The Key Components to Improving Human Movement with Dr. Zach Long

You're listening to the PT Proffit podcast, episode number 91. Today I'm sitting down with Dr. Zach Long, DPT and SCS. We're talking all about the key components to improving human movement. Are you ready? Let's get started. Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their products and services and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast. What's up coach? Thank you so much for pushing play on another episode of the PT Profit Podcast. I'm your host, Beverly Simpson, and if this is your first time pushing play, thank you so much for joining me. So glad you're here. I'm really pumped for today's episode. So I sat down with Dr. Zach Long, who is a physical therapist in Charlotte, North Carolina and runs an industry leading fitness website called the Barbell Physio, where he's a trusted resource to thousands of athletes, coaches and health care professionals across the United States and beyond. Additionally, Zach teaches with the Institute of Clinical Excellence in their Fitness Athlete division where he helps medical professionals better understand the needs of crossfitters, powerlifters and weightlifters. Zach is a board certified Sports Certified Specialist, Level 1 CrossFit Trainer, NASM Performance Enhancement Specialist and Certified SFMA Practitioner. This episode was awesome. We sat down and we talked a lot about the key components and I wanted to say human performance, but the truth of the matter is that we're discussing human movement across the board and how he specifically helps active athletes who might not necessarily compete in the crossfitting games, but they are disciplined and at a committed level and how he can show up and improve movement for these high level achievers. So without further ado, let's go ahead and roll that interview. What's up, Zach? Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. How are you doing?

Great. Thank you for having me.

Oh, I'm so excited for today. This is going to be awesome. So for those of you listening who haven't had a chance to connect with you, I'd love for you just share a little bit about who you are, who you serve and how you got there.

Okay, so I'm a physical therapist in Charlotte, North Carolina, but the majority of my work revolves around online stuff. So giving out programming and information to help fitness athletes, crossfitters, powerlifters, Olympic lifters, et cetera, reach their fitness goals. And so I kind of came to that route through first starting working in strength and conditioning for a number of years before then going back to physical therapy school and not really liking what traditional physical therapy was and just figuring out how to blend those two together. Where do we use some of that understanding of the medical system that we have as physical therapists and then how do we understand better loading and dosages of exercise to help people reach their goals?

I love that. So can you dive in a little deeper into what you mean about the traditional physical therapy that you had been seeing and what you specifically didn't like about it that caused you to go down this path?

Everything traditional physical therapy is, let's say I'm very focused on people that have really high end performance goals. And then that doesn't have to be that you want to go to the CrossFit games, but it's like I want to get my first pull up. Like I'm not satisfied with the fact that I can't do a pull up. I'm not satisfied with the fact that I can't do a full depth overhead squat. That to me is significantly more exciting than somebody that just had a total knee replacement because they spent the last 30 years of their life not living the way the human body was designed to. And so tissues did not adapt properly and then they had to have that big orthopedic surgery. And my job is to get your range of motion back. To me, that is boring. I want to get ahead of those issues as much as possible and help people that are actively trying to do everything they can to improve their health and fitness.

Okay, so what I'm really hearing you saying is that you feel like traditional physical therapy is really geared to rehab and surgery and reactive as opposed to preventative.

Yeah. So we want to get ahead of stuff as much as possible. In all of the businesses that I work with, that's our goal. How do we stop stuff from going down, those negative side effects that happen when you get into the medical system?

You know, one of the things that I have noticed or when I see this happening, I feel like people that you have to really shift people's perspectives about what they think physical therapy is and if they need it and why should they come see you and how are some of the ways that you shift your clients perspectives?

So there's going to be a lot of things that we'll discuss or do differently when I'm actually seeing somebody one on one as a physical therapist. That would significantly differ from what you're going to see in a lot of places. So number one, I'm out of network. I don't accept insurance that just lets me treat people the way I want to. So in terms of that, like, if you come into my clinic, we're throwing barbells around, we're getting on the treadmill and running and watching you run. So we'll hit some higher end stuff from a treatment perspective. But then we're going to also address a lot more of the lifestyle factors that I think not enough physical therapists discuss. I'm going to talk to every patient that walks in my door about how much they're sleeping. I don't think if we're sleeping appropriately, we're going to be able to recover from the work we're doing in physical therapy or life. I'm going to talk to all of my patients about nutrition. That's not necessarily like me sitting down and writing them a full nutrition program. Then I'm going to ask have they ever tracked their total caloric intake, their macronutrients? If you're a CrossFit or Olympic lifter, power lifter, and you're not paying attention to how much protein you're taking in on a daily basis, you could be significantly under eating on that, that key macronutrient for your sport and having that holding you back from progressing the way you want or potentially contributing to different issues going on. So things like that have to be addressed significantly more in that profession.

Okay, I love it. So what are some of the common pitfalls or common things that you see in your patients and in your people and what's your process and how you approach it? That's different.

So my patient population is for the most part crossfitters, Olympic lifters and power lifters. And I'd say in that population it's going to be not sleeping enough, not eating enough. And then just in general, people that do those sports tend to be very hardworking individuals. Like, you're not going to be a lazy individual and stroll into a CrossFit gym and stick with it for a long time like that tends to attract a certain demographic of human beings. So our ability to kind of push through things when we shouldn't, to work a little harder than we should in the gym, maybe when extra life stressors are turned up quite a bit and not knowing how to kind of balance that stuff, that tends to be the things that I have the most discussion around. Can we manage your volume better, your intensity better, your nutrition and Sleep so that your stress and your recovery are on track with each other rather than having a significant imbalance there.

Yes. Because a lot of the gen pop people that aren't attracted to CrossFit, they're just not pushing themselves hard enough and they're reading these Instagram posts every, and they're like, oh, I just need to recover.

Yeah. A quote that I love is you have to do something hard enough to recover from it, to think about recovering from it. And yeah, I think a lot of people want a foam roller massage or other recovery things when they haven't actually worked hard enough to actually need to do that sort of stuff.

Yeah. Amazing.

On the flip side, the crossfitters are focused on all the wrong stuff. Like they want the, they want to take the theragun and they want to foam roll for 30 minutes and get a massage every other week when they don't have their nutrition, sleep, et cetera, dialed in first, which are the most important aspects of that.

So would you say that you're focusing primarily on the sleep and nutrition with your, with your clients?

It's a big component, I don't think. I don't think you could be like a physical therapist version 2.0, like the next level of physical therapy without discussing that.

So I'd love to hear a little bit of like, what are, you know, I feel like we hear just sleep more. But that's, you know, how do you even navigate that, those conversations, what are some of the, you know, big takeaways, things that you see and help people sleep better?

So there are a number of things that will help, and I typically don't. You know, if somebody comes in and we identify that, like, sleep is an issue with you, I don't necessarily want them to immediately jump into doing all of this stuff. Like, think about somebody that's never been on a diet before. Do you immediately put them on the strictest thing in the world or do you just ask them, hey, can we cut out Coca Cola for the next week? Can we see what happens when we get rid of those three Cokes that you're having every single day and cut down 500 calories? Probably. We take little baby steps. So I'm going to outline a number of things, but typically I'm just going to try to get people to address one or two of these at a time.

Okay, cool.

So we have the total quantity of sleep, so needing to get seven to eight hours of sleep for most individuals. But then a lot of the other stuff is around quality. So can we turn off blue lights at least an hour before you go to bed. So your tv, your phone, your computer screen emits some blue light, which tends to kind of stimulate your mind a little bit more. So that's get rid of your phone an hour before bed. Or at the very least if you have a smartphone. They have filters on smartphones and they'll automatically turn off. So set that setting on your phone. Or wear blue light filter glasses to kind of let your brain start to calm down a little bit.

An hour before you go to sleep.

An hour before you go to sleep. Yeah. So I have these really nerdy looking glasses that I put on at about 9pm every night. If I'm doing anything involving a screen at that point, I'm not working that late. I cut myself off at 8pm from working. But the blue lights glasses go on. Cold room, so get the temperature down. Dark room. So I've got like blackout curtains on our back screen door that opens up to our bedroom. I turn all the alarm clocks away from my face so I'm not seeing that bright light into me over the course of the night. Those are pretty much the big ones. There'll be a few other ones, but that's like 90% of what I discussed for those couples there.

Okay, so real quick, and I don't know why this question came to me, but it does. Do people. Can you watch TV with the blue light lockers?

Yes. Yeah, you can do anything if you're wearing the blue light filter glasses, you can look at basically any screen. And so at that point is then you know, to me, there's a difference. For me as somebody that works way too much. If I'm answering emails at 9pm I will not shut my brain off because I'm thinking about that business decision that I just made or whatever it is. But I could watch TV at 9pm and still kind of be down regulating if I'm wearing that blue light filter.

Okay. Because I know for me, the reason I asked that is because I know for me, my husband works nights so often that I just want to have the sound on. So I'll have the television on in the background even though I'm like doing the dishes or cleaning up, whatever it is. Like, oh man, maybe I need to.

Get these glasses another one that I do. I don't like to have the TV on when I sleep, like as that background noise. Put a white noise machine on or something like that.

And now when you said cold room, how do you know? How specifically do you mean cold? What's cold.

Under 70?

Under 70, yeah. Oh my gosh. No way.

Research has shown that you sleep better when it's colder.

Oh, I'm laughing because literally my husband likes to keep it at 68 and I like 71.

And don't quote me on this, but I think 68 is what's been shown to be like the optimal sleep temperature. I have a checklist in the office and I just kind of go through the checklist with people and I'm not somebody that really remembers details very well. So I'm. I usually when I'm reading it, I can remember the exact number, but I can't off the top of my head, I think it is 68.

Funny. Okay. All right. So I told him. He's trying to freeze my breath. But okay. So with sleep and when we're talking about quality of sleep is that, you know, people have tend to have one of two things I feel like happen. Either they can't fall asleep because they're anxious or they're waking up in the middle of the night. Does any of that have to do? You know, if you're waking up in the middle of the night, what do you do?

So my wife is awake up in the middle of the night person. And since we have gotten really strict about the sleep hygiene stuff where we really work hard on not. So her thing is she's going to lay in bed for an hour before going to bed looking at Instagram. When we cut that out for her, that improved her quality of sleep through the night. I think a lot of it is figuring out what of these variables impacts you the most and maybe it's just playing with one at a time and seeing which changes the asterisk sign that you're trying to adjust there. And what about for me, I'm an anxious person. Like if I get going on something business wise, I'm going to think about it all night long and I'm going to be up till 2am game planning stuff in my. So for me that is usually not answering messages after certain cutoff point, which for me is about 8pm the second thing is if an idea does come to my head and I know I'm not going to be able to get rid of it, I just keep the notepad by my bed, I'm going to sit up, I'm going to write it down and I'll tackle it in the morning. But writing it down for me gets it out of my head so that I can actually go to sleep and then be ready to be productive the next morning to actually get stuff done.

What about food? Does food have a significant impact on sleep?

Yes. So you don't want to eat any heavy meals, like two hours before bed. You don't want to drink alcohol that close to bed either.

Like an hour.

Again, don't ask me specific details on that. My checklist has it written out. I just can't remember that stuff. But I think it's two to three hours of.

Yeah, that's funny. Okay, that's super helpful. And so your crossfit people now when they're coming in, are they typically, are they typically worrying about CrossFit specific stuff or is it their life? Both.

In terms of things that are giving them anxiety? I mean there's probably a couple times of the year, specifically like the CrossFit Open or other competitive seasons where some people might be stressed about that, but generally it's other life stuff that they got a 40 hour a week job, they got two kids, all those pressures and they're still trying to exercise at this high intensity, like they're a competitive athlete.

So now how do your, how do your people find you? Like, do they just. Are they typically coming in because they've got pain and they're like, oh wait, you know, I'm, I'm. Especially since you are preventative is what I'm asking because I feel like preventative is sometimes harder to. Preventative is sometimes harder to sell, for lack of a better word.

It comes down to which of my businesses are we talking about? So I own. Tell us about two other people, basically a chain of out of network clinics, out of network physical therapy clinics designed for athletes that are people that are fitness forward in their mindset, whether that's crossfitters, runners, people that just generally want to be active. And I got that business that I have, my online business that's really focused on CrossFitters. So the online business for CrossFitters, typically people are finding us through Instagram or through articles we put out online when they have a specific movement issue. So they're looking for, you know, I've been going across it for two years, but I still can't do a muscle up. I still have really poor form on my overhead squat. And they're looking for a solution to that specific problem. Usually not because they have pain. Then they find us through those avenues. In terms of the clinics, we have actually a pretty good split compared to most physical therapy clinics in terms of who we see. I mean, I bet every physical therapy clinic out there, 99% of them, 100% of their patients come in when they have pain. And I'd say for us it's probably about, it's probably about 2/3 people that are dealing with a pain issue and a third that are more performance oriented. So for instance, we see a lot of runners in my clinic that want to do gait assessments. So we put them on a treadmill, we video them as they run, we test different strength and mobility things, and we try to come up with plans to help improve their performance or the same thing for CrossFit athletes. So we might set them up where we follow up once a month. And in that monthly check in, we're writing them accessory workouts to address their specific strength weaknesses, their specific mobility limitations, or if something starts to get a little tweaked, we start to, we try to get ahead of that before it gets to being anything serious. So, yeah, about a third preventative or performance oriented at our clinic.

Okay, I love that. So now you're like, so speaking specifically to your online program, what is. And mostly because I focus a lot on building online businesses. So one of the challenges I feel like a lot of people have when they're in the virtual space space is how they do their assessment when they can't be hands on. So I'm a little, I'm curious as to how you specifically with your crossfeed athletes, manage the assessment component to your virtual aspect.

Yeah, so that, that's challenging. And honestly, that's something that took me a long time to kind of figure out how to do as, as a pt, seeing people one on one, it was really hard for me to not be able to say like, this is your exact custom program built for you. The issue with that is I only have so much time in the day and I can write programs based on the thousands of athletes I've seen in person that I know are going to help 90% of people out if we get them in the right program. If I have a program for ankle mobility, for example, that ankle mobility program is not going to fix everybody's ankle issue. But because I'm not customizing it for you and spending that hour on assessment and regular follow ups, my price point is really, really low relative to what it would cost to see me one on one to write a custom plan. So there's pluses and minuses there. And if somebody tries it and they don't get the benefits that they want, like it's, it's not a bad thing for me to have to refund that and the occasional time that I have to do that. But overall that, that rate's pretty low. So I had to first get past the. Everything doesn't have to be customized. You can do stuff that is good enough to help 90% of people and keep it at a price point that's lower and more accessible to a lot of folks.

I think that is a really important.

Yeah.

You're putting out. Because I feel like a lot of people, especially as they're starting out in the, in the virtual space, have to overcome that because we are taught that everything is individualized. And I'm speaking from a personal trainer perspective, but, you know, everything needs to be customized and, and cookie cutter templates, like that's an objection to overcome it.

For sure as an objection. And I think we have a lot of barriers right now towards people getting fit. And I don't want you getting on a program that can help you out to be another barrier. I don't want it to be that I have to charge you $200 to write a custom program and you can't afford a $200 program. I want to be able to get it to you for $20 instead.

Yeah.

So then beyond that, like now, how do we like narrow down. Because we have, we're probably getting close to 40 programs right now on our application. How do we narrow down where somebody should be going? And so we have a number of different options for that. Like from a mobility perspective, I have a checklist of basically self mobility assessments that athletes can go through so that they actually identify what they need to work on. Because so often when athletes crossfitters understand how important mobility is for their sport because a lot of the movements that they do are incredibly demanding on how much range of motion you have. So they're working on mobility, but maybe they're working on the wrong thing. They're trying to improve their squat depth and they're, they're working on their hip mobility, but their hips move great and it's really their ankles that don't move well. And so this checklist helps point you towards what areas you actually need to focus on. And so I have that checklist that I'll send out to people and you can kind of report back your results if you want to me, but it's, it's pretty dummy proof and that everybody that runs through it should be able to figure out exactly kind of what they need to work on from our strength program. So let's say we've got a series of programs that get your first strict pull up, get your first muscle up, get muscle up endurance, get a strict bar muscle, like a huge continuum of like gymnastics skills. It really comes down to, you know, before you do program X, you need to have this prerequisite of Y done. And so the sales page, as well as different pages we have that outline people's goals, will kind of have that. If you have this, then you're okay to do this program. If you don't have this, then you need to do this one. And so that helps to kind of streamline people getting into the right program at the right time. And then we have a Facebook group too, so members will regularly go in there and say, hey, I just did this program. These are my results. Should I move on to the next step? Should I rerun this program? Should I do a different program? And so then we'll kind of try to like that's semi customizing it. We're sending them to the general program that, that specific individual needs.

I love that. Do you have a team?

Yes.

Okay.

So in the online business there is myself and Pamela Gagnon kind of built everything out. So Pamela has been a three time CrossFit Games athlete. She was a Division 1 gymnast and she teaches for. It's called the gymnastics course. It was formerly CrossFit specific gymnastics course. So she's very experienced in that area. And then we also have Johnny B. Who is our kind of tech guy and is also a CrossFit Level 3 instructor. So he is an awesome mix for us between somebody that can handle a lot of the technology, customer service stuff that we need and understands really high level programming and coaching. So it's. He's a great person to have on our team.

That's awesome. It's awesome. So what is, what's your favorite part specifically for you in growing your business? Like which business do you love to focus on the most? Like what's your favorite part?

I don't have a favorite part at all. I think I love every piece of my business as much as the other. And I just feel incredibly blessed that I work a lot of hours, but I have enough flexibility in those hours that I can always focus on what I have the energy for. So it's, I don't have like my day blocked apart on like Tuesdays is for online stuff, Wednesdays is for in person business growth, et cetera. It's just outside of my limited patient care hours. It's what do I feel like doing today? Like, do I have the brain space to go deep and build a new project, to write a new article? Do I not have the brain space for that today. So if that's the case, that I'm like, editing videos or something that's mindless, that lets me continue to stay productive, but at what I can best do for myself now without killing myself because I'm working too much.

Yeah, I love that. Like getting in the zone, essentially, and just doing what you love.

All of my businesses are really focused on a pretty easy goal, though. How do I make other people's lives better? So if as an athlete, how do I help you reach that next goal that's going to help your health and fitness journey? Or for me, owning this onward physical therapy group, being one of the owners of that? It's how do we put other physical therapists in situations where they get to treat the exact demographics that they want, the exact way they want, without being kind of burdened with the insurance model? So how do I get people in those situations where they can treat the people they want the way they want and still be really financially successful, which is a good feeling to provide people with that opportunity?

I love that. I love that. Service forward, always when you're focusing on service, then the selling does it for you.

If you focus on helping people and deliver a good product and everything else is pretty easy.

Love that. I love that. So just going back to CrossFit real quick because I feel like in the personal training world, at least in, like, the, you know, gyms, CrossFit will have a. People have very, how do I say, it'll come to me, a lot of misconceptions about what CrossFit really is or not. People can and cannot participate in CrossFit. So I'd love for you to just expand a little bit on. On, you know, some of the misconceptions that people have about CrossFit.

So two biggest misconceptions are gonna be that not everybody can do it. And number two is gonna be injuries. So let me knock injuries out first. There's been studied over and over and over again in research studies, and the injury rates in CrossFit have been shown to be equal to other recreational fitness activities, such as powerlifting, olympic lifting, running, etc. So it's, you know, if your opinion is that CrossFit's dangerous, like, your opinion's cool, but that is a hell of a lot cooler than your opinion. And we have enough data that basically says your opinion is wrong. I'm still in that quote from my friend Mitch Babcock. Opinions are cool. That is cooler. So I'm just cutting that one out real quick. The second one is that CrossFit is not for everybody. I don't think everybody has to do CrossFit. I want everybody to have some form of exercise that they regularly participate and enjoy. So I'm not like a die hard, you have to do CrossFit, but CrossFit is something that you can see anybody and everybody doing. So right now it's July 28th, 2021 when we're recording this. The CrossFit Games are currently happening. And yesterday I was watching videos of their adaptive athlete division. Men and women with missing a complete arm, a leg, spinal cord condition, etc. All different adaptive needs participating in the same workout that high level crossfit athletes are doing. Other high level crossfit athletes are doing, but they're just doing slightly modified versions based on what they're able to do do. And so that's incredibly cool to see that sport be able to hit such a broad range of people from people with no adaptive needs to extreme adaptive needs. On the flip side of that, like that's the talk through the age continuum. So my friend Dustin Jones, who I teach continuing education courses with, he has a in a CrossFit gym, a program called Stronger Life where they have 65 plus year old individuals getting together and they do two classes a day to do CrossFit. What do older adults need more than anything? They need strength, power, endurance. They need community and something to be a part of. What does CrossFit do? It develops the 10 broad general fitness skills. And better than probably any recreational activity we see out there, it builds a community of people that enjoy and encourage each other. So that is really cool to see from an older adult perspective there. And from an older adult perspective or adaptive athlete perspective, if you were to go to CrossFit.com, you'll see tons of pictures of older adults doing like modified CrossFit workouts in their home. Like it's kind of cool. Their website has essentially like a, that 70s show, if you remember that TV show. It's like that living room that really looks like their living room. And so this like old flower green couch and older adults doing like tricep dips off the end of their couch. They've got water jugs and they're doing Romanian deadlifts with these water jugs. It's, it's infinitely scalable when done appropriately so that people from a broad range of abilities can get a good workout in. That builds all levels of physical fitness.

And do depends on the box like in dependent, you know, because when CrossFit and Forgive Me, I'm not super as familiar with it, but they tend to have the workout of the day. And so you're going to get a group of people that are in all different, in all different mobility capabilities and, and, you know, athletic levels. Right. So wouldn't you argue that it depends on the box that.

So like anything in fitness, like, you can go to any boutique fitness gym out there, any personal trainer out there, any CrossFit gym, and you're going to get a wide range of levels of expertise.

So how, as someone who is maybe new to the sport, how do they navigate? You know how. You know what? Because CrossFit, like you said earlier, it attracts a certain person who can actually who. Who likes to push the boundaries of what they can and can't do. So how do you navigate, you know, what's too far and what's just enough.

In terms of the individual athlete knowing when they should push back or pull back. Yes. So I use heart rate variability quite a bit. Have you heard of, like the loop band? So I use the loop band quite a bit. Or another app called HRV for training. And for me, I don't usually want to be the person that tells somebody, hey, you need to stop, you need to back up. I'd rather let Data do that for us. And so if we can get somebody tracking their heart rate variability or something like that through an app such as whoop, we can give them objective measurements of how their body is responding to the current volume of exercise and intensity of exercise they're doing and general life stressors. And then those apps can basically tell them, all right, now's the time to focus a little bit more on recovery. Now's the time where you can push further forward a little bit more. And there's been a couple research studies that showed in CrossFitters and Olympic weightlifters, when training was modified based on heart rate variability feedback, injuries happen less. There's been other research studies on, I know, at least on cyclists where when they changed their training volume and intensity based on what their heart rate variability read, they actually progressed better than individuals that followed typical period of size, periodized training in cycling. So we can use that to help improve your performance and potentially get ahead of injuries.

Okay, I love that. So can you just speak specifically, expand a little bit more on what HRV is and that.

That probably made no sense familiar.

Please don't.

So let's say we're looking at your resting heart rate, and your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute. So we kind of make the assumption when you hear 60 beats per minute, that that means your heart is beating once every second, that it's at these regular intervals. And what's actually true is that there's this variability that happens beat to beat. So one beat might happen at 0.8 seconds, the next one at 1.1, the next one at 1.3, and the overall average over the course of a minute is 60 beats per minute. So that variability is what we call heart rate variability. And that gives us a reading of our body's current stress state, essentially. So when that variability becomes more normalized, when there's less beat to beat variation, you are basically your body's telling you, hey, things aren't trending positively, we're a little bit stressed, you're working too hard, exercise has been a little too intense. We need to focus on how to downregulate a little bit. We need to sleep more, eat better or whatever. On the flip side, when you have more variability, that is your body saying like, hey, things are going well, you are doing a great job from a recovery perspective, maybe we can push the intensity of life of exercise better. So there are a lot of different apps out there available for tracking it. I just tend to find that the whoop band and the app HRV for training typically are the easiest two to get people looking at that. Because you don't want to like take an EKG of yourself where you're measuring your heart rate and pull out, you know, your chart and start measuring beat by beat. So those apps kind of take care of it for you and kind of tell you like, hey, here are how are things are looking and then you can adjust based on that.

So now hrv, does this measure in real time? How specifically can you attach where the stress is coming? What about people like when we were talking earlier who carry lifetime like life stress on them all the time. So how do you does it happen in measure in real time? How do you specifically find out where the stress, root cause of the stress is coming?

Yeah, so there are a number of different things that answers to that. So something like the HRV for training app, that is a once a day measurement. So you wake up in the morning, you put your finger on the camera of your smartphone and it measures it that one time per day. And so you're comparing that standard time every day. So that's not the most accurate because it's not being tracked all the time. But it is valuable and it's a cheap app. It's like $10 to get the app and you have it for life. So that is a great introductory way to get into that. Whoop tracks 100 data points per second. So it is tracking 24,7. Like you shower with it on, you throw a battery on it to charge it up rather than taking it off. Like if you wear iWatch, you're taking your iWatch off. So whoop is constantly checking it but then telling you like your daily stress and recovery scores. So you're not seeing like real time measurements. There are other things out there where you can take like your 1 minute heart rate variability and you can do it before or after doing something. And there are some people that believe that you can then kind of test different life stressors out. So for example, I've heard of people using it to say you check your heart rate variability, you eat peanut butter, you then recheck it. If your heart rate variability trends negatively before and after eating that food, whatever it is, that might be an indication that your body has a difficult time with that. I am not familiar with that research. That is not what I use heart rate variability for. But I know there are some people that do. You can't check it real time. You can get once a day or you can get like daily summaries. Essentially I prefer the daily summary of loop.

Now when you say trending negatively, do you mean that it's inconsistent?

Ending negatively would be the opposite. So would be it is more consistent to beat variation.

Okay.

Almost like, like your heart goes into autopilot is the way I have to think about it because it kind of sounds backwards.

It does.

Sounds like variability would be bad, like you want it to be normal, but.

It'S the opposite consistency. So it's the opposite.

Mm.

Okay. I mean is this is. I mean this.

Here's the thing, for most of these apps, you don't need to understand that the apps are just going to say, hey, today things are looking really good compared to yesterday. Hey, today things look worse than they normally do. Like today's a day where maybe instead of going in and hitting the, the workout of the day all out, maybe we do a long steady state cardio session which is really good for recovery and finish that up with 20 minutes of meditation or foam rolling or something that just kind of deregulates you, helps you relax a little bit. You don't have to know all of that science behind it. You just need to use these apps and let them tell you what to do.

So how does the, well, you did kind of answer this is the difference. Is it showing you the variability as opposed to just showing you the heart rate. Because I feel like all of the iwatches and all of the Fitbits, they're really focused on heart rate. So why specifically do you think both needs to be tracked or just one, or would it be more hrv?

So an app like Whoop does track both. So it kind of calculates your, your sleep, your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, and your body temperature to combine that all into a stress score, essentially stress and recovery scores. I believe that the iWatch now has heart rate variability that it's regularly tracking. The issue with the iWatch is you're not usually wearing it all the time. You're taking it off at night to charge it up. But you'll see trends in resting heart rate. Also during periods of stress, like when you're more stressed, working a little bit harder, you'll see your resting heart rate start to increase. When you're less stressed, more recovered, you'll start to see your resting heart rate decrease. So you do get valuable information out of that as well.

Now, your cross lead athletes who are really operating at a high level, whether they are, you know, doesn't matter whether they're going to the games or not. Most crossfitters, you're operating at a high level. So I'm just curious, out of the amount of volume that you of people that you've seen, how do they, you know, how often and how hard is it for them to come down to a de stressed space into like a really parasympathetic, not activated space?

I tend to find that when you like Whoop, for example, which I get so many of my athletes on, it becomes really easy for us to change specific variables and just really see what your body responds to. So, for instance, for me, if I do two things, my recovery is significantly better. If I eat one salad a day, and if I don't drink alcohol, my recovery is drastically better. And so I typically have athletes just kind of play with one of these levers at a time and see what the app then tells it in terms of recovery, and that will help them out significantly. So it's not usually kind of as hard as it seems. You know, it's harder if you don't have something giving you objective data and you're solely relying on only how you subjectively feel to make some of those decisions. There's value with the subjective stuff for sure, but that's not the full story. So I like using these apps to kind of speed up our process of figuring out what Your body likes the best, what it responds to most positively.

That's good. I was going to ask, do you recommend that every single person, whether they're an athlete or not, be measuring their HRV if they're active?

No, I don't think everybody has to. For me, it's typically like if there's a person that I'm recommending it to the most, if there's two people, and number one is the person I know is trying to be really competitive, that's trying to do a couple of workouts per week, that's trying to make it in the competitive world of CrossFit. I think that's important for them to follow that because their training volume is naturally going to be so much higher than everybody else's that they need to understand this stuff a lot more. Or I see it in the more recreational crossfitter, Olympic lifter, powerlifter that I've seen in the clinic for too many injuries. Like, if I've seen you for two or three injuries in the last year, like, you shouldn't be getting injured that much. So let's see if we can figure out different ways to go about managing why that might be happening. We're going to look at your program and see, like, you know, are we just doing too much total volume overall? Well, obviously, look at your movement patterns. Is the way you're performing some of these exercises putting extra stress on certain areas of your body, and maybe we need to tweak your technique a little bit. Or is it that other stuff? Is it that you work 40 hours per week and you're the manager of several people, which comes with his own stress. You have three kids at home. You got a wife or a husband that wants stuff done around the house, too. Like, you are exercising at a high level while you have all these other stressors that figure out what we can do to better balance that. And so if somebody's getting tweaked multiple times in a year, then that's somebody that I think it's valuable to look at this stuff.

So now, as someone who works with people at such a high level, I'm curious. And you've done a lot of continuing education for other coaches, correct? Or other coaches as well, right?

I got teach continue education. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, for other coaches. Okay.

Mostly for physical therapists.

Oh, for physical therapists. Okay. So you're essentially helping physical therapists bridge that gap between rehab and performance.

That's the goal.

Oh, I love that. Okay, so what are the common things that you See, physical therapists who come to you, what are some of the things that they ask you? Why should go?

I'd say physical therapists, like our kind of governing body, tries to market us as the movement experts of the medical field. So they try to say that we understand movement the way a personal trainer might combine with medical knowledge. And that's kind of what they're trying to define our niche in the medical system as. The issue that I see traveling around the country a lot teaching other physical therapists is that our ability to break out human movements and then coach it, cue it, Correct. It is not as good as it should be, with that being kind of our marketing to the medical world. Like, we don't do a good enough job knowing how to coach a squat, a deadlift, and overhead press. And then when we even identify issues with that, we then tend to lack the ability to properly dose exercise based on somebody's symptoms, so that we're progressively loading those tissues that need to be strengthened up because they've been overloaded and broken down a little bit.

I think, too, because that's why I said bridging the gap, because I feel like you're. They're related and they depend on each other, but most people are like, oh, no, this is rehab, and, oh, I'll go to my trainer for this. And they're not understand.

I hate that saying. Only because I don't think that gap should exist. Like, myself and a guy named Bench Babcock and Alan Fredendall, we teach these courses together inside a company called the Institute of Clinical Excellence. Um, that is the saying. Like, every time any one of us gets on a podcast, people say, bridge the gap. And each time, like, our. Our skin just crawls because that gap shouldn't exist.

I know.

And we hate hearing those three words. Hate it.

Sorry. Also glad the attention are pet peeve.

That their profession's not there yet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah. You're working on. On changing that because there should be no gap.

Correct.

Well, then I do have to ask you this. And this will be the last question, I swear, because I want to be mindful of your time. And I always say that. And then I ask, like, three more. But this will be the last question. You know, as trainers, we are really drilled into us to remember to, you know, our scope of practice. You know, PTs probably hear this too. Like, you know, I see so many trainers, or when I was in the gym, I would see so many trainers almost trying to be an amateur clinician. And I feel like there's a synergistic relationship. Right. So if there is no gap in theory, like you say, does that mean that there's one person should be able to do it all? Is there a synergistic relationship?

There should be more overlap. And the overlap is that the personal trainer doesn't need to go about treating somebody's pain because pain is so multifactorial. That's kind of going to be out of your scope. But what the personal trainer needs to understand is how do we then modify activities for somebody when they're in pain so that we continue to push their fitness forward? Because we have a horrible fitness issue in the United States right now and across the world. I mean, we're just kind of hopefully getting out of the COVID pandemic right now where we saw more than ever how important it is for people to be fit. It's the fit, unfit individuals rather out there that when they're hit with COVID we're seeing really devastating effects of it. So we as a population around the world need to get fitter. And the personal trainer's job when somebody is in pain is to figure out how do we modify stuff enough that we continue to push this person's pain forward and then from the pain perspective, refer that to the right person. The physical therapist needs to do a better job of not just addressing the pain, but communicating with the personal trainer on what their thoughts are around modifying that. And then together they should be able to get somebody to where they're still pushing their fitness forward while tissues heal.

It's so important. It reminds me of one of my friends, my mom friends she had. She went and saw a famous physical therapist in pelvic floor, physical therapist specifically in San Francisco, and basically was like, you can't pick up your baby. You can't walk around your neighborhood anymore. I'm sorry about it. Right. I'm oversimplifying it, but it was like, you can't tell a mom who lives in San Francisco that she's not walking or picking up her kids. It's just not. It's not plausible.

Yeah, we got to find better ways to help people modify those activities so that they're not becoming as symptomatic during them. But, like, you can't. You can't not do that. Just like when a physical therapist tells somebody you need to take two weeks off the gym to let this tissue heal. The issue we see with that is, all right, let's say it's a knee, and I say you need to take two weeks off the gym. Well, guess what? We've deconditioned lost fitness in the muscles of the hip, muscles of the ankle, the opposite leg, our core, our shoulders. Like, instead of telling people to stop or completely rest, we need to be really skilled at modifying stuff. Like rest is very, very rarely the answer to people's pain issues.

How much, you know how much rest is usually you're like, I know that's going to, that's, that's a, that's a big question. It depends. I know it depends.

If you walked in my office and you had orthopedic surgery yesterday on your knee, then today we might be doing some low level exercises on that knee, but on the other side, we're doing single leg squats and single leg. And we're going to try to maintain that tissue fitness as much as possible. So for me, rest is almost never zero. But it's modifying stuff so that we're not getting in the way of other injured tissues healing.

There's never a reason to move. Movement, we always can move.

Yeah. I mean, at the very least, speaking if it's a knee issue or back issue, we can do upper body stuff significantly modified. We can do low level exercises for really high volume so that we're at least getting in, you know, a heart rate response there. Yeah, I don't have people rest.

You're getting, you're motivating me to get off my butt. I'm like, oh, okay, maybe I'll just, you know, walk on a treadmill while I do these interviews.

Bike or desk?

Zach, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I really appreciate it. You gave us so many things to think about and lots of perspectives and things for us to really muse on and take away for our clients. So for those of you who want to connect more with Zach, where can I send them?

The barbellphysio.com is probably the best place to kind of see everything. So there are tons of free articles, products for athletes, list of seminars for coaches and clinicians. There's.

Okay, I love it. And I'll link all of that up in the show notes as well as your Instagram. Are you active on Instagram?

At the barbellphysio.

Okay, cool. So I'll definitely link all of that up. I really appreciate your time today.

Enjoyed it.

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