How to Set New Standards

So the point of departure here is there is a better way. It's in seeking that better way that's the joy of life, that's the fun of being an athlete, that's the fun of being a man, is seeking that physical mastery, seeking that next level. So we're wired and designed to get after it physically every day, whether that's preparing for war or in the modern times. It's sports, it's gym. We need to be exploring what we can do physically. It's in our nature, it's in our essence, and if we're not doing it, we don't feel great. Doing that in the best way possible has been something that has been sought out throughout the ages as well. The systems of yoga, the systems of martial arts are examples of what happens when generation after generation explore better ways of doing things. So in the west, we've arrived to ways of doing things with food, with education, with housing. All of these things have been in a steep decline in quality objectively over the last 50, 100 years. The same has happened for physicality. So if you look back at what was happening 60, 80 years ago, 100 years ago, the quality of training was much higher than what it is today in terms of the methodologies, the mind that goes with it. In the same way that music and architecture and food were all higher quality, when we look back just a little bit further, at least at the top end, they were much, much better than they are today. So what would that higher level if we were to find the next evolution of the current methods? We can't really go back to what we had before, but we can go forward to what, what would the best that we can do now from where we are now look like? So there are five key areas that I'm looking at that through skill, speed, stamina, strength and stretch. Now, generally, one of those areas is massively neglected or completely ignored, even within professional training. And for most gym goers, they're generally only working on one or two of those areas. You feel better, your experience of training is better. It's more valuable when you apply those different areas. Each of those different areas now, working with professional rugby players, working, working with world champion athletes, exploring those five areas and finding where the biggest weakness is, is where the next levels of performance come from. Objectively, the teams that I worked with had much better results than what they previously had, and those results were outliers compared to what they were going to do compared to what they did next. Now, there were many factors in that. Great players, great management, Great coach. But the physical systems that we employed were better. The nutrition that we were using, the styles of training that we're using now. I decided to not pursue developing that method when I went into business because I went with what the market was demanding, what was needed, and what was needed for me was inspiration and systems towards opening gyms and being successful in personal training. Because that's who wanted to work with me when I left professional sports in 2014. But I'm returning to that path of what builds the best athletes. So what builds the best athletes is having that strong foundation in all of those areas. If we're very, very bad at one of those areas or a component within one of those areas. For example, with rugby players, oftentimes they've got to the top because they were physically heavier than the other players. So there's a big bias towards genetics of heavier athletes and those who were able to put on muscle mass and be disciplined enough and have the digestive health and hormonal basis and everything to be able to be heavy enough to play the game. So that was a huge bias. So the most skillful players were playing Dutch on a Wednesday night touch football. They weren't actually getting to the top. So what can those who got to the top learn from those who were the most skillful players? Well, this is an interesting question to answer, and this is a question that we answered daily in the practice in that I made these physically superior athletes who were at a lower level in terms of their skill and their game iq. I made them execute things that they weren't usually executing. Now, I only had six minutes per session and half of that was doing mobility and things like that. But within that time, I would have them throwing and catching longer passes. I would have them doing one on one attack and defense. I would have them getting balls off the ground, I would have them kicking. And so these were all broadening the base of the skill of the athlete. Now, if I knew now, if I knew then what I know now, I would have had them do more of this style of work in the gym because I had a lot more access to them in the gym and I could have developed them into much more well rounded skill athletes during that gym time. Now, in terms of the skill, we've got components of balance, we've got components of visual tracking of objects and being able to comprehend and act on the visual field. We've got rhythm, we've got various areas that we can work on that generally aren't being worked on and that don't have a very high training cost. They require the brain. If we know from classical musical training and things like that, if you want to be a concert pianist, that you should be practicing around four hours of really high quality work every day. Now, a rugby player is generally doing around about two hours, maybe three hours of training. But within that there's a lot of time that's recovering in between efforts because the efforts are very physically demanding. So I think there's space for one to two hours of skill development on top of the normal physical training. Now, I'm speaking about rugby because that was my background and that's what I've been around basically all my life. But this applies to every sport. What would be the extreme of a foundational base for your sport? And you might customize it just slightly. You put less emphasis on the feet for a rugby player. But we know Kobe Bryant played a lot of soccer. Having that bigger base, that bigger foundation is an important aspect of sports. Michael Jordan was great at golf, he was great at baseball. So he had a bigger general base of sport. Messi is known to play mostly basketball during gym time. The best athletes are built outside of team training. They're built in the time on their own with their brothers and sisters as young players or then doing extra training on their own was the hallmark of Kobe Bryant, who set a higher standard in a sport that has extremely high standards. Players like quarterbacks consistently training on their own. But most team sports and most athletes don't really have this pattern or this habit of refining their their own game in groups of one or two very small groups, extremely dense practice. So we want that extreme foundation should be able to. A soccer player should have a basic foundation in Taekwondo, trampoline, tricking. Why would they not develop to a basic level in skills that require extreme explosive, mobile, balanced, coordinated spatial awareness development? Why would you not have that extreme base above the level of all the other players? It makes sense to build that base. You think, well, where does that fit inside of the training paradigm? Most of what you're doing is not making the next Messi. So that next extremely good player, that star player that plays really well on every team with every different style of strategy and team play. It doesn't matter what team in what sport you put the star player on, the star player is still the star player. Yes, the strategy matters. Yes, the teammates matter. But how do we build these star players? It's obviously not with more strategy and more team play. So it's not one or the other here, but it's like what do we need to do to make those outlier players? That's what we're looking at. And if you want to be that outlier, if you want to coach those outlier players, how can we think about that to build them? So on this extreme foundation, if you haven't addressed different areas of stretch, if you look at kung fu, martial artists, if you look at ballerinas, if you look at divers, if you look at taekwondo, you can see gymnasts, you can see extremely explosive athletes who are also very mobile, who are able to get through a high volume of training and recover from that training. Even sprinters tend to be very supple, very mobile. They have good stretching ability. And yet in team sports, we think somehow that that's different, and we don't need to have similar stretch ability to those outlier sports where they're able to get into extreme positions with the leg up. I'm doing the leg up high there without risk of injury and having higher quality tissues that are less likely to pop. This is basic principles of physics, but they're lost in team sports. So when we fill in these basics, there's basics in all of these areas. There's areas that we can. There's things that we can improve. Skill, speed, stamina, strength, stretch. How can we improve them generally? And then on the other side, specifically for your sport, how do we get crazy, crazy dense with your sport? In soccer, we saw this example, this principle play out with five a side, right? Everyone was like, oh, the Brazilians are better. What are the Brazilians doing? Oh, they're playing five a side all the time. They're playing in a smaller area. They're getting more touches of the ball. They've got a bigger requirement for dexterity on the ball. And therefore, at the time when everyone was starting to think about that, the British soccer game was like, kick the long ball, kick it out of your own end, kick it up to the other end. And you can see the game has become so skilled now in Europe that it's very condensed. I was watching some Mexican soccer the other day, and it's very, very, very. It's like a different sport compared to European soccer because the quality of the ball control, the quality of the team play. It's. It's a very, very different game. You almost need. You would need, like, completely different training styles if you're playing the Mexican game versus playing the. The European game. But the more dense training environment was creating new, new types of players that everybody wanted, that everyone wanted to emulate. And so it became more Popular to practice a shadow boxing type of situation scenario. Dribbling your own ball and practicing on your own ball. This system spread around the world where you're sort of working over one ball. How do you find that extreme density of training experience? I would almost guarantee if you look at Ronaldo, you see his documentary and stuff, you see he's got his home gym, he's got his home soccer field as well. I haven't seen the footage of him playing on his home soccer field, but my guess is that's where he became the player that he is on his home field. Playing touch, touch, touch, touch, dribble. I know he was early to training as well. I dare say he was doing both. Kobe Bryant, extra training, doing his own thing. Set a new standard. What would that look like in your sport? Where are the untapped areas and who's doing things better in other sports that would carry over to yours. If you think about fast feet, who are the people with fast feet in the world? Of all the people, of all the different movement types and styles, tap dancers maybe are the ones with the fastest feet. Are they? So would it make sense to have very, very entry level of tap dancing or maybe even an intermediate level of tap dancing? Who's to say that the best players aren't doing some of these things and keeping them as a competitive advantage? If you have an athlete who has that extreme base, it often shows up. It often shows up that, oh, yeah, they did. They did breakdancing as a youngster or they were doing gymnastics as a youngster. I could spot it within the rugby. I was like, okay, you did something different. You did something different to all these guys as a young person because you've got a bigger foundation than they have, and they would be playing representative. That would be one of the ones that would get to the top. If they had the other prerequisites of toughness and the size, then being the one who did some break dancing or being the one who did other sorts of dancing, that would be the foundation. So we want the biggest gap, the biggest area to improve generally, is with skills and finding the way to more densely develop the skills. And look at, okay, what are the best players doing? How do I mirror that, bring that into my own game, and then redefine, go beyond that. So there needs to be a lot of time to explore. There needs to be a lot of deep thought. And if that is undertaken, if you take it as seriously as you would another profession, then new levels are possible. Of course they are. Generally, if you Speak to people who are in the world of professional soccer, a lot of professional sports, there's generally some who are really masters of the craft and others who are just there because they sort of liked it as a child and they fell into it and they just stayed with it. And they're not really still pursuing the mastery that they were pursuing as a youngster. So they get a bit jaded with it and they stop wanting to be better. When men stop wanting to be better, life gets rough. It loses its meaning. Make mistakes, do silly things that you're not proud of. We want to be doing things that we're proud of. We are proud when we're in the pursuit of mastery. I'm not saying it has to be 16 hours a day, but it should be six. There should be six, eight hours of how do I get better at this thing? So finding the lower intensity things that we can do a lot of that don't have a high training cost, that don't have a lot of risk is a good place to work. And then looking at other areas of this has a higher training cost. This is more difficult to implement. But I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to find a place to put it in. Because you start getting diminishing returns on team play and the things that you've practiced over and over again, they can't really make you that much better. Now, saying that like you are pursuing mastery in the basics, but doing them in the most dense forms where you've got extreme individual ability, it is the extreme individual ability that means that that star player goes onto any team. They're playing in the World cup for Brazil, but if they went and played for England, that would boost that team. If they, they're playing for Real Madrid and they go to Barcelona, they boost that team. It's creating those players and consistently you're doing that across the board is something that it's difficult to do on a team level because the buy in just generally isn't there. The buy in for that kind of exploration, it's generally not there. It's sort of like a workers union environment in some team sports where it's okay, how, you know, how early can we get away? There's a time that you're allowed to come in, there's a time that you have to go home and it doesn't necessarily leave the room for this ultimate mastery, but maybe it should be more of a personal pursuit as well. Finding that individual coach, finding other players that want to pursue that next level for Me, this was when I decided I wanted to go to the Olympics. And I had this vision, but it wasn't until I saw another player who would turn up early to training. And then I heard about a player who was playing for Australia who had the key to the field and he would go to the field whenever he wanted to. And that was sort of when I understood, okay, there's other levels to this. You can do this to a level that I haven't even considered yet. And so then I started to train myself, usually twice a day, usually getting to training an hour before everybody else, usually being the last one off the field at the end of the training session. And I went from being not able to make state teams to being a state level player pushing for national selection at 20 years old. And it was because of this new mentality and new approach. Now it was in a really small sport that no one really wants to play, there's no money in it. And so it was, it was, it was possible to go from the bottom to, you know, close to the top in, in a relatively short period of time. But I was working this stuff out for myself and just, yeah, piecing together things that I could see around. We can do it much better than that. We can use resources, Internet connections, group motivation to push those standards a lot further. So it's possible in all the areas. And that's what I would like to do here, that's the invitation that I'm sending to you today, is to become that kind of uncommon athlete who will explore the edges. So this is like a team that transcends all sports. Uncommon athletic. What can we do that others aren't doing? That will open up new possibilities and not so much because others aren't doing it, but just in the pursuit of better. So when I worked with the Catalan's Dragons, I'd been living in Latin America, getting involved in politics and economics and I was at an orphanage, I was doing organic farming projects and I was really wanting to make a positive impact on the world and, and seeing like big problems in the way that we were being educated and just the systems wasted human potential. So when I went back to working in sports, it had a different meaning to me than it did to most athletes. And what I really wanted more so than winning was just to pursue better. To pursue, okay, how do we, how do we do this better? How do I get these men better? I didn't really care that much about winning. At least that's what I was telling myself. And I told the head coach that as well. It's like, look, I'm, you know, we're not going to being judged by what we do versus the other teams. Like, it's not really that interesting. What's, what's interesting is are we objectively better than what we were before? Are we objectively making these individuals better? And so that's what's fun to me is exploring. Well, clearly, clearly this capacity hasn't been developed yet, like the capacity of rhythm or the capacity of balance or the capacity of force production. So let's just make that a lot better. Or clearly the left foot's way worse than the right foot or the left arm throwing versus the right arm throwing. We've got huge area to improve there, so let's just improve that and then see what else is next. What else is a priority to improve? If this makes sense, if this is a lens that you're interested in exploring through, then I'd love to hear more about your journey. Look, let's connect, let's push your standards to another level. Pursue excellence. It's this pursuit of excellence that gives life meaning, that makes life much more enjoyable, much more livable. When we don't have this pursuit of excellence, when there's nothing that we're working really, really hard to get better at, life tends to get difficult, lose its meaning. That's not a good place to live from. I've been there and I don't recommend it. We're here to pursue mastery. Mastery of movement is the foundation for going into other conversations, getting into the business conversation, getting into the self knowledge conversation. Movement is a great place to launch from. So I hope this discussion sparked a few things and thoughts within you. And if you'd like to dive deeper into it, let's have that discussion.