PREMIUM - How To Rewire Your Brain To Learn Anything As Fast As Possible.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, the same processes that help you learn to squat or perform better in a single rep in a squat are actually very similar to what make you write better, concentrate better, or even focus in on building up a business better. The system is as simple as try and fail and fail better. And it really comes down to not repeating bad habits. I would yell to myself in my head, I get knocked down, I get up again, nothing's gonna break me down. And then I would take two deep breaths and I would go right leg, left leg, under the right leg, under the bar, get my elbows in place, get the bar on my shoulders, drop down into squat. If you know how to do a chest press, you can pick up a weight and you can press it with one arm on a ball with one foot up in the air and you'll learn that movement within two minutes.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey folks, Ben Greenfield here and I first met today's podcast guest when I was speaking at an event in Toronto and I was struck pretty immediately by his passion for things like the business of fitness, obviously something I'm kind of into, but also the art of learning, which is more of what we're going to be focusing on today. My guest name is Jonathan Goodman and Jonathan does a lot of stuff, wears quite a few hats, but one of the things that he does is he's the creator of the Personal Trainer Development center where he teaches personal trainers how to be better personal trainers, as the name would imply, and also something called Viral Nomics, which if we have a chance to talk about today, we'll delve into. John's been featured in Men's Health, Schwarzenegger.com, muscle and Fitness and Forbes Magazine, and he's also written some books and I will link to his books over in the show notes and you can access the show notes for Today's podcast@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Goodman Goodman, G-O O D M A N that's Jonathan's last name. Anyways, he's written books like Ignite the the Secrets to Building a Successful Personal Training Career, the Personal Trainer Pocketbook, a handy reference for all your daily questions, and the online Personal Trainer Blueprint, have more freedom, make more money, help more people. So for you personal trainers out there, those are probably some titles that you might want to check out. A few things about John he was a personal trainer for nine years, and at 23 years old, based off what he's told me, he was making as much as he could make conventionally as a trainer, in addition to earning a salary, hiring and training other trainers and making commissions from referring his clients. And he wrote a book and he started this personal trainer development center. But then things got dark and he wasn't prepared for the entrepreneurial journey and he became what he describes as an asshole to everybody I knew. And John says he became selfish. He ran away to Hawaii for six months. He ended up shutting down five companies and he finally took back control and decided to build up things on his own agenda. Jonathan, I'm sure you appreciate me just summing up your most important part of your life story in about 30 seconds. But the reason I did that is because I want to delve into some of these other cool things that you told me that you like and that particularly how to learn how to use your tricks and techniques to trigger certain activities like writing a book or setting a PR on a squat. So that's the kind of stuff I think is going to be kind of fun to delve into today. What do you think?

I love it. Well, first of all, I thank you for the introduction. That's about as good as I've ever heard it. I might ask you for the transcript of that so I can use that later. The coolest part about, I think some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today, we'll speak about it more specifically to fitness, I believe. But the carryover to different industries is what fascinates me the most. I'm actually not particularly interested in any single industry all that much. To me, fitness is kind of inherently boring. Social media is inherently boring. Psychology is inherently boring. But when you look at the interaction between them, you start getting some fascinating interplays. That's what really is really cool to me. The same processes that help you learn squat or perform better in a single rep in a squat are actually very similar to what make you write better or concentrate better or even focus in on building up a business better. So even though we'll kind of focus on the fitness side of it, a lot of these things kind of carry over to different industries.

Yeah. Now, can you jump into kind of like, and this is a step that I think gets skipped a lot when people are talking about learning and picking up new activities, new hobbies, and new skills. And that would be what's actually going on, Like a physiological or a biological standpoint when you're learning something.

You're going to jump me back into my exercise science degree of 10 years.

We're going to jump right back into that. Okay.

I will do my best to get all the names and people correct effectively. What happens to really simplify the process is once we want to initiate a movement, there's something called an action potential that takes place that's just like our brain sending a signal to the muscle, saying, hey, we want you to do something. That action potential travels along a nerve, reaches the neuromuscular junction. Right. That neuromuscular junction then releases a neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, and a couple other ones that go across this junction, hit a receptor. The receptor pretty much picks it up and says, okay, we want you myosin filament to attach to actin filament and pull it. And what you get is what's called cross bridge formation, or what's commonly known as a contraction. The part that I kind of missed out. And that's a very simplistic overview. I mean, anybody who's a neurophysiology buff will kind of be like brothers.

Yeah, they just threw down their headphones and walked away. No, but that's actually. That's a good synopsis of how it's done exactly.

And I mean, there's a lot of interplays and a lot of stuff that goes on with individuals. But that's a very brief synopsis. And what's interesting with that whole thing is that the system is, in and of itself, kind of a ignorant system. It doesn't think for itself, but it has all these control mechanisms that are built into it that are fascinating. And so when the action potential travels along this nerve fiber to reach the neuromuscular junction, it's very similar to an electrical impulse traveling on a battery. There's negative and positive charges that carry this impulse from one to the next. And depending on the level of insulation in that nerve fiber called the myelin sheath, it that signal goes faster or slower. And what the body does to control the speed of the impulse is it actually myelinates these nerve fibers. It puts down more of this fatty layer to sort of pull this impulse faster. Now, you don't necessarily want more myelination. You want the right amount of myelination, because any movement is complex. There isn't one nerve that Kind of takes control of a movement. Our body is built into a series of motor units. There are some very large ones. Like a muscle in the quadricep might be a huge amount of nerves in that motor unit, because it's kind of a big dumb muscle. It just needs to contract hard, versus some of the muscles in the eyes, which are very small motor units, because they're very fine movements. Right. And so movement is the coordination of a whole bunch of different motor units. And what the body does to make movements more efficiently is it actually selectively myelinates different nerves to contract at very controlled speeds.

Now, when you say that the body selectively myelinates certain nerves, what exactly do you mean when you use that term, myelinates?

So what happens? This is where I need to go to my notes a little bit to get the names, because it's been so long since I've actually really studied this. There's something called oligodendrocytes and astrocytes, and there's a couple other supporter cells that do this that pretty much get the signal that the body is trying to attempt a movement. And what they do is they go and insert more of this myelin, more of the sort of fatty layer around. Around the actual nerve cell. Is that what you meant?

Right. Okay. Yeah, so that makes sense. So basically what you're doing is you're enhancing the fatty sheath that surrounds that actual nerve itself so that that action signal can propagate faster or more efficient.

You got it.

Okay.

Exactly, exactly. And so as we become more efficient at movements, different nerve fibers or different myelin becomes insulated selectively so that this nerve signal gets conducted at the right speeds. So if you're trying to do a movement as complex, let's say, as a squat, there's so many different motor units. There's so many different nerves that are firing at once, and they're all myelinated at different speeds so that the movement can become more efficient. And that's why you see somebody, when you first start a movement that you haven't done before, whether it's complex movement or a simple movement, Anybody in the gym, I'm sure, has experienced this. There's quite a bit of shaking. And then as you get better in the movement, the movement gets much more smooth. And as we become more efficient movements like running, I mean, Ben, you're, of course the guy to go for this. And the body, in addition of mitochondrial processes and all this other fun stuff that goes on, the body just simply becomes more efficient at the movement as you practice it. More.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I have some questions for you based off of what we've just gone over. The first is, is when we look at things from a nutritional standpoint, right? And we talk about myelination of nerves, are there specific things that you could potentially eat, nutrients you could use, et cetera, that would assist with that myelination or assist with the health of the myelin cheese themselves?

So this is an area, actually, the physiology, that I wouldn't profess to be any kind of an expert in. So I can give kind of grandiose statements, but I'm not the type of person to kind of throw up stuff when I.

That's okay. I still want to hear. I want to hear your take on it, because one of the things that I learned a while ago was that a great deal of these myelin sheaths is made up of oleic acid, which is what you find in olive oil. And so I think that's quite interesting that the consumption of olive oil. And I'm a total olive oil nerd. I'm part of, like, an olive oil quarterly club, and I do olive oil tastings and I smear it on my face. But ultimately, it may actually prove to be something that. That could assist as you begin to learn a new skill and you begin to myelinate. I'm curious. Like, yeah, I know there's smart drugs and stuff like that out there, but I'm curious if there's anything that you found similarly.

I mean, when I was. Keep in mind, this was about seven or eight years ago when I was really delving into this stuff. I'm interested to hear about the oleic acid. I might go look into some of the research. But what really helped my clients was just increasing the amount of healthy fats in their diet. I mean, I didn't even get into the specifics. It was just like, hey, have an avocado first thing in the morning, or add olive oil to your food or start taking some fish oils. And we found that that made a huge difference. I mean, both in their mental functions as well, obviously.

Yeah. And what about nutrients supplements, things like that? Do you personally use smart drugs or anything like that?

I don't use anything like that, no.

Okay. Okay. I was just curious. A lot of folks are using those these days to improve learning patterns. Things like Siltep or Alpha brain or Upgraded force. I know people. Some people swear by the racetams. Have you heard of these before? Like Aniracetam or piracetam for learning.

I've Heard of them purely because my girlfriend, my partner, is a naturopathic doctor, so she's looked into quite a few of these. And by all accounts, I mean, they seem to be positive. I just personally haven't gotten into them. I haven't really felt a need for them. I think as good as I would like to think, and sometimes I actually think too much to the point where I can't sleep. And so my issue a lot of the time is actually almost shutting off my overactive brain, not making it more overactive.

Right. So what is your technique in terms of when you're trying to learn a new skill? Do you have a system that you use?

Yeah, the system is as simple as try and fail and fail better. And it really comes down to not repeating bad habits. And so to go back to the myelin example, if we're talking about physical skills, it's a matter of saying, okay, well, I can't unmyelinate. Like, I don't even think that's a word, to be honest. Unmyelinated, I probably just made that up. But you can't. You can't remove myelin. Right? You can't. You can't unlearn a bad habit. But what you can do is you can overlearn a good habit over top of it. But the stronger that a bad habit is enforced, the longer it's going to take to learn something over it or override it. And so when learning a new movement or when learning movement to override a bad one, it's pretty important not to repeat the bad habit. So when I would. And also to have a very strong visual cue and an idea of what that habit looks like and also feels like. And so when I would teach people new exercises in the gym, for example, one of the things I would do is really focus on good form at the beginning, because I'm a true believer that you can break the rules, but you've got to know what the rules are before you break them. And so I'm not against cheap techniques and exercise. I'm not against pushing for that extra rep. I'm not even against necessarily assisted reps, even though the research kind of shows that they don't actually make you that much stronger. But I think you've got to know what the form is, and I think you've got to know what the rules are before you decide which way you want to break them. And so when teaching, what I would do is I would focus on only good form, and I would actually stop my client the minute that the form goes. So we would start with watching a video where I would demonstrate perfect form. Then I'd have them do it. Then I would correct one or two cues based on what they're doing, and I would usually guide it proprioceptively. So I'd guide their shoulders or whatever it was. Then I would show them the video again. Then I would ask them to close their eyes and visualize it for a second or two. Then I would get them to repeat the habit. And in following that technique, really over and over again, what they were able to do is almost groove these patterns a lot quicker than if I would just say, okay, do it till failure right away, right off the bat. And once somebody has established a good habit, like I said, then you can go in and then you can start pumping reps or using all these fun little cheat techniques to get a bigger burner pump or whatever you want to do.

One of the things that you talked to me about was a technique that you called triggering, where you would figure out how to trigger certain activities, like writing a book or doing a heavy squat. And you would actually have some type of a token or a song or a signal or a breathing technique or things that you would use before specific activities to help you zone out and focus in on the activity that you're learning. Can you go into how you use those?

For sure. So I think in today's overactive, stressed over information world, it's pretty much impossible to separate. And I think that anything to be truly done well at a level that is kind of beyond the normal, which is, I mean, why people are listening to your podcast, there's got to be outed focus on that activity. Right? And in order to do that, there has to be the ability for somebody to kind of shut out the outside world, both in the gym, but also in projects like writing a book, which, I mean, are very similar to me in that you have this end goal far away in the future that is a fantastic goal to have, you know, get a six pack, run a triathlon, write a book. Very similar goals. If you break it down in terms of, like, the process to get to them in that the end goal is great, but it's really far away in the future. The steps to achieve that goal are inherently painful at every step of the way. And because procrastinators are addicted to immediacy and there's very few sort of immediate gains for most people who don't have maybe that intrinsic motivation built into them yet, it can be really difficult. And so what I Do. Because I'm a procrastinator at heart and I'm actually really bad at delaying gratification. Is I build in immediate rewards at every step, but I also build in triggering techniques to help me get into every step of the way. And I'll give you two examples. One is for a squat. So every time I go into a. A squat, when I was doing more powerlifting type stuff and trying to squat heavy and getting kind of max lifts, I actually would sing two lines from Chumbawamba's tub thumping, which, I mean, sounds hilarious now, but that's.

You mean the.

It's like the most intense song ever.

Right, Right.

And it's.

So at least it was at the time that it came out. And now we all laugh at it.

I feel like you're making fun of me now.

No, I actually did like that song. That was one of my pump up songs at the gym too. So you would sing to yourself two lines of this?

Yeah. I mean, in my head, I wasn't like that crazy dude at the gym, like yelling at. Well, maybe I'd sing it out loud if I have my headphones on. And was that zoned out? But I would be two full steps away from. So I'd set up the bar and everything like that and center and whatever. And then I would take two full steps back and I would like yell to myself in my head, like, I get knocked down, I get up again, nothing's gonna break me down. And then I would take two deep breaths and I would go, right leg, left leg under the bar, right leg under the bar, get my elbows in place, get the bar on my shoulders, drop down into the squat. And it was the same preparation every single time. And I learned that from studying a lot of. A lot from basketball free throws. Because a basketball free throw is a fascinating movement in sport whereby it's pretty much the only movement in any professional sport that is the exact same every single time. There is. I mean, basketball stadiums are always indoors, so there's pretty much never any wind. You're not affected by any outside force. Right. The ball isn't moving at any angle or direction coming to you, whatever it is. So if you watch a basketball player shoot a free throw, they all have their warm up techniques. They spin the ball, they bounce it twice, they pray to God, and then they shoot the ball. And. And the reason for that is they're effectively cueing their neurological system. They're triggering their neurological system to say, okay, here's what we're doing. You know what to do. You've done this a million times before. Follow the plan, right? Sink that ball. And in weightlifting, a lot of motions are very similar. They're the same every single time we do it. And so what you can do is you can prime your nervous system to do that when it comes to writing. And this is where the interplay is really interesting. I have a song that I listen to before I start every single writing bout. And I never listen to that song any other time, but every single time I start a writing bout, I get everything prepared. I put my headphones in, I cue up the song, and I put the song on. And all of a sudden, now I'm zoned in to writing for anywhere from 25 to 40 minutes, which is about all I can do in one continuous bout.

What's the song that you use? I'm just curious.

The song is by I love Flamingo guitar. And so the song is by a flamenco guitar duo called Rodrigo y Gabriela, and it's called Tamukin. And actually, if you watch Breaking Bad, the last scene of the first episode of that show, do you know the show?

No, I don't watch tv.

Okay, so.

But I'm listening pretty much. I'm sure some of our listeners do indeed watch Breaking Bad.

Okay, so if anybody's watching the show, go to episode one, season one, where Walter White decides he's going to be a badass. And it's the last scene of episode one, and you hear this guitar song, come on. And it is perfect in every sense of the word. So that's my writing song.

Interesting. So that song is not something that is triggering you to be a better writer because of words or advice that the song contains. It's a cue in the same way that. Well, I mean, you could argue, right, that chumbawamba worked because that actual song is kind of like a pump you up song. Right. Perhaps even the beats of that song initiate alpha brainwaves or a surge of adrenaline. But in this case, it's simply the fact that you've created an associative signal between only ever hearing that song when you're going to write and the act of staring at the blank page.

Yeah. And I know people who use a watch, for example. They have a. They have a watch that, you know, a lot of people who work at home. So I work at home. I have a home office. And even though I separate my apartment from home and I close the door when I'm in there, it's still kind of home. It's still Difficult to separate it. But I know people who actually have a watch, and the only time they put on that watch is when they're at work. And so they put the watch on when they sit down at the computer at work and they take it off, and then they're at home, and that watch almost triggers them to be at work. And so you're right. Just some sort of symbol or token or something that has an associative connection with the activity that you want to do seems to have this effect. I agree with you. You could definitely argue that tub thumping by Chumbawamba is a pump up song. I mean, it's like the best song ever.

So in terms of other things or other tactics that you've used to help you to learn, one thing that you mentioned to me was this idea of a flow state. And I know I just mentioned alpha brainwaves. And I think that that based off a previous interview that we've done with Steven Kotler, who wrote the book about becoming Superman, most people are familiar that this flow state is associated with increased alpha brainwave activity. For you, do you have other tricks or techniques that you use to actually achieve that flow state?

Meditation recently has become pretty important to me. Me. And so again, a lot of my issues are shutting off my overactive brain or concentrating my efforts. And so I'll use meditation quite a bit. And so sometimes before getting into a particularly creative time, you know, if I'm trying to make sense of a whole bunch of different types of materials for writing or for a presentation I'm giving or something like that, I'll sometimes have a really difficult time kind of making sense of it and putting it all together. And I find. And even five or ten minutes of meditation, and then I sit down on my computer. I sit down even with a notebook, helps me do that. And then taking showers.

What kind of meditation do you do?

It's as simple as I sit down, I concentrate on my breathing. Four seconds out, one second in, and just listen to my breathing. Try to go to a quiet place. And if I hear anything like bird sounds or anything like that, I'll try to focus on them and away from anything else.

And how long do you do that?

As long as I can sustain it.

Okay, gotcha.

I mean, it's usually five to 10 minutes. If I'm doing really good, 15 or 20. But if I need the meditation, it's usually shorter.

Okay. And then you said you do a shower.

Oh, just. Showers are like my eureka moments. You know, I went so far as I Got a waterproof notepad in my shower at one point because it was just where I had like every single epiphany I've ever had kind of happened in the shower. But I. I think a lot of people have that type of thing. The brain's really smart in working when you're kind of unconsciously working on it. So working through a lot of problems, you're not almost ever. I don't ever really figure out solutions to difficult problems while I'm working on it, but the harder that I work on it allows me, when I go for a long walk or take a shower, to kind of make sense of it.

I'm assuming you're not later on. I'm assuming you're not doing the icy cold, cold thermogenesis shower technique then.

No, I'm too much of a pretending for that.

Jotting on a notepad. That waterproof notepad is actually a great idea for those of you out there listening in, who are swimmers, because as many of you know, when you're staring at a black line at the bottom of the pool, engaged in intense sensory deprivation for a long period of time, that you often have revelations that you wish you could write down, but then you forget them by the time you get out. So that's quite helpful. That waterproof notepad. I could see that coming in handy.

That's a cool point, actually, for swimmers. I never thought about it that way, but that's a really cool insight.

One of the things that you mentioned as you were talking about how you would teach a client to learn a new exercise or a move is the concept of video recording and then re watching that technique. Why did you go with that and how do you actually do that logistically?

Well, logistically, I mean, it's as simple as using a phone or an iPad or some sort of a tablet.

And then you're basically just kind of hunched over that after each repetition, reviewing it, like pressing play and just going over it while you sit there before you do the next rep. Yeah.

So often if I was training a client, we'd be standing or sitting or whatever it was. I'd always get on the same level of his client. I think that mirroring or isopraxism is important just for creating rapport. So I get on the same level as the client. If they were sitting on a bench, I'd pull up an exercise ball or something like that, so nobody was kind of hunched over the other person. And then we'd watch the video. And so the video might have been me. It Might have been a YouTube video that I found that was particularly good form. As long as it was just a good example of how the exercise was meant to be performed, then it was fine. Sometimes I'd videotape them and show it back to them. If they did a particularly good rep as well, I'd always kind of be videotaping them.

Gotcha. Do you ever video record yourself as you're learning new activities? Do you still learn new moves, new exercises, dance, things along those lines? Have you ever self recorded?

I haven't self recorded anything of mine physically for a while, just for no other reason than I haven't really had that strong physical goals lately. Might have been all kind of mental goals. So what I have done is I actually record podcasts that I'm not recording with you that are going to be up. I'll actually record pretty much every single phone call I do with anybody and listen to it multiple times.

Yeah, you actually record the phone call that you've had and then you re listen to it to pick up on communication techniques that you can improve.

Communication techniques? How? I more than anything, how I communicate ideas. So okay, I put forth this idea or I put forth this technique to somebody. Is there a way that maybe I could have used a better example to communicate it? Could I have articulated it more clearly, more succinctly?

Do you think there's a difference between learning new types of activities such as communication skills on the phone versus a new exercise versus, say like learning to play music, in terms of strategies that are going to work best for each of these? Or would you say this concept of getting into the alpha brainwave zone, practicing an activity, making sure that you eat healthy fats if possible, figuring out a way to record the activity and replay it in your head or see it on a screen. Is that universal across all activities or have you found certain techniques work best for specific activities?

That's a very good question and take my answer with a grain of salt because this isn't a research based answer, this is my opinion. But what I will say is I believe it comes down to one's experience with the activity and kind of what we've been prone to do. So I've been speaking since I was, I don't know, one and a half years old. I've been practicing language. I've been speaking in more or less synchronous conversation where like I speak to you, you answer, I answer. I don't really have time to think about my answer. I've been doing that for a long Time, which means that if I want to improve upon it, I need to really take a good look and really work on fixing it. Whereby an exercise, or in particular a new activity that I've never really done before. Let's say that it's. Let's say I pick up swimming and I've never swam before, or I'm entering in the weight room and I've never lifted weights before. That it's not quite a blank slate, but it's a blanker slate than something like language. And so while the process may be inherently the same, the background that the person is coming from could be quite different.

Right, right. That makes sense. Okay, so what about if you've learned something the wrong way? What if you need to relearn how to do something properly? You mentioned before that you can't necessarily unmyelinate. But are there things that you would do if you've picked up a skill the wrong way, or even if you have a bad hab that you need to unlearn? What kind of techniques have you found for that?

The first step is accepting the fact that you have a bad habit that you want to unlearn and really identifying why you want to fix it. I think that emotion drives action, and it seems to be forgotten in a lot of conventional goal setting. I mean, I really don't think that most conventional goal setting in a gym is particularly good goal setting. I mean, who cares if you can lose 5 pounds of cut an extra couple minutes off of your race if you don't connect that to some sort of emotional goal? What does that £5 mean to you? Does that mean that you're going to have more confidence to tell your best friend that you love her? Maybe. But, like, that's your reason for working out then, not the five pounds. So when it comes down to unlearning a bad habit, understand that, okay, here's the bad habit I want to unlearn. Here's why I want to unlearn it. Here's why it's really important to me, because that why is going to be your reason for going back and kind of pushing through all of the hard work. Because it can be pretty difficult to really work on something you suck at. Like, we like things that we're good at, we don't like things that we suck at. And so there's going to be a lot of pressure to go back into exercise we're good at. I'm really good at deadlifting. I'm really bad at lunges. I probably should do more lunges than I should do deadlifts. But every single go to the gym for a leg workout, I start deadlifting because I'm really good at it. And so always connecting it and say, okay, I want to unlearn this bad habit because. And then every time you kind of feel yourself veering away from it, kind of returning back to that reason, and then it's a matter of having very good examples. And so it's just that process of almost hacking. And I don't particularly love the word hacking because I don't really understand what it means, but almost doing, like, learning better, right? And figuring out that if I have a very good visual image of what this thing is supposed to look at, I understand inherently the proprioceptive cues, and I understand why I'm doing it. Well, I sit down, I try the exercise, or I squat or whatever the exercise is, the movement. And then the minute that I identify that I'm doing it wrong, I take a step back, I take a couple deep breaths, I realign myself, I watch the video of how it should look again. I remember the one or two cues specific to me, and then I go and attempt that again. And it's just this continual process of trying, failing, failing a bit better every single time and getting to that point where you can perform.

Right? This is so interesting to me because, and don't laugh, I am right now trying to teach my kids how to do the Napoleon Dynamite dance, the actual little number that he does at the end of the movie, because I've convinced them that instead of playing the piano for their upcoming talent show, they should do that instead wearing Vote for Pedro T shirts. What we've been doing is getting in front of the tv, watching a few moves of the dance, pressing stop, practicing those moves, going back, pressing play again, practicing them again, and kind of just doing repetition. It sounds like to me that based off of what you've described, a few little wins for us would be, for example, to do something like box breathing or some type of meditative activity that would allow us to get into the alpha brainwave zone prior to actually jumping in and beginning that practice. That would be one takeaway that I'm getting from you here that would be a practical takeaway for us in our Napoleon Dynamite Dance.

Napoleon Dynamite Dance, for sure. And this is. I mean, in terms of application, this is about as important and high level as I think about it.

Exactly. It's crucial. It will have already occurred by the time this podcast is released, so perhaps there'll be videos on Facebook and then Another thing would be actually potentially having mom or a tripod there video recording us so that we can, after our practice session, go back and see the way that our hips are moving, our arms are moving, etc. That sounds like number two. Number three, it sounds like you have these proprioceptive cues, certain phrases, tokens, thoughts that you associate with specific activities. So rather than just going through each move one by one as random mimicry, that we should instead name each move or have some type of a nomenclature or thought that can go through our head as each move begins. So this one looks like a crane and this one is the booty shake and basically string things together using actual names rather than only having moves and body movements without them actually being defined by specific nomenclature.

Well, yeah, and that last point, I mean, you hit on another aspect of it, which is what's better? External internal cueing. And there is actually a ton of research behind this. I mean, an external cue is like what you said. Okay, you want to shake your booty, or for a squat, sit down into the chair. An internal cue is cueing something internally. Okay, I want you to flex your butt as you sit down.

Yeah. Which works better.

Which works better? Well, the research will generally say external, but the reality of it is there's a lot of contradictory research. And all that that says to me is different people react to different people cues. And so I think then it's just as simple as if you're a personal trainer. If you have a client in front of you. I mean, your first couple sessions is learning how the client reacts to different things. One of them is cues. And so cue them external, cue them internal, see what they react better. If you find that that client reacts better to internal cues, write a note on your clipboard, cue that client internally moving forward. If you find that they react better to external, then that's how they react.

So once again, an external cue, if we were talking about something like a squat, would be to you line your feet up so that they're oriented in the direction of the actual squat rack. Whereas an internal cue would be. What would an internal cue be? Like drive your hips out or feel yourself driving your hips out. Something like that, yeah.

An internal cue certainly comes from some sort of feeling within, like feel your muscle contract or whatever, versus and often internal cues are assisted by some sort of proprioception. So if you want, like the gluten med to fire, for example, as the trainer, what they might do is actually tap on the glute med as the client's squatting. And that, that might be an example. If the client's knees are folding in on the squat, for example, you might tap the glute med, because that will kind of give that proprioceptive feedback then to fire out, which will bring the knees in line over the toes. I mean, that, that's a whole other kind of complicated convoluted story. But, but effectively what it comes down to is there's internal cues, there's external cues, everybody reacts differently to them. An internal cue definitely has to be more in terms of what you want the muscles to do. An external cue is more visualization of what you want the body to do. And often external cues are metaphors.

Gotcha. Okay, so in terms of the process of learning or rewiring the brain or learning things more quickly, are there any other little tips or tricks or techniques that you use that we haven't talked about yet?

Yeah, the major one. And you actually hit on it, I think, really early on. You used a word that's one of my favorite words for learning skills is associated with. So how the brain works is on associative connections. There is absolutely no way for us to make sense of every single piece of information that goes on in the world. I mean, there's just too much. And the first example of a brain using really shortcuts was a study which is now a book which you can get for free, that was published in 1967 by a guy named Alfred Jarvis called Eye Movements and Vision. And you can Google, you can download the PDF for free. And what he did is he told all these, he put eye trackers on the participants, and then he would get them to look at a visitor and he would say, okay, look at the picture. And what they did is they tracked where the eyes went. And the eyes just kind of scanned all over the picture trying to take in information about it. Right. And then what he would say is, okay, tell me how old the people in the picture are. And all of a sudden now the eyes scanned across the faces of the people in the picture. Then he said, tell me how much money the people in the picture have. And all of a sudden the eyes scanned clothing. And what does this tell us? This tells us the brain has pre existing notions of what means what. So how old are these people? Well, I can look at their faces and I know how old they are. How much money do they have? Well, clothing, you know, demonstrates wealth. So if I look at their clothing, it'll be a shortcut to figure out how much wealth they are. And I mean, this happens. And I'm by no means the first person to discuss this. One of my favorite books on it is a book by Daniel Gilbert called Stumbling on Happiness. Just a fantastic book that really goes into detail on this idea. But when it comes to exercise and learning exercises, again, it's a matter of building a very, very strong base. You've got to know the rules before you break them and the various simplest terms. And I'm going to be blown out of the water by exercise pundits for saying this, but at its very simplest terms, the body knows four exercises. It knows how to squat, it knows how to deadlift lift, it knows upper body push, it knows upper body pull. And I mean, that's like the simplest you could ever get right. But if, you know, if you really take the time to learn the squat movement, the deadlift movement, the upper body push, the upper body pull if you want to expand it, the upper body vertical push, the upper body horizontal push, horizontal pull, vertical pull, whatever. If you take the time to really learn those movements. Well, if you think about it, every single thing you do in the gym branches off those movements in some way, shape or form. If you know how to do a chest press, and if you really teach somebody or you really learn how to do a chest press, you can pick up a weight and you can press it with one arm, on a ball, with one foot up in the air, and you'll learn that movement within two minutes. But you've got to learn the basics first. And I think that's a lot of the problem with, like, a lot of these workouts that you see in magazines or a lot of personal trainers who try to do things fancy is you can do all that fancy stuff. That's cool. But understand that your job is a lot easier if you build up that really, really, really strong base of understanding how the movement should feel first. I mean, if you get to the point where you can walk into the gym and you can look at every single person in the gym doing whatever wacky thing on whatever wacky piece of equipment they're using, and you know, the two or three main muscle groups that each single person is working, then you can start playing around with exercises.

Yeah, I think the same could be said for other fields, too. For example, with guitar, before jumping into a complex guitar piece, the first thing I do is I'll just go to, like, the Ultimate Guitar website and I'll download the chords, right? So there'll be like four chord patterns associated with a specific song. And prior to going to a YouTube instructional video for that or prior to listening to, to the song on my mp3 player and learning the actual finger moves that they're using or the strumming patterns used for each chord, all I will do is simply learn the basic chord patterns, right? So once I've got the basic chord patterns memorized, just like you would have the basic, say, squat pattern memorized to progress from a barbell squat to a single leg squat to a barbell squat, holding a medicine ball, standing on a Bosu ball, not that I endorse that the same process could be used for anything. You learn the very basic patterns first and then progress. And I actually, you know, now that you mention it, I'll do the same thing for writing, right. Like I will sit down when I'm going to write an article. Very basic skeleton. And sometimes it's for me, as simple as writing the intro, writing the outro, naming it with the title, naming the actual pieces of the article, like, if it's going to be about sleep, like why we sleep, how to sleep, tips for getting better sleep, sleep myths, summary. And then from there I've got my very, very basic outline and then I learn produce at that point.

Right, and then you fill in the blanks.

Right, right, exactly.

Do you find it funny that on, on the back side or the flat side of every single Bosu ball that's ever been produced, it says it is not advised for you to stand on this?

Yeah, I'm sure that that had something to do with liability, but yeah, quite interesting.

But as a thought experiment for this stuff, which is, I mean, anybody can go out and do today, it's like the amount of things that we'll see every single day that we've never seen before in our life, but immediately categorize is actually pretty astounding. I mean, you can walk out and you can see a box that has an engine with four wheels that you've never seen before, and you immediately know it's a car. You immediately know what it is, you immediately know about how much it costs. And you put all those things together. There were rats that were put into a box, so they had never seen the outside world. They grew up, they were born in a box, they were put into that box and. And they were first given a bed. And then every single day the experimenter would take away one piece of the bed to see at what point did the rats no longer identify this box as a bed or this piece of straw or whatever they had as a bed. And I mean, these rats knew that Like a piece of straw on the ground was a bed. They identified it as that. And if you go outside, I mean, there's so much variation in the world that just because of associative connections that we've built up unconsciously over time, we know what they are, we know what their purpose is, and we know how to use them. And that's actually pretty fascinating. It's something that isn't talked about enough, but it has made me really understand that the ordinary is really quite extraordinary when you take the time to appreciate it.

Yeah, that's interesting, huh? I would love to link to that in the show notes. This study, was it a study or an article on these rats?

I gotta find it. I'll email it to you.

Yeah, you should send it over. I'll put it in the show notes.

I think it was a Scientific American article from years, years back. I got to find it. But yeah, I'll write a note to myself to do that.

Gotcha. I have one other question for you, and that is what is Viral Nomics? I'm pretty familiar and I think most people can wrap their heads around what your personal trainer development center is, but Viral Nomics was actually not something I was aware of as being associated with your name. And you just have my curiosity piqued. What is it?

Bionomics is my playground, really. I mean, I have written one book for it, I'm working on a couple more to be honest, and I will publish books, but I don't really plan on doing too much other than just playing around with it. What it is is Bionomics explores one's ability to create messages that spread purposely through desired networks online. And so what it stems from is actually the interplay and like I talked about with how I find the interplay of different industries so interesting. So in fitness and personal training, the difference between a successful personal trainer and an unsuccessful personal trainer is not one's ability to write a good workout or market or whatever. It's one's ability to get the client to want to do the program. And what's fascinating is that when you get to social media, you get to producing content online or marketing anything online or marketing anything really. It kind of comes down to the simple fact of how can I get somebody to want to selectively self represent with my material? How can I create my material so that it enables somebody, my desired audience, to articulate their own thoughts or desires through my material and in a sense then market for me? And those are the types of things that I explore there.

Interesting interesting. Well, I'll put a link to that in the show notes for people who want to check out viral nomics, as well as some of the books that you've written that are on Amazon. So, Jonathan, thank you for joining us for sharing some of this stuff and for giving us your insights as far as learning and rewiring your brain.

It was fun, man. It was a lot of fun.

Thank you. And I'll let you know how that Napoleon Dynamite dance goes.

I can't wait to see the video.

All right, folks, well, if you're listening in, you can check out the show notes for this episode over@BenGreen.BenGreenfieldFitness.com Goodman that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Goodman thanks for listening in. And have a healthy week.

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