Redefining Athleticism & Creating A Phenomenon with Keegan Smith

Welcome to Health Oddity, the show that strips away the jargon and hype surrounding all things health and fitness to help you live a long, strong and energetic life. Lining up at the bar this week, here's Peter Lant, Paul Bassett and James St. Pierre.

Welcome to Health oddity podcast, episode 61. I'm here today with very special guest, but before we get onto that, we're going to introduce the usual co host. James, you're back again from last week where you were away taking the SFG one as an assistant there.

Yes, yeah. Had a fantastic weekend with Fabio Zoning and Claire Booth in the Midlands and we had a really good three day strong first kettlebell certification and have been back straight away and really looking forward to speaking to our guests today. I actually heard him on a podcast only yesterday with Mark Bell, so I've listened to that one already, which was fantastic. So, yeah, looking forward to this and deep diving into some slightly different information that we've had in the past, which is going to be great.

Of course, we've had Fabio and Claire on the podcast talking about their background. So do check out those podcasts. Fabio's was very recent, Claire was earlier in the year. Both very experienced coaches with a great story and loads of interesting information. So, Peter, how are you?

Yeah, I'm all right, yeah. I'm looking forward to the day because this would be slightly different to what we've done before again, wouldn't it? So, yeah, it's going to be good. I'm also thinking I should change my hairstyle because I only ever seem to be apart from when Fabio was on, I only ever seem to be the one who's got hair, so I might have to change that.

Well, that's it. You know, you're really missing out on the current trend.

I think you're living the dream for all of us, you know.

I am, yes, exactly. This is what it could be like. I'm in my 40s, I've got all my own hair, I've got a lot of hair, I've got all my own teeth, you know, I'm doing quite well.

Yeah, you know.

Exactly, exactly. I'm already taken though, unfortunately.

Oh, well, okay. Okay. Well, where do I go from there then? I'm not sure, really. Well, I still go to our guest. We've got Keegan Smith today. A pleasure to have you on board and thanks for making the time.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to have a conversation.

So I've been exploring. I mean, one of the things that interests me about Health and fitness is that it constantly surprises me. It constantly gives me challenges, both intellectually and of course, physically. And I've always been on my own journey to try and find out better ways to not only rehabilitate myself, because I did a lot of stupid things in my teenage years and 20s to basically mess up my body. Not because of sport, because of other things, but basically everything I do now is to undo a lot of things I did from years and years ago. And so I've always been exploring interesting thinkers who not only think outside the box, but just not only have therapeutic solutions, but also performance based solutions, solutions to some of my needs. And that led me down the YouTube and Instagram, kind of what's a hole? Like the Alice in Wonderland hole. And I ended up coming across the ATG system, which is the Athletic Truth group. Am I got that correct? Many people know things as arse to grasp, but this Athletic Truth group, well.

It'S a play on that, I think.

Fantastic. Yeah. So I came across the Knees Over Toes guy, which is Ben Patrick, which led me to Ben's podcast with Keegan, which you can find on Spotify. And this system, the Knees Over Toes system. And the ATG system is revolutionary in what it's doing to people's lower bodies. It's basically taking banged up athletes and turning them and giving them kind of longer careers, filling in the gaps in their training and for the everyday person, also rehabilitating and giving new life to old knees and showing people that you don't have to be banged up to perform. We've obviously had a number of different people on this podcast, someone like Stuart McGill who talks about the costs of being a high performer. And what I love about the message that the ATG system is giving out is that you can perform highly and be healthy. You've just got to do it correctly. And I've been through zero, which is the Knees over toe system, ATG coaching system for the general public. And I've also done two months of dents. So I found them very elegant programming, which I always like. I'm always attracted to elegant programming, but it's also led me down to listening to Keegan on a number of podcasts. Mark Bell, obviously the podcast he does with Ben Patrick. So it's an absolute pleasure to have you on board. Keegan has a background in rugby as well, so he knows what it is to take high performers and rehabilitate them and keep them going because it's a tough sport. A tough sport. So thanks for coming on.

Keegan thanks for having me. You know, with the. With the rugby side, I guess that was a frustration. While I was working with players, I never really felt like I did know how to sort of keep them together and put them back together that well. I came through the Poliquin system and then got quite interested in Edo Portale and gymnastics and that sort of stuff, but I never really felt like we'd hit it. Like I was the strength coach, so it wasn't really my responsibility. And oftentimes I would just sort of palm off a lot of the niggling things to the physio and you work around things. And I'd say I was fairly similar to most strength coaches in that sense, where, yeah, we don't necessarily specialize in injury and I still don't actually consider myself to be a specialist around injuries. I think Ben and a lot of the coaches in the ATG for coaches community are much more experienced with injuries because, as I said, like, I didn't really want to deal with them. I kind of found it a bit frustrating and I prefer kind of the more, you know, athletic stuff and the big weights and that sort of ego side has probably been more of my journey, chasing the numbers and all of that buzz. But I always knew there was a gap and that's why I was sort of searching for things. And when I eventually came across Ben, it really kind of clicked for me and, you know.

Yeah, how did it click? So what were you. Something that clicked in terms of what you were teaching your clients, or was it something that clicked personally for you?

So I knew that Charles Poliquin had some stuff there within the way that he programmed that was different to what other people were doing. And I kind of had the idea that he didn't give it all away. I don't know if anyone else had that feeling with Charles, but, you know, he was a master presenter and, you know, master sort of coach, psychologist, I guess. And I always had that feeling of like, there's something here, like, he's not telling us everything. He's telling us good stuff, but he's not telling us everything. And so I did the PICP 1 and 2 and I didn't really get it, to be honest. I saw the movements, but I didn't really get it, of how they actually fit together. And I sort of knew I didn't get it, but I didn't have any way of getting it. So I was probably more influenced by Louis Simmons and big fan of Pavel as well. And the strong first stuff, I think is Amazing. And I've had a look at a lot of different styles of coach. And the poliquin stuff almost went in the too hard basket because I didn't really get it. And then I was wrestling with the ideas of, okay, well, how does he put this together? Like, why does he choose this type of bicep curl and this type of bicep curl and that type of bicep curl? What's the difference between these three movements? And it was reverse engineering that and wrestling with that over a period of months and years, sort of 20, 17, 18. I just knew there was something else here. And then I'd sort of worked it out. I thought for Charles, with the arms of sort of, okay, you do some stuff where the connective tissue doesn't stretch much at all. You do some stuff that's sort of the hardest parts, the middle of the movement. And then you do some stuff where the hardest part is when the muscles under stretch. And I was like, okay, there's something here. And I was sort of playing around with it. I'm like, does this really matter, or do we just need to just lift more weights and just get on with it? And then I saw Ben, and he'd done it for legs, and he was pretty confident that he was onto something. Now he wasn't thinking about the way Charles programmed arms. He was just thinking about what gets amazing results. And he'd asked a lot of questions about how do you fix knees and how do you this that boom, boom. So he just solved it for the knee, really where I was looking for this kind of universal key, and I saw it and I said, look, you've got something here. This is really important. I don't think I actually told him my kind of hypothesis and my philosophy for maybe six months or so of why I thought he was onto something special. And then, yeah, eventually, you know, we had more conversations about it and I tested it out, the same concept for other joints, and that, yeah, it's proven to be. To be pretty powerful. So they say there's nothing new under the sun, especially in the world of strength training. And there isn't until there is. And the details really do matter in how you configure things. And Ben really gave me the confidence to sort of say, well, yeah, we actually don't know yet. Like, let's just be in the mystery and let's, you know, keep working on things and not get too attached to any of these sort of hunches that we have, and we might actually end up with something good. In a few years. And that's sort of where we're still at now, I think, you know, even though it's become the juggernaut that it is, it's really the most influential program in the world at the moment. I still think we've got a lot of work to do, and we're constantly discussing that. You know, we're chatting about it. 4:00-clock this morning, I think I was on messages with him, you know, talking about how the new app technology is going to impact the customer experience and the coach experience as that comes online later in the year.

So from a kind of a high view, sort of perspective of what you're doing, because a lot of the people that potentially are listening to this podcast, although many trainers and I know more and more members of the public are becoming aware of the ATG system and knees over toes and that sort of thing through social media.

But.

What is the difference between the kind of the system and the techniques and the movements that you're teaching and that you're a proponent of that is different from much of the other stuff that's out there? Just so that a layperson can kind of understand, if that's okay for you to explain? Keegan?

Yeah, I can only speak from my perspective, and I sort of feel like I'm, you know, it's Ben's program to a large extent. Give my two cents here and there. And some of it gets into the system and the program. But from my perspective, what's really different about ATG is there are a few key things. One is that it's built from the ground up. So when you're a child, you build yourself from the ground up. You start on the floor, and you've got your hands on the floor all the time, and you're stretching out your toes and your feet get strong, tight. Toddlers and kids, they work on the ability to jump, and they're constantly building that strength with relation to the floor. And then when you're five or six, you can jump off the kitchen table first thing in the morning without warming up, without any fear for your tendons and those sorts of things. To my knowledge, that there was no system of strength training that was sort of trying to recreate that or rehabilitate people to those abilities that children had with the logical kind of engineering approach. And I think that's something that really stands out with atg, that it's from the ground up. So you have to have really strong feet. Your feet and your Achilles calves have to be stronger than your Quads and your hamstrings. Otherwise you're going to blow out something in the lower leg or you're going to have shin splints, you're going to have a calf strain, you're going to have an Achilles tear, you're going to have foot pain. And that goes up the chain. So we need the lower body to be stronger than the upper body. And if you get that upper body dominance and then you go running a lot, if you're training consistently more volume in the upper body, then you get that top heavy athlete that has a lot of lower body injuries. Now, that scenario is fairly common and fairly understood, but there's a lot of emphasis on posterior chain. People understand maybe quad dominance and quad development and the importance of that, but no one's really put the effort and energy to say, yeah, from the ground up and a huge amount of volume into the tibialis anterior is something that really sets the program apart. The muscle at the front of the shin and then the calves, because you're handling a lot of weight on one foot, the muscles of the feet get really well developed as well. So I think that's really one key component is that from the ground up, that's something that sets it apart. If I had to go for a second, it would most likely be this concept of training, like how the sequencing of bringing life and health back into a muscle and back into a joint. So the sequencing is, to me, the magic thing. Like that was the thing that I was like, yeah, Ben's got it. And I haven't seen anyone do this as logically, sequentially as he had. So the first step is sled dragging, reverse sledge dragging, or walking backwards up a hill, or just walking backwards in general. And so anyone can get started on the program, which is why part of the reason why it's been so successful is because anyone can start and you don't need any equipment and you don't, you know, that stuff. There's a lot of it on YouTube and whatnot as well. So, you know, you don't have to sign up for his program either to walk backwards. And so many people have had life changing results just by walking backwards. And there's, you know, there's studies even about longevity with walking backwards with the impact on balance. And it's actually quite common in Asia to use it as a tool for longevity. And so we start with that. And that puts very little challenge on the connective tissue because it's concentric only, which means that the muscle is not under load during the stretching component. So it's load during the stretching component that causes more damage, more bleeding to the muscle. So we start with something that doesn't cause any damage. Minimal damage to the connective tissue, minimal damage to the muscle. But then you can actually get a lot of blood flow into the area. And blood is what heals things. If you get a big bump on something, your body sends a lot of blood to the area and that blood heals, heals. The issue when you train really hard, you actually get some micro trauma, you get some tears into that area and that, and that recovery from that is what gets us back to being stronger than we were before. But when there's chronic issue in an area, we often don't want to stir up a bunch of inflammation. We just want to get the muscle firing. So it's good for connecting the mind to the muscle. Again, getting a lot of blood flow. And then we progressively go from that really short range stuff like the walking backwards with, with no connective tissue tension to things like the reverse Nordic or the natural human knee extension. That movement is lots of stretch under load and it's going to be highly sort of damaging to the quad muscles. You've got the squats, the atg, split squat, all these sorts of movements. The muscles under a lot of stretch at the same time as we're strengthening it. And so that is kind of more inflammatory and will cause more adaptations. And so the ability to go from this doesn't cause any damage to this causes a bunch of damage and healing is what's one of the things that's really special about it.

I think that's what I was just going to say. I've been involved in the kind of barefoot running and barefoot movement probably about 15 years over here. And I think what you're saying about the feet is so important. I mean, I think what I've heard just from what you've said there, there's lots of kind of movement based systems out there. We've had Tim Anderson on from original strength, which is very much kind of movement and talks about the development from baby to child and things. But I think where your system is obviously goes to another level and is complete. You then move, you go from the movement into strength through the movement as well, don't you? Whereas a lot of people will have a movement based system that they use for maybe their mobility and their warming up and things like that. Then they'll move into more of a conventional kind of strength program. Whereas. Whereas the system that you're using really Takes someone from an absolute base level of movement through into loading and making it more. More challenging. So that's. That sounds. Yes. I mean, the thing is, I suppose that most people, they go to your Instagram and things and the things that catch people's eyes are the more extreme looking things, aren't they, that people see you guys doing and proponents doing. So the danger is then that they jump in and try and do these more extreme versions first. Where really it comes from this sort of foundational level of building a nice wide base of competent movement and mobility at the base before even attempting any of this sort of eye catching sort of Instagram stuff.

Yeah, and we maybe should throw in a bit of a, kind of a disclaimer on this because if someone does check out, you know, my Instagram or Ben's a lot more conservative with what he posts now. You know, he's got a hundred thousand followers and people really are looking up to him. And so he doesn't post as much of the kind of craziest stuff that he used to post or that he can actually do just for that very reason of, you know, monkey see, monkey do. If you haven't done all the years of practice, then it may not work very well for you. So one of the other key pieces of logic within the system is to consider the joint and the connective tissues and their capacity to deal with tension independently of what the muscle can handle. Now this is a concept that isn't widely understood and I wish I had this sort of logic when I was working with the professional athletes. I'm glad that I have it now. But you can be able to do a movement with the muscle, but you can have a joint sensation at the time when you're doing that of like, yeah, this is doing damage. This is not going in a good direction. It's not widely spoken about. Like intuitively, if someone's listening and they're like a gym goer everyday, Joe, they'd be like, yeah, of course if the joint hurts, you just stop. But when you're a muscle head, you don't. If you lift the weight, then you got the weight and getting the weight is what it's all been based on. So a lot of strength culture is based around numbers and strength sports and even bodybuilding where it's not about the numbers, it's still a strength sport where the objective is not to be able to move well as a human. The objective is to either have as much muscle mass as possible or shift a weight from A to B in atg it's not a sport. There's no competition. It's not about how much you can do and whatever. Everything needs to be in balance. And that putting the balance as the base and really being, I guess using that as the guideline for everything is a difference as well. You have to consider, okay, yeah, the muscle can handle this, but what sensation do you have in the joint? Do you have joint pain, joint stiffness after you do something? So if you're doing step ups and you can do the movement, but if you have a weird sensation in the joint and then after you get some swelling in the joint, et cetera, then, yeah, you did the weight. Don't go up. Next session, don't go up in weight. You need to actually regress back from that. You need to stop doing that because you're getting swelling in the joint, you're getting damage to the tissues. The reason why ATG is so powerful is because it is going to change the connective tissues. But you've got to respect that and say, hey, if this has got the ability to completely remodel this joint and then it's also got the ability to smash it up, you're basically repeating the movement that is going to tear your ACL when you're doing some of the Peterson and Poliquin step ups. If you were to do that movement explosively, you could really tell your knee apart. So you never do that. Everything's very carefully staged. I think even just that concept and logic, it wasn't clear in my mind for a long time. And I pushed through joint pain, tendon pain for years because I could lift the weight and I thought that I needed more weight to get more muscle. But then you have these, you know, the chronic inflammation and joint pain and that inhibits your gains. And it also makes training in life a lot less fun. You feel old even though you're strong.

This is one of the problems, isn't it? Because, I mean, obviously we're talking to people kind of 35, 45 into the 50s and 60s and what have you. And you might have, you know, Paul was saying when we were talking before we started recording, you know, you were working with like rugby players and what have you, and we tend to get them a bit later on and put them back together because they've just smashed themselves in training and all of that. Which, which I think, like you were saying, people are starting. We're talking, Phil Maffertone about this and, and, and Stuart McGill and what have you. And things are starting to. People are starting to look at this differently now and try not to smash up their athletes and get them to actually have more longevity. But for your average Joe, right, for your average, you know, the average listener, which is, which is who we're talking to, who may have been good at sport when they were younger and now they're 20 years older. The whole thing about doing it back from the ground up, this is what babies do. They're like, I can already walk, I can already do all of that, you know, so they just want to, they don't necessarily want to lift the weight anymore. They're not like, you know, I want to smash it anymore. But they're like, no, but I'm going to start from slightly further back than where I used to be. And it's actually, no, you might need to start from the very beginning again if you've been sitting behind a desk for 20 years. So how do you, how, I mean, obviously, you know, you said you deal with your, your clients and stuff like that. How do you convince them that, I mean, I suppose this would go with athletes as well. Like, you know, say, say you've got big rugby players and you're like, right, you haven't been injured, but you might get injured if you don't do this stuff. But they don't care. They just do it until they get injured and then they go, right, I need it now. So how do you, how do you get to somebody? How would you talk to our listeners about this? Do you, do you think to get them to say, look, it feels like it's easy because it's from the ground up and it is going to be easy, but it makes the harder stuff easier in the future and it means you won't injure yourself because that's the stuff that you're going to want to do, isn't it? So how do you get that across to people?

Yeah, and that's the art of coaching and depends on who's in front of you and where they're at. It's what injuries have they had in the past? What are their goals? Are they more of an aggressive type or are they sort of fairly sort of obedient and just want to be told what to do? Or, you know, there's all types and I think that's the art of coaching is still definitely there. If you don't get the message across, then you won't get buy in or they'll just go and do their own thing on their own time or, you know what I mean? So there's always going to be that human component. And that's a big part of why ATG has gone viral in the way that it has is because of the enthusiasm that Ben brings to what he, you know, what he does. He's obviously very passionate about it. He's had great results with himself, but he has the ability to explain, you know, what he's doing, why he's doing it, and coach people through it. And, you know, our goal with ATG for coaches is that more coaches are able to do that. In some ways, it's not that sexy. And, you know, it's not set up to sort of get your wins in the gym. It's more like you get your wins in life where you can actually go and play a game of basketball or whatever and you don't, you're not scared or you don't feel like you're going to have to warm up for a long time. Most people who go to the gym know that they're not ready to sprint. They know that they're not ready to go play a game of squash. You know, even super strong guys, power lifters, et cetera. You know, Mark Bell was saying yesterday he's been running a little bit and like, he's excited to be able to run. And. But a lot of guys, if they even doesn't matter how good they look, they kind of know if I go running, I'm in deep shit. Like, if I try jumping, then it's, it's going to end in tears. And so that's the carrot with this system is you get to do that stuff again. But if you do happen to love CrossFit or powerlifting or kettlebells, whatever you love, if you have this underpinning understanding of the human engineering approach that we're taking, then it's a lot faster in my experience, to overcome the inevitable niggles that come with training harder. And rugby's a tough sport. There are always going to be injuries in rugby. It's brutal. But, but if we knew how these concepts of, okay, yeah, we need to flush the tissue with blood and keep doing that and keep focusing on that and be very gentle with the long range, stretchy type stuff initially and just focus on this stuff that's going to cause the healing effect. I don't know many coaches who think with that logic because it's not taught that way, it's not understood that way. And so that's the kind of the game is to make it more widely understood. But, yeah, I think it's great. Podcast helps.

Yeah, well, that's It, I mean, I think what was really interesting and it's just you talked about Charles Pauloquin being. Getting a sense that he wasn't quite telling you everything. But I think with the ATG system, pretty much most of it's online in some way. You know, there's nothing that doesn't seem to be anything that's massively held back. You know, there's a deep discussions on your podcast, there's obviously loads of YouTube and Instagram work and you guys spend a lot of time explaining this. So from the person who just wants to see what you're about, you can probably find every progression and regression of each exercise. But I think what I did like about it is the emphasis that there is a programming language, there is a route that will allow you to condition the condition of the joints, condition the tissues, but the emphasis on coaching, because obviously you guys value coaches, the value of a coach, because I know that for the end user there's the coaching aspect to the ATG system. Once you've signed up for the app, you're being coached by live people. And when you become an ATG coach, it's because you want to expand that expertise throughout the world. So what kind of leads you to that kind of coach centric approach?

Females don't necessarily need it, but if you're like most people, most guys, then, you know, you lead with the ego and you're going to mess it up. Like, that's the reality is guys mess it up. Like 9 times out of 10, the form is off, the weight selection is off, you know, the timing is off. It's not going to work. If the program was out there, like if Ben hadn't have chosen to do what no one else is doing. And Offer will critique every exercise for 50 bucks a month. Like it's nuts that he even started with that. And I'm pretty sure he didn't have in mind that he was going to have tens of thousands of clients with that system. But you know, he has managed to scale that. And I know the coaches who are working on the back end of this and they're good coaches, they're legitimate coaches and they're constantly upskilling and a lot of them are super strong. Like they're training. Ben has that system within the back end of their system. So it's just so important because, yeah, if you get the load selection wrong and the progression wrong, you will destroy the system. Like if people just choosing. And this is probably why, part of the reason why it's such a good business as well. Because I would say the chances of someone diying their way to success in the system are very slim, even for experienced coaches who understand the movements. And even if you go and watch my YouTube series where I'm kind of explaining all of these concepts, it's still so easy to let the ego run away and just think, yeah, I'll do that with my clients. But I'm just going to muscle through things and get to these feats of the Nordic and the bodyweight, Peterson step ups and these sorts of things. I'm just going to do the weight and just show everyone that I can do it. I've seen it over and over again. It's a challenging system and if you try to skip stages, if you try to go the fast way, it's not likely to work that well. Ben's been doing it for a long time now. He's got the ability to handle all sorts of weight and speed tension in those positions. But yeah, you gotta consider the connective tissue adaptation time is going to be a lot slower than the muscle development time. Especially for stronger guys. They're kind of more at risk potentially because they might have really strong quads and hamstrings, but they might not have developed the meniscus and the, you know, the ligaments, those tissues, if you load them, they're going to adapt. Like we know that happens with bone. We just haven't thought deeply enough about it, in my opinion, to really get training for athletes right. And yeah, it carries over to everyone, to everyday jokes like I love all the different strength sports and I see this applying and I see it being applied to strongman and to weightlifting and to CrossFit and to, you know, every, every endeavor. It's just, to me it's like a new underpinning and it's so simple once you kind of get the concepts and it can just help people to enjoy their stuff more because so many people, you know, the majority of the world don't train and they're missing out on the joy of training, which sucks. And then those who do train are in pain because we haven't had the logic right. And so that's not ideal either. There's a very small percentage of people who really get to enjoy a relatively pain free body and achieve things to a high level.

I think when we spoke to Phil Maffetone a couple of weeks ago, he's got the math formula of the 180 minus the age to build the aerobic base and he was saying that, and it's true, most People that I've spoke to and talked to about the math formula will say, oh, but that's too slow for me. You know, I'm different. I need to add 5 beats per minute or 10 beats per minute because I can't run that slow. I'm, you know, I'm more advanced than that. And it's in the same way. I suppose it's the same with, with your system where you'll ask people to do this stuff to begin with and left to their own devices, they'll kind of flick forward to the next, you know, oh, I'm past this. You know, this is too, you know, I'll move to the next level or I can do this with more load. And I think that's a very. It's probably, It's a very human thing, but like I think you said, it's possibly a very male thing. I'm not sure, you know, where, where you kind of just. You want to skip to the next level all the time, you know, and you don't want to. You, you, you think you're kind of more advanced than you are. Well, you don't really appreciate the, like you say the time it takes and the, the laying the foundations with the. Not even the regressions, just the foundations, you know, so having a coach to actually say, no, hold on, you're going to stay on this program for the next, you know, this, this, this variation for the next two or three weeks until you're ready to progress is extremely powerful, isn't it?

Yeah. You know, guilty. Several times over already. It's easier said than done, but it's the journey.

Yeah. How are you? You still there? Yeah. Paul's still there. Yep.

Cool.

I'm still there. It was a funny old sound then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was gonna say that wasn't. That wasn't me.

It wasn't me. Someone's doing some drilling. There's all sorts of construction here. Montenegro's on fire. So.

Okay.

I mean, the thing is, I mean, you work with elite athletes and you know what it is to regress even elite athletes. So from the average, average individual looking to get back on track, get fit, reclaim their health, then, you know, if you're not doing the basics and not trying and not working on some of these earlier progressions, then you're really overestimating your place, I would say.

Yeah, there's generally a big gap somewhere, and those big gaps are where injuries happen. And it's tends to be a loop that athletes get stuck in where they get an injury and Then because they still have to go to training, then they get really strong in the upper body, especially with the lower body injury, and they get really strong in the upper body and then they have to carry that around. They shift more of the protein from the lower body to the upper body because that's where the training volume is. And then you have to go back and it's worse again. Often. Yeah, we don't understand this philosophy of really like rebuilding the foot, rebuilding the calf and then something else goes, you know, so often with one injury, then the other side, you know, the hamstring goes, you know, it's, you get an ankle on one side and then you get a hamstring on the other side or those sorts of things. So yeah, I, I can see it making a big difference. It's really been athlete led for the most part that there are more and more like Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA coaches who are in the system and working with Ben and it is definitely becoming more accepted. I've had there's two EPL teams that I discuss the, you know, the system with, the guys leading their programs, a bunch of guys in Australia as well. So it is happening. But I know a lot more athletes who are doing it on the side and have kind of brought it to their coach and whatnot. Like it's, it's being led often by the athlete because they're like, yeah, I dealt with that crap for like 10 years and now I fixed it. And now you better understand how I fixed it because you probably should have known this, but at least now you're going to know. Like I've had that conversation with, you know, actually having that conversation yesterday with the cricketer played in the England team as well. So it's, it is happening and it can help a lot of coaches if they're willing to just have a look at it, experience it. You know, you guys have been doing that. It's not the solution to everything. It's, it's a foundational piece that then allows you to go and do whatever it is you want to do, whether that's lifting or cricket or whatever it is.

It's interesting because we often have a discussion with our guests about kind of peer reviewed science and what's being studied in the universities and what's accepted kind of dogma, et cetera. And there is generally one consensus that if something works, people at the higher level of sport will be integrating it because they will notice very quickly whether or not it makes a difference to the performance of their athletes. If your strength and Conditioning program is not effective. You will know very quickly in the performance of the team. So I expect this is probably expanding unless you use the appropriate word, going viral because it is starting to see results very quickly and you're not having to wait for peer reviewed papers.

It's going to be a long time. A lot of the movements have, there's like zero studies on training a bunch of the movements that are in the system. So what are you going to do? What is going to happen is, or what's possible that could happen that we've been discussing is, look, we've got 20, 30, whatever it is, however many tens of thousands of people are going to be on this program, we can actually verify their last set. And so we could probably actually do some really good research because there are people who have continuity of two years on this program or 12 weeks or whatever it's going to be. But you can pull out whatever cohort you want as well, the age, training history, the injury history. So there is actually potentially an opportunity within this system to do some real research. I think the, you know, people in engineering make a lot of fun of nutrition science and exercise sports science because of the level of control that you're able to exercise. It's not a criticism of the researchers themselves. They're doing amazing things and they're doing their best. Who have they got to work with? You know, how do they actually control for what they want to do? Do they have the ability to be there watching the sets and making sure the form is good? I don't know any studies where they've actually got video footage of the last set over the whole 12 weeks for every member of the study. You know, do they have them training three, four times a week? Do they, you know, none of that, none of that stuff to my knowledge has existed before. So there is a chance, there is a possibility that this thing is going to have an impact on just redefining, I guess the science behind things. Are a lot of PhD and physiotherapists and what do they call them in the US Having a mind blank, but they call them pts over there.

Physical therapists.

Physical therapists. Physiotherapists. Yeah, there's a lot of those sort of guys in the program. There are a number of people who are master students and whatnot. So there is a real possibility that this can become recognized in that way. Charles always said, you know, if you wait for the research then you're going to be a few decades behind. And he's proven that to be True in a lot of ways. So, yeah, the athletes are going to wait.

We had Paul McIlroy on a few, a couple of times and he was saying, you know, like, about all the, about lots of research and stuff like that. He's like, you know, you can't even research and like, get funding for research into heart disease and cancer and things like that. So no one's going to be researching into like, knee joint pain and what have you. So you've got to, you've just got to, you've just got to move with it and go with what works. And if, if you can get the momentum, like, you guys have got, you know, it works, it works, it works. And then like you say you're getting loads and loads and loads of examples of it. It's like, right, okay, there's your research now, you know, let's go from there.

And there have been a lot of, you know, there has been a lot of feedback where you do think, you know, changes happen to the system as well. Like, okay, work, we need. Something's going wrong here. Like, we're going too aggressively with this. Like, how can we slow this down? One example of a change in the system was with the Nordic, which is really one of the big symbols of the ATG system, is a lot of athletes get to being able to do full Nordics, you know, and Nordic curls have been around forever. Very, very few people have ever achieved the full Nordic, the Martin St. Louis or the cheetah reps that, you know, Ben's able to do and a lot of the coaches and athletes are able to do. Now it's become more of a buy in or, you know, and it's cool that it's like, how many naughty curls can you do instead of, what do you bench? And I think, like, that kind of shift is a, is an important one. Like, bench press is great and it tells you a lot of things about different things. But for a running athlete, I'll take the Nordic any day of the week. We were having issues with the Nordic, with people blowing up their tendons. Not blowing them up, but just getting sore tendons and causing irritation. So we brought in the short range work in the same way that we've been doing for the knee. I was sort of bringing that idea of, hey, I'm pretty sure this is going to work exactly the same way, because I actually had the experience myself already. I tried too hard on the Nordics and went in hard and then had to sort of scale it back. And I found that if you do A lot of stuff with it, with the heel close to the butt, short range, where there's no stretch on the connective tissue, that you can really bring a lot of blood flow into that area and get rid of tendon pain very quickly. Where it might have hung around for months and weeks and years and you get that muscle atrophy and it's just that negative downward spiral. It can be avoided. And in the west side Bible system, a lot of this stuff like Louis kind of has there within his system. I just don't think people have understood the like, why it's there. I don't know if he has. You know, I haven't heard him talk about the strength curve being, you know, the driver of it. But the hamstring, banded hamstring curls are part of their system. And just that that exercise itself can be a really good one. And then we have the monkey foot variation as well to work the sort of shortened position. And people can use a hamstring curl machine if they go to the gym as well. But it's. The system's all set up so that someone can train from home. There's full body weight version and then there's like within a few hundred. For a few hundred dollars, you can be, you know, set up to do the whole system at home, which is cool. Cause there are a lot of people on a shoestring doing, doing atg, A lot of young, young athletes and whatnot.

Which is what, what day? Because obviously Monday is International Bench press day. What day is going to be International Nordic Day, do you reckon?

Depends on game day, you know.

Well, it's got to be Thursday, Thor's Day.

There you go, the connection straight up. But yeah, that's good.

I was just going to ask you, Keegan, in terms of. On a slightly kind of philosophical level, I suppose, around the system and the way that you're training with the kind of whole ancestral health kind of movement and the kind of looking back at, you know, what our ancestors would have done stuff. Do you see that? The kind of work that you're doing now and the movement, I suppose, the ranges of movement and things that you're using. Do you see it as you're helping people kind of regain something that's been lost as opposed to create something that's new within, you know, human movement? And the way that we move, because obviously the way we live nowadays is so far removed from. From any time in, in evolution. Do you see that you're actually the. Putting people through these ranges of motion and gaining strength in these ranges of motion is actually something that is a human should be, you know, ancestrally a kind of a human trait, as it were.

Yeah, I think it's a great lens to look at things through, James. Like if there is a historical precedent for it. If, you know, so called primitive man or people in cultures that don't have chairs and don't have, you know, don't live the lifestyle that we have, what do they have that we don't? That's a good lens to look at things through. And yeah, when you look at it through that lens a hundred percent the system is trying to get you back to what you would have been able to do had you sort of just grown up having to be athletic. Whether it's just, you know, running away from chasing animals and running away from tigers or being prepared for the local tribe to come over the hill and you're ready to go. Whatever it is. Like I think it's, it is the system, it's the most logical system I've seen to be prepared for that. And I think that's really what it's trying to solve is to get back to, okay, how we meant to be put together. And the child example is another good one. You know, the 10 year old doesn't bother warming up, they just go and sprint. Now they don't have a lot of muscle development. The problem is that as we get that muscle development the way that we get the muscle development, because we don't understand the concept of actually stretching the muscle as we strengthen it, so we get a lot of connective tissue development at the same time, then we become fragile. So that's that the long range strength component is going to have different adaptations. So athletes who don't have good range of motion on the RDL or slant board Jefferson curl are going to be much more prone to a hamstring curl, even if they're strong on the Nordics. You know, all the rage now is to do the eccentric Nordic with the Nord board. And it's fine, but I personally worked with one of the highest profile athletes in Australia this year who's had like six hamstring strains. And I said to him, what's going on? And he'd been with a PhD scientist who was obviously doing his best. And they said, yeah, you're super strong, you should be good to go. But he just had another one and it's like mid career. It's going to cost him millions of dollars if he can't get his stuff together. And he's gone on and been, I think he's in the team of the year and he's been one of the most valuable players in Australian, one of the Australian sports. So what we did was I said, well, can you touch your toes? And he said, no. I said, well, why don't we start there? But there are a lot of people who know their hamstring research will tell you that doesn't matter. And actually it turns out that, well, you went and played every game this year and I've seen it over and over again that if you can lay down more connective tissue and improve the quality of the connective tissue and take some of the resting tension out of the muscle. They're trying to take resting tension out of the muscle. They're doing massage over and over again. Guess what? If you actually just lengthen that whole unit, then there's less tension in the system. And there are a lot of people who make the case, oh no, you need the tendon stiffness. That's one of the pushbacks against the ATG system. We want that really tight calf. So the Achilles is really tight, so it can be really explosive and jump really high. It's like how explosive weightlifters. Klokov can do a chest to floor pancake and he can snatch 200 kilos. He can power snatch 150. How much more explosive do you need to be? His back's flexible as anything. His hamstrings are flexible as anything. And he can, you know, he's got absolutely phenomenal power. You can see it with Ben as well. He's very, very bendy and he's throwing down windmill dunks when he couldn't, you know, couldn't touch the ring when he was.

See, I find that amazing because, like, to me that's, it's not necessarily obvious, but in my experience and from some of the people who we've spoken to on here, that makes perfect sense. You know, if you can't touch your toes, your hamstring is not going to function as well as it, as well as it should. I mean we had. And you're saying about the pat, like powerlifts. I've been watching them. I've been following Martin's. Is it Martin's Lissis, the, the world's strongest man. And he's been working with the.

Oh, what's he called?

The squat university guy. And, and he's kind of putting him back together because he's just, he's had loads of injuries, doesn't he? And he's like, no, you need better Range of motion, you need this and that and then you'll be able to get strength within that as well. And because some people think you need to compromise that don't to. To actually get strength. And then we had David Keown, who's a, on the other week, who's a kettlebell sport guy, and he said, you know, he's been, he's been over, spoke to the, you know, trained with the Russians in kettlebell sport and they are ridiculously mobile. If your shoulders don't move, you can't do long cycle, clean and jerk. You just can't do it. Or you can, but like you can't do as many and then you're going to get injured. Whereas if you can, you know, if you can swing your arms around a lot. He does this thing on the wall. He puts his arm on the wall like that and kind of goes underneath it and all the way around and then all the way back again. And I had a go at that the other day and I can't, I was, I was quite a way off it.

Then you have, then you have. So then we had Stuart McGill on and, you know, he sees a lot of chronic cases of like, where everything's gone wrong and the back is in a position where that is so fragile that it's affected not only careers or ruined lives, but he talks about like, you cannot have maximal stiffness and flexibility. You cannot be able to squat a thousand pounds, but then also have spinal flexibility. So where do you work within that continuum? Because obviously you're seeing, I mean, I've heard stories of Ben helping someone squat £1,000. So you are working with a very wide ranging population. Where does this kind of tendon flexibility, the stiffness, this kind of suppleness come in and how do you balance it?

Yeah, I think there's some, there's still work to be done with this. I think there's still some mystery here and that's going to be fun to see it unfold. But you see, Stephanie Cohen is able to do weighted squats. How many powerlifters are comfortable with doing that? Would they lift a little bit more weight if they had that health in their tissues where they were happy to do that? I'm pretty sure most of the elite guys would be very intimidated by the idea of doing a sissy squat with weight. And they'd probably be in a lot of pain before they're even through half the range of motion that Steffi Cohen's able to get through. It's going to be really interesting to answer that question, how much is the passive tension of the tissue contributing to the stiffness and the lower back? If we're talking about powerlifters, Louis Simmons is probably the thing that he's most well known for is the reverse hyper, which is tractioning and getting some life back into that area, getting some movement back into that area so it's not just a block. And he broke his back twice. And he credits being able to still be a world class lifter in his 50s and 60s because he had that machine. So I'd be more inclined to listen to Louis, to be honest. But I know that McGill's work, as you say, he's working with the worst of the worst. And when you're working with the worst of the worst, then you have to look at, okay, what helps the worst of the worst. And I think he's got a winning formula for people who've lost all the muscle because there's just so much pain in the area and they can't function. But not everybody's worst of the worst. And you actually want to go even if you are worse to the worst. Ideally you would go from being worse of the worst to being best of the best. Now, maybe that's not realistic, but let's see, you know, let's see how far some of these people can go. And I know for sure that there are a lot of people in our community who are told, yeah, you're always going to live with this. And they don't live with it anymore. Whether it's backs or knees or. And it's just about. It's not like we don't deal with injury, we don't deal with pain. We just deal with ability. So can you do this? Well, what if you could do one millimeter more? Okay, you can do one millimeter more. You feel good. Okay, let's try another, you know, centimeter. Like baby, baby steps. And often the body's more adaptive than we give it credit for. You know, you have to. Excuse me, you have to give it the stimulus and give it the opportunity to change. And if you do that, then a lot of good things can happen. So I think it's, you know, there's definitely a place for partial range. There's a place for creating stiffness. But there's also an important conversation to be had about how much is this really contributing versus making us fragile.

It's interesting. There was a podcast, I believe, and please do correct me if I get this wrong, and I thought it was incredibly interesting because you've got Some people who just seem to have natural athleticism and you call them natural athletes. But we would see it from the outside perspective. You say he's just been an athlete all his life. He's got it. He's genetically gifted. And I think, and if I'm recalling this correctly, you and Ben were talking about whether their tendon health and development inform their muscle growth. And someone who is more athletic has their muscles have grown in line with better tendon health than someone who has poorer tendon flexibility and the muscles have grown around the tendons less effectively for their athletic endeavors. Have I got that right or have I just made that up?

I don't know if I'd explain it. I know where you're going with it.

I hope you know where I'm going with this.

I don't know. Yeah. On this topic, if you confine any athlete to bed rest, if you make them obese, if you break their bones, if you snap their, make them go through multiple ACL surgeries, then at some point they're not going to recover and they're not going to get back to where they were. If you give anyone bed rest for two weeks, then they become a much weaker athlete. They're at huge risk as soon as they go back to their activity. So every, it's always the environment. Like, the environment is the big driver of everything. What you see with these naturally gifted athletes. People talk about it, okay, this guy's never lifted weights and he can go and do a Nordic. It's because we're thinking about training. Wrong. Strength training is actually poor terminology. We need to just be talking about force and we need to be talking about tension. And if the person's done a lot of tension training, then it should be no surprise that they can handle a lot of tension. So if someone's a super high level sprinter and they're just smashing that foot into the ground, you know, you watch someone on the track who can really run and you're like, wow, like they're just whacking that floor. And like, this is just, you know, you can see why people ping hamstrings when they go and do that and haven't been doing it for a time. So it's no mystery that they can do a Nordic. They've been strength training. It's just that they do it on the track. It's tension. It's tension training. The muscle has the qualities, the tendons have the qualities. Now the way that we develop the muscle is going to have a huge impact. So if we become Very muscle dominant by training like a bodybuilder, never training the lengthened positions. If you want to tear a muscle, I don't know if any of you guys, you know, but if you needed to tear a muscle, you would make it short and weak. And if you can have that muscle be short and weak, then all you need to do is expose it to length, load at speed, and you'll be able to snap that muscle or tendon. Right? And so that's kind of what we do. And that's how a lot of people train themselves when they just go and train, because they have no idea of these concepts. Where human engineering requires that the muscle is long, strong and can handle speed, but you can get to being able to handle speed. It turns out that we've just sort of discovered this with atg, is that you can get to being able to handle a lot of that explosive tension simply by getting to the point of a lot of load under stretch. So if you get to the point of being able to handle really heavy rdls, then it turns out it's very difficult to try and damage your hamstrings with top speed sprinting once you've got that real long range and very strong. So I think that my experience is that anyone can change this as well, as long as you respect the time that it takes for the tendons to change and then also the time that's going to take for the connective tissues, you know, for the ligaments, for the. Especially in the knee, like the meniscus, but even in the elbows, a lot of people have trouble with the elbows and they hate. They hate on movements, you know, they hate on the French press or the skull crushers. We just need to think about, okay, this is not a muscle movement for me at the moment. This is a joint dominant movement. I just need to focus on the joint sensation and rate the joint sensation of each set.

Right.

Rather than rating the muscle perceived exertion, because who cares about that? Because the muscle isn't the limiting factor. The limiting factor is my joint can't handle this. And this is. These are kind of concepts that I'm encouraging coaches to consider, philosophies that we're sharing with atg. For coaches, my experience is that once these concepts are understood, then a lot of nails and frustration can be undone, or at least understood. At least when you mess yourself up, you know why you did it, you know how to go back in the opposite direction, undo it. We're still going to make those mistakes. We're still going to have injuries. But I think this logic is just. Well, I've seen this logic, you know, gets us back on track sooner.

And that's an excellent, excellent way to look at it and an excellent way for a layperson to understand it as well, I think, because it's easy to explain. Does your joint hurt? Because everyone knows what a joint is and like, you know, and everyone knows if, what pain is. So it's like, does it hurt? Yes. Right, okay, don't do that then. And then find someone who can help you, help you stop it hurting. That's an easy way for anyone to look at it, I think.

And sometimes you just need to do more blood flow before you go and do it. Sometimes if you do the reverse sleds and then you do your step ups, then you get a different sensation in your joints and for the triceps as well. But if we understand there's a big difference between doing tricep press downs or behind the back, you know, barbell, tricep kickbacks. These are short range exercises that will pump the muscle without stretching the connective tissues so that then you might find you can go on French press and go, go nuts. You might be able to do sets of five nice and heavy without an issue. If you do that prep first, where. If you went in and did the French press first because you didn't know about this technology, and you go, oh, my triceps are not good. And so I won't train triceps, you know, like that sort of stuff happens, or, you know, I'll can that movement. That movement's bad for me. It's not the movement's bad, it's just that your muscle can do it, but your joint can't just yet. So almost always there's a solution of either if you slow it down, decrease the load, or if you do better prep before it, then oftentimes you can actually do it. So people say, oh, I can't do this movement. I'm like, well, can you do it without any weight? Right. Can you do a French press with no weight? Yes. Okay. And they giggle at you. Can you do it with one kilo? Yes. Okay. Can you do it with two? Yes. So at some point there's a, there's a, you start to get training load and adaptation. And if you let them smash the triceps with the tricep push down, then happy days, you know, everyone goes home happy that that muscle's been, you know, trained hard and you got a pump and, and you just go gentle on the stuff. That you need to, you know, you're only ready to go gentle on. So you've got to earn that long range, heavy stuff, lower reps, higher speeds. But if we do just understand that once we do have that, then we're athletic again, then it does actually give you a base. You still, if you haven't played basketball for a very long time, you still probably want to get into it gradually and do some other stuff. But we have had a lot of people, a lot of guys have dunked in their 40s, never dunked in their life, played basketball their whole life, and then they dunk in their 40s. Something's going right when that happens. And in the system, they're only encouraged to go on the court once a week at the most, or twice a week for dunking. Um, someone will do a bit of extra, you know, they play place in one on one. But it's not, it's not built on plyometrics at all, you know, and that's, that's one of the other interesting things about it because in the basketball world, there are a lot of people who just tell you do plyometrics. The sports already plyometric. If that was going to work, it would have already worked. Like it's. And it works until it doesn't. When you have a niggle, then, then you're, then you're jammed because you can't use that at all. Where this scales, where you can always use it, there's always a level that you can work on things. And yeah, it's a fun time. And it is kind of an information war to an extent. Like, I'm not out to defame anyone or to battle to debate, but there is meritocracy of ideas. You know, like, the best ideas do need to sort of go forward and it's just up to us to test them and make him our own and challenge them. And if there are things here that people are hearing, coaches or athletes are hearing and going, hey, like, yeah, but you're missing this. I'm happy, like, I'd love to have that conversation. I'm happy to hear, you know what I'm, what I'm missing. That joint dominant kind of concept has just been, it's been ruminating a little bit because, yeah, you might be able to do the movement with your muscle and we're doing the right things with the muscle, but if we're not listening to the joint, then we're. Yeah, it cannot work. The system doesn't work.

I think the. I'm sorry I was just going to say, I think with the. Like you said, there's lots of different, you know, viewpoints out there and there's some people who are. Who on the face of it or on the surface of it, appear to be in. In total contradiction to, to your stuff, you know, where it's, you know, limit the range of motion and go to 90 and all the rest of it. But I think when you actually talk in, you know, in depth to someone like yourself and, and you look at the program in depth and you realize that you're not recommending that everybody barbell back squats, ask to grass. You know what I mean? You're kind of. It's not either you go to 90 or you go full range. It's kind of building things up very gradually and like you say, really listening to your body and working your way through the progressions and understanding that it's a joint centric sort of system and everything has to be right before. Before you start to stress yourself in these kind of longer ranges and certainly longer ranges under load. So I think, like I said earlier, I think on the surface, people look at Instagram and can very quickly polarize people and say, well, this person's saying, do only this. This person's saying, do only that. But in reality, when you actually speak to someone like yourself, it's actually a far more nuanced kind of system and a far more nuanced program. And, and, you know, you're not encouraging everybody to do. To do anything. You're encouraging each individual to do what's right for them. Which, which I think is the sensible, balanced, you know, educated and most responsible thing to do, you know?

Yeah. I mean, Mark Bell and a lot of guys that are trying this program, they're crazy strong, and so they can continue to be crazy strong and just play around with baby weights with this stuff. There's no stress in the nervous system. There's no, you know, no, there's no need to get psyched up or extra caffeine or smelling salts. And within a few months might find, yeah, I can run again. Yeah, I can get out of bed early, you know, in the morning with no worries. I'm not scared of picking up my child anymore off the floor. Like, it can be huge quality of life wins with minimal training intensity in some of this stuff. So you can attack it from different angles depending on how much, you know where you want to go. Not everybody needs to go to the point where they can do all the, all the things that Ben's able to do, you know, some of the best athletes in the system. I'm certainly not one of the best athletes in the system and I'm okay with that. You know, I'm 38, I don't play basketball, I don't tend to do much sport. I love my training and I'm happy with my gym work sort of thing. So it is different for me compared to Ben, who still has a possibility in his mind that he's going to play in the NBA, you know, so his, his, his demands in his mind are very different to mine. And that's the cool thing about the system. There's a lot of 60, 70 year olds that are using it as well and they, they're getting what they want. It's, it's interesting to consider when you think about someone saying, you know, don't do any full range stuff, you have to consider like whether they're working with other people who say something else. You know, if they're, if their strength coach says that, but then they have a mobility coach or they have a physiotherapist or they just, the athlete just knows that they feel better when they stretch, then doesn't really matter what the strength coach's opinion is because that's not what's actually happening. And yeah, I think in a lot of cases that probably is what's happening with, with a lot of the elite athletes that you see in those sorts of training systems. And it can work, you know, for a time it can work until it doesn't work. I'm a huge fan of partial movements, partial range of motion movements. And there are a lot of partial movements within the ATG system. If you look at step ups and things, they're phenomenal for peaking and for position specificity. But you have to look at the whole athlete and what they're doing. And oftentimes that's not necessarily public. And you also want to look at, through the lens of what's worked historically. Let's look outside of the gym. What happens to ballerinas. What, how are the, how are soldiers trained in preparation for the, for the world wars? You know, where did that information come from? And if you look at the manuals that they had for the movements that those athletes, you know, athletes, those soldiers were doing, like that was life and death. That was like, who's going to be the winner here? And they weren't messing around. You know, they needed people who were physically capable and they were going all the way to the floor like they were. And they were working from the Ground up. If you look at the movements they were doing, there's a lot of high rep stuff, but it's. It's very similar to the ATG movements when you. When you look at it, the guy, I think it's Henry Ling. It's a Swedish name. I don't know how you say it, but he was apparently deciphering the ancient Greek texts and put together a system for the military, and that ended up being adopted by the Germans and the British. So that is the historical origin, according to a historian who's published a. A few books. He was actually in the ATG for coaches as well, but he pulled up all the images and told the story. When you look at the world, if you look at the world through a straw and you think pro athletes and you think, what are these guys doing then? Yeah. But if you zoom out a little bit, you look at dances and you look at break dances and you look at different cultures, you look at Asians and you look at Africans and you look at indigenous communities and how long can they sit in the squat for? They can sit there for half an hour. They can sit there for an hour and they wouldn't think anything of it. How many Westerners can do that? So is there something wrong with the position? You look at the knee replacement statistics. In Asia, they have a lot less knee replacements. In China, they're much, much, much less likely to have a knee replacement.

And you know how many Cossack dancers have knee replacements? Yeah.

You look at some of that stuff and you think, like, our athletes are terrible. Right? Like, if you're working with a rugby team and then you watch those guys and you just think, like, well, maybe we're missing something. That's. That's really how I sort of went. You know, I went and did a lot of work with Ido Portal. I did some work with Coach Summer gymnastic bodies. Because I was like, there's something missing that athletic training just isn't. Like, these dancers are, like, so much more athletic than us. And why don't we do that stuff? Like, why don't we know about that stuff?

And have you ever watched them Singing in the Rain?

Doesn't ring a bell.

Gene Kelly, the Gene Kelly film. Honestly, some of the stuff they're doing. That is bonkers. It is, absolutely. My missus loves it, so. She loves musicals and stuff. We watched it. We actually went to the cinema to see a couple of years.

A brilliant film.

Honestly. It's good film. Yeah. But honestly, some of the stuff, him and the other guy, are doing is. It's. You watch it and you're like, wow, that is. That's proper strength. But fast as well, like proper tap dancing and all that. And it's just. It's bonkers. It puts. Puts anyone in the gym to shame, honestly. It's ridiculous.

And we. It's easy to sort of just pretend it's not happening and just. I'm athletic because I can. I can lift. I can definitely squat more than him. Like, I'm fine.

Yeah, you watch, like, they do it. They do like a tap move where it's like a pistol squat and they're just swapping legs. Like, tap, tap, tap, tap. Like that. I mean, that is. That's not easy on the knees, and.

It'S hard to do. Well, I'm expecting that on your Instagram now, Peter.

Yeah, don't worry. Sean used to do some tap dancing as well. She's got the shoes and everything, so I'll have a go.

But I think if it doesn't work.

It'S because her shoes are too small.

Right, okay. Good excuse. Yeah. Well, one of the things you said when you mentioned the meritocracy and kind of the information kind of war, in a way is. And that is. That is something you certainly. You guys have got down, is that you have created. Created a very, very compelling narrative. A narrative that's both one side, an interesting story from Ben, and then kind of the second part is that you communicate it very well. And then obviously you have a lot of success stories. And that is very compelling. And that's why I think the kind of. What's the word? The tentacles of the system have kind of spread far and wide. It's a very compelling narrative that you've managed to develop. And it is important to do that.

In this modern era, I think, and in strength as well as, you know, other areas, without getting too political, it is important for people to think and experience and question and, you know, test ideas and then, you know, talk about what works for you. And I think if we all do that, then we'll be okay if we sort of just trust the gods of strength and movement and think, oh, well, everything's been worked out, and we just, you know, listen to the authorities on movement. I just don't have good experience with that. You know, I've made so many mistakes by sort of blindly following things. If we can be more intuitive and let yourself be the judge, I think that's really why so many people want to recommend this system to their friends. And it has gone, you Know, just on its own into this global adoption because people rave about it because they're like, I had this thing for 10 years, I tried all this stuff. I had the injections, I had the surgeries, and now I don't have to do any of that stuff. And now I can X, Y, Z. So once if you have that kind of experience, then you're going to become somewhat evangelical about it. So, yeah, that's what I encourage people to do, is test it against your own experience and see what it gives you. And yeah, even having the honesty or awareness to recognize whether you're doing what you're meant to be doing or whether you're just making things up and going on a different. And there's nothing wrong with making up as long as you know that you're making it up. We're constantly experimenting with different movements and different ways of doing things. But yes, it is a very interesting time in the world for information in general. I think it's going to continue to be like this, a battle of ideas and who's got the solutions, the best solutions and the solutions that work the most and most often. And I'm excited for that challenge. I think it's a good way for it to be. And ultimately it's accelerating the rate of change. Things are changing very, very fast in lots of aspects of technology and life. So, yeah, it's time that training, strength training caught up as well. I feel like we're in the dark ages. Like if we were building bridges and skyscrapers with the level of consensus, the level of consensus that there is in the engineering world and what's gone on there for thousands of years in the strength training world, we don't have that. You know, the bridges would be falling down, the skyscrapers would be like every known would be safe to walk the streets because we're all doing different things and we don't really know what we're doing. And if we can admit that and say, hey, you know, let's get to work. Because most of society doesn't even train because half the time when they do, they do a bunch of crap that makes them feel worse and tells, you know, so they stop or it's causing, you know, it's causing pain. They're persistent through it, but it's causing pain and they're missing the joy of it. So we do need to work this stuff out. I do think it's one of the biggest problems facing humanity at the moment. It does sort of sound superficial to talk about strength training and movement and whatever but it's a huge part of the human experience and it massively impacts the mind. You know, like people talk about, there's no differentiation between the body and the mind. So when you give someone back the ability to move, then you're giving them a lot. And in my opinion, strength trainers, personal trainers, athletic coaches, it's one of the most important roles in society and humanity. Food production is up there. You know, education. If we had an amazing schooling system or education system, you know, then those. Those are really, really important roles. From my perspective, a lot of the best minds are going into legal stuff and app building and technology and this and that, and we're progressing with all this stuff to do after you're, you know, after you messed up your body. There's not that much, you know, money intelligence research going into this area, and there should be. And, you know, it's up to us to kind of take our profession more seriously, I think, and, yeah, be. Have the courage to kind of have these. These conversations and it is happening and it's getting better. So, you know, we just need to knuckle down. I think, as we got a lot of work to do and a lot of room for improvement, I think that's.

Probably a good place to end the conversation. I think you wrap that up really nicely. And I like the fact that you guys seem to be the ones wanting to take on that mantle and take the weight on your shoulders of pushing this thing forward, because it's a big.

Job.

And you've got a lot of minds to. To kind of not convince necessarily, but there's a lot of people with a lot of opinions in this industry and it'll be an exciting battle. But anyway, James, do you have anything you'd like to end the podcast with?

No. Just to say it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Keegan, and having listened to you on other podcasts before and been following you on social media, it's. Yeah. So that was a really, really interesting conversation. I love the idea of you almost waking people up and reminding them and training them to be, you know, the humans that they were destined to be, you know, rather than the humans that we seem to be becoming at the moment. So I love that idea of, you know, turning back the clock and recovering our ancestral movement. I think that's. It's a powerful, powerful lens to view things through, like you said. And it was, yeah, fascinating talking to you. So thank you, Peter.

Thanks so much.

Yeah, similar. That was. That was. That was great. I love what Keegan said at the end there, that was just fantastic. I mean, you know, years ago, people moved more. You know, there wasn't as much technology around people, you know, kids played out in the street more and all of that sort of stuff. So what he's just said there about what we're doing here, this podcast, anything like, things like this, things like the ATG movement, all of that is, like. Is becoming more and more important.

And.

And I love that because it makes it. It's just made me think we're doing this for the right reasons and we should keep doing it and we need to do more of it and all of that. So it's.

It's.

I really like that. And hopefully the people who are listening take that on board, you know, and start to. To listen to this stuff, because otherwise, you know, life just gets harder, unfortunately. This will make it easier. So, yeah, thanks for that, Keegan. That was great.

Thanks so much. There's never been more demand for good information in this area. There's more people getting coached around their health and around their training or even life coaching. There's more of that happening than ever before. People want help and support. So, yeah, this is. These sort of forums are really important for that. And every coach out there who's doing it, like, just value yourself that little bit more, take it a bit more seriously, and you can build a good career around it, and it can be a really fulfilling area to work in. So, yeah, thanks so much for having me on here. And once people experience the truth for themselves with this, whatever that is, tends to lead to asking better questions in other areas of life as well. So that's the goal.

If someone is interested in finding out more about you and the system and what you offer, I mean, what's the best route for someone to go through?

Yeah, so if you're a coach, then ATG for coaches is a clear path in terms of getting that coaching support if you're not a coach. I have another program called Uncommon Success Education, and there's all sorts of weird and wacky things in there that are designed to take you from where you are now to a bit more of whatever you define as success. So, yeah, there's a lot of things that sort of helped me to get my life together, from being fairly down and out in my teens and early twenties to enjoying life and having a lot of good things to look forward to. So they're the two programs that I run at the moment.

Fantastic. We could put those in the show notes on YouTube. That'd be great. Well, thanks a lot. Keegan. It's been an absolutely fascinating podcast, particularly as I've been following the system for a very long time and gone through zero myself, as I said. And I've gone recently gone back to zero because, and I'm quite glad I did, having spoken to you, talking about sometimes just knowing, you know, really mastering some of those basics and because I'm, I've got a kind of training load that's quite high. As soon as I moved back to zero, my body just started feeling better. So I'm really glad that I've done that. And it's been a really big part of, I think just my kind of general joint health, which is at times tested quite significantly. So I might pick your brains. Once we press, once we press. Stop. On record.

More than welcome.

Yeah, my aches and pains. But anyway, thanks a lot guys again. For those of you listening, please do refer back to any of our other episodes. We've got some of the best thinkers out there in the fitness industry and as we've spoken about earlier, you know, we want to get the brightest and the best on this picture podcast. We want to introduce you to some really deep thinking individuals who are interested in self development, interested in getting you strong, interested in getting you eating well. So please like this podcast, share it, subscribe whatever they ask you to do on these platforms and join our group, the Health Oddity Group, on Facebook and we'll see you next week.

You've been listening to Health Odyssey with Peter Land, Paul Bassett and James St. Pierre to get your regular fix of hype free health. You can subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your favorite podcasts. You can find out more on today's and other topics@healthodity.com or find us on Facebook or Instagram by searching for Health Oddity.