S2:E15 - Andrew Lock on the Wolf’s Den with Mark Ottobre - Full Podcast

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Wolf's Den. My name is Mark Ottobre, and in this episode we're going to be deconstructing the world of health, fitness, and performance and exploring all things personal training. My guest today is probably one of the world's most sought-after physiotherapists and rehabilitation experts. That's Dr. Andrew Locke. If I just read up a few of Andrew's achievements, he's accredited in the McKenzie Spinal Method, He completed his master's degree in 2004, studying the resolution of intervertebrate disc injuries. He's a conveyor of the Australian Strength Scientists Association, the coordinator of the Ultimate Strength Summit at the Arnold Sports Festival, an IFBB Pro League judge, a current bench press Australian and world record holder, and the owner and founder of Functional Strength Rehabilitation, which he has clients from all over the world participating in Major League Baseball, MMA, You name it, sports, you know, clients that probably can't even mention on camera because they're that famous and that well-known. So I've known Andrew for over a decade and he's always been my go-to guy for the world of health, strength, and performance and rehabilitation. So it's an absolute pleasure to welcome him onto the Wolf's Den. Let's welcome Andrew Lock.

It's a big fist bump welcome, Mark.

Alrighty, well, first question, this is the moment of truth, Andrew. What do you bench?

Benching currently 200 kilos. Now I've got to do that next week in the comp.

Right, so have you benched 200 in comp before?

Not in the comp. I've missed it 4 times in the comp so far.

And what's your best bench in training?

Oh, in training, gee, back in 10, 15 years ago, it was 230. Wow. But I was just having fun because 230 was something I wanted to achieve. But now doing it in comp is a very different style of approach.

And have you always had an affinity for the bench press, or is it like the lift that you've decided, you know, I'm going to master this lift over the squat?

If I can lay down and do an exercise, you've got me, you know.

Touché.

Bench press is made for me.

Touché. Alrighty, well now that's out of the way, we've got the important stuff out. Let's start. So I suppose let's do the origin story and start there first. We'll jump all over the shop in this interview, no doubt, and as we unpack Andrew's great mind. But tell us, how did you get into physiotherapy? What was your starting point?

Probably really blame Arnold Schwarzenegger for that one, I think. Essentially, I started my life thinking I was either going to be a professional wrestler or I was going to take up professional baseball. I played for Australia as a junior, and I was getting prepared to go to the States to play, and somehow I just saw a muscle magazine with Arnold Schwarzenegger on the COVID and thought, that's it, I'm going to do the next Conan the Barbarian movie, right? I thought, no, I better go back to university while I'm doing that 'cause this might take a little while. So I still haven't made one of the movies yet, but 20 years later I'm still a physio. So that's where it really took me because as a physio, I had an affinity, I suppose more as a baseball player, to being injured all the time, throwing high velocity balls and things like this, and constantly seeing physios. So it was a profession I knew a lot about, as in I like this sort of thing, it makes sense to me.

[Speaker] And you've competed numerous times in bodybuilding as well, or is that not your— [Speaker] No, no, no. No, it's the power. No, but you've also seen a lot of top bodybuilders and seen what they've—

Yeah, like Tony Doherty, who you've met before. You know, Tony and myself go back so far that I can remember him bringing out Brian Buchanan, who was Mr. Universe at the time. And you know, we've probably seen all the great ones from the '80s onwards and probably known a lot about even the great ones from the '60s and '70s. So when it comes to the I suppose the science of weight training. I've read everything that possibly could have been published just growing up, so I've tried every routine you could possibly do. When it comes to the book of mistakes, I've written my own chapters. I can tell you I've tried everything in weight training and made up a few of my own. And that's why, as a physio, I know when people come to me and they tell me they've done something in particular, I'll probably have a good clue about what it is.

So you're almost this walker of two worlds. You've got the hardcore trainer, you know, bodybuilding, you know, love the bodybuilding side, powerlifter expert, and all these kind of things, you know, hardcore gym guy. But then you've also balanced it out with this super intellectual academic feats that, you know, your mind reading the studies and really understanding them and being able to challenge a lot of the pseudo experts or even experts and hang out with that. So, I suppose firstly, let's go into the how did you become a hardcore gym guy? What age were you? When was the first time you picked up a dumbbell?

Hmm, it's tough. Might have been about 16 or so. I basically truly would say myself I've got a body image disorder. I wake up every morning and I see myself as small. I go to the gym to get bigger. You know, it really is, it's that sort of thing. I'm never going to be big enough. So that's been really, I think, one of the driving forces is an underlying look at myself and saying physically I don't feel I've satisfied my strength goals and my size goals. And intellectually I'm still pursuing my intellectual goals, trying to put together the most complete understanding of the biomechanics and the sciences of lifting and the sciences of injury. That's my consuming passion.

When did that affinity for, I suppose, academia, where did that kick off? I mean, was it always, I'm just gonna, I'm fascinated with the human body, or was there a trigger to say, you know?

Definitely a fascination with the human body. Through high school I definitely never tried hard enough. It was I was more interested in playing sport, I was more interested in being a professional athlete than I was doing the study. It was only after I left that I came back and I decided there were big gaps I needed to fill.

So you played Major League Baseball, or no, you—

I played for Australia as a junior, played in the Junior World Series in America, and that was really where I was seeing a career path heading.

You also played cricket too?

Yeah, I played cricket. I was selected to the Australian All-High School team as well, so you know, they were my sports sports at the time, but something in there changed and I started to want to lift weights and get bigger. And that does not necessarily make you a better baseball player or a better cricket player, so those sports are going to suffer when I start to get bigger.

So was it due to injury that led you on the path to the physiotherapy, or like, what was the moment that you said, you know, this is what I'm going to dedicate my life to and be an absolute master at this?

I still think I'm still developing, a long way from what I've got to be yet. So I would look at it and say those things are very unfulfilled for me. So intellectually, I still think there's a lot of things I want to be perfect at. And I think the sciences are very established that we're pursuing. It's just the universities now are doing a very poor job of educating health professionals. They've lost 400 years of research. They're going off in weird places. It's just the most strange, almost abdication of responsibility. So my work now is to help health professionals get back on track, saying, you know what, the same science that launches a rocket to the moon by NASA is the same science you're going to apply to a deadlift. It doesn't matter what the random control study says. Random control study, if it conflicts with the fact that NASA puts a rocket on the moon and knows how to do it, well, which one's wrong? Maybe your random control study didn't look at the variables that should have been looked at. So that's where I find a lot of problems with the current approach to things, like, oh, what's the evidence base? The evidence base is actually a science. The research sometimes is so poor, that's not evidence.

Let's just get into that a bit. So for you getting into the world of physiotherapy, was there someone who, I suppose, you looked up to that thought, right, their body of work is very complete and that's what I want to kind of model myself as a physiotherapist and rehabilitation expert as?

It's very strange to think about. I initially went into it to think I was going to get answers. I think what essentially happened was by getting a degree, I realized that it just enabled me to start finding the answers. So the first stage was I probably thought, yeah, after 4 years I'm going to be a physio, I'm going to know what I'm doing. After 4 years you come out and you go, well, guess what, you really don't know a hell of a lot, but you know how not to hurt people, hopefully. You've got a few biomechanical ideas, you've got a bit of science to start you off, what are you going to do? So for me, it was like, there's big gaps in my knowledge. I wanted to become the best spine guy. And one of the great pieces of advice I got was that, you know, most students when they graduate, they went straight into hospitals, feeling that that was a safe environment. I had been asked to join a sports medicine group because I played baseball and cricket and I knew how to throw, and I had some ideas on shoulders. So the first day of work I ever had. The boss pulls me in and she goes, so your job here is to become the best in the world at something. And she looked at me and said, and I happen to be the best in the world at shoulders, so you're gonna have to choose something else. And that's led me on saying, okay, what do you want me to look at? What am I less confident at? Spines. I thought that we were very deficient in spine knowledge.

So how old were you then?

I'm still 21 now.

Okay, so you're 21 back then. When you say you're looking for answers, What, what, because I mean that's quite an interesting topic, what answers were exactly were you looking for? Answers to what? What was the question that you're posing?

A person who would come in who had pain in their back, how was I going to get them better? But not only how was I going to get them better, how was I going to know that what I was doing was going to get them better? So yeah, 80% of all back problems get better in 4 weeks regardless of the treatment. It doesn't matter whether you come down and the guy slaps a fish over the top of your head 5 times under a full moon the physio sticks, you know, dry needles in your butt, the osteo stretches you, the chiro cracks you. Basically, the statistics are straightforward. Human bodies heal. So human bodies are going to heal, and it's got less to do with the practitioner in those first 4 weeks than really just your body doing the work. 92% of back problems are basically better in 8 weeks. Now to me, that's not sufficient. That just means that you're basically a babysitter. You've got to know how do you get 100% of people better. How do you beat the tough cases? I love the ones that come in 10 years of failing with everybody. That's the one I want to see. Because I know there's an answer underneath there. So it's a burning passion for me to never accept anything less than 100%.

But what prompted you to ask that question in the first place?

Funny enough, I think there's a pride issue. I think that there's an ego issue underneath there. And a belief that I should be better than I am. So it's always fulfilling something. It's always not believing that I'm good enough. And of course I'm not yet. I haven't benched what I want to bench, haven't lifted what I want to lift, too high in body fat still. Intellectually still doing really well, but there's better answers out there for the occasional case I'm still having challenges with. I'll still get someone close, but I want to be— I want to aim for perfection. So that's the constant goals, you know, constantly polishing and refining. Doesn't matter what an exercise is, doesn't matter what the diet is, I've still got to work towards it.

Now, would you describe yourself— and this is kind of an open-ended question for a purpose— but would you describe yourself as a regular physiotherapist?

Oh no, I'm not the only one who does what I do. So I actually don't even like being in that respect, saying actually I'm a physio, because I think of myself as a health professional, a scientist. There's no difference to me between the professional professions of chiropractors, physios, osteos, myos, exercise scientists, exercise physiologists. It is the person, not the profession, that matters. If the person's got a burning desire to do what they're going to do, they're going to be the person you want to see. You don't want to see somebody who says, I'm a physio, therefore I ignore chiropractic, I ignore osteopathy, I ignore exercise science, I will only do what physios do. You do that, That's lazy. It means basically to me that you're not going to become really good at finding the answers. There are answers in all the professions, and I'm trying to bring them all together. That's one of the things about the Australian Strength Scientists Association, which I'm looking for, is we're going to just bring everybody together under one banner which says we all have one burning desire to be the best we can as scientists. And that's much more important than being a physio. So yeah, if I bill it under a physio, physio code, but reasonably I'm the only one who does what I do. They don't teach biomechanics of the spine in universities for physios.

So for those who are watching this maybe on YouTube or Facebook, you say you're the only one who does what you do. Can you define like what you do? How is that different?

Well, the thing about it is too, there's other practitioners who have come to my courses who are also on the path that I've been on. So I would say all that in that respect is I'm the one who's at my point in my career. But there are some really good physios, chiros, osteos, exercise scientists, myotherapists who have been to my courses and work thinking the methods I've taught them and are learning their own things and are on their own journey the same way I was. But as physios go, what I do and what I teach physios is not what's taught in universities. So way back in the 1600s, was a fellow called Barelli. Barelli wrote the first book on biomechanics. He called it Iatrophysics. Now, he started to apply just basic lever systems, torque, rotation, weights, as applied to bodies in motion, whether it's animals or humans. Now, this is the basics of science. We know these things are real. There's no need to do a random control study on basic science. So when I look at what he started with, and I look at the evidence that especially comes after that, whether it's the physiology of— you can look things up like Lord Sherrington on nervous system, you know, way back, he got his lordship for that. There's a lot of basic physiology we understand. I think the physiology is not well understood by physios, because you should look at length-tension relationships of muscle, you should look at force-velocity curves of muscles. You should understand how systems work. And they don't teach this in physio, as far as I can see, according to what I'm hearing from the physios who I've been chatting with. So then I look at, say, the evidence of spine problems, which starts really very, very well back in about the 1930s with the first important, I say, study published on disc injury. And after that you'd have Robin McKenzie's great work on understanding how discs are influenced. There's no question about what he said. There's no question about his approach to diagnosis. It works for the right person. Everything's a tool in the toolkit. Now, there's professors now, Adams for example, who you can look at his studies. His studies support what McKenzie does. It shows how discs are influenced by different areas of pressure that you put the body in, flexion or extension. But physios are saying, "Oh, we don't have random controlled study for this." You're missing the point. The science is actually already established, the biology, the physics is already there. What are you looking for when you're saying there's no established lifting pattern that proves itself better than anything else in a random control study? Well, that's because you haven't looked at the personal anthropometrics of every single person you put in that study. What's their femur length? What's their arm length? What's their hip socket like? All these things are going to influence how a person lifts. But if you just put a study together of getting 10 people in And say, looking at deadlifting, you're gonna get 10 different deadlifts.

So would you say the field of physiotherapy at the moment, the big difference between what you're doing and say what's being taught at university, is the lack of understanding or acknowledgement of the science that's come before? Is that a—

Spectacularly so. What really horrified me the other day was I found out there was a— one of our greatest ever physios as far as a manual therapist goes, a guy called Jeffrey Maitland, he wrote a book, two books on manipulation, on approaches and thinking and how we look at spinal problems. Geoffrey Maitland came from the University of South Australia. I think he was a World War II fighter pilot. Brilliant mind, great techniques. So we always look to the University of South Australia, saying this is where Maitland is at the time. He's dead now. People who went there to learn from him, it was tough. He was very, very specific about about how good you have to be. After him, we still follow his approach. University of South Australia, we're told, doesn't even mention his name anymore. They're running pain science, which means, hey, guess what? There's no evidence for the way you have back problems. It's all in your head. You're scared of lifting. What the hell has happened to 400 years of solid science? Great educators. Oh, we don't even talk about that anymore. Published studies are ending up in Lancet, the English medical journal, which have no biomechanical input but are all written by people who don't talk about biomechanics, who talk about, hey, guess what, 70% of problems we don't know what the answer is. Well, maybe you don't, but there are other people in the world who do and are far better at assessing back problems. In Australia, we tend to push Australian things. So we've got a bit of an intellectual black hole occurring right now. We're ignoring the work of Professor McGill, who's published over 240 scientific studies, published 5 books. No one knows more about the biomechanics of spines than Professor McGill. You won't find his name mentioned at an Australian university.

What do you think happened there? Why is this rejection of science by the Australian, you know, I suppose rehabilitation medical professions?

I think it comes down to politics about what funds a university. Is funding studies that are Australian, for example. So the transverse abdominis multifidus fiasco that occurred back in about '94 onwards— just trying to remember the perfect date— we all ran with the idea that there was this force couple between multifidus and transverse abdominis. It isn't actually a force couple, it fails first-year biomechanics. They are not a force couple, it fails that definition. But it was written by the professors at Queensland University that it it was a forced couple. It then allowed the Pilates phenomenon to take off because they said they validated how they worked. Now everyone's saying basically that was wrong, but it was evidence, it was Australian, so because Australian, everybody taught it. It was wrong.

So is this— this kind of presents an interesting issue for, I know, personal trainers, strength coach, and people with back problems all over Australia.

Is—

should we be very distrustful of our rehabilitation specialist? Should we be distrustful of the physiotherapists that we're seeing because the education is subpar? I mean, I suppose it's a twofold question. Should we be distrustful? And then what do we do when we're injured? Who do we actually turn to if not you? Because obviously you're one guy.

The challenge is realistically, is that as professionals, we've got to become a little more solid in our understanding of the true basic sciences and look to those before we start wandering away into what study says what. We need to know our physiology outstandingly. We need to know our basic biomechanics. We should know pretty much straightforward assessment techniques. That's pretty straightforward science. It's not tough. It just takes a bit of work, a bit of application, and I think most health professionals are capable of doing that. I think that's really important, is basically we need to just find more health professionals who are separating themselves away from what's been taught and saying it's not not good enough. We need to be better.

So what does the average trainer do, right? So, or not even average trainer, what does a great trainer do? Great trainer, they have a client, they're like, yep, this is out of my pay scale, there's stuff here that I don't know. Client says, you know, this has been a problem for me, I'm gonna go see a physio. They go see a physio and they get some, no, that's in your head, your trainer doesn't know what they're doing, go do some cardio equipment. And then that person ends up worse. What's some practical advice?

Well, I think the practical advice is actually that trainers need to talk to the health professionals in the area. It doesn't matter whether it's an osteo or a physio or a chiro or an exercise scientist or an exercise physiologist. You gotta say to them, so how do you treat a particular problem? Whether it's a back problem, how do you treat a shoulder problem? If they say, oh, we dry needle this, we stretch that, I'm just thinking that person doesn't know how to assess something. So I'd say to the health professional, I'd say to the personal trainer, I'd say, ask the health professional who you're gonna refer to, do you personally deadlift? 'Cause if you don't personally deadlift, I'm not sending my clients to you, because you don't know what I do. Now, I would say the same advice to someone who played tennis. If you're a tennis coach, I would advise that any health professional you see, you would say to them, do you personally do my sport? That's a great start. Have you personally got experience in my sport? That would be a useful start, 'cause that person then has probably got an affinity to it. So I would never send to a generic professional. I would, as a health professional, say, do you know what I do? If you don't, do you know someone who does? So there's some good physios out there who I know who are powerlifters now, and bodybuilders, and chiropractors, and osteos, and exercise physiologists. So that's really important. I think there's some good professionals out there who are embracing strength, and that's essentially what we say. My mantra is weakness cannot be tolerated. You know, street solutions to problems.

What do you think currently is the biggest myths or biggest myth in the physiotherapy realm?

The biggest myth currently would probably be the concept that there is such a thing as non-specific lower back pain. So we often see this put in the study. If I see a study that says non-specific lower back pain, don't bother reading it. It means that the person cannot assess the problem doesn't know what the direction is, basically hasn't got an ability to say whether this problem has got a flexion or extension intolerance, whether it has certain characteristics. It just means you put everything together and you did a study. If you have a study, if you have a person who's flexion intolerant, you can hear from their subjective, you can look at their objective, and you get another person who has an extension intolerance, but you can't find on the scan something on either of them, It gets lumped together as non-specific lower back pain. Now if you give that person, those two people, exercise intervention, one in deflection, well, one of them's gonna get better, the extension intolerant probably. The other one's gonna get worse. Vice versa. Your study comes out zero. It's because you put everything together. You didn't properly define each individual person. And there's, that's where this idea of non-specific lower back pain doesn't exist. There's no such thing as non-specific lower back pain. There's always a specific to a back pain. There's always an answer.

It just kind of means that they're not educated enough to find the answer, so go see someone who needs—

and if you've got people at the tops of universities who say that 70% of them, they can't understand what 70% of the pain is, and that's one of the professors that I saw who probably said, I don't know what 70% of my back pain problems are caused by. Well, that person's supervising studies by undergraduates. That's horrifying. That means that person's going to be just running studies in the same intellectual vacuum that they have.

It almost seems that universities are almost being offended by the facts in a way to keep a political correctness, not to offend people and say, no, this is not right, this is good. And yeah, which is quite a sad state of academia.

A big thing against is they're not acknowledging that overseas are actually better than us.

Who do you think overseas-wise, all over the world, who do you think produces the best rehabilitation specialists?

No doubt at this point, Professor Stuart McGill. Most progressive individual, the most experienced individual. We've spent over half a billion dollars in research money at least on work. No doubt the person who I would approach from the most open-minded, philosophical philosophical approach to science.

What's been some key takeaways for you from the work of Professor?

To examine everything. To basically test your hypothesis. You find a finding, apply an intervention against it, reassess your intervention. Basically what I learned, even as I learned from the Maitland system, that's what we did then. Apply an intervention, assess. Is your hypothesis right or is it wrong. If it's wrong, change hypothesis.

What's the hypothesis that you've believed for years and then applying this kind of thinking you've proved yourself that actually that's not so? Has there been something that springs to mind?

Not so far, it's looking pretty good. Basically by the time I've got a hypothesis, I've got a good reason for it. Awesome. So within a session sometimes you go, that didn't work quite as well as I thought, perhaps I increase the load, it may change. That's probably how I have to go. It might be a load choice. So if I'm looking at a person's QLs, I might have to look at a way of, hmm, maybe the side plank didn't work as well as I thought it would. Maybe we'll do a suitcase lunge and see what that does. And basically, maybe that involved in some glute. Now I've got to look at the glute involvement then. So basically, it's like an evolving thing. If I'm doing assessment, I'm evolving within the assessment. And the big thing about this I can take an hour for an assessment at least. Professor McGill was well known for taking a whole day on a single patient to find out the tough ones. Now, you walk down to the local, as I call them, sausage factory, and you're in there and the physio chucks some needles in your butt and heads off to the next room, or puts a hot pack on your back and heads off to the next room, or goes to the next room, the chiropractor lays you down and cracks your back in 5 minutes. Hey, there's no assessment, there's no reassessment, there's no no science behind it. It's mostly, I'm under time pressure, I've got to sort of figure out how to make this work. That's an old model that I think should be basically banned. And all the good chiropractors I know would say the same thing. I've got a great neurosurgeon I know in Perth. Now he sends his clients to a chiropractor for rehab. His chiropractor knows how to deadlift. Well, there you are. I reckon he's a great chiropractor. It's not the profession, it's the individual.

So let's talk about a slightly different topic, but still on the lines of myths and misconceptions, and that's Palates and Joseph Palates. Can you tell, give us your thoughts and I suppose what happened in the Supreme Court?

Yeah, well basically the problem which I found with Palates was that it's, he died in about the 1960s. He wasn't a scientist, he was a creator of things to sell. Basically if you look up you can probably find a lot of interesting wacko things he created. The Reformer just happens to be one of them and when he died he died, a lot of different students basically determined that they thought they knew his system well. So as it goes, it mutates. Someone decides they wanna trademark the Pilates name, so it ends up going to the Supreme Court in the US. And the Supreme Court basically says, you know what, there's so many different versions of Pilates, we can't define it. We can't say that there is, this is the true Pilates. Basically, no one can trademark it. So it becomes this open thing where I can walk my dog and say I'm doing Pilates. I can brush my teeth and say I'm doing Pilates. There's no Pilates international body that says, no, that's not wrong, this is a series of things which we do. And unfortunately, I think when the transverse abdominis multiplexus thing came out, the Pilates people said, hey, this validates what we do, we pull our belly buttons in. Well, the bad news is, of course, that's now been proven to be dead wrong. So it invalidates the Pilates that was done back then. But Pilates is now morphing and using. Fortunately, there's a health professional I know who sort of looked at the same problem, and he's a bit of a Pilates advocate, and he sort of looked and said, yeah, what we've got to do is we've got to say I like the reformer, but I'm going to set down a standard series of exercises, movements, and assessments using that reformer that will become under my name a standard protocol. Now that's what Pilates is missing, it doesn't have a standard protocol. Protocol. So you can go to 10 different Pilates places and get 10 different things. But if you set up a serious protocol on the reformer as an exercise piece of equipment, I'm happy to say that you're a scientist and you're starting to make some evolution, you're starting to get rid of the rubbish. So that's the problem with the Pilates thing, is it's like saying yoga. Is yoga good or bad for you? Depends on the practitioner. It could be good, could be bad.

So essentially everyone today pretty much watching this, if they're owning a gym or a personal trainer, they could say, yeah, we do clinical Pilates.

You could, no one's gonna be able to stop you.

Yeah, and be then deadlifting heavily and, you know, the squat bench.

Yeah, it's also—

yeah, no one can stop you. All right, interesting, hey. So kettlebell— kettlebells have in some regard gotten a bit of a bad rap by particular strength coaches, and I suppose the industry in general. Sometimes people just don't know how to use them.

Them.

So, I mean, the kettlebell swing— let's go start with the kettlebell swing first and kind of unpack kettlebells. But kettlebell swing, good or bad?

Depends on the individual, depends on the problem. So there's no such thing as a bad exercise. There basically is just the wrong exercise given to the wrong person at the wrong time. That exercise might be great at the right time, but at that time it's the wrong one. So one of the studies that was done very well, it was McGill's study, looked at a particular style of kettlebell swing, and when you add up the mathematics, you basically pull things apart, it's like, you know, you're basically looking at how things, forces, are occurring in the body. So he found out that the net effect was that there was a posterior shear on the spine with the kettlebell swing of the particular style he used. Now, is that a bad thing? or a good thing. Depends on the person you're going to apply it to. There are certain people who a posterior shear force, which is just how the muscles will work, will actually make that person better. They were deficient in that posterior shear, that's something they needed. They needed a balancing force to an anterior shear. But you've got somebody else who the posterior shear is not going to be very effective for, it's going to make them worse because that's actually part of their problem. So you're going to know whether it's a posterior shear problem and anterior shear problem, and the kettlebell's fine.

So on that, is the kettlebell a mutually exclusive rehabilitation tool? Is that how practitioners should be looking at it, as it's only— it's not really a tool for anything else?

I think you could use it for anything. Great conditioning, you could use it— I use it for teaching lifting patterns. Yeah, it could be used for any version of almost any exercise you want. Just have 'cause you have some damn big kettlebells sometimes. You know, I've got up to 92 in my clinic at the moment for kettlebells. So if you can deadlift more than that, well, you need to move fucking kettlebells if that's your goal.

Something you taught me a while ago was you should have phases in your training: practice, train, performance. And the problem with a lot of people is they don't have any practice phase. They don't learn the movement patterns, they don't learn the lift, they just go into training. Or worse, they go from basically what they should be a practice phase into performing. And you see a lot of one rep numbers when they really shouldn't be because the movement. So how long would you in your clinic, would it take to say someone says, you know what, I want to be an Australian deadlifting champion. How long does it take to grind a good movement pattern to then say, yep, you've done practicing, let's go into training?

If you want to get to reasonably in a federation that has —well established, not a new one that started last week in the backyard and you can get a world record from. If you look at really established great federations, it should take you at least 3 years to learn the skill of how to perform that deadlift, squat, bench press. At that point, if you've been training consistently, and I would say that means no less than 3 times a week on the lift that you're trying to do, I don't mind for 7 days a week in practice, then I would expect it would take about 3 years for you to have a 1 rep max that I would probably feel that you're gonna be safely performing without changing your technique. So there's a lot of work to be done. Some people, it may take a year, but then again, you're looking at biological tissue under stress. It can take a lot longer than 1 year for your bones to know how to handle 150 kilos. You might be able to physically do it, but you may not be doing it in such a way that's actually beneficial to you as a person, that your bones might not be accepting it. You may need a little bit more time to take time off, time to recover from the heavy sessions. There's a lot to it, the biology of recovery too. So I would say technically practice every day, but you might practice at 50%. I'm gonna do a bit of bench press here today, I'll probably go up to 50% just to practice because I compete next week.

And you've seen that certainly in your practice, people who have been quite proficient at lifts, broken bones on, say, a bench press, you know, snapped humeruses and all kinds of issues. I've heard, certainly heard the war stories and seen that, which has been pretty nasty. You look at some of those people, you go, well, that shouldn't happen, but it does. And that's just simply because the adaptation on a skeletal level just hasn't happened.

That would probably be it for most of us. That'd be the best explanation we'd almost have for why a bone is broken under a load. Because it hasn't adapted. I know that if you look at the bones of people who have been in some of the institutions in America for 40, 50 years, have been lifting weights, you look at their cadaver, they have adapted, they're solid. There's positives and negatives to that.

So I think you've mentioned before Bev Francis. Yeah. Would you say she was very good at understanding the practice, training, performance kind of thinking style in terms of her training? Because she trained what, the same lift almost every day?

Well, the thing about Bev, who's in my mind perhaps Australia's greatest ever athlete, if you really want to have a look at the history of Bev Francis, you can look at somebody there who— she actually, it was interesting because I chased Bev for a while because I always wanted to know how she set the Australian bench press record. I think it was 150, um, I'm trying to remember what it could be, 155, I think it was. And that stood for 34 years. I think she looked at me and thought I was a stalker, so she used to run away, but one day she had to sit next to me on a judging panel, and I finally turned around and said, "Bev, so how did you bench the 155?" And she looked around and suddenly realized I actually had a question I was supposed to answer. So Bev said, "Bench press, squat, and deadlift 7 days a week." We got chatting, and I I said, you benching 150 kilos as a female, setting the world record, I said that was like Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile. And she said, yeah, we both had the same coach. So there was a coach who knew how to create top-level athletes. And his approach was you practiced every day. So it didn't mean you busted out max singles every day, but if it was Monday, it might be a big bench session. Tuesday, you might go in there with 50% of the weight, work on your your technique. It might be a day when you're doing squat training, that's where you do your hard work, but you still practice your bench and your deadlift. Maybe that's why she won as many world championships as she did. It's the fact that practice creates better neurological patterns if you do it right.

So is this how you structure your training now? I mean, do you bench every day? Yeah, bench every day. Yeah.

Not massive amounts, but you know, within a cycle and a program, and out of the program I I put my hands on the bar every day and set up and try and find that groove. So even last week, I actually found a whole new cue I'm gonna let everyone know about today.

So on that, let's say your max is 200 kilos on your bench. Do you have the structure of your week of like, okay, Monday is gonna be max, you know, Tuesday is gonna be 50%? Like, is there, is there a reason, a rhyme, is there a structure to it, or is it how you feel?

And I'm not a programming scientist, so I allow programming scientists to help me. So I will ask someone like Gus Cook in Queensland, who's very good for my powerlifting programming. Sebastian Oreb, coach the World's Strongest Man, I ask him for advice as well. So we work together. So I don't program myself, I practice myself.

Is Sebastian a train-every-day kind of guy? Is he, in terms of the programming that he recommends? He practices every day. Practice every day.

You can see the results. No doubt, there's a guy who pisses me off greatly, he weighs about 40 kilos less, what is he, 110 today, and I'm 135, so he's 25 kilos less than me and outbenches me by probably 40 kilos. Yeah, fantastic athlete.

What do you think the worst thing that someone could do for their, when I say back, I'm really talking about lower back, and I suppose lumbar spine, but what do you think the worst thing someone can do for their back?

Well, the worst thing you could possibly do is keep doing the thing that you've always done that has caused you the problem. That's the classic one. So someone hurts their back and the professional says, okay, rest it for a few weeks. Okay, you rested it for a few weeks, now you go back, you're not feeling in pain. What have you done different? You've changed nothing. Definition of insanity: do the same thing, expect a different outcome. So the worst thing I think anyone can do for a back problem, keep doing whatever you've been doing. Because there's a problem with it. Find out what that problem is, make a change. Rest is not what you ever do. You've gotta actively figure out, hopefully under the guidance of someone who knows what they're doing, usually a biomechanically educated professional who's seen me at least, and learn and find out what is it about what you do that's been hurting you. Stop it. That's usually You know, one of the great things about it is I get people who come and see me who have seen a lot of other health professionals, and they show me what they've been doing, and I just say, well, if you stop doing that exercise somebody gave you, you'll feel better. That's the reason you've got a problem, is you've been doing that exercise that somebody else gave you.

What's a common intervention that you would give for back pain?

Obviously there's a form of flexion, they tend to sit in posterior pelvic tilt, not anterior pelvic tilt. Anyone who says that has really lost the plot. Anterior pelvic tilt is so rare, it's phenomenal. Every single person in this room right now is sitting in posterior pelvic tilt. You don't have an anterior pelvic tilt problem. So posterior pelvic tilt is a form of flexion. You're gonna sit in that for a whole long period of time, and then you're gonna do other flexions. Work. Well, there's a problem. You're not extending. You're not balancing out your flexion forces with your extension forces. I have a rule that says you should put every joint in your human body through its full range of motion once a day. That's pretty important. If you do that, you probably won't get the rust accumulating. So that's a bit of a philosophy approach I take. So I take that to the spine. If you haven't been extending, you should extend if it's appropriate, because guess what? Every rule you will ever make, there will always be an exception to. There is somebody out there who should not extend. And it's gonna happen. You just gotta know how to identify that individual. And I don't think it's that hard to identify. There are people who need to sit in flexion. Guess what, they're pretty rare, but they'll be out there. So there's no blanket rules ever gonna apply to everybody. The day you make a rule, next day someone's gonna walk in and break it on you. I did that with toes. Deadlifting, I spent a couple of years defining the physics of deadlifting and I had it all figured out. Just as I figured it out, a guy walked in who broke my rule. He had to actually bend his tibias forward to actually get to the bar. His torso was too short, his thighs were too long, his arms were the wrong length, hip sockets were too deep. Guess what? You just broke my rule and don't ever deadlift and don't think you'll be a world champion because you've got everything wrong with you. Wow.

What I'd love to do now is again just to give the, the viewers at home and everyone in the audience a real insight into the way Andrew thinks is to get someone out. And I'm thinking we go for Adrian and get Adrian up. Let's give Adrian a round of applause. He's one of the great trainers here at Enterprise. We'll use this box so you can see it. We've got him in position and you can see what's going on. But would you be able to give a bit of an assessment and demo. So, so Adrian, is there anything wrong with you besides the obvious? No. But if you, if you, you get to have a client and, you know, you've got a client for the first time and they come in, like, what's the— like, run us through the way you think about things.

It's a long process because I take at least 20 minutes to talk to the client. So one of the first things I say is, Adrian, what's What problem do you have?

Oh, well, mostly I get tight traps, big problem, and this tight hip kind of leads to sciatica pain sometimes.

Now, the interesting thing is, where's your hip? Show me the hip. Alright, now if you were using the back of the hand, I'd say to myself, okay, so we've got a different version of what the hip is. But if we're using more of the thumb, it looks like we're getting pretty close. So it's always important, I find, to get the person's anatomy defined with your anatomy, If somebody says hip and they point to their knee, okay, we've probably got lost because we've got two different versions of what a hip is. But that's okay, now you've pointed to it, I know what you're talking about. Now one of the problems I always get here is a couple times a week, if not a day, I'm gonna get a person who comes in and I say, so what's your problem? They pull out a scan and say, I've got an L4-5 disc bulge. I'm gonna say, no, that's a diagnosis. I just asked you what your problem was. Because the thing is, what is the problem? What's the person's problem. I don't treat a diagnosis, I treat a problem. So when a person says, "I've got shoulder bursitis," I didn't ask what your diagnosis is, I said, "What's your problem? What can't you do? What gives you pain?" Now that's the super important part for me. So when you wanna know how I think, this is how I think. I want to define what the person's problem is, not what diagnosis they've been given. 'Cause people sometimes possess diagnosis. I don't want to possess a diagnosis, I want to understand a problem. So it starts with the person I'm actually looking at, what are they feeling? A lot of times they've had problems with professionals who come in, they'll put a scan report down on the table and the professional will read the report and suddenly that's doing everything. Anyone walks in to see me with scans, I tell them to put them on the table or put them under the chair because we're not going to look at them until I've done everything I can do, then I'll look at them last. The whole idea is to be totally clear clear-minded and see a person as a new person. Someone comes and says, "I've got my last physio's notes." Good, put them away, I'll see them last. I don't wanna know what anyone else has thought until I've seen you. So that's the sort of approach I tend to take. So if we came back and said, this would take a long time, 'cause I would go, okay, so you get a sciatica thing, how do you define sciatica? What do you feel? What is that for you? Where do you feel it? For example, I would say, knock on wood, go through, it'll take an hour or two. I'd also say, okay, so when do you feel it? When you're doing what? What makes it feel better? What makes it feel worse? We go and pull all these things apart, so I've got an idea about what forces a person has a problem with. And then I'm going to ask things like, you know, whether there's a constant nature to it, whether there's an intermittent nature to it. I want to know whether there's an inflammatory component to it. I want to know the history behind it. Basically, there's a lot of questions. I'll take probably 20 minutes quite easily. Sometimes someone Someone walks in and I've got a problem in 30 seconds, I know what their problem is, but I'll still go through all the questions just to make sure I haven't missed anything. I'll teach you all those questions today as we chat through. So what would we like to look at today, Mark?

So I think what we're talking about, which is one of the common interventions that you give, which is the backbend. Maybe we get Adrian to demonstrate where he's at.

Do you have problems sitting, standing, walking? What tends to be What would be your problem?

Well, it's more so when I'm not moving, that's when it gets really tight. And I find that I can't, when I shift out, it feels like it shifts.

Does that make sense? Yep, sure.

It feels like muscle shifting over there.

Alright, we could do a fairly quick style of approach of a test for you, right? So you've had no diagnosis of any strange conditions? No. Great. We'll whip off the Wolfpack top there. We just want to have a look at the movement patterns. So Mark, I suggest we have a nice time sitting down for a while. Show me how far you can go bending forward to touch your toes.

So can I just get you to stand up on the— so everyone can see. Stand up on the box. There you go, perfect.

And face me. Come on. Good, and just do your thing, bend forward. All right, and come back up. So what I've looked at there at this point, because I'm sitting in front, I just looked at how far he went, okay. Now normally I'm going to actually look at how— I'm going to have his shirt off and I'm going to look at how he got there more importantly, but because we are looking at flexion extension for the moment. Okay, so put your feet a little wider apart for balance so you don't fall off there, put your hands on your hips and bend backwards. Good, that's fairly Fantastic for about a 75-year-old. Okay, I want you to do that 10 times now, bending backwards, and each one I want you to go a little bit further back. Hips go forward, shoulders go back. Unless I won't. Hips go forward, shoulders go back.

Shoulders back.

That's it, it's a very passive movement. Basically, this is lumbar extension. We're placing his upper body's center of mass behind the disc. It's the basic concept on here. Hips forward, shoulders back. Let's at least turn you into a 50-year-old.

If you wanted to explain what was happening on a vertebra.

Now come on, can you do better than that, seriously?

I'll just repeat the question for the audio, and that's Andrew, how far would you want them to go? What's the gold standard?

Probably age-appropriate, how's that? So as I said, if he's a 75-year-old, that would be acceptable. Okay, now bend forward and touch your toes again. Let's have a look at what you got. Do your thing. All right, it increased slightly, didn't it? Was it easier? Yeah. No, what happened? Why is this flexion increased, but we didn't stretch flexion, did we? Normally you'd think that to get further in one direction, you've got to go that direction. But even with the opposite direction, you increase that direction. This starts to make you think about the way you do things too. Why is it going one direction increases the other one, yet normally you'd think that you'd have to go that direction to get there? Well, the concept here goes back to in the 1930s, but especially 1972, when the great Robin McKenzie, whose work you can find and read his book Lumber Disorders, and you can get his own book called Treat Your Own Back, which is a really great straightforward explanation. The concept is here, this is what our spine looks like in Adrian. Now as he's been sitting, he's been sitting doing that. Like a kid's party balloon, if you you put pressure down the front here, disc fluid in the centre gets pushed backwards. So when he goes to bend forward, his spine's already a little bit forward anyway, and the disc pressure is up towards the back. It doesn't really want to go that much. Alright, and as he then bends backwards, he puts pressure here, which causes the disc fluid to move forwards. Now as disc fluid materials move forwards, they are centred. So when he goes into flexion, his body's not gonna resist, it's gonna say, "Thanks." I now feel better, I've got more movement, the pressure's off, and centred to be normal. So I took 10 movements there to improve his flexion. Now that's one of the things I might look at, all depends upon where my hypothesis is lying, because this is not objective. Now, I could put him through a series of stability tests now as well and find out, which probably would happen, is the more stable I make him, the more range of movement he'll have as well. So suddenly, without stretching, I've made him tighter. By making him tighter, he gets more range out of his body. So we use the concept here also then to say that proximal stability unleashes distal ability. Thank you, Professor McGill, for that, because I think you should have the t-shirt. I think he said it first. And it's the approach we'll take. I look at things from the passive tissues, which we just did then, and then I also look at the active ones and how do we stabilise. I'm going to take you through that stuff because that's really important. I'm going to teach you how to assess, basically understanding where the passive tissue insufficiency might come in and how we might use active tissues to make up for that. This goes back to a research paper and book written by Punjabi and White in about 1984. It's called Neutral Zone Theory, so it's not really a theory, a theory as much as evolution is a theory. It's like saying it's a construct of fact. So, we're going to look at how neutral zone theory affects the way that you train, how you affect the back problem. Thanks, everyone.

Let's give Adrian a round of applause. So, I know that you've said before with the back bend, some people it's like, oh, you know, you're not auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. So, I suppose just coming back to Reece's question of, you know, what is a gold standard appropriate range, yeah, for depending on the sport, like, is there a What do I put in it too?

What is that person's requirement in their activity? How much extension should I need to have? So if I have someone from Cert II Sol A who's a contortionist, I'd better make them get to that full position. That's what they need. If I've got a tennis player, I know how much bias I should be working with there. When you analyze, for example, a tennis serve, I look at it and say, okay, that's how much extension I should be expecting to see there. That's the important thing too. So when you look at a sport, now if we're looking at say powerlifting or looking at squatting or deadlifting, there's not a whole lot of extension I have to deal with there. But if they are lacking into extension, it may have had a big influence upon why they're in the position they are. So I sort of look at what a healthy movement looks like to me, having seen 75,000 patients, I've got a bit of an idea about where I would the person as per age effective. So we'll look at that a little bit today as we go through.

So in saying all that, I mean, one of the things you touched on was, you know, you go one way and then it increases range of motion the other way. Is it an oversimplification to then start to think on that line of thought? If someone does or experience lower back problem, there's probably— the abs aren't working the way they should, therefore a good intervention should be basically training the abs. Is that a way to look at it?

What we would do there is we would, from the subjective history where I'm talking to a person about what they do, how they do it, I will get a clue as to whether that is the problem. Then as they stand up and I do an objective assessment, I'll get a bit of an idea what their ab tone's even looking like too. Then I might look at a movement pattern and see whether that ab tone is actually working. So there are people out there there who definitely, I mean, it's almost universal to say there are not a lot of people who would have a detriment to working their abs and working and understanding how to control their core well. But that also comes with a balance of something, their extensors in their spine have got to work, QL's got to work, psoas has got to work, lats have got to work. At least 10 muscles there I think of as core. So I think a lot about 10 different muscles Obviously, when we go back to one of the most common areas of problems, weak abs, weak butt. Everyone has those two things, weak abs and weak butt. That's probably— you're gonna get better than your 80% success rate if you start hunting up those problems. I think that's a good way for a health professional to go. Like what I was told, become the best in the world at something. Okay, pick a muscle, pick a joint, understand how it works, pick an exercise. Become really good at understanding that, we understand the principles there, you'll start to find other principles start to apply to other parts of the body very similar.

So deadlifts, which is a topic probably close to your heart and a lot of people's heart watching this. It's almost paradoxical though, when we talk about deadlifts, because on one side of the fence, you have people shouting that deadlifts are bad. And if you pick up a bar, you know, it's gonna hurt your back and put down the deadlift and how bad they are. And then on the other side of the fence, you have people saying, you know, deadlift's basically cure-all, and they put up videos on YouTube where it's a completely absurd form and they're shouting, you know, as long as the bar stays close to the shins, you'll be fine and deadlifts are safe, just make sure the universal rule that the bar doesn't travel away from the body. And obviously they're both extreme perspectives and they're both misguided in truth. So yeah, let's start there. I mean, what are your thoughts on the deadlift and kind of navigating those both extreme ends.

Yeah, let's look at it from the point of view of saying there's no such thing as a bad exercise. There's just the wrong exercise for the wrong person at the wrong time. It's not gonna— deadlifts, I've banned two athletes from deadlifting. They don't need it for their sport, their structures aren't right for it, don't do it. Cost-benefit ratio isn't there for them. But that's two people I can think of. Now, I see, 50, 60 people a week. Gee, over the last few years I've told 2 people I shouldn't deadlift. Right, I mean, pretty much everybody else I've been able to work with has a form of a deadlift that I may use within a rehabilitation pattern. Might not be a conventional, might be a sumo, might be a hybrid. Lots of parts to it. What's my rationale for using it? Well, I can really well to drive somebody into learning how to use their glutes for another task. So I was working with a fantastic athlete the other day, who does strongwoman work, and she was working on keg lifting. Felt her hips weren't coming through well enough, so I just brought out the band, put her into a box squat on here, put the band around a conventional position, and worked on the glutes from there. Went back into the keg lift, fantastic glutes fired up. I started with a sumo thinking, I want to get the glutes fired up, it's got the best hip range you'll ever find. That sumo wasn't going to work her in the pattern that the keg lift was going to work. So when I look at deadlifting, I look at it the same way. What am I using it— what am I going to use it for? Am I using it to rehab a back problem? Am I looking to increase the size of a muscle group that's there? Yeah, I can use it there pretty well. That person has a driving reason they want to deadlift? Good, then I must make them learn how to deadlift. Once again, as I said, I've met 2 people who I think straight away don't have a deadlift. Now, if someone came to me and wanted want to be world powerlifting champion and they had those unfortunate genetics, I'd tell them to take up chess. This seriously is going to be a car wreck. You know, that's not worth rolling the dice on. Pretty much everyone else I can work something into. But you've got to be honest with people too. Seriously, if you're not made for this and you're going to be taking on people who are biomechanically superior to you and have just as much drive and resilience and will, then they'll come through. So I love deadlifting. I think it's one of the most primal, normal things to do. As you just said, if someone says keep the bar close to your shins, that's the rule. Not for everybody. There's a problem. A rule has to be broken by somebody. And if you only understand the rule and you don't understand the parameters which break the rule, then you're going to hurt the one who the rule should be broken for. So there are some people, great, close to the shin the better. Other people get back over the midfoot, that's where you need to be. Because their shoulder position might have to be better to get the bar forward. Their femur lengths might be the wrong femur lengths for that person to be at the front.

So you've studied world record-breaking deadlifters. Yeah. What's the pattern, what's the commonality that you've found?

The commonality, the thing about every world record I've ever seen really truly set, it uses a technique technique that no novice should ever go near. Because the whole point of it, it's like Formula One racing, okay? You look at the world record holders and breakers in deadlifting, their technique is very similar to driving a Formula One car. It's an edgy thing that you must have so much experience knowing how to control them. Now you put a learner driver onto a Formula One track in a Formula One car, what is going to happen? It's going and it'll probably be pretty freaking horrific, okay? You have to teach a novice technician, a novice lifter, a whole different series of things before they will ever get to world championship levels. You gotta teach them how to control lots of things, how to switch lots of things on, how to use everything before they'll morph into, okay, now you actually got this, you're not getting injured, we're gonna change the spine position, we're gonna change the bar position. That changes, and that's my call is it takes about 3 years to go from put your hands on the bar to you've got a hell of a good technique. So that technique that that learner has to have, put on the L-plates, make them safe, because they don't want to miss training, they don't want to be hurt for a couple of years, which can happen. You want to get them as a professional too. It loses you money if your client's not coming in to train with you. So it's really important you get to the World Champion, you'll find that, yeah, it's pretty close to a stiff-legged deadlift for most of the conventionals. Big spinal flexions. Yeah, but they can do that now, but don't do it to your novice.

So technically, do you think there is some overlapping things in terms of— I know you've spoken about vertical tibias with world record-breaking deadlifters. Do you think that rule does apply? Or, I mean, I know it depends.

It's the rule that absolutely applies to setting world records. But not for novice? Exactly. With a novice, you may allow them to come forward while you have to learn to get their hips into a certain position or their back into a certain position, because Yeah, everything changes for the novice. Make them safe, make them work. So as far as physics goes, hey, vertical shin is imperative to apply maximum force to the ground. Gives you maximum ground reaction force. That's a fact. And if you watch every video of the world record set, that's how it's done. So they will achieve that position, and they'll achieve it probably with the help of spinal flexion as well. That's okay.

This is what I love about, you know, speaking to you and really talking all things physical culture is because there's a topic that people are so dogmatic about and you usually get this black or white answer, here's the way it is. It's when you express, and just on this topic of deadlifting, it really is all the colors of the rainbow of yes, but, it depends if, and I think it's, I really appreciate, I think everyone watching really appreciates the angle and it's just great to see.

That's how we don't get people injured, is accepting that everybody is different and listen to find out what those differences are. And look to find out what those differences are. You know, people might, for example, say, "I've got short hamstrings." You've probably not got short hamstrings, you've probably got tight hamstrings. Alright, well, there's a difference between the two things. Realistically, most people can achieve the splits today if we're able to make them unconscious and stretch it out, because the muscle length is there, but we have limiting switches. Our bodies have learned how to limit certain movements. Our work, maybe having to get past that tension better.

It's almost in the strength community and rehabilitation and personal trainers, people have identified themselves with certain beliefs and they become very dogmatic because that's the identity and I suppose dogma that they put on themselves and they have to portray this to the audience, rather than in terms of what you're saying is, well, there is no identity to begin with, it's just science and let's look at that and then from From that, our body of work, we can then decipher and get rid of the identity kind of politics of this is who I am, this is how to relate to, and actually care and look after our clients in a—

Find me a VMO. No such thing. We can talk about that another time.

Just on that, you said something before previously, there's a chiro in Queensland, I think you said, that, that Perth, that you refer to. What's something that you look for in other allied health professionals, whether it be chiros or osteos? Like, because there has been this baiting, I feel, from the chiropractic and physiotherapists where they've never— the two professions have never got along. But that here you are saying, you know, there's this chiro who now you communicate with and talk to, they come into your courses. So what do you think is a good, good, I suppose, trademark of good practitioners like this, like chiro? How do they think differently?

Well, one of the things I found is that the chiropractic approach was very simple. The spine was the cause of all problems. Now you can look, you don't— we can not throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. ability and your mental understanding is going to make you keep getting better. So I'm never content.

So you've, um, I know I'm personally a client that you've rehabbed, but you've rehabbed multiple shoulder injuries through bench pressing. Yeah, yeah. If you presented that, I suppose, to the average physiotherapist I think they'll say, you know, what? That's absolutely crazy. You know, you're supposed to not bench press at all. So, you know, how? Tell us about that process of how you figure that one out. Movement patterning.

So if a person has pain on bench pressing, for example, okay, it mightn't be the first session we add a bench press as a rehab exercise, but I will pull the components apart and find out why they're getting pain when they're benching, address those components with the end goal that the bench press becomes a technique that actually just makes them stronger and reinforces the pattern that will prevent their pain in the future. In other words, they're bench pressing wrong, something's gone wrong. They're not using a certain pattern, they're not using a certain muscle group. So then if I can use that muscle group into the pattern of bench press, I got my rehab and they're happy. So that's one way I approach this. Although that is the movement that they're hurting on, it's only because they're doing it wrong or something is missing somewhere. And then by the time I've got into 3 or 4 sessions down the track, probably we should— the client and myself— know exactly what I'm asking them to do, where the problem lies, and we can use it as a rehab method.

So I know people watching this, strength coaches particularly, might be familiar with some systems of strength coaching where you're looking at, say for example, a bench press or a squat or even a front front squat and looking at other lifts that are going to contribute to it. So say for example, if your bench press is say 100 kilos, then you need your seated military press to be 66 kilos. If you can bench press 100 kilos, then reflectively external rotation on knee should be say 10% of what you can bench press, which means you should be doing 10 kilos and these kind of numbers going forward. Have you seen any correlation or do you have a system to, if I want to hit this, this is what it needs to be.

No, because I'll tell you what, the very best athletes, I mean most successful athletes who come and see me are usually the most dysfunctional athletes. Okay, the guy who's going to be bench pressing 230 kilos is probably unable to lift 1 kilogram in the right position that I want to see him in external rotation. Now I can probably get a girl who's a ballet dancer who can lift that 1 kilo, but probably has trouble trouble lifting 20 in a bench. So those, those numbers don't really correlate at all. What I tend to find though, it's very individual, is that the biggest and the best and the strongest are so dysfunctional usually, quite often, at least the ones who see me. There are the ones who have addressed those dysfunctions and now really move well, but initially a lot of the ones I get to see are, they might be able to operate magnificently with 90% of the dysfunction that anybody else couldn't move with. And then you get somebody else who's got a 5% dysfunction and can't move at all, they can't hurt it, it hurts too much. There's such a thing, I think, with these, the strong athletes is that they don't feel the pain the same way because they're structurally put together, physiologically a little bit different. But it's a really amazing thing to see how dysfunctional top people are, you need to make a little bit of difference and suddenly they're out of pain and they're performing really well. But underlying there you go, that person's still pretty dysfunctional. Whereas you get other people who aren't very resilient, who it takes a little bit and they can't function. That's why it's such an individual thing. The really great athletes I'm seeing now who have done the hard rehab are now performing and functioning really, really well and accepting the fact that there was some big big deficits that got them to be in pain.

So a hybrid athlete, or an athlete essentially searching for balance, you know, I want to be fantastic at, like, say, you know, bench, squat, deadlift, and be able to run and be performing an XY. I mean, are we really chasing a myth on that?

Absolutely. You know what, if you want to be a nobody in life, get really balanced, all right? That means you'll be absolutely shit at everything. If you want to be good at something, something is going to be sacrificed. Hey, the world record bench press holder, you know, probably doesn't run that fast. Now, if you want to be really, really great at something, something is going to be sacrificed. And it might be money, it might be a job, it might be relationships, it's other exercises. But to be the best at something is sacrifice. A balanced athlete is not going to be great at anything. Anything in particular, they're going to be an amalgamation of a lot of things. So that's what you tend to find. Successful people are only successful—

Have you worked with any CrossFit athletes? Heaps. And would you say the most successful CrossFit athletes are either, and this is just my simple observation, either ex-gymnasts or ex-weightlifters? Because they essentially started out specializing in something and then went into a hybrid, whereas what a lot of CrossFitters in, say, CrossFit boxes will do is they will try and be a hybrid of everything and then end up being nothing. Is that consistent with what you've seen?

Great athletes will still dominate in something, but you'll tend to find that Olympic weightlifting, for example, is such a sport that if you really want to take it up, you better be biomechanically able to move in that pattern. Hip structures are super important, having the right ligaments is super important. That's why you look at who the most successful ones are, they are biomechanically gifted people.

So I know there's people who'll be watching this, probably myself included a little bit, it's like, damn it, I still want to be a hybrid, I want to be good at a lot of things.

Words are good, you want to be good at it, but you're not going to be great at it. If you want to be great, something's going to sacrifice, you're going to give up something. But you can be good at lots of things, but that's what you'll be, you'll be good. There's a lot of good athletes around, I don't know their names, I know great athletes. Touché, touché.

What's What's the worst injury that you've seen?

It's interesting, the worst injury, it's almost so used to seeing things now that I think worst has to be more defined upon how it impacts a person's life, not actually how physically is the car crash look. It's how, what it depends on a person is probably a psychological level, how it impacts on their life and how how they're gonna perform. You know, 'cause you can see broken bones and people are gonna go, "Yeah, I'm okay, I'll be back," and they do get back. And you can see other people have smaller things which impact greatly. So it's really hard to say the worst injury because most of them seem to come back. You know, if you wanna see a nice injury and sort of thing that looks pretty catastrophic, it would be, say, Jean-Pierre Fuchs, the bodybuilder, Probably the worst injury that you have been a part of and seen and then been able to successfully rehabilitation.

I know in my mind, just to kind of prompt a thought, I remember seeing on Facebook a spine that was pretty battered, and, you know, x-ray 1 and then x-ray 2 was a spine mine that looked pretty damn healthy. I mean, that's one that kind of comes to mind. What's been the—

Yeah, you could look at those where you that's causing the person to have a behavioral reaction to it.

Folks, you're watching The Wolf's Den. My name is Mark Ottobre. This is my guest, Andrew Lock. We'll be back right back after this short break. Make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube for more great interviews just like this one. Welcome back to this episode of The Wolf's Den. I'm Mark Ottobre, here with Andrew Lock. Let's get into a game that I like to play. This is the one-word game. So I'm going to say a topic and you're going to give it an answer in one or two words. So for example, for those who haven't played this game before. I might say something like legs and you might say squats.

The association game. Great.

Exactly. You ready to go?

Tell me what you got. All right. Pilates. Cult.

Yoga. Yin Yang. Muscle magazines. Inspirational.

A good book. Hunter Thompson.

Biggest meathead you know.

You'll have to ask Aussie Muscle Asylum about that.

A good book. Oh, sorry. Breakfast? Eggs. Greatest bodybuilder of all time? Arnold. Greatest powerlifter of all time? Ed Cohen. Favorite supplement?

Branch Chain Aminos.

Greatest athlete of all time?

Bobby Bear Francis.

Least favorite supplement? Protein powder. Most respected colleague or peer? Stuart McGill. Movie you love?

Escape from LA. Superhero? Thor, comic book Thor.

Most underrated and underutilized exercise?

Dumbbell pullover.

Most common injury that you see? Low back pain. Modern bodybuilding? Evolving. Most impressive athlete, which is kind of favorite athlete, but Francis is what you said.

Maybe Herschel Walker. Who was Herschel Walker? He played— he was a great college football player and went to the— I think it was the XFL before. It was sort of like a breakaway from the NFL. But if you ever get a chance, look up Herschel Walker's highlights. You'll see a very interesting athlete there who will blow your mind. While judging a bikini division, Andrew Lockie's thing Thank you, Tony Doherty.

Go-to food or comfort food? Steak. When I am deadlifting, I like to listen to? Myself. So no playlist, no tracks that you listen to, just silence when deadlifting?

There's no silence in my head, man. It's always something going on.

The rehabilitation industry is?

In trouble.

Most visited website in Andrew's browser.

What is a website? What is a website? I'm a Neanderthal, man. Wolfpack. Hungry.

Let's give Andrew a round of applause. Alrighty, so as a fellow physical culturist, I always appreciate our chats and insights into your training and your training minds and methods and systems that you've been using. In the past and that you've been moving for ages, in your opinion, is there a bodybuilder or powerlifter or even athlete weightlifter that you hold up as and say, yeah, that person was onto something, they knew how to train?

I'd probably look at Tom Platz. Tom Platz, probably because of the mental side of training. I could see, I've actually had the opportunity to spend a couple of days with Tom, as you know. And I just thought he is, physical result was a result of his mental side of his training. He took himself to places I don't think many people ever get to. So for Tommy, if you look at any of the interviews that you would see on YouTube or anywhere, you can just see he is, to me, a bit like Ed Cohen. There's a person under there who is still 18 years old and still mad and still passionate and still unrelenting. It's one of the things that Tony Doherty used to say is, you know, relentless momentum. That's what I see in those people. And that's the most defining characteristic of this success is relentless momentum.

So do you think a lot of the time with athletes, the mindset side and just simply their passion, that's the indicative factor of how far they go, not actually how they train or what they eat and what they lift?

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think it's a combination of perfect storm situation where you have somebody who's able to connect an incredible force of will with a physiological result that other people probably couldn't achieve as well. But they could only force it by that force of will. Didn't come easy.

So if we talk about training systems, if we hold up, let's say, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and compare that to say, for example, Dorian Yates, they've had training philosophies philosophies, they're quite different in the way they see the world and see the training. I mean, are you influenced by one over the other? Are you in one camp? And I know it's kind of a loaded question, but because there are people who just kind of label themselves early in this camp, how do you learn from both of those and say, take the best bits?

I'd almost say what Tom used to say is what the training you hate the most will probably do you the best good. The thing you hate the most, the higher reps, the lower reps, whatever it is, they're probably the things that's gonna work for you the most. And I think in the volume approach that Arnold used, I never produced Arnold. Dorian's approach produced Dorian. There's a lot to it in, I think that's when you look at how, say someone like Branch Warren trains too. And so I look at, think his form's a bit loose, but if you look at it, he connects to the tension so magnificently. And then you might watch someone like Phil Heath, beautiful form or Kai Greene. There's something about the way these athletes connect to what is almost like that tension under time, over time, you know, there it is, is that ability to create tension at the right time to move the weight that connects with the stimulus to produce a result. So there's a lot of individuality when it comes to those sorts of things. And I think it's almost inevitable when someone like that picks up a weight, that they do it the way that they're going to get a result from. But they're different to most of us. I think that's the big thing. Sometimes looking at those people is hard to expect to get the same result. Dorian's approach was, yeah, train damn hard and try and recover. I think that's a sensible thing within it. Arnold's approach was a lot of stimulation, a lot of volume. That works for the right person as well. It's, you've got you've got to really be able to find the thing that works a bit for you. And it might not be what your hero does.

So rather than heavy weights are the only things that build muscle or volume is the only thing that builds muscle, it's—

Yeah, I can lift a heavy weight, but did I use the muscles that I wanted to actually apply the force to, the stimulus to, to get it from A to B? And did another muscle group pick it up better? Am I— my triceps taking the work rather than my chest when I'm benching? It all depends on the individual quite a lot. The arm lengths, the bone lengths, the muscle masses, the densities of spindles, everything's different between individuals to some extent.

So for the bodybuilders watching at home, what advice would you give someone who's wanting to put on lots of mass?

Prepare to probably do a fair bit of volume training initially. Find out the exercises that work best for your body. It might not be the incline curl, it might be a standing dumbbell curl, it might be a preacher curl. For example, you gotta find the thing that you connect best with to find the area that you get the result with. It may be what your hero does, it may not be what your hero does. Steve Reeves had great arms, Steve Reeves used to like dumbbell incline curls. Arnold tried them, said he didn't really get a lot out of them until he learned how to do them later in his career. Arnold worked with a thing, Zottmann curl. Very interesting girl. That was early in his career. There's so many different things that, and variations that people find that work for them. So it is, you can't be lazy for the normal person. The abnormal person, they're gonna get results anyway. They almost can't help but get results. We had two guys in one of the gyms I used to train at. And one of the guys idolized the other fellow who was just had a really great looking physique. And he was a fairly big guy, and he had an islander Maori background. And the other guy was very Celtic, Scotch background. And the Scottish guy emulated everything from the way this guy walked, the way he talked, the way he ate. The Maori guy got beautifully big, he could run a marathon and grow. And poor the other guy, he just turned out looking like the Michelin Man. It was just blubber everywhere. Two different physiologies, two different responses to the exercises. So it's very individual. That's where great coaching comes in. Good coaches know that everyone's not the same. There's no recipe. You've got to pull a person apart and really find out what that individual needs to grow, what their recovery processes are like. It's all different.

I think that's actually absolutely key because what you alluded to earlier in the conversation was about universities. It's like universities teach you the dogma or teach you the textbook, but they don't actually teach you how to think. And that's what I certainly see with a lot of personal trainers and strength coaches is they want to be labeled and placed into a camp and have the rules dogmatically indoctrinated into them so they can put all their clients into the camp. And that almost— they alleviate themselves of this conundrum of having to think about things or think through a problem. It's rather than, oh, we're gonna do this because that's the way we do it, rather than that's what's actually appropriate for you.

Yeah, if you want to be an unsuccessful personal trainer, that's a great not a great approach to take. My way or the highway. You know, certainly one of the better personal trainers, as far as understanding and knowing his work goes, I know there's one who's really great. But he happens to be the worst people person I've ever met. And 20 years later, he still struggles in business. Now, intellectually, he can apply excellence to his clients. But his approach to them is, you're gonna do it my way, we're not talking about it. You submit to my will basically the whole time. Well, doesn't work, don't get a lot of people that will stick with him. And so that's sometimes where you find the personal trainers who are actually really crap, but they relate well to their client and the clients go into them year after year with getting no results because they have good personal relationship with them. Now that suits some people.

Switching gears into scoliosis, I know a lot of the time when clients come in and they might come in talking about labels, you know, I have scoliosis, and it's almost they say this, I am scoliosis, rather than I have scoliosis. So before we move into the question about scoliosis, can you give a quick definition on what it is?

Well, when someone comes in to me and says, I've got scoliosis, I usually say, really? So what do you feed it? And the whole point there being is I'm gonna throw them off what they're possessing, and we're gonna start to talk about the fact that Structural abnormalities don't define an individual. So scoliosis is a curvature of the spine in a certain plane across the frontal plane here. And so when we look at that, we see a person who has a curvature of the spine. It does not define anything about the individual. The world's most successful— no, one of the world's most successful powerlifters of all time called Lamar Gant has a spectacular scoliosis. It looks like an anaconda, goes like that. Having to be the first person I think to lift up 6 times body weight. So it was an advantage perhaps to him. So don't look at the structural problem of saying it's got to be a disadvantage, it may actually give you an advantage. It changed the height of his torso. He had a shorter torso that worked for him. So if you've got something, that's why I say when somebody comes in and says to me, I've got a disc bulge. Okay, but I didn't ask you what you got, I asked what your problem is. That's how we define it, you work with the person's problems. So yeah, if someone says I got flat feet, fine, well, the research doesn't indicate there's got to be a problem. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. We'll find out when we have our interview with you and we'll find out the way you move. Is it structural? Is it functional? Lots of things. So don't ever possess a diagnosis, don't let a diagnosis possess you. Bad language on these problems influences badly about how people perceive their ability to perform. So yeah, some of our most pretty much, if you look at so many great athletes, you'll see they're all unsymmetrical. Great tennis players, they have one arm longer than the other. Usain Bolt's got one leg longer than the other, do you wanna change that? Probably not a good idea. So don't be defined by structure.

So it's almost the mechanical at a perceived disadvantage by this world that's trying to create a perfect symmetrical human. Well, one, we're under a false illusion. We're searching for something that just isn't really there because there is no really perfect symmetrical human. There's only models.

I've got a classic one for this one. Everyone, if they want to do this right now, write your name down on your book just right now. Just write your name. Hand just after you've written your name. Now write it with the other hand. All right, go for it. Now, is there anything wrong with that other hand? No, just neurologically you're efficient with one side, not the other in that task. Is that detrimental to your life? Probably not. We have different tasks devoted to different parts of our brains. We're not symmetrical creatures. We focus on function with dominance in one thing and dominance in another thing. Dominance and ability, dominance and stability, different legs, different arms. Don't look for symmetry. Symmetry is a great way to become basically useless.

So, so for scoliosis, those who are watching who have scoliosis, it's really— I suppose the message is don't make it a big deal.

Find a health professional who understands whether it is an influence, because there are certain levels that Yes, it can be that big that it needs intervention. But for the ones who it's only usually a couple of degrees and it's something that's not going to be— it's pretty close to normal, then it shouldn't be defining you. Once again, everything's done on an individual basis. But yeah, you must not be possessed by the diagnosis. And weight training can certainly help those and move them forward. Well, some of the biggest scoliosis have been the most successful athletes. There was a great distance swimmer that we had in Australia who held lots of world records. Spectacular spine with huge scoliosis, yet probably one of our greatest ever record holders. So moving back into—

I just want, before we go to audience questions, I did want to do another demo. Yeah, of the bodyweight squat used as an assessment tool. Yep. I think for this one, we'll bring out Luke. Mr. Luke, let's give Luke a round of applause.

Oh, actually, Luke, Luke. What would you like to see Luke do? Bodyweight squat, Luke. All right, so what do we look at there? What do you see there, Mark? Do we see a bit of a challenge to get horizontal, to get to parallel, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.

And the reason why I just wanted to pull pull this one out to show, obviously get this on camera for those watching on YouTube and for the audience, is how you would use a simple motor pattern in terms of— Yeah. —of outlining. So, I mean, what I see is, you know, he's struggling with the movement, he's, you know, curving forward, hamstrings look tight, you know, I don't think his knees are coming over his toes as freely as possible they could be, and looks like there's a lot of tightness.

It looked hard, didn't it? Yeah. Alright, so we're going to give this kettlebell a look, are we? There you go. Great, lucky guy. Down. Yep, hold it up higher. That's it. And now just give us a squat, Joe, again. Great, and you can put it down. So we got a hypothesis there, isn't it? He moved better than he did without weight. So why would he move better with a load? He got tighter. His ability increased because he got tighter, he got stronger. He switched more things on. So if we looked at it and said that first squat was his structural ability, we would be wrong. His structural ability is far better than what he displayed. His body structure was holding back and failing in certain ways until it was made to tighten up. He had two choices, putting the weight in front of him, he could faceplant, or he could stay up. His muscles decided to stay up, held him together, he got tighter proximally. Proximally in the center. As he got tighter there, his body then allowed him to move better. This is one of the premises that I approach is proximal stability, increasing strength will increase your ability of the peripheral joints to move better. So nice to see, we have lots of hypotheses we can go with there. What's weak? What's strong? What do we gotta look at? We can tease him apart later and see what we can find. Let's look forward to that.

Awesome, let's give Luke a round of applause. Take this one, Mr. Luthman. Alrighty, so now what we're going to do is we're going to open up to your questions, audience questions. So who has a question for— Audience question.

Way to go. Just based around like AFL or any sport really, why do you think there's so many more injuries these days? Probably if you look back at the history of AFL and VFL and things like that, people were training less. They had other things demanding their lives. So I would say you'd probably find that the volume of work that people are doing now has increased dramatically. And it is the inability of the biological tissue to stand up to those increased volumes of stress. And that's what I would look at as saying the biggest problem we would probably find with AFL and other sports now. It's the ability to handle the volumes of work. And that's a tough one for the strength and conditioning coaches to individually plan for the people.

I know Amy has some questions.

Go for it, Amy. I train a few boxers, so I find with some of them, they have a lot of lower back issues, tightness. So what that— reasoning behind that might be and ways to help reduce that. Well, the thing about any system there is if a person has lower back pain, it will probably indicate that the lower back is either compensating for somewhere else, because it's trying to make up for a weakness somewhere else. Or it might be a biomechanical inefficiency into rotation. Well, basically pull things apart into three directions. I look at a person moves forwards and backwards, side to side, and then into rotation. Now, if you're looking at boxing, you might be looking at, is a person getting lower back problems because he's into the flexion position quite a lot? Are they training so much ab work that they're doing inappropriate sit-ups? So they're flexing the hell out of each other before they get into the ring. Maybe not. Maybe there is an inefficiency in their glutes holding together and allowing them to rotate their hips really well. And as a result, the lower back's taking out the rotational work. And lower back doesn't like to do a lot of rotation. It's not made to rotate very well, that's your thoracic spine. Maybe there is a thoracic spine stiffness that's being displayed at the lumbar spine. So what you start to do is you start to pull apart the question. You're subjectively gonna sit there with that person, say, when do you feel this problem? Within the session, after the session? Which part of training are you getting it with? What do you find relieves it? When do you feel good? All those things, and they'll tend to start to give you the direction you wanna go. We'll even have a look at some of that with someone today perhaps.

Hi, just a question on AFL women's football coming up.

I'm thinking of playing, but I'm a little bit scared about just the injuries that are present in it at the moment, which was mostly like the knees, et cetera. Would you have any advice? Well, the usual advice, I mean, there's a blanket moment, as we say, everything's taken on a case-by-case basis. But I've yet to see somebody who's strong enough in abs and glutes that I would say you don't need to do a whole lot more. So if you look at foot control, knee control, a lot of that comes off the hip and glutes. If you look at back issues, a lot of it relates to weak abs. So especially I would say the domination is looking at that sport, is it a bilateral sport, is it a unilateral sport? A lot of unilateral work. Is squatting going to do a whole lot of good for your preparedness as an AFL player? Probably not. Step-ups, lunges, single leg movements. That's where I start to look at saying, "Ah, we gotta do this 'cause this is what this person does, they run." They do unilateral movements. So I start to think as far as core goes, unilateral work as well. So there you go, start to think it when you look at a sport and you look at what are you gonna do for it, determine is it bilateral? Is it unilateral? What do they do with different parts of the bodies? We don't just deadlift and squat and bench press because that's what we do. You gotta say, how does this person perform that sport? What do they do in tennis? What do they do in golf? What are they doing in boxing? What are they doing in powerlifting? Well, your program's gotta be different for every individual person. So AFL, a lot of running, a lot of unilateral work, look at lumbar pelvic stability. I would not be spending a lot of time squatting.

Just on that, would you use squat as an indicator of how someone is strong and how their progress is going accordingly to that sport?

No, not for them, not for an AFL. Mainly because I don't see it as transferring to demonstrate that's gonna make them a better runner. For example, you could use it as a tool, but I really think realistically, what does that sport require? Probably try and find a better objective. But it can be used as an objective. I just think I start to think more in the pattern of the person. So it's easy enough to use a squat. I still think it's a great movement. And we know that you can create good athletes away from it. And lots of great running athletes have used squats. I just start to think of how much time you got in your day. Where you gonna spend your best time as far as what you got for training and what we might work from you from there. So if I was an AFL player, I'd run a lot. That's what I practice. Do you think that's what they're doing?

Just repeat for the audio. The question is, do you think that's what they're doing?

And perhaps they're doing it badly. Yeah, so you're repetitively performing that movement badly. So eventually the tissue has a problem. So it's time to pull those players apart and to look at where their strengths and weaknesses are. So if you make a person who's weak around the hips run a lot, you'll probably get a knee or foot problem out of it.

So more unilateral step-ups, lunges, split squats, this kind of thing.

Yeah, jumps, vertical leaps, all the things that you're gonna put together there. Banded squats might be a great one to play with just to make that work. There's a really great reason to put a squat in, 'cause there's a good place to put a band.

Hang on, just pass the audio.

Would that be the same for someone with plantar fasciitis? Yeah, don't look at the foot. Go everywhere else but the foot until you end up back at the foot. Look at the knee, look at the hip, look at the core, but look at all those things. And then end up at the foot. So if you find something else somewhere else, that may be the reason the person's got that. Yeah, so remember the last thing you do when someone says, I got plantar fasciitis, push the foot, look at the foot. Don't do that first. Look everywhere else first. So you wanna know what you don't know, not what you do know. Knowing what you know is not gonna help you. You really gotta find out what gaps. And if there are no gaps, Great, then you're confident you missed nothing. It sounds like the theme of what you've been saying so far is everything really is case by case, it's down to the individual, it's so unique. What would you say the best, if let's say for example whether it's for me personally or a client, what would be the best start to say if I wanted to get assessed as to what would be the best technique, should I even be doing a squats? Should I first come to someone like you? And there's not many people like me, it's a good challenge. It comes with good trainers who have the education. I think a good trainer who's been educated into understanding the squat, deadlift patterns, how humans move, movement screening, all those things can give you an understanding of what structural advantages and disadvantages you might have. But yes, a true screening process does help. Okay, because whether it's, for example, if someone just wants general fitness and all that, I'd say, okay, yeah, maybe just join a gym and be fine. But if you wanted to train at an elite level and really improve, it sounds like what you're saying is get screened. Even the person who goes to just the general gym, really, they need to have some assessment of their physical limitations or abilities. Do you buy a set of golf clubs and go out to the course and just start hitting away and think you're gonna be okay? Or do you get a few lessons from someone who's got an education, who's good, who knows what they're doing? So that's why coaching to me is the imperative. If you're going to take something up, you get coaching to get your basics right. So if you wanna play tennis, do you buy a tennis racket and just start hitting the ball across the net? No, you've got to know how to hold the racket. You gotta see someone who actually knows what they're doing. So this is what good coaching is about. Good coaching is about making sure that you take a novice, you teach them the basics, you make sure they understand the basics usually. And then you can start to program them and away you go. But it's always defined by the goal of the individual. If a person just wants to play with their kids when they're 70 years old still, well, I wouldn't be giving him a max single deadlift to test him out every few months. Cost to benefit ratio, it's not part of his life goal plans. So you make him move well, safely, get all the joints moving through the range of motion, you've satisfied that person's reason for training. You got someone else who wants to be a champion at something, all right, it's a different goal altogether. Coaching's gotta be a fluid process. You gotta adjust for every single client that you meet. They're all, everyone's different.

And just on that, which could be anything, I just thought you'd give that one. Just on that, we've actually put together as part of Wolfpack, and people can download it publicly who are watching this on the personal trainer mentoring website, which is the Wolfpack website. There's the first 5 classes of Wolfpack, which is basically a structural and assessment mini e-course that takes you through the things that probably the highlights that you've taught me, which which is the overhead squat, the clap test, the forward flexion test, lumbar extension, and the bodyweight squat. And some of them are half-hour videos where basically I dissect with— I've got a model in and, you know, we dissect what to look for and then what to do as well, which can be a great starting point. So definitely check that one out. There's 5 videos and there's 5 tests, so using the 5 tests, but then yeah, it's based off the Andrew's work and stuff that he's taught me as well, because having a conversation with you as a personal trainer and coach, what are the key assessments that we should, we should learn? And from speaking to you, they were, they were the 5 kind of standout assessments that we've implemented not only here at Entiplyze, but that's also what we teach in Wolfpack. So you can rewatch those anytime you like. And for those watching it on YouTube, you can head over to that website, Melbourne Personal— not Melbourne Personal Trainers, rather Personal Trainer Mentoring and just leave your details and you'll get signed up for that e-course and yeah, be able to watch those 5 videos. That's a really great starting point. But then I suppose the next thing would either, obviously you guys are already here at Wolfpack, or, you know, seeking out Andrew Lock and going to one of his courses and learning from him directly.

So, yep, yeah, always good.

Tyrone, what would your advice be for, say, us as trainers when you get a client, they see a physio, osteo, whatever, and they diagnose them with something and they say, okay, just rest. And they come back and go, okay, I can't train anymore because the physio said I can't train because I've got this, this and this.

Yeah, I would then approach them as saying, well, which I've already said is, make the client understand that rest changes nothing. That if you've got a problem and you're not doing anything about it, you'll only come back and do it again. So you'll show them that that piece of advice should be put within a construct which involves change. So if a person is doing a high volume of work and the physio or chiro or somebody says, you need to rest, they also need to rest, but to change within that, to practice something. So they have to be doing something realistically to move, to make a change. And then I'd also say, look, yeah, It depends upon your relationship with that health professional, but it might be useful to get a second opinion from somebody who's experienced in what your goals are. And that may be someone that you can recommend. So then that I can get a second opinion about somebody who would prefer to get back. Look, if I have a person who comes with a broken arm, good, they got one arm and two legs to go, back to the gym you go. You still train. It doesn't mean you rest, just means you rest that arm. But hell, don't rest the other arm, because neurologically, that's gonna help the other arm. So you never sort of have really almost any situation that I can find that you should completely stop.

That's a founded premise that if you break your left arm and you keep training your right arm, it actually helps facilitation for recovery of the left arm.

Correct, yeah. And there's a lot of things you can do if you wanna play with that. You can play with mirror work and other stuff. It all works. So there's always ways to assist. What's mirror work? Well, for example, when you look into a mirror, your brain sees Mark looking in the mirror, but in the mirror it sees the reverse. So you might have your left arm's got a problem, but in the mirror, your right arm is your left arm. And you can actually work with the movement pattern in the mirror to change what's happening on your real left arm, because your brain sees that as a visualization. So I've used that with clients. Had a guy once who had 10 years, he hadn't moved his foot because he was convinced that he had a surgery, that his foot couldn't move anymore. And fortunately, because I got a little piece of equipment, I saw there was an electrical current, so I knew it was still working there. So I sat him in front of the mirror, made him tap his opposite foot. I said, look, see which foot's moving? So now turn your chair around 180 degrees, do it with the other foot. Came back in 2 weeks, he could move both feet. He had accessed the program. It's a useful tool if you know what you're looking for, changing people's shoulder movements. Sometimes I'll do that if I can see that I've got a tool there at the time for the right person. So you can change neck ranges of motion sometimes. Sometimes the body limits itself because it's got a feedback and expectation, but you can actually mess with that. Quite well. So with phantom limb pain, that's one of the tools that's used. If a person has their arm removed, the nerves that control the arm are still in the brain. They're looking for it, so they construct a phantom limb. They construct what they think should be there because they're still there. Now, what you do is then you can use a mirror to see that that arm is actually there, the brain sees it, and you can use methods to decrease pain. So there's ways of getting to anything, there's tools we can always use. Fantastic little area.

So do you think we've tapped out the, I mean, neurology, you know, 101? I mean, do you think there's more to be found? Or do you think we're just really understanding the tools that we have? Where do you think it's going to go?

We're understanding a lot with the tools we have, and there's more to be done. Yeah, everything's still, we're still evolving our approach to lots of parts of science. But the fundamentals of the science are still there.

Progressions in rehabilitation over the next 5, 10 years, are there any predictions there?

No, it's really regressing a little bit in Australia anyway. So Australia, the best way we can start to do is to look overseas to see often what the most current researchers or what the best evidences and teachers are doing because currently, as I said, the professionals and health professions here are getting a little bit restricted by the current academic pushes, which I don't think are very good and they've been bad for about 30 years. They have, Basically, Australia did a disservice to the world with the transverse abdominis multifidus theory. It was wrong. And I've written on that before. And yet that influenced the way we approach things and a bit overseas, but they got rid of it pretty fast. But the biomechanics of human movement are being progressively done well over in North America, in Canada, and Europe, in certain parts of Europe anyway. So we'll take two more questions.

And then we'll wrap up. Move the mic over to Terri.

You were saying about a person who's lost a limb with neuropathways and so forth. What about in a case where someone's a paraplegic and they've actually got pain where they actually have no feeling in their legs but they've got pain?

Yeah.

So how would you treat that sort of thing? I would actually send that person to a behavioural specialist. In other words, a psychologist. For a start, because there may be other issues there which may have to be investigated, which are influencing why that person feels pain. It may have a lot to do with, obviously, the trauma of what they're experiencing too. So maybe about how they're handling the experience, it may be a lot to do with a lot of parts of their life. I would almost look to having that certainly cleared and discussed with a behavioural professional before I'd actually look to anyone else.

Lucky last. Pass it down to Carl, all the way from Sydney.

Knowing that you know that the average person's back, 80%, is going to be better in the first 4 weeks, how do you get the compliance of the client to stay with you for 8 to 12 weeks to hit that 100%? Well, you see, I don't see a cure acute people very often anymore. It will take you a month to get in to see me anyway. So it's very rare someone's gonna ring up, I've hurt my back, I need to— I get it all the time. I need to see you and I just go, yeah, well, my next appointment's about 5, 6 weeks away. So I'm not gonna see the acute very often now. I tend to see the ones who have, hey, I've been hurt for the last 2 years. I can wait to see you for 6 weeks' time. Now I have a little compliance thing that if you don't do your exercise, I charge you twice the next time you come in. It's double the amount. Might give you a motivation to actually do what you're being told. I don't have a really great problem with that because one of my things with people is we discuss the amount of work that needs to be done. So it's unnegotiable. This is what you need to do. You do this much every day. You're doing it twice a day. You're seeing me anyway because you failed with a lot of other people. That's why you're coming in and you're serious. So I tend to get a really great client client population because I get people who are very serious about trying to get a solution.

Excellent. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Wolf's Den. Stay tuned for more great episodes like this, and if you want more information about Andrew Lock, where can they find you?

On Facebook's usually the best way, Functional Strength Rehabilitation. I do a lot of work with the Australian Strength Coach Sebastian Oreb. We run a series of workshops on the power lifts and the different injuries. We do that throughout Australia and even internationally now. And so Sebastian's the strength coach for Thor, the World's Strongest Man, and we put together a lot of his experience with the particular deadlift, squat, and bench, and I do the rehab side of things. Fantastic.

Well, thanks for joining us for Wolfpack, folks. Make sure you stay tuned, subscribe to us on YouTube. We're always all the episodes and great videos from Enterprise and Wolfpack will be found. So just subscribe below. And if you want more information on Wolfpack or all things personal training mentoring, do check out personaltrainermentoring.com. Thanks for watching. How about a hand for our guests today?