51: Brian Buck: What You Don't Know Is Killing You... Well at Least Holding You Back

And everyone's accountable. Everyone's accountable. Right? That's all this data does.

We live in a space in which we have more free technology capabilities, but the discrepancies in between education, knowledge and application to our life become so great.

We all have goals in business, that's pretty much a given. How much we want to make, what.

We want a career to look like.

How big we want our business to grow.

Welcome to the Coaches Council podcast with Justin and Pradeep where the art and science of athletic all the things that these things are supposed to fix. So Pradeep, I don't know about you, but with all the grayness out here, I'm feeling pretty depressed every single day. And Brian, I know you've got some nice sunshine out in Washington and Oregon area up in the Pacific Northwest. So really excited to get this going today. But guys, Brian Buck, our guest today, has a massive footprint in the sports science field. Basically running combines for NFL players and the NFL itself with Sparta science, as well as having a career in Major League Baseball ranks really kind of getting him involved in it. So Brian, really happy to have you on the show and kind of bring this data and wellness structure side over to business and practical application.

No, I appreciate you guys having me on here and yeah, I got a little the rare sunlight today, so I'm basking in it as we just touched on. No, I appreciate you having me on here and really was just more so involved on the performance side. Really my goals and aspirations as a young guy was really just more based on performance and then, you know, was lucky, you know, to be in positions in my career where I was exposed to data and uncomfortably at first I would say even or very unsure about it. And I know that people listening might be able to relate to that. Especially with the overwhelming amount of data there is today. It can be overwhelming. But you know, I was lucky to have success using it in the team setting and get buy in with people to understand what it meant and how it could be applied. Because really at the end of the day, if you're not using it and applying it, then what's the point of collecting it? And so I was just lucky to be in the MLB and I can go back as an athlete. Started as an athlete with someone that always got hurt. Ended up going back to school and really studying kinesiology and business and then ended up going into a strength conditioning role in Major League Baseball with the Colorado Rockies. And that's where that was the first stop that I really got exposed to a lot of data. And really we put together a well thought plan of how we wanted to use that data and then you know, with some uncertainty and so saw a ton of success there. And I've really been able to use that time in my life to help others and apply that kind of similar model in other settings. And so, yeah, now as you said, I'm working with Sparta Science. I've been here for about four years now. I'm a director of pro sports. So really working a lot with organizations and teams and private facilities and military, anyone that's trying to improve their current situations or improve the availability or health of who they're working with, if not themselves directly. So yeah, you know, my day revolves around looking at data points and really being able to explain those to. If you've never heard of this before, I can make sense of it pretty quickly. And so that way whoever I'm working with can apply it. So that's kind of my background and where I spend a lot of my time today.

I love it. And what are you really kind of seeing from the data points that are making major waves? Because I know when I apply it over to what we're doing with wearable technology and information that a lot of other, that a lot of people are confused about. When you talk about hrv, when you talk about sleep cycles, when you talk about recovery readiness, performance scores, whatever metric you want to put on it, what are you starting to see from more of the physical data and physical information that if it was to be deduced down to the most impactful thing for somebody at home to be able to take action and practically use, what would that be?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. That's the million dollar question. Actually it's more like first defining the problem because I think today there's so much sex appeal and every wearable is out there and it's all sexy. We all want to have it, we want to own it, we want to say we have this, we want to screenshot it and put it on the gram, hey, look what the data is that I'm collecting. But you have to take a step back and say, okay, first define the problem. So if you're an entrepreneur and you sleep four and a half hours a night, you might want to first look at, okay, are you getting deep sleep, are you getting into rem? And then what impact would those make on your life? So it's just baby steps. So first identifying what the issue is and then putting a plan in place to improve that. And so, you know, And I can go a lot longer than that. Like in sports, it's like the sexy thing is to look at everything and that's often what gets us in trouble. We want to look at so many things, but how can we simplify and drive intent with a few specific data points or specifics that we want to look at and then how can we apply that in the measure it to identify if it's working or not. So really step one, identify what it is that you're trying to improve in your life and then measure if that's working or not.

Go ahead. Pradeep.

Well, I was going to say for the average everyday guy like me, what are a couple of things that you think that we should be looking out for? Someone like I should be watching out for?

Yeah, so. Well, I guess I'm a little bit biased towards sleep and your overall physiological adaptation and improvements cognitively in that sense. So something very basic like a wearable, you know, I think very popular wearables today, you know, might be an oura ring or a whoop strap, something that is, doesn't cause you more work. It should be something that sits into your daily workflow and doesn't add something for you to do because if it does, you're probably likely to fall off that new habit or whatever it may be. So I would start there, I would start with that. And then even if you don't have those, I think just being more honest with yourself when you look in the mirror and subjectively asking yourself, perhaps starting with a daily log of how do you feel when you go to bed at this time, etc. Like we don't have to spend money on anything. I think that's probably another misconception. We can strip it to the bare bones and identify, you know, for free, some similar, some things. So that's where I would start.

That's a conversation that I really want to have Brian, and really focus on here is because the wearables industry itself is a third dirty 5 billion dollar industry. 35 by 2027 it's expected to be a hundred billion dollar industry. The health and wellness industry itself today is a $4.1 trillion industry. So there is a massive amount of money going into this space and we're talking about more than 2% total wellness spend being spent on a wearable that you, me, anybody has access to. But yet we're sitting in a world where by 2025 more than 50% of the world will be obese or, sorry, 50% of North America will be obese Currently we have over 200 million overweight or obese people in the United States. There's 1.35 million people who are suffering from severe debilitating anxiety on a day to day basis. There's 135 million people with type 2 or pre diabetic issues. There's 65% of Americans with hardening of arteries and heart disease. There's 115 million people who are regularly sleep deprived. There's 67% of Americans who suffer from burnout. 81% of Americans suffer from micronutrient deficiency. I could go on and on and on. And we live in a space in which we have more free, more paid technologies, options and capabilities. But the discrepancy, the space in between education, knowledge and application to our life becomes so great. And as somebody who has spent their entire career, both you and I, applying these things to athletes lives, we've now have companies who've spent billions of dollars in taking those same technologies and now made them available to people who don't know the difference between an apple and an avocado. And so what, what have we kind of created for ourself here and how do we start to close that gap a little bit in terms of application to somebody's life?

Well, yeah, I mean it's similar, the metaphor there too. Like you know, we have more of this knowledge and we have all these high performance facilities now, yet you still see injury rates through the roof. Right. It's like we have, we have access to all this. So first off I would, I would back up and I would say again, if we had no money and we were looking to take care of ourselves and improve our well being, I think in. So I'm 34. I just realized that my health insurance will take care of one physical a year for free. Didn't even realize that it's little things, right? Like you don't always have to pay for something to be done. So you gotta first start at, you know, an engine check, you know, internally what's going on internally and how can I make an adjustment to improve that? You know, because it's like in sports as you know, like you can sit there and measure what you're putting in all the time. You can measure, you know, the volume of work you do, but you, you need to measure the, how you respond to that or internal load. And it's more of the sports science world. How do you actually, how does that impact what you're doing? So let's talk about your average person that's Just trying to be successful and work hard from home. How can they do something like a physical or an allergy test to understand of what they're putting in? Is it actually good for their body and are they responding well to it? You know, there's so many little steps that we forget about just easy check marks. You know, those would be, you know, your free physical measuring internal load. So in the sports science world and pro sports, as you know, you're always measuring like how much work they're doing, but then like how can you measure how it impacts each person? And that same thing can be applied to, you know, everyday life. So, you know, there's so many things out there that are claiming to be life changing stuff as well. That's not. So it's just a flooded market, but I think like I love that.

Expand on that a little bit.

Yeah, expand on the flooded market.

Yeah. And the claims in which are more. So playing. It's something we say a lot is playing the guru's game and not yours.

Yeah, I mean, that's the problem. Right. Because you can have some really good products out there that really work and maybe they're peer reviewed and there's research on them and there's studies on them. Right. And there's a lot of them that aren't, that are more accessible, maybe have better marketing. But when one of those fails, it actually hurts the rest of the market. Because now that claim of injury prevention or you know, whatever it may be is like, yeah, I've heard that one before. I don't really, you know, it doesn't fly with me anymore. Right. And it burns a lot of people. But so much of it is like we all, we all see what other people are doing, whether that be social media or TV or whatever. We see what others are doing and we want to do the same thing, regardless if that might work for me or not. We all kind of want to be involved. So that's probably a big problem is, you know, starting off and spending money on something that you don't necessarily understand the problem to begin with. And that's, you know, that goes a long way in sports and life and whatever.

Pradeep, in a lot of the men in which you coach through the business side, I'm curious as to what you start to find holds a lot of people back on the physical health and wellbeing side.

Well, it's just simple. It's one word, busy. Everybody's just so busy with the work, their career, the families, and then when it comes to their health and themselves, the wellness area, that's as much as even guys that work out, they might spend that time in the gym but they don't get the chance to eat proper meals or get effective sleep. So busyness, I think in a lot of aspects takes away from the quality of our life from taking care of ourselves to even the relationships that we have with people around us. So that's the biggest thing I see right now. We're just getting into even a deeper go, go, go society. It's not acceptable anymore to be chill and you know, Brian's from the west coast. I grew up on the west coast and the west coast compared to where we are, where I am now, which is just outside of Toronto, which is a go, go, go city, you can see the two totally different types of lifestyles and I think that has a big impact on people's quality of life overall. That's my personal opinion and that's what I've seen. Fairly consistent consistently across the board.

No, Pradeep, you make a good point and that's, you know, we're wired to always be in the sympathetic dominant response. We're always going, going, going and then, you know, adding more stress and fatigue on top of that. Maybe via you know, HIIT training or something you're doing to try and fit in that 20 minute block. Sometimes your body's better off skipping that but you're forcing it or whatever it might be, right? Because you might be so stressed and you're just adding more and more stress and then the lack of sleep, you don't get that adaptation you're looking for and actually you feel worse. Right? So I think it's, you know, and I really, it took me to like traveling more internationally to understand how we are wired in the States. Like we are the only country that's just like never rest. Emails on Saturday and Sunday, you know, like, you know, just talking with people from other countries and like, no, we don't work outside of work. What are you doing? You know, it's good to get that perspective because we are on all the time, whether you're aware or cognizant of it, it takes its toll. So yeah, you got to take a step back sometimes and look at another way. Sometimes skipping a workout is better than your workout depending on how you're feeling.

It's interesting you say that Brian, because a lot of things that a lot of people don't know is that your body doesn't know the difference between mental, physical, emotional, spiritual stress. It sees it as stress. It sees it as that one thing that creates that increase in heart rate, increase in blood pressure, increase in cortisol response, decrease in mental clarity, all of these immense things that are hard on your body. And so whether it's a fight with your spouse, whether it's an argument at work, whether it's a deadline you need to hit, whether it's that hiit workout you spoke about. We live in this sympathetic overload that our body all of a sudden has to get used to over this chronic long term time and we start to see the adverse effects. And I'm really interested to dive deeper into this, the differences that you saw internationally because when, and I was listening to Sean Stevenson the other day and he was talking about the data that first came out of Italy on the deaths From COVID and 89% of the people who passed away in Italy initially had pre existing conditions. And if you dive into the data here in the United States, what's wild is we are by far the sickest country in the world BY Far. And 94% of people who lost their lives in the United States had an average of 2.6 pre existing chronic diseases. And that is just absolutely wild. And where do chronic diseases live? They live in chronic sympathetic overload. And so I'm curious to dive into more of what you're talking about in lifestyles that you see amongst different countries that we can start to apply to put us into a different parasympathetic state.

Well, other countries just have better boundaries. We have lost boundaries here. The whole Sunday email thing used to be like a whoa moment. That is regular now, right. So it's, it's, it's boundaries that we put up. We put them up or we don't put them up. It's right. It's like the same thing. Like you know, I've had these discussions with you in the past on just like planning. Right. So it's like for me I learned like as you know, I've gotten older, I've dealt with more anxiety. And the reason is, is I haven't, I didn't put my boundaries where they need to be. In an example is like I used to, you know, phone was plugged in next to my bed, I'd wake up and the first thing I do is start looking at emails and you just start getting these reactions of stress or I need to do this or I need to do that, you know, first thing in the morning so your alarm clock goes off. That's a stressor. You look at some emails, that's a stressor I haven't even had my coffee yet. I'm still a bad person. Like, I'm not a nice person at this point. And so these, you know, these inputs that I'm not ready to handle or tolerate yet are, you know, some might consider nothing for me, you know, if you're, you know, if I really care about that or responding quickly. It's a stressor and an alarm, you know, alarming response. And so I, I had to say, okay, I need to take a step back. I need to have my the first hour of the morning and I'm sure you probably do something similar, but I don't look at my phone, I don't look at emails until I've had a couple cups of water. I've done some red light therapy, I've meditated and I've read a chapter in a book that's just my time. And then I'll get into what I need to get into. But if I do it anytime before that, it kind of throws my day. So it's just trying to have it stack early and it puts myself at ease and then I can take on someone that's a little bit better. And, you know, I traveled to India two years ago and that was a place that was like, hey, no, we don't, we don't do anything on the weekends or past this hour of the day. And I thought it was so peaceful to be around. I was like, I love this. There is no, you don't take the phone with you outside of work. It's like, this is family time, this is people time. It's a social hour. You know, I respect those boundaries and I don't feel like we respect them that well here in the States.

It's so unique that you bring that up, Ryan, because the boundary marker that we both were brought up in in pro sports, pro sports and sports in general don't recognize any type of boundary. And holidays, you're playing, weekends, you're playing birthdays, weddings, funerals, you name it, you're playing. It's a rarity that something else takes its place. And what can we do as people, what can we do as business owners to really kind of take back our time? Which not only putting boundaries in place, will put us into a more parasympathetic state right away because we've now put us first. But I mean, even Justin Bat talked about this yesterday, talked about this last week on our episode about fatherhood and combining your personal and your professional calendars. And all of a sudden, if there's A baseball game for your kid at 5 o' clock in the afternoon, that goes on the calendar. It's a meeting, it's a boundary that you're setting. This is your meeting. That's what you're saying is a priority. If your workout is on the calendar, that is a priority. It's no longer something that battles with you. If your morning workout, morning routine that you just spoke about is a priority to you, it goes on the calendar and nothing takes its space. And so what can we do to really enable these for us, but also create sustainability there, man, the calendar is.

Everything you are right there. Like, I don't know what I would do without the calendar. Just I schedule my weeks out, my days out, but it's putting these boundaries in play and respecting it. And like being in an environment where it is respected because it's not respected everywhere. And you mentioned pro sports. That's not. These boundaries aren't respected there. They're not supposed to be, but they're just not. So if your environment currently, whether this is your office, your company, whatever it is, if these things aren't respected, that you really need that time, then you're kind of in a bad environment if you can't change it. The other piece of this is, yes, you want to design your week, your days accordingly and block out those hours because you will do it. But then also going back to the data, working smarter. So more is not always better. Getting feedback, whether that be objective data or objective feedback, subjective feedback, you know, and I referred to the whoop strap earlier, right? So looking at your strain, your recovery, you know, your hrv, are these things working for you? And then when it comes time, I think you'll tell pretty quick if you're organizing things correctly when it comes time for that, you know, kid time, workout time, whatever it may be, that's your time. If you don't look forward to it at that time, something else is off and you need to figure out what that is. Because if it's your time of the day and hey, it's gym time and I'm not, I'm looking at the gym and I have no motivation to go. Something else has taken it out of me and I need to figure out and identify what that is. So it's, it's never perfect, it's just always coming back to it and putting a better plan in place. And that's why everything's in pencil, man. Like you've got to change everything. You always got to look in the mirror and figure out how it can.

Be better if I can just add on to that. Just in terms of what I see for let's just say high performing business guys is we all have goals in business. That's pretty much a given. How much we want to make, what we want a career to look like, how big we want our business to grow. Very seldom do we have goals outside of that. Whether that's family goals. And Justin again in the last episode is all about fatherhood. Very few of us have goals about fatherhood. When it comes to other social relationships and what ends up happening as men, we are driven to achieve and our brain is a goal driven organ and it goes to that goal that we have. And typically that's with business. And so we can be in social settings, we can be in family settings, but our goal, our brain will continue to look for that goal. And if we don't have them, we get pulled into it. So that's why I see a lot of guys scheduled in terms of spending time with their family, but they don't have that pull because that fulfillment isn't attached to a goal of any sort. And so I think that's important. I think that's, that's specifically what we do in terms of working with guys. We is, we identify goals for them outside of their business and say, what else do you want to achieve in your life? And so if one of their goals is to, hey, look, I want to make my kids, this is my personal goal, make my kids laugh for 10 minutes, then my, my brain is going to latch onto that and I'm going to go full force into that. And I think that's, that's in Western society, that's what I see a lot of that. It's so goal driven, goal focused. And on top of that, we also have become all about productivity. And this is something that's plagued nations like Japan for example. Japan is a very highly productive environment, very efficient. But what we're seeing there is a lot of people committing suicide because every minute people are trying to be productive, they're trying to do something, trying to achieve something. And I think that goes to a detriment. It goes to exactly what you guys are talking about. People just don't like to relax these days overall. And that's catching up with us as a society.

Well, it goes back to that hustle culture. If you're not working, if you're not busy, if you're not doing something that is go, go, go. If you're not in the 5am Club, if you're not in every mastermind out there. If you're not working late and putting the hours in late at the office, if you're watching Netflix with your significant other at night, you're was, you're not doing things the right way. You're not putting, you're not deserving of a win. And I think that goes back to Brian. What you were talking about is this sympathetic overload that we live in is. It's this constant go, go, go. It's this constant hamster wheel we find ourselves on. Because right back to the initial thing that you spoke about was we haven't checked our engine, we haven't set up this look inside of us to say, oh my God, what has my habit of being in sympathetic overload day in and day out over the last 10, 15, 5, 25, 50 years done to my body? Because we haven't gone for that physical, we haven't thrown on that wearable, we haven't looked at the data and the information to apply it back to ourselves to get that holy crap, wake up call to say you're 70 pounds overweight and you may not be able to see your daughter walk down the aisle because you are so dedicated to building this business or you are so dedicated to stay up until 6, 7, 8 o' clock at night doing work that may or may not have garnered the same exact outcome had you focused more on more is not always better. And so I think, I think your point, Brian, of checking that engine and having checkpoints throughout the year and having that level of awareness is really the key in helping to bring us out of this chronic state of sympathetic overload. Because how many times do we hear habit culture, habit change starts with an aha moment. Nobody's going to listen to this podcast and go, oh yes, I am going to. Actually, you know what? It doesn't even need this podcast. January 1st, over 100 million people said, hey, I'm going to do this New Year's resolution. It's now the 19th of January, and I guarantee, well, when we're recording this, it's going to be February 10th. I think when we release this, over 85% of people will have stopped.

Totally, totally. Because there's not the next step in place of like your follow up meeting or your next check. So that check doesn't just randomly happen, it has to be scheduled. So like, I'll give you an example. Like this last year, actually the summer when I was in Toronto, like my own personal experience, like, I have psoriasis, I've had it my whole Life, but just very little of it. I noticed it was more than I've had in a while. And I was like, I wonder if this is dietary because I'm still active, still doing the same things. So I decided to go to a metabolic document that I had sent plenty of pro athletes to in my day and get blood work done and get allergen tested. I wanted to know if anything that I'm consuming and taking in is somehow affecting my sleep recovery, skin, body comp, etc. So I paid to get it done. And it was one of the best things I've done in my adult life, to be honest, because I got the blood test, I got the allergens, I figured out highly allergic to gluten, highly allergic to a handful of things that I regularly consume. And no one can be tip top if they're constantly putting in something in the body that doesn't agree. You just won't. But you don't know you're. You don't know you're not doing well. So basically how it was set up is you get the blood and then you do 90 days of, okay, maybe these supplements or these vitamins along with, hey, let's pull these things out of your diet. And diet's just an example, but there's always a 90 day follow up. And I just had one. And so this is that check mark that you had to schedule because otherwise you'd be like, no, I'm subjectively feeling better, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. But you have this hard 90 day Zoom call and you do your blood work again and blood doesn't lie. And actually this guy has a book called Bud Doesn't Lie. So we sit there and go over all the results. We can look at my trends from the previous one and talk about what's happening. And I've seen a dramatic change in my blood work, how I feel, my sleep. You know, the numbers I'm looking at with the whoop have an aura. I have all this, I'm looking at all of it. I'm trying to see what's going on. You know, I have the force plate data. I'm like, let's really figure out internally what's happening. And it's been one of the biggest eye openers in my life of like, you know, and people would argue this, like, food is medicine to me, but people might argue the other way on that. But it really impacts how your body operates, not only from your mind, but your physical outputs and what you're Trying to do. So these checkpoints, on figuring out if what you're doing is right or wrong, they have to be scheduled. And I've never done. You know, I know. You know, you talked about prioritizing things outside of the business, which is rare. I think one way that people can do that is vision boards. Right. And, you know, you've met Brian Nunez, my friend, and he's a big, big vision board guy because there's so much outside of his own business that he's trying to accomplish and he looks at it every day. Right. But he probably has set these check marks to make sure he's doing what he's doing and tweaking those when he needs to. And I'm sure you're doing similar things. You cannot guarantee improvement or success, but you can guarantee, you put something on the calendar that you're going to check and look internally or look in the mirror at what could be going better and what am I doing really well and what am I not and adjusting. So everything is a plan. And then adjust and plan, assess, adjust, all of that. So you still got to plan it all.

You went into something there, Brian, that's really interesting. And it goes back to really what we were talking about. Pradeep and I have discussed on countless occasions. And it's knowing what your game is, knowing your information, putting yourself first. And it's as soon as we start to dive into that, I'm just like you. I mean, I've been this way since I was 13 years old and I wanted to optimize myself to play in the National Hockey League. It was heart rate monitors, it was brain analyzers to see what states of sleep I was in. It was everything else. So I same thing. I sleep with an OURA ring, I sleep with a whoop band, I sleep with a heart rate monitor, I work out with a heart rate monitor. I utilize certain power tests every week. I want to know where I am. I do DNA and epigenetic tests. I do an epigenetic test every four months, like all of these things, to figure out myself. So that because, like you said, you were putting things into your body. Listeners out there, listen to this, listen to this statement. You were putting things into your body unknowingly that were putting you in compromised states to perform, to do what you wanted to do. You're sacrificing everything around you in order to accomplish a certain goal, but you're sabotaging yourself and how you're able to show up simply because you don't know. And in no way does that make any type of sense. And that is what the true definition of performance is, is really caring enough to know the data, the information that truly matters to us as individuals, that is going to optimize the way in which we can show up, perform, and accomplish the goals that we want, both at home, at business, ourselves, and with our families. And so I think that at the end of the day, Brian, is a great way to sum it up with what you were talking about is know what you're doing, know what you are putting into your body, know what you are making yourself susceptible to, if that's truly the goal and orientation that you're trying to accomplish. Is that. Is that peak state, that peak level? No different than what you do with people at the combine with players through Major League Baseball, through different sports teams. They have the initial engine check, they have the checkpoints, and then they have a plan and a guide of where they want to go and how they get there.

And everyone's accountable. Everyone's accountable, right. And that's all this data does, is it holds. Whether it's just yourself or a team, everyone's accountable. And if you can consistently look at it, you can consistently adapt and make changes to improve it. But if you, you know, it's just one of those things, you have to keep yourself accountable for your actions, and you have to measure accurately, like you do with everything that you're looking into, because that's always going to drive change. And you can't be scared to change. You can't be scared to say you were wrong about something either, because you just got to change it and make it better. And that's why I love data. I love data. Whether it's, you know, sleep data, training data, you know, whatever it is, you got to have it, you got to look at it, and you got to do it frequently. It can't just be once or twice a year either.

No, you're exactly right. Exactly right. So, guys, as you go forward, as you're trying to perform at that highest level, as you're just sacrificing different aspects of your life, be sure that you have checkpoints, be sure that you have that check engine light, make sure that you have those things stationed on your calendar throughout the year, throughout the months, to make sure that what you're doing and what you're engaging in, the habits, the routines, the food, the people you're listening to are pushing you in that right direction, are creating the change that's setting you up to optimize your performance. Every single day. Because at the end of the day, if you want to accomplish a goal, if you want to be the best and you want to succeed, you have to make sure that you're in the optimized state to do that with that. Guys, stay hungry, stay humble, and we'll see you next week.