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
Scott Jones on Embracing Endurance: Coaching, Discipline, and Lifelong Fitness
Scott Jones shares insights on how to fuse playfulness with discipline in athletic training. He emphasizes the importance of strength training for endurance athletes while fostering individualized coaching to create more engaging and tailored fitness journeys.
• Combining fun with consistency in training
• Transitioning from power sports to endurance coaching
• Importance of strength training for endurance athletes
• Personalized coaching beyond programming
• Navigating fads without losing sight of fundamentals
• Encouraging long-term adherence through joy in movement
• Goal-oriented training to inspire motivation and purpose
Scott offers an engaging narrative on blending strength training with endurance coaching. He talks about the intricacies of adapting his knowledge to a clientele dominated by long-distance runners and cyclists in Colorado. By integrating physiology and psychology, Scott emphasizes personalized training that balances rigorous efforts with sustainable practices, making a compelling case for consistency over sporadic intensity. His insights into the evolution of coaching practices, grounded in both literature and common sense, reveal a holistic approach that champions foundational training as the key to long-term success and injury prevention.
The discussion extends beyond athletic prowess, delving into the art of coaching, parenting, and life balance. Scott shares valuable lessons on discipline, motivation, and teaching his children the significance of effort and commitment. He underscores the importance of simple, fun training, and the role of nutrition, sleep, and stress management in overall well-being. Scott leaves us with a powerful reminder: exercise should be enjoyable and meaningful, tied to activities you love, ensuring fitness is a lifelong journey rather than a mere destination. Tune in to explore how fitness, family, and fun intersect in Scott Jones' world.
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Hello everyone and welcome to yet another episode of the Art of Prevention podcast and, as always, I have a very special guest, scott Jones. And Scott Jones has a wonderful and quite varied past and a lot of various experiences that we're going to be picking his brain on today. So, scott, thank you so much for coming on today. Why don't you tell everybody who you are?
Speaker 2:let's do it. Thanks for having me, man. Um, yeah, my wife calls me special. Is that the same thing as a special guest, or?
Speaker 2:sure oh okay. Oh anyway, I'm scott jones. I'm out here in fruta, colorado, not too far from nick. I think nick was one of the first uh professionals I met out here. He hit me up through through the podcast and uh that I've been doing for years. There was a running group out here. We had coffee and um yeah, we've been connecting ever since. But my background is in uh sport, performance coaching, endurance coaching. My master's is an extra science. I've got an undergrad in education. I decided long ago I didn't want to go teach because I was afraid of choking out a kid in a in a moment of weakness.
Speaker 1:But I've been.
Speaker 2:I've been a lifer man, I'm a lifelong coach. I'm not doing anything else. I love it. It's not a hobby for me. It'll never be a hobby. Um, you know me and you talk a lot off off air our thoughts on business and how to do things. And, yeah, I've just always been passionate entrepreneurial. For the last 15 or 20 years Live out here in Fruita with my wife, got two boys, 11 and 13. My older boy is a runner and a bookworm and a very intellectual kid and my youngest is a hyperactive ball sport kid. And it's crazy man, it's crazy raising kids in a cool place like this because there's just so many options. But, yes, where can we? If I told you, if I kept going this with this intro, we you wouldn't even get a word in and the episode would be over in 40 minutes. So that is the general idea entrepreneur and the art of getting people to move and move better and have fun while we do it.
Speaker 1:Awesome and you started out being more of a baseball player kind of person power athlete and then sounds like you really dove into the endurance athlete. So how did that switch over?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's a great question. It's. It's funny to even think of myself as an endurance athlete or coach, because I grew up making fun of runners, like literally. Because I grew up in South Florida, like why do you want to go run and do nothing, not chase the ball? It was, you know, 90 degrees, 85% humidity. Running was a punishment for all the sports that I played back in the day. I mean, we, we all know this story right. And uh, south Florida I mean you grew up in Texas South Florida is very similar to to where you grew up. It's just, I mean, it just takes your soul, man, the, the two days in football in the middle, in the middle of August and um, being able to play sports year round was a blessing for sure. But yeah, I played baseball, basketball, football growing up.
Speaker 2:My dad was my coach for a lot of that stuff. My dad definitely planted a seed in me from a work ethic standpoint. He played college football for a year at West Virginia before he tore his knee up back in the 70s. And you know we would get up at 515 in the morning, go to the gym and bring a couple buddies and he put us through plyos and and lift and and do stuff that people think is crossfit today, which is like power movements that we've been doing for 80 years but now it's called crossfit for some reason. And uh, yeah, so we did that, went to college and, on the east coast, went to appalachian state up in the mountains of north Carolina. I knew I wanted to get to the mountains, played played ball. Transferred to a D two school after that wasn't wasn't seeing my future at that school. So played baseball. Went to Marshall university for my for my master's. I thought I wanted to be. You had to have a master's to coach D D one sports and I thought it was going to be a baseball coach. And I didn't. I didn't have a good experience during my graduate assistantship with the baseball coach. So I turned my GA over to the exercise physiology lab and worked at the exercise physiology lab. I was getting my master's in exercise science over and over at Marshall university.
Speaker 2:And then my very first job ever was in a suburb of Denver, colorado. A few months after I graduated I packed up all my stuff to go take a job in Columbus, ohio. I was going to go live with one of my best friends from undergrad. I moved all my stuff up there and then a week later I got offered a job in Colorado. So to this day he still has a bunch of my crap up in Ohio. I put everything in the back of a truck, moved out to colorado and helped start this business that my um, my professor and advisor in grad school. Uh, this business he started was turned into a franchise. It's the first franchise that anybody bought. So I came out here it's really cool. My, my main boss was the head of the exercise physiology lab at the air force academy. So I got to hang out at the Air Force Academy, which you know they have a lot of resources there for, for for testing and all kinds of cool stuff, so he mentored me a little bit. Um, that business never really took off.
Speaker 2:But my the this is a roundabout way of telling you how I got into the endurance sports when I was on the East coast and training athletes. We were training guys coming in for the NFL combine, for you know, four to six weeks before the combine, tons of team sports out there. So we were working with primarily young athletes like under 22. And when I came out here, just the demographic was completely different. It was way more competitive to work with those athletes and there's tons of adults that had some disposable income that wanted to be coached on how to go run further or ride further or you know, whatever adventure they're going to do.
Speaker 2:Colorado is very adventure centric. So so I went from 80% of power athletes to about 30% of power athletes out here and you know we were doing VO two maxes testing. We had a cart and all kinds of toys at this place, but we were testing all athletes and um, so many endurance athletes came in and I started coaching them and I had to learn. You know I knew the physiology but I didn't know the, the psychology. I had to start running long distances and riding long distances just so I could relate to the type of athlete I started working with.
Speaker 2:So that was back in 2003-4. Um so started doing that, started coaching a lot of endurance athletes along with the other athletes I was working with, met my wife in 06 and she was a really strong runner and mountain biker and you know we started doing all those adventures and I don't know, about 10 years ago I started a brand called Becoming Ultra and I was getting really interested in running further and further, because I was just like getting hurt playing basketball all the time and I wanted something that would still like give me that that kind of mental edge I I have to push myself to be happy. So I started doing a lot of stuff, started running ultras and and, uh, you know, probably 80 percent of my clients now are running really long distances, and so that's kind of the the quick story of how I transitioned over to to work with those athletes, although I still I still work with every type of athlete you can imagine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've seen you working with everybody from the running athlete down to the youth sport athlete and everything in between, and it's been kind of neat watching that variety of coaching that you've got as tools in your tool belt, if you will.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's unique to have a background in the power sports but then to come over to the endurance and like to apply a lot of those you know concepts of biomechanics and you know economy and all the things that make power athletes what they are. Translating that into endurance athletes so they can enjoy the sport a little bit more, be a little bit more resilient, a little stronger a little bit more. Be a little bit more resilient, a little stronger, a little bit more durable. And uh, it's been fun, man, I love it.
Speaker 1:And for me I feel like our backgrounds are almost flipped. You know, I was that tall, lanky kid that was running in short shorts in the middle of the summer with my team full of guys also in like our short shorts and stuff like that. And then I grew up and got injured a ton running. And now I'm on this almost like crusade to get runners to strength train in order to improve the capacity of their tissues, whereas you you've just known all along like oh yeah, if you want to have stronger tissues, then you strength train. And now there's all this literature that supports like not only does strength training and resistance training improve endurance athletes resiliency in many of their tissues, from their ligaments to their tendons to their bones, but also can improve running economy. But this is stuff that you've been inputting into runners programming for basically decades now. So tell me a little bit about how. How did you first start convincing runners to start resistance training?
Speaker 2:well, I didn't know that you could train for any sport and not strength train from my background so it was great. I mean, I just literally had this conversation yesterday with a runner who's working with a high level coach. When I say high level, they're, they were a really good runner, they've been a professional runner in the past and um, so they have that background. But what I was finding is that no running coaches were programming strength. They were asking their clients to go source it out themselves, whether it's finding a coach in town or looking for programming and you know the the level you need for everyday runners just to get what they need from the strength training. It's pretty simple, man Like.
Speaker 2:The fact that people weren't programming that into their clients was just wild to me. And you know, like in the last five years especially, all the literature is just supporting common sense in my opinion, which is kind of a nice place to be because, as you know too, like you're you're from academia you go like I knew every. I knew every function in the Krebs cycle at some point. What? Why in the world would I use that terminology? Training an athlete? They just want to know how to get better and faster you know.
Speaker 2:But when the you know, when, the, when the knowledge base kind of supports common sense, I think that's a good place to be. I mean, so yeah, so the the long-winded way of saying that is like we were. You're always just kind of testing what other coaches do and and what you get from high level athletes. We're always kind of reverse engineering what the best athletes are doing and applying it to everyday athletes. If you're working with everyday athletes, or to mid-level athletes if you're working, working with, like a high school kid that's going to go to college, he needs to have, or she needs to have, a certain base of understanding of what their body needs to be able to do.
Speaker 2:But I just started messing around like, okay, we're doing higher volume, let's go heavier and focus on range of motion and try to build a little bit of strength before we go into these big volume weeks and months. If we're in off season, then in the volumes not as high, then let's do some plies, let's do some higher rep stuff and and and work on muscular endurance for those types of athletes. So we're just, we were just kind of testing things and seeing what works and then eventually, you know, the little come out to support those things, and that's what a lot of coaches are doing now, the ones that are doing it right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and one thing that you mentioned also was psychology. And you know, we know that there are things that if we put a training plan on paper and the person was able to follow that training plan 100%, then we'd get a good outcome. But the actual implementation of training plans kind of crap hits the fan at some point. So when you're doing that one-on-one dialogue with your athletes, sometimes it's a give and a take, right. So how have you learned how to navigate that over the years with some of your athletes?
Speaker 2:Well, I think defining certain styles of coaching before you get into that is important. Like when somebody comes to the gym and I'm working with them one-on-one, like some of the kids you know. Like the athlete that you saw me working with over at the gym that we've been a part of in the past, I'm there for every second of his hour hour and a half that he comes in and I can manage that and we can push them a little bit and see how he responds mentally to tougher efforts. We can. You know, a lot of times the stuff is written in pencil. I might have a goal for the hour and we get stuck on the second thing we're doing and we might end up working on that for the rest of the session. I mean, it's very similar to treatment that you do Um, so you're you're customizing to the needs of the athlete.
Speaker 2:But when we're talking about this, a lot of the style of coaching out there where it's more of a programming platform. Like my virtual clients, I do all their programming, but the goal is to talk to them every every week or two or three, based on where they are. That's where the coaching happens. The coaching is the relationship you have with your clients, not writing something down on a piece of paper or in an app and having them follow it. So, when it comes to that, like for programming and the virtual style coaching, like I've told people in the past, if they're having a hard time hitting their, their goals that I'm setting for them, like if we can get some, if we can get like a 75 or 80% adherence to programming, they're doing pretty damn good. Uh, but when you walk in the door and I see you, you're going to get a hundred percent of the of the adherence Cause I'm I'm managing that the hour for you.
Speaker 2:So I think just kind of understanding the concepts and how we coach is is important. But the mental aspect, um, if you're working with a coach, they need to take everything into consideration your sleep, your fatigue, your nutrition to an extent, your fueling to an extent, stresses in your life, practices in other training sessions, external activities. If you went on a 10-mile hike and you don't do 10-mile hikes and you come in and you're lethargic on a Monday, then that's that has to be taken into account, depending on the type of athlete you are. But those are just. You know, those are just some of the thoughts that come to mind dealing with athletes like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that those those thoughts are definitely applicable to not only coaches, especially new coaches, but also to people in my sphere, the clinicians, and even like the high school athlete or person that's training themselves Like it's not ever, it's really like almost never, having somebody come in with hip pain and you go, okay, I'm going to put them through my hip pain flow chart and we're going to see where they lie on that flow chart and then I'm just going to give them a progression or a plan based on that.
Speaker 1:It's always that always seems to be kind of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You know, the coach or the client and the patient they rarely read the textbook before they come in, you know. So you can't just take somebody's VO2 max scores and then just write out an eight-week training program for them to do their first 5K, you know. So all of of those nuances I think are really important, and especially in the age of things like ChatGPT and all of these AI softwares where anybody can just say, write me a Couch to 5K running plan, like, yeah, that can spit out a running plan where if you followed it it might work out pretty well. But if you want to optimize your results, then having that one-on-one relationship with someone and developing that relationship based on your experiences and the needs of that individual are going to be differentiators of us versus other individuals.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the optimization thing is why people hire coaches. I mean the accountability that's built in. All the knowledge is out there. I mean it's there for the taking. I don't think me or you or any coach who's being honest would say that everyone needs a coach. But if you want the accountability, if you want the push, if you want the information laid out in front of you so you don't have to go do all the legwork that's what coaches are for at every single level and for pretty much every sport. Like we're providing information based on experience and and knowledge and we're passing it on. And if you want to be, if you want to be in that cog, then that's that's why people hire coaches, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Now, if you want to hire a coach and decide that you're still going to do things your way, then you're not being coached, you're just saying that you're being. Then it's just a status thing sometimes, and sometimes it's just because you know we all do things that we think are going to motivate us. Like I might buy an app. Like this has happened plenty of times I might buy software for my business online. That thing is going to streamline things that I hate, like social media and all the stuff that we have to do as practitioners and coaches in this day and age, but I still gotta do the work, like I still gotta get in there and come up with ideas and still put it out there. I think a lot of people use use coaching for that as well and, like I would rather somebody back away from my services if they're not committed to it, even though, um, it doesn't always work like that. But we want to get the best of our, our people, so they have to be looking for that as well yeah, and I mean anything.
Speaker 1:It's like making something that's adherable. I don't know if that's really a word, but that adherence that you mentioned was the most important thing. You know, if you go out and you hit singles every single time you're at bat and you're on, base percentage is 900 to a thousand. Every single major league baseball team is going to pick you up. Right, they would pick you up over the person that hits 20 home runs and then strikes out every other day of the week. And this is something that I was talking about with one of my patients when they're doing some of their rehab and some of their resiliency or capacity training is, hey, I would rather you go out and you just have basically mediocre workouts but you consistently do them, versus you go and you have that amazing three-hour gym session.
Speaker 2:The consistency is huge. How many people have you met I can tell you right now I'm in this category who've had an injury? They go to PT. They get good information. They you know you shouldn't have to go see your PT for the rest of your life after an injury. That's not how it works. They release you when you're ready to play or when you're ready to be functional again and you know the movements that are going to help you. You know the exercises that they gave you and after about two weeks or 10 days, whatever it is you stop doing them. And the reason you stop doing them is because they're boring and sorry. Like 75% of training is boring, it's just it's logging miles, it's doing your base strength work that you need to do every single week. And if you earn the ability to hit that 25% of the things that are fun, exciting and new, then you're going to be a good athlete and you're going to stay healthy longer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know the way that I look at my personal training, the things that I do to try and accomplish some of my physical goals, is, you know, I used to go out and I would do those like home run sessions or whatever where I go, and I do like a thousand. You know, I could never do them again, whereas now I just think, okay, if I implement this new training, am I going to be able to do it for at the very least six to eight weeks, and if the answer is no, then I'm probably going to skip it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's normal. And like we get addicted to the effort too. Man, like I, I love doing big, hard freaking efforts. I I mean, I like traveling far distances on my legs and I'm on my mountain bike and I love the really hard two or three hour gym session with with a few buddies who want to get after it, and if you're in a place where you can do that regularly, that's awesome. But if you're in a place where you just haven't found that consistency and and to put a workout or an effort like that into into your week or or two where it tears you up for the next two or three weeks, you've got to risk the reward. The risk versus reward balance on those things, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really like to think of it almost as like a lot of people talk about the 80-20 rule, where 80% of your efforts are going to be pretty slow, pretty boring, kind of like just foundational work, and then that last 20% is your efforts are going to be pretty slow, pretty boring, kind of like just foundational work. And then that last 20% is your real, like workout stuff where you're doing thresholds and intervals and things like that, and then maybe less than 1% is racing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it. I mean, you got to fall in love with the process, so you're not going to be getting any of this stuff. If you don't enjoy the Monday morning at 6 o'clock, getting up and and doing the work before you go to work or class or wherever you are in life, um, I don't know, do you really, do you really earn the ability to go push hard on on the race day? That's six months from now? It's, it's human nature, but that's what we're trying to break people of. We're trying to teach people how to get consistent with these things so they can do this until they're 75 or 80 or 85, whatever it is. At least, that's my goal with people, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost like that reminded me of that Jocko Willink phrase like discipline is freedom. You know, we always think that discipline is this constraint that confines us in what we're able to do. But that discipline to get up early and get that work in is the thing that allows us to then go out and have those really big fun days or go to those races and put everything on the line and not be too messed up afterwards. Yeah, I agree, man. So what are some of the ways in which you help some of your clients like kind of for lack of better words like fall in love with that process. So, process over outcome, journey over destination.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, we're always reverse engineering our clients goals, whether it's a 16 year old kid who wants to be the starting quarterback at the high school, or if it's someone who has been running five K's and they want to go run a marathon, or they they've been running half marathons and they want to go try their first ultra. Um, any kind of training program is always reverse engineered and it's reverse engineered off best practices. It's a reverse engineered off of what the highest level athletes are doing. Um, you're not going to take the best ultra runner in the world and apply their training to somebody who's just getting into it, but you can take those concepts and apply it to them as far as the ramp ups concerned. And then you, you find ways to benchmark athletes efforts. Like I can think of a handful of athletes I'm working with right now. Like they don't have any big endurance athletes for six to 12 months from now, but this is their off season. So we're going to work on things that, uh, they don't enjoy working on as much or they just need they need to get better at. So we're dropping volume, we're doing more explosive movements, we're doing heavier, heavier weight sessions in the weight room and we're taking the opportunity to like create seasons of fitness or seasons of training for people, so they're not always just going out and doing the same type of effort year, year round, and I think painting a picture for people like that is really helpful.
Speaker 2:The accountability from a coaching standpoint is really helpful, but you have to have people that are receptive to accountability. There's a lot of people who've never been coached. Who I coach, and it's I always tell people it takes about three or four weeks to get used to having somebody dictate some of your time, because nobody likes having their time dictated. But's what the that's what the deal is. Um, so I think that's that's helpful to, to paint a picture for people. But I mean, it's as simple as just explaining like we all get a rush signing up for a race that's six months away, but how do we create energy every day? That serves us well, because we can all get excited about going to disney world, but how do we get excited about going to work nine to five to make the money so we can go to disney world?
Speaker 1:that's kind of the same, the same idea, you know yeah, it's like um people say like if you're just working off of motivation, you're not gonna get it done no, this or motivation.
Speaker 2:I mean, dude, I don't have motivation to get out of my freaking bed at five o'clock Like I get. I get up and work, work or work out early in the morning every day. If it was based on on motivation, I mean I'm not motivated to do that, I'm just I'm looking down the road. I just know that compounding effects are going to help me, whether it's in my business life or you know I'm.
Speaker 2:I'm raising two little boys and like seeing the effects of their day to day, like if they didn't have a sport practice or they didn't work out hard at school, then we're, they're doing something at my house. Like there's a lap runner neighborhood, it's a 0.75 loop and my older kid, um he's not always the one to like tell me that he wants to go do it, but if I tell him to do it he does it within two minutes and he's a great kid about it. But you got to earn every day, man, and hopefully that's rubbing off on my kids and if it can rub off on kids, then I think adults know better. But still just burning that into people's brains to really get them to a place they need to be no-transcript putting three meals a day on their table and all these different things.
Speaker 1:Because you know that's something that you know me looking ahead it's. You know I'm kind of selfishly asking for some of your advice here, you know.
Speaker 2:Well, I can go on all day. First, there's no perfect parents. I mean, we're all. Every parent is trying Well.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to say that.
Speaker 2:Not every parent is actually trying, the ones who just hand them a frigging fifth grader a phone and give them complete autonomy. You're not trying, you're being lazy as hell. But for the people who are like, really conscious of of this type of stuff, nothing's perfect. Like I'm, I'm not trying to create a collegiate athlete in my house. I'm trying to create somebody who values movement in their bodies as a tool. And if they want to use that tool for sport or for performance at some point, that's awesome. But I have to model that as well.
Speaker 2:And if, um, you'll get this pretty, you don't have to have kids to understand these concepts and it gets really common sense. But if I tell my kid to go clean his room, that junk ain't happening. Like I have to go show him where I want things in his room and how to vacuum and you got to do it a few times before. When you say clean your room, they know what they're going to go do. But if I go clean my room and they see how it's done, that takes half the effort and a modeling form somewhat. And my kids know that me and my wife we work out every day. We are disciplined about it. It's not always perfect, but they know that I get up early and work out. They know that I'll leave the house at like eight at night to go walk or jog around the neighborhood to get some more activity in. So they know it's a value system that we have in our house. Uh, and then you just gotta be willing to watch your kids freaking, fall on their face.
Speaker 2:Man like my. I was teaching my. This is a funny story. Actually I was teaching my boys I don't know if it's both of them are youngest, but we but it was after a baseball practice when we were on the front range and the ballpark had a playground with swings and stuff. So we were playing around on the swings and goofing off. This was probably a year and a half ago and Wes, my youngest, was trying to jump off the swing at the highest point.
Speaker 2:So I was like all right, dude, you're not doing right. So I got on the swing and I was showing them how to do it and my father-in-law came over. He's like, hey, you're going to get hurt. I was like Steve, I got this. I was like I want to teach them how to do that. They're going to do this anyway. I want to teach them how to do this so they can take some risks that don't have. You know, maybe you'll sp thing. We get on the river and we want to jump off of a little cliff that's 10, 20 feet off the ground. Well, me and Lauren will teach them what you do. You get in the water first, you check for depth, you make sure there's no rocks or logs sitting around, and you go feet first and you go for it Like, we do that stuff all the time. But I would rather teach them the risks that are associated with their actions. Then then just had them go test it out for the first time with some idiot who just jumps off a bridge in the water. Like you know, like my dumb ass did down in Florida growing up, you're just looking for adventure, you know? Um, so don't be, don't be afraid to like, show them how to do hard, challenging things and then let them mess up a little bit.
Speaker 2:We were, I was in the gym that we're building out here in Fruita the other day and then and I had the boys doing like a little kettlebell workout and they're skinny little dudes they're. They're small but from a biomechanics standpoint like they can swing a little 10 pound, 15 pound kettlebell around. And I look over and my, my youngest, has a 25 pound kettlebell. You've youngest kid and he's little. And I look back and he's pressing overhead.
Speaker 2:I was like yo, yo, yo yo. It's like calm down, you're going to drop that thing on your head. He's like no, not as like, all right, well, you said you're not, so go for it. Like it's going to be okay. Like his body has no idea that that's a kettlebell in the gym or if it's a box that he's putting up on the highest shelf in his room. Like our body. We get a little bit crazy with what we allow kids to do. Now should you be doing max effort, deadlifts and back squats with a 10-year-old? No, but things that are going to translate to real life, the functional movements and stuff. I think we can let the reins off a little bit with these kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's like, when are they going to learn that? Are they going to learn that when they're putting stuff overhead in their college dorm room? To learn that, when they're putting stuff overhead in their college dorm room, or are we going to rely on, you know, the coach at the, the high school to teach them the overhead press? Or, you know, are we going to drive with them to their dorm room and help them set it up? And then it's the first time they move into an apartment by themselves. It's like, yeah, we got to take the cotton off the corners of the tables at some point, you know yeah, and I mean we.
Speaker 2:We routinely have our kids ride their bike to the grocery store, put together a menu and make dinner for us, like they're 11 and 13 right now. We've been doing it for a couple years, though. Like these kids can go to the store and buy groceries for us, they can. They can go around the neighborhood and play at the park and come back at a time that we tell them to, like the world's not as dangerous as everybody wants it to be.
Speaker 1:They can ride their bike to my apartment anytime.
Speaker 2:That's a haul. I would love to send them on that one. No, kids are great, man. You just it's like, it's really like coaching. My two boys could not be more different. It's, it's wild, but you just gotta let the reins off a little bit. You can't be afraid to freaking, make it tough on them and you know if, if I want to go on a 10 mile hike they've been doing 10 mile hikes since they were six years old they can do a 10 mile hike. I don't care if they complain, we're going to keep moving. They know that. They don't complain about stuff that me and Lauren take them to do anymore. They just know it's going to happen. So you just got to build those habits in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome. Now, if we shift gears here. You've been coaching for a while now and with coaching and increasing longevity of, like your athletes I'm sure there are some athletes that you've been coaching for a really long time how do we navigate this world that is just obsessed with fads? You know whether that be certain training fads or certain nutrition fads, or whatever you know.
Speaker 2:I saw a client probably I don't know maybe six to eight months ago go on a forum and ask like a fairly technical question about her own training. And I was coaching her at the time and I don't think she knew that I was in that forum at the same time and I texted her. I was like, hey, dude, um, you're going to go ask a bunch of people Like there's probably 30 to 40 comments on her post. I forget what the question was, but I was like you can go ask 30 or 40 people who literally just Googled that and gave you an answer. I was like I, here's the answer, stop, who literally just Googled that and gave you an answer. I was like here's the answer, stop wasting your time.
Speaker 2:And she's like okay, I understand, because what she did as a living was very similar, like she needed people to trust her expertise. She was in the medical field and so you got to trust expertise. Now, if you don't want to trust the expertise, that's fine, but my coaching is going to be representative of the information I give you. You can't be coached by me and then take other people's advice and then say that I wasn't a good coach. That's not how it works. So that part's challenging for sure. And then, what was the initial question?
Speaker 1:again, because I got off on a little tangent. There Just fads, which I think you mentioned the story about. There's always this flashy thing, this distraction you mentioned the story about. You know, there's always this flashy thing, this distraction, you know. It's like oh, we got to do our, you know. Basically, you know something like 80-20 where we're doing our foundational work, we've got some hard efforts, but then oh, we've got this shiny new training method.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe I should do cadence, pacing or like all these different things, and it's like no, no, no, no, no, stick to what we've been doing and you're not gonna get you. You know you're not gonna have some crazy insane progress because that's just not how the human body works. And people are gonna claim that if you go fat adapted or keto, that you're gonna get some crazy thing. And it's like maybe some individuals have done that, but the fact of the matter is you don't see all the stories of people bonking out in races because they tried to go fat adapted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, my gosh, that's a big one. I mean so many of the fads around uh fueling nutrition. I mean I used to consult on uh nutritional stuff. I had the background for it, but I got sick of that because what you put in your body is a 24-7 proposition and I can get as much as I need out of you athletically in an hour or two a day. So the discipline to go to the gym or to go for the run or to do the thing is going to take you 60 to 90 minutes for most people on a daily basis. But what you're putting in your body food-wise is all day long and it's a huge behavioral. It's more behavior than the knowledge base when it comes to food stuff. But, oh man, it's frustrating.
Speaker 2:I would just like to use some common sense around the nutrition stuff, the fads around the movement, I just think, keeping it simple, like there's been a lot of chatter about, like just back squats. Should your knees be every toe Should they? Should they be back? Should your heels be down? Should they be? Well, let's use some common sense.
Speaker 2:Were there good athletes back in 1998, 2005, 2015? Yeah, there were some really good athletes. What were they doing? They're doing squats. They're. They're doing good form, good core engagement, good range of motion, squats.
Speaker 2:Now if you want to add some different modalities to somebody's squat to get you know that extra little percentage point for somebody who's near the top of the bell curve already go for it. But if you're working with an everyday athlete who can't squat their body weight a few times, then you need to start with the basics. Keep it simple. The things I've been working forever have been working forever.
Speaker 2:It's not like we're walking around seeing better looking athletes on the street than we did back in the fifties and sixties and seventies. Like people aren't taking care of themselves as well as they used to, but they want to use information as their tool of choice, without applying any of the information. So it doesn't really matter what you looked at on the internet today, like squats and lunges and pushups and sit ups and pull ups. Like. Those things aren't going away and they're not going to be less effective just because it's 2024. Our bodies haven't changed that much and over the years, you know, we haven't evolved into some creature that can just go pop out 10 pull ups because we read an article about how to do a pull up better. I'll go off on that stuff man, pull up better.
Speaker 1:I'll go off on that stuff, man, it drives me insane. Everybody's obsessed with like hanging from a bar now and things like that it's. It's like, yeah, sure, that's great, you know, but like, is that gonna be the magical thing that makes you live to 100?
Speaker 2:like absolutely not, yeah no, but also like your, your body, your um. Power to weight should be where you can hold yourself off of a bar for a few seconds.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's not an unreasonable ask. Every time you watch it it's Titanic. Like those poor little guys couldn't hang on for more than a few seconds and they're just falling to their deaths. Let's learn how to hang around for a little bit, I mean. But it's everything. We all do this when we're coaching. We kind of get interested in certain aspects of of coaching, cause you have to do certain things to keep keep your own practice fresh as well, and you know you might go into a rabbit hole where you're training people a little bit different for six or eight months and then you kind of go back to things that you know. You know your bread and butter and I think it's fine to to be creative with it. But I think half of coaching it's like taco bell model. Man, like you go to taco bell, they have the same meal and 20 different delivery systems.
Speaker 1:you have one little crunchy thing.
Speaker 2:You have one little soft thing. You have it laying on the ground. You have it like it's the same food and like 20 different things. Coaching is very similar to to that kind of thing, like we're trying to get a interval set off of a runner. Well, we can come up with three, two ones, two to ones, one to ones.
Speaker 1:We can do fart looks.
Speaker 2:We can do hill, where it's all the same energy system when it comes down to it, but we're trying to psychologically make people get a little more excited about these things yeah, should we do mile repeats, k repeats or 800 meter repeats, or should we do 400 meter repeats?
Speaker 1:and it's like these are all the same thing. Should we do long runs or threshold runs, or should we do both, or should we do the threshold run in the long run?
Speaker 2:it's like, hey, what fits into your schedule, you know, yeah I mean, you know, sometimes it's our job to make it, to keep it fresh for people. Yeah, so I'll change it up. They probably know in their heart it's the same thing. But even if they don't like, at least they're seeing some different stuff on the paper every once in a while, you know you know, and what role would you say?
Speaker 1:so I know that we've talked about you know, the grind work. You know, getting in that base mileage, things like that. What role does just having fun? You know? I just listened to um kelly starrett's podcast with andrew huberman. He talked a lot about, you know, having fun and exploring new training methods and things like that and I thought it was just a fascinating topic. And you know they're doing that 80-20 where, like a lot of it's just that boring work, where it's like we got to do the capacity work, we got to do the base mileage but then at the same time spend 20 minutes on the ground or maybe you do hang from a bar or something like that. It's not the emphasis and it's not the thing that your training is centered around, but it can be an important thing as far as just the fun standpoint and just working on finding little holes in your physiology that you need to fill.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, as you know, I'm in the process of opening up a facility out here in Fruita and our tagline is train to play. I mean it's it's whether you're a 65 year old who wants to be able to bend over and play with your grandkids, or whether you're just a weekend warrior who wants to be able to hit the mountain bike trails and do it, you know, with some kind of efficiency or proficiency, or if you're playing a sport and you want to get better at that thing. Like, play is the foundation of all of the stuff that we're doing. Like we don't have to go dig ditches all day long If we don't choose that profession. We have to keep our bodies moving and I think I think I was telling you there's.
Speaker 2:I went to a conference years ago and the guy was speaking on play as a way to increase performance, but then he was talking about the psychological aspects of play and how the opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression, and I heard that maybe 20 years ago it might've been 15 or 20 years ago, and it's never left me and it's. It's why, when you just go do the training that's prescribed to you, if you do that in a vacuum. It might not bring you the joy or the satisfaction that it's meant to, but using our bodies for, for movement and sport, um brings a lot of. It brings. It brings a lot, a lot of externals to to life. That is the reason I do this stuff. That I do, I mean, as I can't imagine our culture without sport and competition. It would be a weird culture. I mean, we have to have those externals to be excited about. We play from the day we're born and then at some point unfortunately whether it's in this day and age where people throw a phone or an iPad in front of a kid and they kind of stunt the psychology of what kids are supposed to be doing on a daily basis, or if it's adults who never look up at the sky when they're out and about and they don't have like this curiosity about the world anymore, or they stop dreaming or whatever it is I think all these things tie in together.
Speaker 2:It's a holistic approach, for sure, but you got to keep it fresh and fun, man. Like. If you can't figure out how to how to keep it fresh or fun for yourself, then you need to articulate that to your coach. Hey, I'm getting. I've had this happen before. I've had a client where we were just building post injury or getting back into the sport of running and it had to be boring for a couple months to build a base, and they're like, oh, do we have to do the same thing on Monday? Like no, you don't have to do the same thing. I can give you a million different things. We can go over 20 different concepts that might work for you. You just got to communicate with your coach, or be honest with yourself on what you're trying to get out of this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm so excited to see the gym once it officially opens. I know the first thing that we did when I came by your gym was we played horse and then we played oversized golf, which you beat me at both of those, which is like now I'm going to. I'm going to be showing up, you know, before everybody else in the gym and practicing my oversized golf.
Speaker 2:It's going to be great. I'm going to put people so far out of their comfort zones Like I'm going to make people shoot a hoop when they come into the gym.
Speaker 2:I don't care if you're an 80-year-old woman who's never touched a basketball. You're going to shoot the hoop and you're going to get better at it. You're going to learn how to throw or you're going to learn how to catch, and it's not going to be a part of your bigger goals to be a professional athlete as a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom. But it's going to be fun and it's going to take your mind. Have this gym with you know pretty much bare floors when you walk in and there's all these cool weights and toys and everybody's going to. They're always going to gravitate to the fun stuff and if you can implement the fun stuff into the training, that's really where you see some gains, where you see people adhere to programming and want to come back.
Speaker 1:Like that's the goal. Yeah, and I like that. You also talked earlier about, you know, doing these baseline things with like the goal in mind. You know, a couple months ago somebody in the gym asked me, like you know, a pretty innocent question. They're like, dr Nick, like what kind of what do you like to do to work out?
Speaker 1:And I was like the first thing that popped into my head was like I don't work out, I just go rock climbing and I go trail running because it's fun. And I was like, oh yeah, I do, I do do strength training like a couple of times a week in the gym so that I can then go and rock climb more or trail run more or trail run faster or rock climb better, you know, and it just goes to show like having that end goal in mind, like it doesn't feel like I'm going to the gym and just working out, just to work out. And I think that's where adherence really starts to drop off. It's like I do this so that I can put three bouldering pads on my back and then walk a couple of miles to the boulder that I want to do and then jump off and fall off that boulder a bunch of times and then walk back out without spraining my ankle or tweaking my knee or things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, walk back out without spraining my ankle or tweaking my knee or things like that. Yeah, oh, yeah. I've always said, man, if, if the only reasons you're working out is for health or for looks, uh, you're going to be done soon, because the only way this works is if you don't look a certain way, which, sorry, you're probably not going to look what you thought Like. If you're using social media and comparison as your as your uh metric, it's going to be rough going. But if you use health as your metric, it's going to be rough going too, because you're only.
Speaker 2:Your only uh metric is am I healthy? And if you're ill, sick, hurt, then all you're doing is rehabbing things forever. So if you don't have something to connect your training to, like when you go in and you go do squats or you go do lunges or step ups or you know any kind of probably forearm strengthening to decrease your chances of tendonitis or injury for rock climbing, because it's a really redundant sport, while you're doing the exercise you're thinking about how much better that experience is going to be, and if you can make the thing that you love more enjoyable, then the work doesn't feel like work all the time.
Speaker 1:yeah for me. For me it was a bicep curls. I was so against bicep curls for like the longest time Me too, dude it's so funny.
Speaker 1:I was like people just do this for aesthetics, like it's not going to help you with climbing. And then over the past like eight months I've been incorporating bicep curls because, lo and behold, the long head of the bicep comes up and attaches into your shoulder, pretty much directly, directly onto your labrum, and like once a climbing season or once or twice a year, I'd get these big tweaks in my shoulders and the one thing that I wasn't training was my biceps. So I just started training that and kind of build that gap in my physiology and in my strengthening. So it's always a continuously changing process but at the same time I've been consistent with it for eight months or so. It's really paying a lot of dividends.
Speaker 2:Heck, yeah, man. Yeah, I think it's great advice for people. You don't have to want to be some kind of adventure athlete. You don't have to want to be some kind of great team sport athlete. But if you want to do those things longer, throughout your life and without getting hurt as much, try to find, try to find something to attach to your training. It's really, really important.
Speaker 1:What are some signs, when you're training somebody, that it is time to pivot and try something out? That's a little bit different, you know. So if somebody is adhering to a training program and they're just not getting those results, or they've got all these tweaks and things, what are some blags for you that come up, that you go okay, we need to try something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean if you're getting the niggles, especially for runners, if you're getting we'll name them off your Achilles tendinopathy or your runner's knee or your IT band syndrome or your plantar fascia, all of the chronic use injuries that you can get from from high repetitive sport or movement.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you're getting those all the time, there's time to change it up.
Speaker 2:Maybe drop volume, maybe increase weight in the weight room, maybe take an off season for yourself and don't just keep hammering, like like we said earlier, like go work on on your weaknesses that you know you're having, and so that would be one you know sometimes you can't for for team sport athletes, though, because the goal is to throw the ball or the goal is to jump higher, like you're not going to take jumping out of basketball, you're not going to take throwing out of baseball.
Speaker 2:So a lot of that is going into more of a prehab or rehab mindset, and if you've been doing it as long as I can, like you at least have a base understanding of the things that a PT would have your clients do if they went in. So if we can start using those same tactics as a preventative method, then just backing off on things that are that are flaring you up and then just go to the peripherals. Man, if you are having a hard time with some of these things, are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? Are your relationships good? Are you keeping stress down in the personal life and the work life Like? Those things do affect your body holistically and you have to pay attention to that a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I know that you've got to head off here pretty soon, but at the end of each one of my episodes I always tell people or ask the difficult task of if you could distill this entire we're at almost 45 minutes now this entire conversation, into one little ounce of prevention, one little takeaway for everybody to wrap up the episode. What would that be?
Speaker 2:up the episode. What would that be? I'd say train and play and train every day and get out of your head the all or none principle of I need an hour and a half to go do this thing. Well, if you only have 10 minutes, that's going to be better. And consistency is key. And off days are contagious.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much, Scott. Where can people find you? Where can people find your podcast and all those things to hear more of your coaching philosophy and how you help out people? You can find me on the internet.
Speaker 2:Uh, becoming ultracom is a good one for the running stuff, athleanonfirecom is a good one for like the, the podcast and the personal reach out. And then if you are in Fruita, colorado, and you're looking for an experience, um, we can do that. Out West training is coming to Fruita.
Speaker 1:So if you want to see us in person, that's a good way to do that as well. All right, very excited. Thank you so much. I know that you're a super busy guy and I really appreciate you taking the time out today.
Speaker 2:Hey, camion, thanks a lot.
Speaker 1:I hope that you enjoyed this episode of the Art of Prevention 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 doctor 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 and board-certified medical professional, such as your medical doctor or a sports chiropractor, physical therapist, etc.