But then I was definitely like one of those people that kind of got left behind. You know, two stress fractures in my freshman year of high school that really affected me, not only physically as far as from my D training perspective, but also mentally as well. I wasn't able to hang out with my buddies and you know, coming back off of not one but two stress fractures, that hits you in the space between your ears pretty hard and then just rampant injuries throughout my entire collegiate career, which is really the reason that I started this whole damn podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, a quick story on that is we had a. So Chelsea High School, which is right down the road from our office, in the past three years has put out, you know, a ton of runners. Like you know, we got a couple of kids that are running Kentucky now, I mean all over the place, but are set in you know records I think in the next couple of years are going to be awesome. Some of them, I think, are going to go beyond college and run. That to be said, there was one kid in particular that was set to run for Auburn University and junior year rolls around. This kid had always had some like lateral foot stuff, like had a very stiff foot, grew immensely, was six foot. Two, is going into junior year. Just kind of where you ran, you know, really caught himself in a met like massive supination angle and you know, had a hard time not putting stress up through lateral foot, you know. So runs into a stress fracture of his fibula, you know. And fifth met and it's just kind of all. It's all over the place all the time. So I kind of just told him I go hey, if you want to shot at running, you're going to have to stop running. It's the gray cook outage. Like I cannot change a motor program, like I have to get you to stop running. We will work as hard as we can to change it and we did. I mean it took six weeks and I was like D load. I mean we were in this kind of like stress fracture phase. I was like you're not running anyways.
Speaker 2:The short of the long is he goes back in a senior year to run him better. He did right towards the end of a senior year, I think. Second, there's a second to last race a year before. Basically I think it was before sectionals, maybe Foot starts hurting them. We kind of made the call clinical. I was like I don't think it's stress fractured, it's reaction. You could still run but you could tell like mentally he had been through the ringer so many times that he's like um ended up not running at Auburn but cool enough, the kind of you know silver lining is this kid and loved it so much. And I'm not saying it was me, but as the conversations we had that like you want to run your whole life, right, yes, like. And we had this conversation of like it's beyond is now you know when, in his state in contact with the coach at Auburn, runs with the team every once in a while, is now the assistant coach for the women's team, um, and is also possibly up for another spot on the team. So like stuck with it. But what has he been doing? Not just slamming a hundred miles a week. Like he realizes, I have issues that other people don't have. I say issues, things I got to work on his work like a dog on those things and it's now paying dividends.
Speaker 2:Versus, like you said, just kind of like we've normalized that, runners, that you get injured if you run, and we just kind of say, yeah, that's kind of normal, yeah, I'm helping the coach having a little more time. Yes, I don't. Maybe I don't want to say moral, ethical obligation, like feeling a bit responsible for like oh, somebody gets hurt under my guys, like maybe that's on me a little bit versus you know, yeah, football there's trauma, maybe it's not training injuries, like you know in this scenario, like you're the one imploring the load, like you know on that athlete, like who's to say that it's inappropriate? You know I'm out. Yes, I think there's something to be said of where the I'm not blaming a coach, but like maybe if you had more oneness you would be more apt to change training around individual athletes, but you know he had a good outcome.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of student athletes that do not that just stop running because they had a frustration point, they had an injury point they can't come back from On the game of the day. What are we doing? We're trying to make healthy humans for their whole life, and if you remove something that I think is, I mean it's a normal human movement, right? My three year old daughter nobody taught her how to run. It's running the human movement. And somebody says I'm kind of done with that and they were doing it at a super high level in division one or division one athlete. That's kind of sad.
Speaker 1:I totally agree and you know some of the stuff that I'm kind of like unraveling to is like when I go back to running, you know my Achilles will probably flare up again. You know stuff like that and I think you're right. A lot of you know it's a it's a heavy burden to bear being a collegiate runner coach, you know, because you're the one telling them what to do and a lot of coaches will say, oh well, they're not doing it right, but a lot of kids are a lot of those really type a motivated kids are doing that. And then some. Now, in terms of increasing resilience in our tissues, like our increasing bone mineral density, increasing connected tissue capacity, whether that be a tendon, a ligament or muscle, what are your thoughts on strength training for runners?
Speaker 1:This is something that I really believe in and I think that there are a lot of misconceptions that I've written about in my PDF strength training for runners and stuff like that. What kind of tools or I don't want to be a good trainer, what kind of tools? Or I don't want to say protocols, but what kind of methods and things do you prescribe to your runners and what kind of things do you use for runners to improve those tolerances and capacities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the first ones that I always try to lose today, because I think, for whatever reason, it seems to peak everybody's interest, whether you're an athlete, a clinician or coach.
Speaker 2:You know, keith bars, work on an opposite and just looking at literally, if you look at somebody that's a little more stretchy from a soft tissue standpoint versus somebody who's stiff, and then if they're dealing with an injury, of how we would a treat the injury and the post treatment, right building, tolerance, resilience, the quick and dirty on that if you haven't covered it, just for people listening is if you're really stretchy person say we're, you know, maybe we're getting up on the bait and criteria, which that's in question. If you've seen that through, you know, recalling the criteria, yeah, which good, they should keep looking at stuff. But so say you're higher on that criteria or you're what we're going to call a super, pseudo, hyper mobile, our video gamer, seventh grader, right, and then we should basically treat them differently in the the broads you know strokes here is they would do better with more ballistic load on plyometrics to kind of stiffen that matrix versus if you get a me right, I'm stiff from a soft tissue standpoint, which is great for a sprinter, not so great for a distance runner. Well, I'm going to be better dealt with with heavier loads but going through a much slower, in particular eccentric phase to kind of heat up the tissue as we have time under tension and kind of create more of an elastic effect. And how I drive this point home is I always there's a upside down bell curve on out of a research article. I couldn't remember the author's right name or author's name right now, but this surprised me, so I throw it into a talk. Where do you think most elite marathoners would fall on a bell curve in terms of mobility? Right, if one end is completely stiff, the other end is hyper mobile. They actually fall on the more mobile end, which I would be like oh, we just think that running kind of tunes tendons and stiffens you up as you have to handle all this impact.
Speaker 2:What do you see? You see, you know East African runners and things that have full mobility but fantastic motor control so they can access a full windlass mechanism, wind up their Achilles fully and let go. So it comes down to less, not less. It's one part. You know tissue phenotype? Well, it's one part. Motor control. You have to be able to control that stuff if you can get into these four range of the motion, and that's from a strength training standpoint.
Speaker 2:I always tell people like, yes, we love it, I can phenotype you right away, and it's not like we do one or the other. But I get that seventh grader, you know pliometrics, jump, rope fast, quick poppy things. I get my 55 year old guy that big toe doesn't move, an ankle stone move and as Achilles keeps flaring up, guess what he's going to be doing? Slow, heavy sled pushes and you know I, you know heal raises that are weighted, you know. You know, maybe one and a half time body weight or something like that. So I like that phenotype approach.
Speaker 2:And then my second take would be let's break runners out of the saddle plane. So if I just had those general rules like, hey, let's put in the stretch stiffy cat or you know, stretchy stiff category, well then let's also. Hey, we have, you know, the transversion coronal plane that you rarely access. That's great for what? Breaking apart kind of habitual motor patterns that maybe aren't, you know, paying you dividends, but also making sure that we're dialing in things like balance, because you're basically jumping from one leg to another and it plays back into the longevity thing.
Speaker 2:Right, staying mobile, you know, through the transverse plane, because I know you've seen as many as I have how many runners, cyclists, triathletes have a T spine I could, you know, bounce a quarter off of. And you know, then we got to talk about breathing mechanics with that type of rib cage, like we could just you know right away be like your performance is not maximized just because you don't move in this area, your spine. So yeah, I think that's where applying load appropriately and then always being a sniper as much as you can right, trying to be like, yeah, I would do this for you, do this for you, and yeah, we could give general strike training guidelines most runners, because they do little to none. So, yeah, just try to be a little bit better than the rest by now. Just give them something. Give them something that is made for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's that was kind of my aim was really just using a flamethrower, basically on this issue of runners, just not strength training or if they are, they're like, oh yeah, I did some strength training, I did some clamshells and then I took an eight pound medicine ball and I did some twisting lunges and, yeah, strength training right, and it's like More like increasing fatigue and not increasing any tissue tolerance whatsoever. But I love that breakdown of phenotypical expression. So for those of you who aren't familiar, like, your genotype is your genes or your your DNA sequence and kind of what you're born with. But the expression of those genes is what we would refer to as our phenotype. So that would be you know, we have a genetic sequence that basically encodes for how tight or how loose we are, which was what we were talking about with Keith bars work, and then the expression of those genes would be our phenotype, which is how we have physical manifestations of that genetic sequence.
Speaker 1:And I love the the, the nuances there, because I feel like there's this huge trends towards what we need to have a randomized controlled trial, we need to have multiple randomized controlled trials with systematic reviews and then we need to have meta analyses and then we need to have a meta analysis of the meta analyses to really see if anything works and it's like what you're losing with that really high level of research.
Speaker 1:Don't get me wrong, I love that stuff. I'm not really a supplemental instructor for statistics so like I'm like as nerdy as they come with that kind of stuff. But I also know how that that bell curve and how much we lose the higher order we get with those reviews and things. Because if you look at the highest level meta analyses and systematic reviews, what most of those tell us is we don't know anything and we can't do anything. But that's because that individual variability is so lost once you get into those much higher order of research. So we've got to keep an open mind and we've got to change tactics based on the newest research that comes out. But we can't keep an open mind so much that our brain falls out of our head and we can't lose our common sense.
Speaker 2:I listened to. Oh yeah, a strong theme in RX3, or Rethinking Run or Rehab, is, you know, yeah, we look at gate, we nerd out on it but like, when should you try to intervene to change somebody's gate right, rather than letting, like your treat table treatment and other you know rehab training bleed into this? You know integrative motor pattern that running is. So we approach that as a question like, should you, when? Should you? You know, is it appropriate? If you looked at big meta-analyses on a, can you change gate, it's going to say yeah, and then it's going to give you, you know, your typical stuff like oh, we can tell people to, you know, increase cadence, we can tell them to land softer, and then you'll see direct correlations in the meta-analyses too. If we had somebody you know, try to land softer, we see a decrease in injuries. So then that's going to be a broad sweeping just thing that this happens right, it's going to go into runners world and you're going to see people, hey, try to land softer. I always try to be. You know, give the straw man proposition If you looked at the other side of the equation is well, there's a whole body of research that says you need to actually increase the amount of impact into the ground, be better at attenuating it, which gives you better elastic recoil. And though that is what the best runners in the world are doing Now, just because the best runners in the world are doing it doesn't mean that Bo Beard should do it, and that's you know, the cool data detail there is.
Speaker 2:The biggest indicator of injury for an amateur runner is what Mileage biggest indicator. So the more mileage a runner is an amateur, the more likely I'm to get injured. Do you know what the biggest indicator of success is for a high level, elite runner Mileage. And this, you know. This is just. If you look at meta-analyses, you're like well, that gets frustrating. So then you have to be good at what, determining, like, what level of athlete, patient, runner you're working with, before you open your mouth about modifying training or what are they doing right or wrong, so you can see how it's like. Like you said, pay attention to the fundamentals. Like I got the seventh grader that plays video games in front of me and they went around a bunch of volume. I don't need data to tell me that's a bad idea. It does. Like, just use your brain right, common sense goes a long way. And then, yeah, knowing the details is fun when needed, but rarely needed at the level that we think we do.
Speaker 1:Well, we all know from normative data pools from high level runners and these pooling samples that were done by Jack Daniels, that every single runner should run at 175 steps per minute for their cadence.
Speaker 2:So luckily it's as simple as that, you know we just calculated off of a wrist top watch view to Max.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like geez, like the devil's in the details. If somebody's six foot three, then like their cadence isn't going to be the same as somebody who's five foot two. Yeah, you know, should maybe keep dancing around the theme of constants.
Speaker 2:I mean, this whole thing's been like you can learn, you want to learn all this stuff, because I've always said you know, I think sometimes in the rehab world we're talking clinical, it can look like we're leaning towards just generalized exercise, right, the way the profession's spinning. Well, that's because 70% of America's unfit so like that's going to be of benefit to build tolerance, resistance, decreased pain. There's a whole subset of that population though that has you know mechanical issues, motor control issues, you know tissue pathology, trigger point, whatever we want to call that stuff. And then if you're working with an elite athlete, you better know the nuance and details, right, because that could be the differentiator of performance gains. So again, it is a clinician. We have a responsibility that supersedes a coach, so you have to know more. But again, the best in the world know a lot about a little bit about everything, and then you just kind of go off in your niches. I kind of forgot where my tirade went there, but yeah, that's just kind of my two cents on that.
Speaker 1:And then well, at the same time, there's the opposite side of the coin, where we as clinicians also need to learn from the coaches. Like this past weekend, you know, I was at the Parker seminars and I got to learn from a lot of really, really cool people and I'd say gosh, maybe one of the top like quote unquote clinical speakers was Mike Boyle, the strength guy, you know, and I just got so much practical information from that talk and he really turned a lot of my thinking on its head, you know.
Speaker 2:I call somebody like Mike Boyle basically a medical whiskey machine. So he's distilling everything that we know into a much more applicable, easier to kind of convey and teach to other clinicians and coaches. That's what he's really good at. That's why he's spoken, you know, on the circuit for 30 years and written a couple books is like he's distilling where you're like, oh yeah, why didn't I think about like that, like doesn't really change what you're doing per se. You're just like, yeah, that's, that's a lot easier, you know, and that's that's what we need more of. We don't need more complexity in this profession, we need more. And then you know a ton of info. People are you know again, brett Winchester, cody's like people are drowning information and you know, dying for applicability or whatever is. Quote like, yeah, they don't Cool, what do you do? You got somebody in front of you. You know all the stuff you got to. You know get them out of pain, make them perform better, and you know, make them healthier person Cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, the other population that's really drowning in information, I'd say would be the athletes themselves, because when you've got a Garmin watch on right now, right, the Garmin Coros bud, oh gosh. Yeah, sorry I'm, I've gone to the Timex with no, no Bluetooth, just a love it Start stop. It actually just ran out of batteries, so I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to buck up and spend the $25 to get me another one soon.
Speaker 2:A lot of benefits to that.
Speaker 1:With the utilization of various wearables, we could say from you know, you can have a, a whoop and oring, the Coros, the, the Phoenix, that measures basically every facet of your physiology, and they're getting better and better. Now, what are the things that are important for runners to look at and coaches to look at? You know, and what are the things that you know? What changes should we be looking at? Say, oh, this was a good change or this is a normal change versus this is maybe a change that we want to look at.
Speaker 2:Well, that's, you know, it's I think I can't remember. There's a syndrome now of basically you know the measuring things all the time, where it's a form of like hypochondriac, whether you know you're not sick but you think like, oh God, like I've literally heard people say, oh yeah, my fitness level is like a little lower, like that's what your watch said, like wait, come on now. But they're like, they're adherent to it. Right, it's not just a passing. You know sentiment, you know the things that I think you really need to feel or pay attention to would be feel, and this is the, I think, a huge differentiator for elite athletes, people that can feel, and this is tough, like I've. You know another mistake story by Beau Beard, a college local to hear asked me to teach just a, you know, a quick seminar to their athletes and I let them pick what I was going to teach on and they said can you tell, teach us how to differentiate between injury and like pain and stuff that I should like go through. Good luck teaching that seminar. Right, that didn't give us so well, but because when you get to the end of the seminar, it's what I'm about ready to tell you is like that takes a probably a big training experience, a lot of probably running into different injuries and pain, but then intuition, kinesthetic awareness, like all of these things get amalgamated and then you're like man, some of the people we know this from running, right, the best in the world typically aren't the best in the world. It's the people that didn't take as much time off as other people do to injuries, right, so they have a bigger training load because they don't keep hitting hurdles with time off. And the people that are maybe more talented fall out of that because of how they got coached or whatever.
Speaker 2:So my thing would be well, how do you you know what's this feeling thing, rather than being led by you know data, that's, you know, coming from an algorithm or something like that is not necessarily how you feel on each and every run, but maybe how you feel overall when you're not running. So we know, you know there's things like red ass, like this relative energy deficiency syndrome and things like this that, like you, can you know the whole idea of can you over train or can you just like under. You know nutrition and things like that, but it's safe If you're feeling like dog shit 90% of the time as you're in a training block, something's not right and the likelihood you're going to get injured is probably higher, whether that's due to lack of sleep, over training, under nutrition, under hydration, whatever it is. So I think the feeling that you're getting outside of running because you know as well as I do, you go out for a run some days it feels terrible. You go for a run, other days it feels amazing, and we're always beating our head against the wall Like, well, what was the differentiator?
Speaker 2:A watch is not going to tell you that you're going to have to come down to you know, that's where training journals came from and, like God, I slept six hours. I felt terrible. Like, oh, there's a correlation. Well, we're trying to take data and then build a feedback loop. Hey, I know, if I sleep poorly, I train poorly or feel bad. Okay, don't do those things. That's the whole goal, because we get more wrapped up into technology and become, you know, the quantified man. You got to build intuition and a feedback loop at some point. So I'd say, if you're a data nerd, you know I'm just like you're supposed to cycle caffeine, which maybe we don't, even though we know we should.
Speaker 1:High versus just medium. Right, yes, go like this, and then you're going to go to sleep. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Just get rid of it. Every once in a while, try to build a better feedback loop of how you feel, not necessarily how you're running your time, your speed, and then because we do see the highest correlations to injury or what lack of sleep stress, it's not it is how you train, but it's the it's everything wrapped around it, right the outcome of the training itself. So if I have somebody run six hours a week, that's sleeping eight hours a night, eating really well, they've never run in their life, though Versus I get somebody that's run for 10 years and I take away two hours of sleep, they only get a thousand calories a day. I'll break that runner that's got a huge training age compared to the other one, right? So again, I've tweaked the variables, just in a different way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had Lucy Haynes on the podcast. She is an incredible athlete. She climbed 514 in rifle, which is pretty gnarly, as well as got second in the Leadville in the Leadville 100 in the same summer Cool, and and now she's a. She's a sports psychologist, so she's like a mental training coach and she also has had personal experience with disordered eating, relative energy deficiency syndrome and you know, it's one of those things where it's like you can never really say like oh, and now she's, she's overcome it. You know, like that's just those, those feedback loops and things like that are something that are always there, you know, and she's always like working with those and she's on the better side of those things.
Speaker 1:But exactly to your point, you know, a lot of times you talk to a bunch of different people who know a lot about a topic and they talk about the same things. She didn't say, oh, go out and get the latest chorus, get the latest Garmin 360, go get the latest Oro ring and try. She said you need to cultivate body awareness and you need to recognize how your body is feeling. You need to cultivate an awareness of your mental states and be able to track those things and track these qualitative measures and not just the quantitative. We're going to become more and more quantified and those algorithms algorithms are going to be better and better and more predictive of elite athlete performance. But at the end of the day, we cannot lose sight of the importance of the qualitative data, which is why this is called the art of assessment or this is called the art of prevention, why your course is called the art of assessment and why we need to rethink a lot of things like running rehab.
Speaker 2:Now again, you know, in a seminar that I'm teaching, I'm trying to not leave it up to the unknown variable. Right, like if you've read in Durba, alex Hutchison, he tells the story of, you know basically his bell lap and the something wrong with the clock and you know he thinks he's what, four seconds behind. He's actually ended up eight seconds ahead PRs, and then, as this PR cascade for the next few races, we, you know the whatever you want to call it central governor, the mental game. But that's what you're kind of training every day. Right, a run that feels terrible, even though physiologically you're the same, maybe a more beneficial run for you to go through than the day that you feel amazing. Right, because you get that kind of like push If you went purely by data.
Speaker 2:Right, if you wake up and your HRV is a little bit dipped and you're like I'm going to just take it off, like you won't get that effect, that effect's gone completely. Right, because there's the myth you won't ever get that mismatch. So I think you use Ben Stevens. He's from Canada, he made fun of me the other day because I had weaponized. He's like that's very American, but you weaponize the ability to say like hey, I may not be at my best, but I am going to train.
Speaker 2:But if you did that every day, it's not a great thing. Every, you know everyone's small, it is a good thing. So yeah, I think I agree with her 100%. And then you know, welcome to the best coaches in the world. That's what they're playing with at that level right, the it's almost at that level, like the physiology, the training, yeah, that's super important, but like the mental motivation and all of those other things, that's kind of a. You know, that's the 1% right there. And I believe that in a lot of other fields, you know, in professions, not just you know athletics.
Speaker 1:I completely agree, and we're kind of winding down here, although, gosh, we could talk, for probably on each one of these topics that we've discussed we could do a whole podcast on and don't worry, I'm going to be bugging you to come back on again at some point and the way I love to end all of these podcasts. Bo is talk about basically Benjamin Franklin and the volunteer fire department in Philadelphia, and he has this very famous quote an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So we've talked about a ton of different things, from advice for runners, coaches, clinicians, kpis, advice for coaches for youth athletes, strength training for runners, all these different things, qualitative versus quantitative measures, etc. But if we could distill this talk into one ounce of prevention, what would you say to people?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it may be a little bit different than you think, but and am I wrong? Is it Socrates? Is it know thyself, is that somebody else? Plato? I don't know, it's a famous Lotsu, lotsu, oh, way off.
Speaker 1:No, no, no thyself and no thy enemy. If you know thyself and your enemy, you need not fear the results of the 1000 battles. I just did a whole thing on it, sorry, look at that Wow, I'm impressed I did it last week. The title of my last podcast was know thy enemy, yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's what I would say is know yourself. But that because then that's going to go across patient, athlete, clinician, coach, and what I mean by that is you know, let's break each one of them down. The athlete know yourself. This is tough for you know you're a seventh grade, you know who you are. You don't know anything about running, but if you know you're a 35 year old, you know mama three, the 20, you know half marathoning. I hope you know that, like if a coach throws something at you that looks like advanced, right or scary, it probably is for you and then, like you got to know where you're at.
Speaker 2:You know, within this thing, if you're a patient knowing yourself, we have patients that come into our kind of clinic style. It is not the best fit for them because they don't want an active care model, even though they may be an athlete, which is kind of a crazy. It's like crazy pants to me that somebody's like yeah, I'd rather you do things to me than me do things. I just want to go run. And then we get into the clinician. Let's say you have, let's say you're, a year into practice and by some random, you know stroke of chance or something, you get a professional marathon in your practice. I'm not saying you couldn't handle it, but know yourself and know your limits and maybe there's a better referral or somebody you can ask for help. Or the other side of the coin, say somebody isn't a great fit for your practice, right, you know like they're never going to go home, and do you know? Home care, rehab? Hey, the appropriate thing to do is to refer them to somebody else. Even though that may not be, in your eyes, the best care, it's the best thing for them. And then same thing for the coach, right? Knowing the athlete you're working with, but knowing how you're going to interact with those people, right? So say there's somebody that you wouldn't mesh with from a personality standpoint. Somebody's giving you pushback on your coaching ways. That's where, again, what I mean by the best coaches in the world. They know themselves, but they literally have to become super adaptable.
Speaker 2:Within that You'll see outlier coaches that are concrete, they don't move and the world wraps around them. Welcome to Nick Saban, right? I don't think he's adapting to every player. He's just built this prowess that it's like I don't move, you move around me. But he knows that, he knows himself, knows how he operates and again, that applies outside of the medical performance athletic sphere, obviously that I think that's one of the most important things you could do as a human is kind of take time to dig inside, know what's going on with you and know what's kind of motivating you daily so you don't get burned out. And then we could like wrap that right back into training for a marathon, right, like you may have a 12 week plan and like why the hell am I training for this thing when you get six weeks in and it starts go a little hard. So again getting back to that kind of that initial why, which I know you. Just you know it's all Simon Sinek in Vegas. So yeah, kind of go into that and know yourself. So yeah, that'd be it.
Speaker 1:Gosh. Thank you so much, Bo. I really actually got. I got a ton out of this myself. So I'm going to be relooking at my Keith Barr literature and diving into those those different phenotypical expressions myself, and we're definitely going to have you on again to talk more about all these different things.
Speaker 2:Love her now, so I'm game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so thanks again and we'll be chatting soon.
Speaker 2:Thank you, man.
Speaker 1:I hope that you enjoyed this episode of the Art of Provincial podcast. If you did enjoy and or benefit from some of the information in this podcast, please be sure to like, subscribe and share this podcast, or please give us a five star review on any platform that you find podcasts. One thing to note that this podcast is for education and entertainment purposes only. No patient is formed and if you are having any difficulty, pain, discomfort, etc. With any of the movements or ideas described within this podcast, please seek the help of a qualified, qualified and board certified medical professional, such as your medical doctor or a sports chiropractor, physical therapist, etc.