Why Core Strengthening Makes You Slower! Do This Instead (With Dr Jordan Moncrieff)

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Gerard Donnelly. In today's episode we get to speak to expert movement specialist, injury prevention coach and osteopath, Dr. Jordan Moncrieff, who is a great friend of Tribello and someone that we put ultimate trust in with our bodies as our movement coach and is the strength and conditioning coach of Travelo Coaching. Jordan's backstory As a young, highly talented footballer, chronic injury limited Jordan's capacity to train and compete at the highest level that he wanted. It was very frustrating for him as a teenager to be chronically injured for years on end, but it also gave him the biggest gift, a powerful reason to explore effective movement training and injury. Not only prevention, but rehabilitation. So Jordan helps his clients identify their movement, posture, breathing and or stability gaps and together helps them fill those gaps with a combined approach using both osteopathy and exercise rehab for the most effective long term results. Dr. Moncrief has worked with professional athletes across multiple sports to help them achieve peak performance. Athletes including AFL footballers Dylan Shiel, Dan Hannebury and Brownlow medalist Tom Mitchell. And more specifically to us, help cyclists and triathletes as well as people among a wide range of sports, but especially with the most common problems, back pain, hip pain or knee pain. And dad, we absolutely loved the chat with Jordan today. There is so much to unpack in this field of information. It's hard to get through a lot in one podcast but we really enjoyed having Jordan on.

Yeah, it's really valuable information and from my point of view it's enabled me understanding and I've had in my career two really influential almost strategists from another from a left field in, in Jordan and Jim Chin and it's like Yoda, like instructors it is and they have enabled me to continue the journey of my athletic career as a, you know, as a, originally as a professional triathlete and then as an everyday cyclist and you know, once you, once you start getting on in years, you feel like you're going to be limited in your performance. Jordan clearly establishes that that's entirely up to you and if you want to rethink the way you go about your training, that you have the ability to perform as well as you want to with the chances of being injured drastically diminished and the ability to perform at a higher level no matter what your age is. And they're the key things that I think is important for those skeptics, I suppose, that are out there think that there's only a couple of things you need to do to be a good performer. And as I've said in many podcasts, it's never one thing. And this is just another example of an expert in his field who has absolutely enabled me to perform at my own personal best for a long period of time. And, yeah, I'm really grateful to have him on board. And hopefully everybody who listens can have that open mind to trying to really understand what are we doing here, why should we be doing this type of training in our program and what benefit we will get from it. And that's the exciting part for us to have Jordan on today.

Yeah. And our ask of you today is to have an open mind in this conversation because it is a more, like you said, left of field or unconventional approach to movement and strength and conditioning and injury prevention that you may have heard. There's a slight little educational lesson on exercise physiology in here, and you might not be interested in those details as much, but it is so important just to hear them and pay attention to what Jordan says, because in his instruction and in his explanation is just profound wisdom in understanding how our bodies move and understanding how you can get the most out of your body and why this kind of approach is absolutely vital to your success as a athlete, your success in terms of performance. But most importantly, and we really get into this, your longevity with your body for now in terms of wanting being able to train now and your longevity long term and in a functional sense of having a working body that you can trust will work for you and reduce the impact of breaking down with age. So, yeah, that's our ask of you. We really hope you enjoy the chat. We certainly did. There'll be some things to really wrap your head around, so hopefully you can expect that. But I really hope you enjoy the story of how this came about and where this knowledge and brilliant information comes from.

I suppose, George, I could add, if I wanted to say something, you know, if you are an athlete out there that's consistently chronically injured and you're progressively deteriorating in your performance, then what have you got to lose? This is. This is, you know, gold nuggets being thrown out there, and they're definitely not conventional, but, you know, you know, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We know that's the definition of insanity. So, you know, have an open mind and be prepared to actually try something. And you will be amazed, like I was about the results that I've been able to achieve with not only less injury and being able to extend a career that I love doing.

Absolutely. That's brilliant. So without further ado, here is the episode with Dr. Jordan Moncrief. Okay. Dr. Jordan Moncrief. Jordi, welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to have you on. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having us, Jordi and Jerry.

Now, not only has Jordi already paved an elite career, as we just discussed, in the movement space, in the strength and conditioning space, and we'll talk a little bit about why we're going to use quotation marks when we say strength and conditioning, but also we've got a little bit of a story we want to start with because we start most of our podcasts with gratitudes and you hear us do our weekly gratitudes on the podcast. And I told the story a few months ago when we started doing this about where the gratitudes came from. And it's the fact that I used to run a boot camp years ago and we would do the gratitude circle at the end of every single session. And the person that I ran that boot camp with was none other than Dr. Jordan Moncrief himself. And we started that gratitude circle together. So it only seems fitting that we start with some gratitudes again today. How funny it is that we can come full circle. So, dad, I'll let you start with a gratitude and welcome to the podcast.

Yep. Thanks, Jordan. And welcome Dr. Jordan Moncrief. And I'm excited today because this is game changing information that listeners are going to get. And as always, we try to get some people on board to the podcast who are going to really help everybody out there focused on their particular sport. And this is no different. So welcome, Jordan. Look forward to hearing your gems. What am I grateful for? What's my gratitude? Well, we're in lockdown number four in Victoria, so how can I be grateful at the moment? Well, I can definitely be grateful because I know that we're used to doing this and the Victorian public are so compliant that we will get through this again. So I'm grateful for the fact that Victorians are all on board with it and they know what's necessary to do and there's always exceptions to that rule, unfortunately. But I'm really grateful that everybody's on board and we'll get through it again.

That's a really good one. That's a really good perspective to Have. It's kind of cool to have trust in your fellow members of society when there's 2 million people in Victoria, or maybe more two and a half million, and you can have a trusted majority of them to do the right thing. That's actually really cool. I really like that gratitude, Jordi. I'll pass it on to you. What is your gratitude for the day?

It's always hard to have a gratitude at times when you know that other people are doing things really challenging. Like, it's a really challenging time for people in Victoria at the moment. But for me, I'm grateful that I got to walk my dog along the beach before sunrise this morning, and he was mostly well behaved.

That's a good one. That's a really nice one. And my gratitude, I feel a little bit bad for this. I was saying to the guys off air that I have a clear gratitude in my head, but I'm not sure if I want to say it because I wouldn't want my gratitude to rub it into any Victorian faces. But really coincidental timing. I happened to be in Queensland the last couple of weeks, and then Victoria went into lockdown, and so I stayed in Queensland rather than coming back to lockdown. And I'm really grateful for the lucky timing to avoid it. So I. I don't want my gratitude, like you said, Jordi, to be a negative for someone else's, but I personally just feel really lucky about this timing and I'm trying to make the most of it while I'm up here.

Fantastic.

So, moving into today's episode, Jordi, we really want to do a deep dive into. We'll just call it a new movement approach. But to start with, basically, we want to get your story. So why don't you take us right back to your teenage years and how you got started on this journey of exploring movement and functional human patterns of movement and injury prevention.

When I was 14, I got chronic groin pain. I was like any other kid. I. I loved sport, I loved being active, and I tended to overdo it, I guess. So chronic groin pain is osteitis pubis, where it's inflammation of the pubic bone. And it was so severe that I just couldn't play sport anymore. Naturally, you go see a physio, and this particular physio told me to get stronger, strengthen my core, rest and stretch. So I went away and I would see them every week or fortnight. I continue to do my exercises really diligently, twice a day. I remember I always joke about coming home from parties late at Night, so it might be like midnight, and then I make sure that I do my exercises before I go to bed. I was super diligent and super committed to doing them. What happened, though, was that two years later, I was actually in worse pain as a 16 year old than I was 14 year old. So that was really tough because I did everything that I was told to do, yet I still wasn't playing footy, which is what I absolutely love to do, and I was in worse pain. And what would happen is every time I go see a physio or in that time I'd see a chiropractor, my therapist, osteos, everyone on the sun, sports doctors. Every time I go see someone, I'd only get temporary relief. And this was really frustrating because it created a model where I was reliant and dependent upon that practitioner for relief. And even if I got relief, I knew it was only going to be temporary until the groins tightened up again and then caused me pain.

Jordan, just hold there. How did you actually first get the symptoms? Was it something exact that you can remember, or was it. Did it progressively get sorer as the weeks and months went on? Can you remember? Can you pinpoint any point of, of, oh, geez, I've done my groin today, or was it more progressive injury?

Definitely more gradual onset. It wasn't like a muscle tear where you feel something go. So what happened was I was playing footy with one team, then I was also playing representative footy with another team and I was also doing athletics. And when you're a kid, you're invincible. You can do all these different sports. So I love doing that. No, say yes to doing as much as I could, as much as I could pack into the schedule. We'll talk about this later, I'm sure, but more is not necessarily better. And for me, I think the chronic groin pain was definitely an overuse injury. But as I said in the introduction, just resting itself also didn't help. So there's clearly a problem in my movement pattern that needed to be addressed and changed. So, thankfully, I went to the Hawthorne Football Club and I met with the doctor and the high performance manager there and they took me through an assessment and they said, we just don't really know what's wrong because I was performing really well on the assessments. And then they said, look, we've got a guy that's a bit left of field. When we don't necessarily get results with our athletes and players through conventional means, we generally send players to him and his name's Mark McGrath. And Mark McGrath is a mentor and friend of mine who at that point changed the course of my trajectory, my life, really. He introduced me to an approach called DNS. It stands for Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization. And it's a process, process or a system, which I describe as a reliable framework for identifying gaps in someone's breathing, stability and movement based on how we were designed to move, breathe and stabilize. And what he helped me do was realize that I was training wrong. How I was taught to train was wrong. And everything that I was doing wasn't actually addressing the source of the problem. So what I've now done over the journey is dedicated my life through becoming an osteopath and a movement coach to help enhance awareness and teaching clients and athletes how to breathe and stabilize and move based on how we're designed to do it. So essentially what I do is I help alter people's perspective on training how to train. And this DNS approach essentially is based on developmental kinesiology. Now, all that means is our natural maturation of our brain and nervous system. So if anyone is observing a infant between the ages of 0 and 18 months and they don't have a brain lesion, then we see that they go through predictable movement patterns, and that's predetermined by the brain and nervous system. No one's taught to crawl, stand, walk, et cetera. These are movement patterns that are inbuilt within us. So by honoring those principles of how we're designed to move, breathe and stabilize, I was able to relax my abdominals, which were overworking, which were placing further tension on my pubic bone and creating that irritation. So I actually had to change my stabilizing strategy to get better. And as a result, in the last 10 plus years, I haven't had any recurrence in my groin pain, nor have I had any soft tissue injuries. And for me, that's all because I learned how to address the source of the issue, the habit that was creating the tightness. And then also, how do I continue to enhance and improve how I'm moving biomechanically so that I've got the freedom and confidence in my body that no matter what I go to do with my body now, I'm confident that I'll be able to handle it and manage my body well without any injuries?

It's such a powerful story, isn't it? And yeah, I love hearing. I've heard that a few times, and I love hearing it again. And it reminds me of a journey that I went on with back pain. And. And I was fortunate enough to come across a local Melbourne physio called Dr. Jim Chin. And ironically, he had been taught the DNS system. I think it's from overseas. George, you'll be able to explain that a little bit.

Yeah, it was developed in Prague. And essentially, what I love about this system is it's not anyone's opinion. So if you see a lot of the things that are being created at the moment, they're based on someone's opinion on how they think we should be teaching people to move or train, et cetera. Now, what they did was they measured babies with healthy brains against babies with brain lesions, such as cerebral palsy. And what they noted was babies with healthy brains went through those predetermined milestones. As I said, lying on your back, being able to lift your legs up, rolling to one side, making your way up to crawling, standing, walking, squatting, et cetera. So these are all predetermined. What we do with this system is we want to reactivate those brain and nervous system pathways that are inherent to how we were designed to move. So that's why I love it, because it's not based on anyone's opinion. It's how we were designed to move. And the leader of the DNS approach is from Prague. His name is Professor Collage, and he's been a pioneer in spreading this movement across the world.

It's a big coincidence that, dad, you found Jim 15, 20 years ago, and he actually worked very closely with your mentor, Jordan Mark McGrath, and both of the same approach, and both with amazing results. I really love that breakdown. You kind of have said there a couple of times in terms of a summary of what you're actually talking about. And it's helping prevent injury and manage injury and get some rehab by getting our body to do what it was designed to do, move in a way that it was originally designed to from when we're born and through that developmental phase. Now, there was a lot in that story. It's an incredible story. There's a lot of language or maybe jargon that people might not understand. So I want to dive a bit more specifically into some of those terms and concepts that you spoke about. Specifically, if we take it back to your own example, you would say that you developed in those teenage years what we call osteotis pubis or something similar. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Yeah. And so explain that. And compared to, you know, this developmental phase that you're talking about, something had changed from when you were 0 to 2 to when you're a teenager, 14, 16, and your body wasn't moving in its optimal way. Is that correct?

Yeah, definitely. There's. There's lots of different reasons why we end up having pain. A lot of them can be habitual and compensatory reasons. So let's use my example. I overtrained. So when we over train, we start to fatigue. Then we lose our ability to create good support in our body because we're essentially just using our muscles because everything else is fatigued. So we're just overloading our body. That's what happened for me. But in that time, I was also. The funny thing is, when I was doing the two years of traditional core training between I was 14 and 16 years of age, the reason I was getting worse. And it's funny in hindsight, but very frustrating looking back at it. At the same time I was doing conventional core exercises, those core exercises were giving me an eight pack. All right. Looks very good on the beach. Very terrible for our functioning. So that eight pack. Our rectus abdominis is connected into our pubic bone, just like our adductors. Our groin muscles are also connected into that same central point at the front of the pelvis that was continually getting aggravated twice a day when I was doing my exercises. But what happens is, when you do your exercises, the idea is for them to be conscious, but then you make them subconscious so they become integrated into your way of life. Now, with our core, everyone needs to understand that the core is stabilized, even with the intent for movement. So if I go to reach my hand towards the camera, there it is. If I do that, I've got to stable stabilize my body before I initiate that movement. So that means we're organizing our body around this core 24 7. Now, for me, if I'm training it to brace and lock down and tighten, then I'm doing that 24 7. It's just expressed in various ways, whether I'm playing footy or whether I'm sitting at the desk or whether I'm doing core exercises or whatever it might be, but I'm taking that habit online all the time. And I'm just constantly tensing, and that's constantly creating tightness in my groin, Constantly creating tightness in my six pack. And then it's constantly irritating the pubic bone, which is creating osteoartis pubis inflammation of the pubic bone.

I was just going to say it's been interesting having just. Jordan's brother Liam has just had a baby, and she's nine months old. And watching the process that she's going through. She has no muscle tone whatsoever, yet she can stabilize to a sitting position. She's only been on earth for nine months. Her spine's not strong, her bones aren't strong, her muscles aren't strong. Yet she can roll, crawl, stand now, and there's no tension. She's got flexibility. It's like a floppy doll. She's got such flexibility with no tension in any of her ligaments, tendons, muscles. It's exactly what you've just described. And watching her function really well, you know, for literally nine months of life.

Yeah, it's a beautiful example of weight shifting. So this is when we talk about how this system might be different to other systems. A lot of other systems train concentric muscle activity. So when the muscle shortens, as an.

Example, now, bicep curl is a clear example of that. It's just one muscle shortening.

Exactly, exactly. As opposed to when we extend the elbow, straighten the elbow out, our triceps working, but our bicep is lengthening. So it's eccentric lengthening. But essentially my main point is a baby will use weight shifting as opposed to muscles. Now, if we can use weight shifting and get the right muscle activation as opposed to trying to grip the muscles, then already that's an efficiency. So when I look at the principles around DNS and how we're designed to move, it's ideal. Breathing, deep system, core stabilization, spinal length, joint centration, body awareness, turning, gliding. These are the things that we start to see in babies. But as we grow older, we start doing more sports, we start sitting at school, we start hyper specializing for either sport or desk work. There's lots of different variabilities. We might have a certain pathology where we go into surgery. It all changes our pattern and we create compensation and we move away from how we're designed to move. So essentially what I do with my athletes and clients is I say, this is where you're at. This is my ideal framework, where I want you to get to. So there's a gap. We want to minimize that gap by teaching you how to breathe, move, and stabilize better, more in alignment with how we're designed to do it. Once you do that, you'll be far more efficient, you'll have far less likelihood of injury, you'll be able to train more consistently, you'll reduce your time till fatigue. Therefore, not only will your performance improve, but also your longevity with that performance will improve.

That's a really great summary. And I want to keep diving into this because again, A lot of this terminology or language will be very new for people. And I really want to get an understanding of this kind of this core concept, you know, pun not intended there, where you were talking about everything kind of stemming from your core, and the fact that traditionally we are told that to improve your core, you do core exercises like you were talking about, where you got prescribed, maybe sit ups or planks or that kind of thing, which is really developing these superficial muscles. And I want you to kind of explain a little bit deeper the difference between the superficial side and the deeper core stability side, because there's two factors to this. One is that deep versus superficial, which you've touched on a little bit. So that's one part of the philosophy. And the second part is your philosophy on those words you used before, which I think are really key words. Gripping and tightening versus relaxed core. And if you ever go to a gym, you do a PT session or something like that, and you're doing these exercises to get more of a six pack or that kind of thing, the trainer there will tell you to squeeze your core, tighten your core. And even in cycling and triathlon, when you're on the bike, a lot of people will say you need to squeeze your core more, but you're saying the opposite. You're saying to have a stronger core, you actually need to relax. So do you want to dive into that a little bit?

Yeah, for sure. There's obviously a lot there. Let's talk about the components of our core. Okay, so our core is combined up of many different muscles. It starts at the front of the neck, in the front of the throat, deep neck flexors. Then we've got the diaphragm, which is housed underneath the ribcage. And then if you go down even further, you get to our pelvic floor. And then we've got the muscles of the abdominal wall as well as spinal extensors. So they're the muscles that form our deep stabilizing system. Now, what happens is when we breathe in, our diaphragm actually comes down. So if you place your hands on your belly now and you breathe in, if you haven't breathed too much into your chest, you'll feel that your belly expanded as if there was a balloon on the inside of your abdominal wall. Now that belly is expanded is because the diaphragm has contracted and come down, which creates pressure inside the abdominal wall. Now, because there's this expansion, what actually happens is we get that I talked about eccentric activity. So the opposite of the muscle shortening in the bicep, it's lengthening. So we get that lengthening of the muscles of the abdominal wall. So it's eccentric activity of the abdominal muscles. Now what happens is that's breathing, but we want to talk about stability. So the stability element is the ability to create that size of the balloon, but also be able to maintain it irrespective of the breath. So that's the main difference. So that takes training and guidance to start with. But essentially we want to be able to create that balloon like effect which is what essentially stabilizes the spine as opposed to the concentric activity of the muscles which is that bracing, tightening or sucking of the belly in towards the spine. Now all these variations of stability are non preferred. The, the most preferred way of stabilizing is doing it exactly how a baby does at three months of age. So when a baby's three months of age, its diaphragm comes online not just as a muscle for respiration, but also for stabilization. So the diaphragm comes down, the baby can lift its legs up. And again it's doing it effortlessly, as Gerard said, because it doesn't have the development of the muscle groups. Whereas clients and athletes that I see are heavily dominant in rectus abdominis and that bracing pattern just to lift the leg up. So I've got this heel lift test that I do with clients. So imagine you're lying on your back with your knees bent, feet are being supported by the floor and you just lift one foot a millimeter. And I see what changes happen in the abdominal area and what shifting or arching of the back happens with that simple movement. Then imagine when you're doing exaggerated movements such as running, jumping, etc.

So basically what you talked about before with the clients at a certain point, and then there's the ideal point that you want them to get out and there's that gap. That test is an example where if they're lifting their foot a centimeter off the floor and there's lots of bracing happening in the abdominal wall, there is a clear gap there because a baby would lift their leg up with absolutely no bracing. And so you're trying to get it closer to that absolutely no bracing point.

Exactly. And I use that one with athletes specifically because lifting a foot up is hip flexion. So the hips flexing, what do we do when we're running, what do we do when we're cycling? It's all hip flexion. So it goes to show what your abdominal wall is doing when you're doing those activities. Because are Those activities more difficult than lifting your foot off the floor 1cm? Absolutely. They are, yeah.

So this is a whole lot of new stuff here. And it's, again, it's hard to wrap your head around because it's so backwards to what we're conventionally taught. We are taught that the more abs you have, the fitter you are, you know, the better your posture is, the. The stronger your core is. And you're right now saying for people to do the opposite, you know, the. And you can take it a little bit far and say, oh, well, the bigger my belly, then maybe the stronger my core. But I do want to ask about this because why is it that, and this might be a tough question, but why is it that everyone isn't injured that has abs? You know, everyone that has an apac. There are a lot of people with six or eight packs who do look like they have really strong core, not injured, they don't get osteitis pubis. Yeah.

It is a good question and it is a difficult one to answer. I think the first thing I always think about is when you're younger, you've generally got youthful tissue, okay. So that, that we all see when you start to get to 30s, into your 40s, the body starts to deteriorate and you don't recover as well. So that's one part of it. There might be a reduced dependency on that particular action. I guess it's really dependent upon the athlete and what sport they're doing specifically. Like, for example, if you're bike riding and you've got a really tight core and you're bracing, it's probably going to have less of an effect on your body compared to if you have that pattern when you're running, for example, running a much higher impact activity. So it's going to have much greater implications than riding on a bike. That's why everyone goes through the process of running and then, oh, can't run anymore. I'm going to jump on the bike and I'm going to swim because they're lower impact activities. But I guess the main point I want to also make around that bracing strategy is all it does is create more tightness and pain. So if I push on someone's muscles, as an osteopath, when I'm doing soft tissue, for example, their muscles are hypertonic, so there's increased toneness in the muscle because it's overworking. Now that tightness is what eventually creates pain. So what I need to do is I need to release that muscle for them. Either Using manual therapy or using exercise and postures, which is in alignment with the DNS approach. And how I phrase it is I want to reset their body. I guess I want to say I want to reset their body and bring them back to their natural, most optimal state. But what bracing does, especially if we are using the cyclist as an example, is it costs a lot of energy. So if you hold your hand out in front of you and you just let the fingers be nice and relaxed and then you make a fist, which one costs more energy?

Obviously the fist.

Yeah, making the fist. So it's the same with the abdominal wall. If you've got this balloon that expands and is effortless and it's efficient versus someone that's locking down and bracing, not only do you not get the diaphragm firing correctly, so getting the main benefits of optimal stabilization, but it's an energy cost. So if you're thinking about running long distances, cycling long distances, triathlons, Ironman, and if you want an edge, efficiency, any energy conservation, it's the biggest edge that you can get. Just learning to breathe better is going to give you a massive benefit over the course and duration of your training and competition.

It's such a great point. And I only thought of it yesterday when I was out on my 5 kilometer radius bike ride around the hills where I live and doing repeats of the same 16 minute hill three times. And as I progressed through the training session, my back was getting tighter and tighter and all of a sudden my brain re went to where it should have gone from all the stuff that you've taught me and Jim taught me. And instantly I started breathing through my abdominals and the pressure came off my back and I was all of a sudden pedaling properly with no tension. What a difference. And that was just an example yesterday of thinking about the action that I'm doing whilst my back is tightening and getting more, you know, fatigue is creating that tightening and obviously I'm tensing as I'm getting tired. And it's just a great example of what we're talking about.

Yeah, I mean, Jordy, you, you've basically taken the DNS approach and you've molded it into what you've coined, your own reset approach. And I want to touch on kind of this reset approach because you've worked with us very closely on this over the last couple of years and that's why we have you on this podcast and that's why you are the, I'm going to quote, unquote it again, strength and conditioning coach of Trivalo coaching. And I want you to talk about your reset approach and kind of the details of what you focus on yourself in this approach and how you've created it and what makes you so confident in this approach with athletes.

The reset system is a collection of guided videos that help you reset your body every day. And we want it to be a daily or an almost daily practice because we need to start to change how we move habitually. We need to make the changes consciously so that they can become subconscious. And also within the program, there's a complete guide to optimizing your movement. So what we want to do is we essentially want to redefine your understanding of optimal movement, because I think no one really knows what it is. But as I've said before, if we use a baby and their ideal natural development of our brain nervous system, we know that it's nobody's opinion. That's how we all developed. So that's got a lot of merit. Then we've got to recondition your training perspective, because everyone has an idea around how they need to train to perform at their best. For me, for example, I was 16 and I was looking at how AFL players were training. I didn't want to do anything different from what they would, how they were training because they're at the elite level. But I also needed to understand that I needed to do something different because that wasn't working for me. So over time, what's termed the erosion model is I'd fall back into doing strength and conditioning and being like, okay, now if I do a little bit, I'll be all right. But I just kept getting worse. So eventually, over time, I did less and less of traditional strength and conditioning, and I got better and better. And then once you redefine your understanding of optimal movement and recondition this new training perspective, that's when you can start to retrain and set your body using those videos. What gives me so much confidence in this system is, I guess from the start, when I was working with Mark Mark, Mark had a history of working with players in the AFL, such as Chris Judd, helping him avoid groin surgery when he had osteoartis pubis, he helped extend Luke Hodges career in 2012. And then if anyone's familiar with AFL, not only did Luke Hodge then go on to play in three premierships, he also played an extra two years at the Brisbane Lions. So some of those examples definitely when I was younger gave me a lot of belief in Mark as well as the approach. But I think what Mark did for me was he helped me actually understand the source of the problem. He actually helped me understand how people move. So when I'm working in a clinical setting, every day I see it, every day I'm putting people through the same tests and seeing very similar responses. Whether it's bracing, whether it's shifting side to side, rather than having a turning body and a gliding body, which we know is going to have less impact on the joints. There's just so many examples every day, which just reaffirms for me what you said before, Jord, with me seeing clients with that gap, the gap so big, we've got to minimize the gap. And when we do start to move, ideally we're going to someone work with me in a one on one setting. Or someone might come to my face to face group classes, or someone might come to my online group classes or use the reset videos on their own. Whatever it is, if you do a mix of those, or at least one of those, but on a consistent basis, I start to see that gap minimize. And then what happens when that gap minimizes is less painful, less dependency on stretching, start to train better, start to do more with your training and just an overall increase in sense of confidence and freedom in your body when you go out to perform. And that can be in what area ever area of your life you want, whether you're an athlete or whether you're someone in the general public that just wants to feel better, wants to go for a run along the beach, it doesn't matter.

You're essentially enabling longevity. Whether it's years or in an actual session, you're able to hold the form for a few more years or you're able to hold the form in that one session each day. And that's what I found from doing the DNS system, is that I am much more able to put off fatigue because I am actually utilizing all the things you talked about, which was getting the body to flow as a 1, 1 unit rather than being a tense, tight, massive fatiguing muscles. Would that be accurate?

Yeah, definitely. And we've talked about training the brain and nervous system. So what happens is when I go to think about movement, I create the muscle action. So what that means is the muscle is actually the end organ. It's the last thing that that receives the information before the action happens. So if we're talking about a hierarchy, it's way more effective to train the brain and nervous system because it's higher on that hierarchy and the muscle's just the end organ. So what you're saying, Gerry, is within one session, your form is going to get better. But over time, because we're training the brain and nervous system, it becomes subconscious so that when you start to ride your bike, with time, your back won't start to tighten and you'll check in with yourself and you'll go, oh, I'm actually diaphragmatically breathing now, I'm not bracing. So they're the changes that we want to see when you start to integrate from your regular practice into your sport.

An example, from my perspective as to why I've bought into this system from you so much, apart from the fact that you've really done a lot of work with us individually to show us the benefits of it and we've experienced them ourselves, is the understanding of the reasons why behind it. So one of my personal frustrations with traditional or conventional strength and conditioning programs is you can't get really crystal clear answers as to why you're doing certain things. So I never understood why I was doing really heavy deadlifts or big squats, or they're sometimes referred to in training as the big five movements, bench press, squats, deadlifts, et cetera. And I understood generally that you were getting, you know, these massive, the larger muscle groups in your body stronger. But I, there was always risk involved. It always seemed like a lot of overload. And I didn't see the direct correlation between that kind of strength and performance, whether it's on the footy field or running or cycling. But it is quite common for elite athletes to do these kind of programs. And I fell in love with this kind of reset approach that you've taught us because you could really clarify why it worked, you know, why it makes sense from our body's true kind of evolutionary perspective. And like you said at the start, it's not an opinion. This is exactly what happens from a developmental phase compared to an opinion of a strength coach that, you know, this type of deadlift is better than that type of deadlift. And I think I wanted to give the example that if you ever see Dr. Jordan Moncrief in real life, he is a man mountain. So he's 6 foot 5 and just a ball of muscle. And if you looked at him, you would assume that. And also a very high level footballer now still playing in the Quaffle, also previously played bfl. So you'd assume that you are like most professional footballers and you spend a lot of time in the gym. But you mean, you tell me us, George, when's the last Time you went into the gym and did some serious weights?

Yeah, it was probably back when I was playing VFL. So that was 2015 to 2017. And I think each year I just did a little bit, a little bit less and then post bfl. Nothing. Nothing at all. So it's been, yeah, four or five years now.

So most people would assume that without going to the gym you would lose kind of any superficial muscle growth. And if you look at, you know, if anyone gets to see Jordan, you can go visit Instagram or something. You don't, you look like someone that goes to the gym. And so that is a lot of fear of people, that if I don't do these traditional things, my muscles might shrink or I might get weaker. And what you're saying is that that's not a problem, that's not something you need to worry about. Oh.

And it depends if you, if you're going to be a bodybuilder, of course you don't want your muscles to shrink, but if you're a triathlete, you want to be as efficient as possible. So actually carrying that extra mass is actually going to be detrimental to your performance.

Yeah. And I guess the main point is that you, you can stay strong regardless. And in your case, you know, you might have lost a little bit of muscle mass, but you are just as strong because of these movements. These movements don't, these movements are making your core stronger, even though you are relaxing and not overloading the muscles as much.

Oh, I feel, I feel way stronger. I'm more connected to my body and also with how we move. And the sort of movements that you're talking about, Jord, with traditional training is they're very rigid, it creates a lot of tightness. And today we've talked a lot about relaxation and efficiency. So the other point that I could make is with training, especially for athletes, more is not better. So an effective long term approach requires balancing. So not necessarily balance. Because I think all three of us can agree there's no such thing as balance. Everything's happening in ebbs and flows. But balancing with yin and yang, we want to make sure that our program is balanced. So that's why you go to Tribella, because you want someone, a coach, to say, this is what you do. You do this much. Not anymore. Because they're looking after you. They're the one that's making sure that you're not getting injured. So what happens with this is this is something that actually makes you feel better. So you do it, you make it makes you feel Better. You feel like you can run longer, you feel like you can run faster, you feel like you can cycle more. It's something that is allowing you to reset back to your most natural optimal state so you can go again. So it's all about quality. And essentially what we want to do is we want to improve someone's functional threshold. So it's got nothing to do with someone growing bigger muscles. We want to improve their functional threshold, which is essentially their capacity to do more with good form and lengthen their time till fatigue. That's what we want to do and does. We've got to ask ourselves a question. Does your current training program allow you to do that? Is there a direct transfer to enhance performance and athletic longevity?

That's a brilliant question. Well, let's touch on how the recent approach actually applies to triathletes, to cyclists. And the muscle example isn't as relevant to triathletes and cyclists because most triathletes, cyclists are trying to get leaner. Um, but the point is that you don't have to do traditional weights to get the benefits of becoming stronger and getting a stronger core. Um, you can do this through this approach. So you've worked with, you know, some triathletes and cyclists already and you've specifically worked with triathletes and cyclists in the Tribalo system. Um, so how does this approach actually benefit and help people on the bike? For example?

There's, there's lots of answers. I think the first thing I think about, about a cyclist is their posture, so their posture on the bike. They've got flexed hips, so hip flexors are tight, and then they've got this C cat shaped spine and then they've got reclination or extension of the neck notch and neck, if you're looking at a cyclist side on. So what we're already seeing is these different pulls on the body and it's creating this posture. So what we want to do is we want to lengthen out the spine for one. That's really important. So increasing the distance between the crown, which is the top of the head and the tailbone, making that nice even length, not having these big curvatures between the crown and the tailbone, that would be one. The other thing is if we don't get that, then the diaphragm doesn't fire correctly and optimally. So that means we don't get that effect of the intra abdominal pressure, which is that balloon type effect inside the abdominal wall expanding. Now when we get that length of the spine and when we get that pressure and that balloon type effect inside the abdominal wall. What most, if not all cyclists report is greater pedal power, greater push through the pedals. So that's one way that we can influence posture to create a performance effect. Other things that we do within the Trivelo strength and conditioning program is we also address releasing full body. So areas that we know that you're going to be tied in, we've got postures that allow you to release those areas. We work specifically with the core and breathing and how that can improve yourself on the bike. And then we talk a lot about knee tracking and alignment. And that's also really important for runners, not just cyclists.

When you look at that fixed position on the bike and you're talking about the diaphragm, the spine being shortened, and so therefore the diaphragm being compressed, you would say, but massive negative of that is also your ability to breathe properly, right?

Definitely. Definitely. And I think really important is we just want to be able to breathe through the nose as much as possible. It also depends upon the intensity of what we're doing. But breathing in through the nose rather than breathing through the mouth. Nose is for breathing, mouth is for eating. It's an easy one to remember. So we want to do that as much as we can. And then we also, as you said, Jord, we want to be breathing as efficiently as possible, because we all breathe between 17,000 and 25,000 times a day. So I think if we can improve how we take one breath and do that over the course of the day is going to have a great impact on our energy and how we feel and how we perform.

So, Jordan, when I look at the elite, let's just take triathletes or cyclists, they make the act, the action, the activity. They make it look easy. And then you can immediately see the elite cyclist who's about to drop off, say, the pack. Let's just take the Giro, for example. You look at Yates attacking. He looks free, he's flowing, he's fluid movement, his body's in sync. You would say that's an example of someone who's got really good course, you know, core stability and functionality of their. Of their pedaling action. And you look at the guy who's about to drop off or get dropped, his cadence becomes harder, his pedaling technique, everything. His form is falling apart. But they're examples of what I think you're talking about. And for whatever reason, they're fatiguing. If they went back to the basics like we're talking about, it is going to prolong the chance of you becoming that cyclist who gets dropped off. There's a whole lot of other things that are important. It could be to do with nutrition, it could be to do with your fitness level. There's never one thing. But certainly if you have a relaxed body, and I keep looking at the way Yates attacked, you know, the pink jersey and. And rode away, it. It just looked effortless. And that's kind of what we're aspiring to, is to. To make our functionality of. Of our cycling or running or swimming. You know, it is not just a vision, it is actually a true story that the more effortless you make it, the less fatiguing you're going to make, because you're not fighting with yourself.

Yeah. And it's really not a matter of, let's say you're riding Jerry, and you've got this bracing strategy, and then I just tell you to relax, you're going to say, I can't. So it's actually something that needs to be trained off the bike, needs to be trained in an environment where we can give complete attention to the breath, to stability, and then we work on challenging that movement. So let's say you're lying on your back, and I say lift your legs up one at a time so you're in a lying squat position with your legs up towards the ceiling and hands up towards the ceiling. Now, that already is going to be super challenging for most people to do without tensing their abdominals. But if you get to the point where you can start to relax those abdominals, then we say, let's roll onto one side so you're supporting through one, like your right hip, right shoulder, and you're on your right side and the left shoulder, left hips off the floor, so you're rolling. Can you do that without bracing? So there's different ways of increasing the challenge to our body off the bike, where we're saying, okay, no matter what the challenge, is your habit that strong, your new habit that strong, where you can maintain that relaxation despite how challenging the specific task is. And for the moment, we're talking about the bike. But it can be anything. It can be you're running, you're swimming, it can be your gym training, whatever it is you're doing. That's a specific task. So can you maintain that relaxation based on the task?

Yeah, look, there's so many examples, and we've got a few athletes who've come to us, one particular from a CrossFit background and really, really going great guns as a triathlete. And he's identified that the tense, tight, big muscle groups that he's got are not actually functional for a triathlete. And he's doing everything in his power to reduce that. And it's been great watching him decrease the size of his body to enable him to run better and, and to move free. And he identifies that. And they're examples of what we're talking about to try to get your body to suit the activity that you're actually trying to do well in.

We could go on in this topic for a long time and I feel like we will got this overview of the approach and we will probably need to do a part two of the podcast to start going into more specifics. And I'd love to get some feedback from the listeners about questions you have about this, because I know when I was learning this and I was fortunate enough to learn from both you and took some classes with Mark McGrath himself as well, and I asked you both about a thousand questions to try and gain an understanding. So that's how long it took me to really grasp this whole concept. And you've done a really good job of explaining all the basic concepts today. But what would you like athletes out there to know about their movement, about their bodies? You know, what's the message that you're trying to get through to athletes to start thinking about? Because they really need to start thinking about things a little bit differently, don't they?

Yeah, I think just stay open, Stay open that there are other. There are other options for how we can train our body. I think we get fixed on and put things into boxes. So, okay, a triathlete does bike, run, swim, and then they do strength and conditioning with some foam rolling and some stretching. So it just becomes known that that type of athlete does that type of program. I think we need to expand how we see it and need to get in touch with how to move again and how to do it well and then integrate that into our performance and see what the benefits are. The thing you always want to ask a coach, and I hope all Trivalo athletes are asking you this, Gerry, is why? Because you want to know the reasons why you're doing things. You want to know why you train the way that you're training, or why have you decided to train this specific way? Or why have you decided to program us this specific way? Because once you understand why, you can process it and say, does that make sense to me? And if it does, then you do it. But we also talked about in the podcast about Are you training in a way that creates a direct transfer to enhancing your performance and athletic longevity? So as you consider what we've spoken about today is your training reflecting and honoring those principles based on how we're designed to move, breathe and stabilize. You might not know the answer right now, but if you're open to the fact that there might be something else, another way of training, in particular, if you've plateaued in performance, in particular if you're constantly getting recurring injuries or feel like your body and how your body moves is limiting your performance, if you fit under those three categories, then you're already going to be hopefully open minded to try something new and something different. Because again, as I said before, something different is probably exactly what you need.

It's interesting we've used the example in the podcast already that you know, for example, you, you know, you aspire to be at the top of your tree in your, in your chosen sport, which happens to be football. And, and you knew what was the right pathway to take, yet you still wanted to keep dabbling in the things that were holding you back. And that's totally understandable for everybody out there. Yeah, I might do this, but I'll still do the other things as well. And that's your decision. But we're just trying to get the listener out there to understand that there are better ways. And just because one person who does very well in their chosen sport does it this way, it's not necessarily, they may not have achieved the highest level they could be, if they did did something like we're talking about, they could actually be better. And, you know, that's kind of the message we're trying to get across.

I think that's a really good point, Jerry, because we can do that. We can look and idolize an athlete at the top of the tree and then we can say, okay, whatever they're doing must be working. So I need to apply that to myself. So if you think about golf, Tiger woods, top of his game, when he was at the top of his game, right? But he started to gym train and he started to get tighter, stiffer, and then he gets back surgery, right? So that's one example, great example. Doesn't mean that he's not gonna, it doesn't mean he's not gonna come back and still be a great player, but it doesn't mean that his training program was what allowed him to be the best in the world. There's so many other factors and just pure grit is certainly one factor to Tiger and. Yeah, exactly. The the second guess pair of athletes that I look at is Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. So both being number one in the world, both almost won as many Grand Slams as each other. But they've both done it at a very different cost to their body. If you look at how Roger Federer moves versus how Rafael Nadal moves, rap is much more grit, it's much more muscle, he's much heavier. And then Roger Federer is much more fluid and flowy. So I not only just think about that from a performance point of view, but I also think about a longevity point of view. I know that yes, there's some triathletes that are elite triathletes, so triathlons of their life. But I also know that some triathletes are dads, they're grandfathers. So they also want to be able to squat down and play with their kids or their grandkids. They want to move well. They don't want to be restricted and limited by their body. And this is what this movement system, this approach allows you to do. It allows you to, I guess, get to a point where you can move well and do all the things that you want to do and not be limited by your body. And that's really important for me because for four or five years between the ages of 14 and 19, I was just limited by my body. I was limited by my capacity to move. And not only does that have an effect on mental health, feelings of frustration, anger, depression, anxiety, etc. It means that it takes you away from doing the things that you want to do, doing the things that you love. So that's why I'm so passionate about it, because I want people no longer to be limited and restricted by their body. I want them to be educated and empowered, to start to move, breathe and stabilize better so they can do all the things that they love to do.

That's a really brilliant answer because a lot of age groupers in triathlons stop running because it becomes too painful. They get too many recurring injuries and they might just go to cycling and then maybe can't be as functional as they want just in day to day living because of these things. And you're saying that doesn't have to be the pathway, that doesn't have to be the option. You know, you really want to encourage people to use this for performance, obviously, but use it to be really functional in your life. And I remember, you know, those two athlete examples of Federer versus Nadal is a really good one because both elite, you know, Nadal shows that he can get to that top level using the strategies he has at the moment. But you might argue he's had a whole lot more injuries than Federer and maybe that's because of his inefficiencies. You, you can't say for sure unless you're in his inner sanctum. But I remember I asked you and Mark both, you know, I was watching Usain Bolt do his bit of his training camp and he was doing heaps of crunches and sit ups and using, you know, big weight plates to do crunches side to side, and he has, you know, quite a ripped abs at the peak of his performance. And I said, well, he's the fastest man on the planet, so are you saying that that's the wrong type of training for him? And you both quite simply said, well, we can't say for sure, but maybe he could be faster, you know, and that's the type of approach that you're talking about here, is that you just need to be open to something else. You know, a strategy might be working, but it might not be the most efficient for you. And could you find a more efficient strategy that's going to help with one, performance, but two, longevity as well?

Yeah, and I think for him, he had a, he had a lean strategy with his sprinting and he also, I think he tore his hamstring his last, last rights. So we, this is the, this is the most exciting thing about this approach because I talked about we're lifting the functional threshold, so essentially we're lifting the ceiling on how well you think you can perform. So we're going. Nah, we can go, we can go to another level. We can go to another level. It's just that because you haven't been there yet, you haven't been there yet, you don't know that it's there.

Yeah, it's a really brilliant way of thinking. And I think just touching on, you know, pain points. A lot of triathletes or cyclists just constantly have the most common ones, back pain, knee pain, you know, ITB pain, and just live with it and just kind of accept that, you know, that's how their bodies are and that's just due to the load of training and that's not really changeable. But yeah, what would you say to athletes with that mindset?

If you've got that mindset, then you probably haven't tried everything. I got a lot of people come in and fortunately I can be that person that can steer them in a different direction to maybe what therapists or practitioners in the past have done with them. But if you're getting knee pain, hip pain, neck pain, back pain, etc. Pain is information. The pain is a signal for you to stop and pay attention to what's going on. If you're getting pain in those areas, then you're overloading those areas, you're overusing those areas. So what we first do is take away what's causing the harm. That's the first thing you got to take away what's causing the harm. Then you've got to identify what's creating the problem, what's the source of the problem. Not the superficial, like getting a rub down or a massage, you know, that'll relieve the tightness, maybe temporarily. But what is the deep rooted source of the problem? What needs to change? And likely it's how you move, breathe and stabilize. And when that is changed, then it's likely that you won't have the knee pain, you won't have the hip pain, you won't have the back pain, et cetera. But there's a way that you're moving your body. And I always laugh and you guys can appreciate this, that imagine if we didn't have pain. Imagine how crazy we train. We'd be out surfing for six hours, we'd be out doing marathons upon marathons, we'd be absolutely abusing our body. But that pain is the signal not to overdo it. Because if we continually overdo it, then it's likely we're going to need back surgery, hip surgery, a knee replacement, hip replacement, spinal fusion, whatever it might be. But we want to obviously avoid all of those things.

Yeah, that's spot on. The longevity aspect as well as the functioning in the moment, they're two integral parts of what we're saying in this podcast and equally as important to each other. And you've got to think about and looking at you guys, the younger, you know, 20s and 30s, and looking at me in my 90s and hundreds, sorry, 60s and 70s, you know, you really want to get to this age and still be functioning, you know, and not be restricted. And the things you do from where you are now to where I am is so important to have that longevity. And you know, as you say, you don't want to abuse yourself in the moment by just doing so much overload and, and really not allowing your body to function as it should. And the one thing is though, it's not going to happen in two or three weeks of a program. Jordan, you're going to need patience, you're going to need to work at it consistently and like everything, the longer you do it for, eventually the body will come around and it will be second nature. Is that a fair comment?

Yeah, definitely. And the sooner you start, the better. Where every day we're building upon our habits and our compensations day after day. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to re establish a new habit. And as you said, Jerry, that takes time, that consistency. And then what I find with people is you eventually get to the point where you start to see progress and you start to see results and then we want it just to be a part of our training program. We don't want to do it till we get to a point where it's like, oh, yeah, I'm satisfied with where I'm at. I'm 12 years in and I'm still working on it every day, 60 to 90 minutes, still working on improving. And obviously this is what I do for a living. That's obviously something that I'm extremely passionate about. But for athletes and clients that I see, it's really important to maintain a consistent and regular movement practice because you're reminding your body of how you want it to move. So if we're sitting in a chair all day and that's the only information that we're giving it, then we're going to be hyper specialised for sitting at chairs. If we're sitting on a bike for six to eight hours, we're going to be hyper specialized for bike riding. So we're going to begin to adopt this posture. So we need a way of resetting the body to bring us back to our most natural and optimal state and then we need to do that consistently because not only do we need to bring ourselves back to that state, we need to keep us there or as close to there as possible. We need to keep that gap between where we're at and what's ideal as small as possible.

Unbelievable. Plenty of words of wisdom from you, Jordan. Thank you very much for joining us today. We've gone into a lot of different topics. This is a bit of Pandora's box. So I can't wait to have you back on again to explore some more topics in this realm. Just some final words of wisdom. We do like to ask a guest a final question and that is what is a life lesson that you've learned in the last 12 months that you would like to pass on to others?

Life lesson in the last 12 months? I'm of the belief that the only way to change our posture is to be able to own the posture ourselves. So if you're continually going to see an osteopath, a chiropractor or physio for temporary relief, you're not owning your posture. You're going to that therapist and saying, I'm broken. Fix me. And then you go away and wait until you're broken again to go back to the therapist. So what I'm taking is for you to start to own your own, become less dependent and less reliant upon other people for how your body feels.

That's absolutely brilliant. Once again, thank you very much for joining us. If you have enjoyed this or if you have any questions on this, Jordan will be more than happy to come back on and answer questions, clarify further things. Like I said, I when I was learning this, I still am learning so much about it. I've only scratched the surface myself. I asked hundreds of felt like a thousand questions trying to gain an understanding of this approach and system. So we would love to hear your questions. What do you want to know more of? And so we can get back Jordan back on and discuss them a little bit further. But thank you very much for listening. Jordan, thanks again for coming on. That's it for this episode and we'll see you next time.

Sam.