The Future Of Athletic Development w/ Keegan Smith (New Athlete Project)
Keegan Smith outlines the New Athlete framework, which develops athletes across nine dimensions like Acrobat and Endurer instead of single-sport specialization. The approach builds foundational skills in juggling, dance, and tumbling, drawing from circus traditions, CrossFit, and Soviet training systems to improve transfer and athleticism.
Chapters
Keegan.
Phil.
How you going, brother?
Good to have you.
Yeah. Cool. New athlete. What is it?
It's about building a different type of athlete with a different paradigm. Yeah, I've always wanted to do that, but I didn't really know how to put it into words and I feel like it's finally come together. The idea is that when you work on a specific sport, you start to turn your back on other qualities. And it's those other qualities that can make you better within the sport that you're doing. But also if you look at like just what is an amazing athlete, whatever qualities you're rejecting as an athlete or whatever abilities you're rejecting, you're not going to have. So there's. It goes from a through to I. I made it simple so that I can remember it. Acrobat, bowler, combatant dancer, endurer, fastest giant, health yogi and intellect. So there's all of these areas to develop of athleticism and every athlete will have them to some extent, some level of development. And within them, say for the bowler, you've got like your soccer ball and then you've got your hand juggling and then you've got your basketball. Yeah. So that there's. Within them, there's, there's other areas. Some people straight away will be like, where's the time in the day to do all this? But they're saying the same thing about CrossFit.
Yeah.
Know, look at what CrossFit did. Like, it's. The time is there. And it's like, okay, if I'm going to be training for the next 10 years, which qualities do I not want? Or if I'm going to give my boy the best shot in life. Yeah. Like which. Which of these do I want to cut out? And the answer is none of them. I want them all in there. I want to give him an opportunity. It's not about turning him into Messi or LeBron or whoever.
Yeah.
It's just, it's our nature to be able to use our abilities maximally. We feel amazing when we're using new abilities, when we're gaining new abilities. So this is three minutes of what new athlete is.
Nah, for sure. I think since I've been here, man, like just seeing how clear it is in terms of. Because there's the arguments at the moment where you just enforce or you just play your sport. This just bridges the gap because ultimately with any athlete there's a bit. There's a piece for each quality that that's trying to express on the field and you can't just get it from sports, you can't just get it from the gym. So it's like, where do you put it?
Yeah, I think it's a big missing piece that when I was working in footy, I knew they weren't as well rounded and I wanted to. I did make them do stuff that was like a bit beyond what a rugby player normally has to do. I made the players who didn't kick kick. I made the players who didn't throw long passes throw long passes. And that was part of this. But now it's a lot clearer. And we've got a professional Tonka athlete here at the moment. I know he knows he's getting better in what he's doing and all we're looking for is fractional transfer into his specific sport. And like for those specific sport athletes, for anyone who doesn't have a specific sport, it's an infinite game of expansion and having fun, playful with children. We've done this. Sport has been going in this direction for a long time of we need to do speed training, we need to do weight training and rugby, we need to do wrestle training. So we've been bringing these other disciplines in and the idea of general skill development, of we need to be doing juggling and bouncing and soccer ball and basketball or some boxing type footwork. That hasn't really come into the paradigm, but for me it's even more important than, or at least as important as doing your speed work and doing your wrestling weights. It's really important until you're big and then, you know, you could make the argument that some of these players be better off sinking more of their time into being better general athletes. And most athletes will tell you if they're honest that they were most athletic at around 15, 16, 17 when they played a bunch of different sports. And then they start to see that as they're doing their professional sports.
Yeah, it's really interesting because like I think about a lot of the qualities people try and build. Like I could touch a rim when I was a kid, 10 foot rim and I'm not tall and we didn't do any training at all. We just played rugby and jumped a lot and played a lot of sports, but it just worked.
And you need more and more weights because you think that that's the thing that you need to do. Yeah. And you can't touch the rim anymore. You don't even feel good about coming down from the height that you would have been touching the rim. Absolutely.
Really? Yeah. And that's where like I think now just rebuilding these capacities, you know, after 40 is, is pretty cool as well.
It's fun.
Yeah. Yeah. Where was the where with this? Where was it like? Because I know iteration after iteration, real movement, it's gone atg, it's gone where you're at now and then it's gone into new athlete. How did you consistently iterate what keep you on that iteration of it?
Yeah, some of it's just sort of life circumstances.
Yeah.
Like you were in the early days of Real Movement where it was small group, 12 month mentorship. Like we're all pretty tight. We got together in person quite a lot in Australia and then it went more international. Right around Covid we started doing more stuff with, with Ben Patrick and we started having a lot of American coaches and European coaches coming to network. So sort of by, in a Covid kind of push, pushed a little bit Ben Patrick's influence. He had a 50 product, I had a hundred dollar product. I went to $100 instead of $10,000. So there's a bit of just the situation. And then I knew that ATG was something the world needed to see more of and that had potential to become something you see in every gym around the world. So I went in, you know, really hard with supporting Ben with that and you know, he suggested to me one day, do you want to start ETG for coaches? You're on the coach's side.
Yeah.
And I just, I've always wanted to change the way the world trains. Like that's something I wrote down in 2013 when I was thinking big. Yeah, I want to change the way the world trades. That's where dead strength came from as well. Thinking about like, what's the method that the masses can really get great results.
For those who don't know what is the instrument?
It's pretty much taken from CrossFit. Like CrossFit had a lot of emoms, but they were making a chaotic of like 6 one week and then 7 the next and then 12 the week after and everything changing a bit too much. It's like a more systemized version where it's either 5 minutes or 10 minutes and there's specific starting percentages and you progress through it, makes every change session a game and it stops you from going too high on the intensity because if you choose too heavy a weight, you won't finish the block. Yeah. So it builds in some autoregulation, builds in some gamification, so you get the dopamine in the end, which is like I'm that kind of athlete as well, that I want to get a win, but if I always try and get a win with maximum weight, then I burn myself out or can get injured. So that's. It also stops you getting on your phone because the time is going to go off. That's a big part of it as well. No distractions. Works on that. Same concept as clusters. So it's really good for strength development. At the time, people thought it was rubbish because some people, because it didn't have the long rest periods and people thought you have to have three to five minute rests. You really don't have to have three to five minute rest. Yeah, CrossFit's proven that and it's gradually become more accepted. But at that time it wasn't really how people were thinking.
Yeah, I know a lot of people, man, and like yourself, you know, CrossFit had a lot of good. Dedicated to the world. Where do you think people misunderstood, like the adaptability that CrossFit athletes had?
Yeah, I think the original vision of Glasman, I'm not the number one historian, I never really did it myself, but they had flips, they had more complex gymnastics. They did have this vision of, at least in terms of it was a strength and conditioning program to make adaptable strength and conditioning athletes. They left out that skill piece. You can't catch, can't throw, can't kick, can't dance, can't do combat. Not much really. Tumbling like a little bit with the handstands and stuff. But it's amazing. You get jacked. Yeah, but it wanted to be that Swiss army knife tool that would. Every athlete would do it and it would produce a new. A new era of athletes. There's a few athletes that have gone into weightlifting off the back of it. And the powerlifter, that best powerlifter in the world now, he did crossfit for a couple of years. I think it's almost like triathlon's a great base for a lot of stuff because there's just so much work capacity and the ability to move for a long time. I think CrossFit kind of gives. Gives an athlete that, yeah, it's good, it's got its place and it's beautiful. But the learning curve tends to be. For a good athlete, the learning curve is like that first six to 12 months and then it's just you got to get bigger, you've got to get stronger and you start pushing against that thing of. Do I go steroids and peptides and like. Yeah, I wanted something different to that because I didn't want to go down that path. I didn't want to set that example for my children. I've traveled the world. I want to be on. On stuff and. And it may be for health and whatever. So, yeah, it's taken me a while to get to, like, what do. What do I. What do I believe in? And I always knew that circus was this other thing. Circus, I think, played a big role in Western culture in the past. It's still there in Russia, has lots of big circuses now. It's ridiculed and it's strength world and everything.
Like, there's a lot of that strength world came from circus.
The roots.
Yeah, 100%.
A lot of the roots are there.
Yeah.
The modern, Modern strength world doesn't look at it all and kind of just ridicules juggling and things like. That's what circus is. But, yeah, yeah, this idea of, like, the ultimate adaptable athlete like that, that's what excites me. And being able to then, you know, you've seen it. We went and played paddle today. Yeah, I played paddle for the first time two days ago.
Yeah.
And I was. I was honestly, like, there's so much joy from the shock of, like, I'm actually so much better at this than I would have been five years ago. And it feels good to be good. Like, it's in our nature to want to be good at stuff. And it doesn't matter if you're not. Like, it's not to judge anyone who knows that if they went to paddle that they'd feel really uncomfortable. What if there was a training system where anything you went to pick up, like, you'd just be starting at that much higher level. Because foundations, hand, eye coordination, rhythm, timing, tracking objects.
With that, then where does specificity of sport. Yeah. Link up?
Like, I've also been diving deep on the Japanese because. Yeah, there's the Russian. Soviet system was, like, pretty general of, like, let's build these athletes that can do everything. And for my baby, I want to give him a shot at everything. And I think that's his nature at the moment, is to absorb everything. And so he. He wants variety. He didn't love seeing you. He loves, like, oh, someone use. Here, let me kick the ball through and let's see what comes of it. Yeah, but he doesn't want to just see me all the time. He doesn't want to just do kick the ball all the time. He wants to do bounce the ball. He wants to roll. He wants to go in the pool. He Just had a breakthrough in the pool, like, 10 minutes ago. He's putting his face in and people playing around. Yeah. Like, that's. His nature is, like, expansion as much as possible. And my goal and my role is to give him the environment that's most expansive. You know, that's why my children aren't going to school.
Yeah.
It might not turn out better, but this is. I'm following my heart, my instincts, and this is athletically what that is. So that's the big, expensive thing. The Japanese, I've been studying quite a lot. Say Otani Inoue, the boxer. Yeah. Lots of. Lots of different sports. There's a Yuki Nakamura in the. Basketball is like, five, eight. Yeah. How are they producing these outlines? Why do they take over the sport of skating from nothing to, like, being all the Olympic champions?
Yeah.
And there's a lot of things there of, like, specificity of, like, going absolutely all in. Like, you don't have hobbies in Japan. If you're skating, like, you do it as if you're a samurai skater. Like, that's the culture. It still comes from the samurai times. Yeah. There's no goofing around. And so that specificity. But you look within that specificity of how. How are they producing these baseball or volleyball? There's these outliers. There's a guy who went from Japan and played in Europe, and he broke the serving record, and he's undersized in volleyball, he broke, like, the most consecutive serves. Why are they doing that? Well, they make a bigger sport out of the sport. So they break it down into the components, and then they train each of those components, like, with full intensity. And it's not strength and conditioning and skill. It's this integration of skill and force. You can see it on YouTube. Some of the stuff you got to look up in Japanese, like, I'm putting in Google Translate, like, put it in Japanese into YouTube and then come up with this. All this other stuff. Yeah. Like, you can do the subtitles, but even just watching them, Japan has more sub 215 marathon runners than any other country. The third best. So Kenya and Ethiopia. But their depth of runners is so much. So much deeper. Yeah. And it's. It's the culture you look at. Okay, well, how are the high school runners training? You've got a much more complex system of, like, developing hips, developing gait, doing all of these different drills. That's. That's how they do it.
So they're building from the ground up almost.
But so, like. Yeah. So complex within the sport. So I'm sort of creating this picture of like let's go complex, like let's be able to do acrobatics and combat and, and produce lots of force. But they're like within this sport and how do we, how do we get good at all the different things? You can see the high school baseball teams and like all these different drills that they're doing and some really interesting channel. You maybe started to follow a couple of the, have you seen some of the IG channels?
No. No.
There are a few good guys that they got into WEC method more as well. There's a few good channels that are like done weck method and they're doing this amazing like throwing drill stuff. But they're like, he's working with javelin, volleyball, baseball and it's all like this spine thing. Yeah. Because I started to want to throw first because it was one of the metrics. I'm like, I should be able to throw if I'm trying to be this all round athlete. Haven't thrown for a long time. Let me look at throwing. So I was starting to build all the American stuff and I was like, they just tell me to deadlift.
Yeah.
Get big and like produce more force and throw like throw some heavy balls, throw some lighter balls. I'm like, oh, okay. And then I saw, oh, the best baseball player in the world is Japanese. Or like, what, what are the Japanese doing? Like they, they keep winning the Junior World Series and they've won the world Game. And then you look at it, they're like, oh, they don't train anything like the Americans. And then you look at the history of it. They've actually.
What do you think the big difference is? Because obviously the American systems have been front and center for 30, 40 years now and for good reasons it's produced results. And like now obviously that system has done its time tool a point. It's, it's as good as it's probably going to get. How do we swing it back now? Why do you think is this swinging back to. Yeah. Real athletes?
I, I see the American. There's a lot of innovative coaches working with young athletes and NBA teams and whatnot as well who are like Joel, Joel Smith, the Just Fly like every second podcast now is like play skill.
Yeah.
Like the paradigm is shifting. He's talking to a lot of the open minded sort of big names in. So I, I see it shifting in America. It's almost like that wave that takes time from like Edo Portal kind of pushing this concept in his own way. A While back. And I think that wave is getting momentum that I think the American system will. The American system. It's not to say the Japanese have everything right, the Americans everything wrong. It's like the Japanese, because of the language barrier, they're just doing all this stuff like completely differently. And the. When I find that oh, this is treasure. Cuz you put this together with this and then like what. What does that make? Like how do you. How do you measure some of this sports science and preserving athletes together with the Japanese, like if we die on the field, like we've lived a great life. Literally like running guys to death and like thousand ground balls and stuff is one of their like best. You got to get a thousand ground balls take hours.
Just repetition.
They've been on repetition. But then there's the Shorthorn stuff, which he's super critical of the Japanese and he's like, they're wasting too much time. They're spending 200 repetitions to get done. Well, we can get done 20 repetitions. Oh, this. Who's this? What's this stuff about differential learning? It's all this year just inspired by my son and starting new athlete but being more curious and people say me, oh, check this thing out. There's one about wrestling. It's about skill development with constraints to let approach.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We use a lot of it in Jiu Jitsu.
So he touches on differential learning. Ecologicals. It's similar. Yeah. But the difference actually came before ecological.
Yeah.
And I really. It's a bit more of an expansive creative philosophy. So I love what Shorthorns just released a book actually.
So I'm loving that just for the specifics of, you know, taking a skill but then also like putting yourself in a bad situation and then you've got to actually unlock it under pressure. Yeah, it's been phenomenal. Just ski development. I know for my Jiu Jitsu it took me a year to get blue belt just by training that style and that system and understanding. Like if I'm in this position now.
Cool.
I'm gonna have to think my way out of it. But then I'm getting multiple repetitions with fresh partners all the time. Made it amazing like that five minutes of just dense skill work on one specific skill that I need to unlock.
Ph, now the gym that you go into too has been implementing that.
Yeah.
Just by chance or did you find it by chance or.
Yeah, yeah.
That's pretty cool. Cuz it's quite recent that Jim started to go all in on this before.
I was just like do drills and now you do jiu jitsu drills but never really connected in terms of actually application. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's the shorn stuff is super interesting. It's also about his, his way out there. He's doing research online. The positions of the planets in relation to learning speak. He's got like thousands of published papers and articles. He's a big name. But then he's researching stuff that's meant to not be important like Christianity and religion. Like don't look at the planets and it doesn't matter. Like he's actually doing database stuff. So it's really interesting work and it's a lot about. He's big on like no, no coaching. Nice feedback and, and cultivating the state of mind for faster learning. Yeah, it's really, really, really interesting.
What, what would you like to see in a stradic over the next five years in terms of the athletes?
They got to take on this. Get rid of strength and conditioning as a role and turn it into total athletic development. Everything that's not specific to the sport. And even you might find that coach is actually even able to add specific, specific stuff to the sport.
Yeah.
Which I ended up doing quite a bit of. I was lucky to have a head coach that gave me some license for especially in France with the younger players and probably never going to make it. We were doing footwork stuff, catching the ball, evading. And I had Steve Menzies. There was a legend of the game. Yeah. I was getting him to teach young players and watching how he would teach them, what his positions were. So I got the opportunity to like Branch and I think most head coaches in sport they really, they want, want that from their strength conditioning coach.
Yeah.
But often it depends on the background of coaching out there. This is the big, this is the big thing is to, to bring this general athletic development paradigm. It's just so obvious once you see it. Like they can't, they can't catch, they can't dance, they don't, they can't balance.
Yeah.
And they can improve it like that and we don't do it to them. Like we don't, we don't give them that opportunity.
Yeah.
It's, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
Like just relies on talent and brute force.
Yeah. Every, every coach wants, every coach could take a team of players with the ability of the Australian team or the ability of like state of origin team. You said like all your players are going to have that ability. Don't worry about the names. But they're all going to have that ability. Yeah. Like, do you want those players or do you want the ones that you've been coaching? Every, every team would go straight for the talented players.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A player changes team, from this team to that team. It doesn't matter really. It matters to an extent who the teammates are, who the coach is. But if you prepare the origin team against a New South Wales cup team, they gotta, you put them in that competition, they're gonna go undefeated for the season. Yeah, no doubt. No worries. We've sort of given up on how do we turn them all into that stuff or. Yeah, we haven't given up on it. It's there. We're doing it in a way. But I, I, what I really want to solve is like, we can do this a lot better than what we're doing now.
Yeah, that's. Is it actually there, though? Because, like, you look around, especially in Australia, it doesn't seem like it's here at all.
It's like within the specific context of like, this player carries a ball like that. Yeah. We need him to make that little pass there. Yeah. And you practice that over and over again, like it is getting practiced in the way we want him to be better, this thing. But yeah, like, it's, it's more, much more boxed in than what the Japanese are doing. Yeah, it's much more boxed in and I would have them doing the same thing. You can do that same thing with the tennis ball, do the same thing with the blindfold and one eye. Yeah. Like, the skill research is really clear that the methods we're using are not the methods that are going to get the best results. And if they've got just straight up deficits in terms of their ability to, to track objects, to catch, like, they're at a deficit if they can't, if they can't track a fastball, if they can't track, you know, multiple balls at the same time, etc. Yep. Like, juggling isn't complicated. It's just that there's a lot going on. Like, it's, it's not, it's a very simple thing. Everyone can do it with one. So why is two difficult? It's just, it's too much for the brain to. So we want the processing speed, the accuracy to accelerate. And then we get that same thing with the ability to turn the head, the ability to, you know, flip and go upside down.
Yeah.
If we upgrade all this foundational stuff, that's what had to happen in the first 10 years of life, all that base work without all that, there was no way they were going to be a talent athlete at 12, 13, 14 to get recruited into them. But then we like wipe all that history of like. No, we need to be footy specific. No, no, hang on. If you any man footy specific from baby, you would be completely like useless. Like it's not enough. It's not, you're not developing enough. Every, every coach knows this. They want the players from multi sport backgrounds. And this NFL coach was saying like I recruit the guys who played lacrosse.
Yeah.
Because they just know they got more growth.
Yeah, yeah. They see things different. Yeah. See things a lot different.
Yeah. But it's, yeah, it's always, it's always like there's always this lag in. Yeah. I've started pitching like I've mentioned it to teams in two countries now and I've had no, no interest. Now I've got the highest profile rugby player, rugby league player. You know, one of the, one of the top names at least.
Yeah.
Here doing with me. And it only takes like it took Melbourne Storm dominating the league and like okay, we need to wrestle. Yeah, yeah, we'll wrestle now.
Yeah.
They keep winning. They've been doing different stuff in their weights as well. Like Dan De Pasqua. Let me messing up his name. Apologies. I message him. We talk from time to time. He's doing west side. He's been doing west side there for 20 years.
Interesting.
And they produce force. Melbourne always a team with a lot of force.
Yeah.
But they early to the wrestle. They're not early to this. Yeah, yeah, we'll see.
And we said before is like where is the time for it? So where do you see it fitting into the new athlete?
Well, in the professional setting that's the big thing of like oh look, we just training volume.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah. If they're not significantly better year on year, scrap the other stuff. Let's try something else. Because most of them aren't significantly better year on year. Yeah. That's like an aggressive way of saying, saying it the other way to look at it is like, hey, there's a bunch of this stuff that we can get done that's almost like recovery level intensity.
Absolutely.
It's, it's fun and like it's naturally engaging.
Yeah.
People want to surf and skate for fun, like balance sports, going water skiing.
And athletes are still like, they love to play, you know and it's like you almost have to take them away. And you know, even talking today is like they go do these weights. They do the commission as soon as you get them in game SN scenario or something that makes it fun. All of a sudden they light up. They just light up and their intensity is higher. It's getting better quality and they just do it a lot better. But most of the time they're just dreading going to their weight session.
Yeah, that's, that's another topic in itself. Gamification of, of the weights. We were always gamifying. Yeah, we started with a grip game and you know what? They would be ranked against themselves, against each other. And I'd always been playing that off with like he did this today. What are you going to do it? You know, and then, yeah, we would, we would jump every week for tests. We use the arms. All the science guys are like this, but the arms one is more, more fun, more playful, more specific to sport. Yeah. And then we would be, we would always be getting a maximum number on a clean or a snatch or a squat or a bench press or standing press or a push jerk or a push press. And I didn't, you know, players liked it. The accounting department was above the gym and not too long into that first year they're like, what are you doing down there? We never used to hear the players and we hear them yelling and screaming. Yeah, we get strong, we get fast, we get powerful. So yeah, it's, it can just be a shopping list that players dread or it can be something that they really engage with. And that's the challenge of it. You're not going to win all the time with everybody in terms of having that fun environment.
But yeah, 100%.
I think striving for it is a big part of the role.
Something recovery wise too because I think that's incrementally like with a player, there's so many things that go on. They might have a big game the next day, they're tired. So their program session is like, hey, just rest day recovery, whatever. Take some time off lightstop. But then giving them that edge with say some of the Swiss ball works on the flow. Juggling all of that instead of being here, they get to back to baseline or even a plus one fast run. It just seems to be incrementally better.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're going to. I'm keen to dive into it more with you. I know you've been thinking about this and like how different players, different kinds of nervous systems, you can see it.
All the time, man. Cuz like ultimately, even if they expect their hard gap game and then it's like actually easy, like they haven't put too much load on their case down or whatever. The next day they've got a program rest day. And it's like on paper they should take it because of low management, but it's like, hey, if we just get them on the Swiss ball doing some of that athletic Pilates, you know, get them rope flowing at least like that are getting that blood flow to getting that movement and all of a sudden come that Tuesday or the second day after the game, they're firing. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's where I see as like that gap of like. Because most people are just as you said they might, they might add 5% to their squat, you know, over 12 months, you know, like at a decent level, it's not much, but if you can incrementally improve your actual gameplay or the way you play the game, you're. You're always going to be better.
Yeah. That's what people might think of rope floss for sports like recovery tools or. There's not much force in that. So what can it be be? That's what we're saying is that there's these soft qualities to athletic excellence that aren't being well developed.
Yeah.
The graceful athlete that does dance well, that does pick up the road flow well that can football juggle after, you know, two or three sessions. They happen to be your highest paid player, the one that never drops the ball. Yeah. And the thing is, like all the other players can learn that. And, and, and your highest paid player, he cheated. It's not natural, it's not genetics. It's that his cousin was a dancer and they used to hang out with.
Him all the time.
And his brother was a BMX rider and so he was always doing backflips on the bmx. Yeah. Or he grew up playing trampoline. Doing trampoline. Like Anthony Minichello, they called him the cat. He cheated. Yeah. He didn't do what rugby league players did, he did trampoline. So he always knew where the ground was and that was his superpower as a short fullback.
Yeah.
So there's always this history behind the star players. Yeah. Whether it's more that Japanese approach of what they just went out with their dad and drilled everything. Two of us as chef was a bit like that. Like we need you to be able to. They just broke it all down.
Yeah. Drill, drill, drill, drill, drill.
And. Or they also, you know, they were in the state basketball team as well. Yeah, yeah. Work with, with. Yeah. Basketball. Afl. Like, you cheated, bro. Like, no wonder you're getting all these balls in the air.
It's the same for the Shears. Like, they're all the. All the mouldy is the best we've all done. Haka. They've all got perfect timing, rhythm. Their footwork's good. They played touch, they played basketball. Like, when we were kids, we just played everything. And the guys who played touch in particular, like, when they went back to 15s in rugby, just the ability to find gaps, get a short pass, whatever. Just like, so much fun. So much fun.
And then it becomes longer and longer.
Yeah.
Since you were that young athlete. Yeah. I saw this when I was 20, like when I first went into Parramatta Eagles. Yeah. Well, these guys are getting worse as they get older.
Yeah.
And I thought it was more about stiffness because you could see the hips getting tighter. Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, that's. I didn't. But it was also. It's also this. It's like, it's longer and longer since they were a child, but also since they were in high school playing soccer. My first mentor hated narc. He was. Was all over this stuff.
Yeah.
And he's had a big impact on the game. Same with my father. You know, my father had a big impact on rugby league and he was innovative with things he was bringing. And that's. If I can continue that lineage and add that, that's. The opportunity that we have in the world today is I get to speak to coaches from Sweden and handball and Slovakia. I'm talking to Saquon Buckley's coach. And actually, we're going to be on a call to tomorrow. And that's. That's the opportunity that we have in the world today is like, things can. Things can change very quickly. I think this. I honestly think it's going to change the athletic world. Yeah. In, like, two years. Like, it's like night and day. Because when you switch this on, you know, athletes know. Yeah, we. We'll see. Like, I got five days here with an athlete, you see. Like, let's see what he. What he feels about this and how he thinks about it. Yeah. The dream is that it's like he goes back to his team, all the other boys start doing it. The culture of the team changes, their standings in the world, Rangers change. And now everyone else has to look at it.
Exactly.
It's like we're kind of narrowing in a bit more on the skill, but it's like it's there within all the areas, like the force and the detail. You saw this. They were doing like the details of the fee. Yeah. There's details of the shoulder details. And I, I'm not going to be, I'm not telling you. I know all this stuff. I'm. I'm saying, like, I'm going to bring in hundreds of coaches who get this and we're all going to talk to each other all the time. Yeah. And wherever you go in the world, there's going to be a coach there. And whenever I want to have a conversation, like we're podcasting, we getting our ideas clearer, we can explain it better. We need that. Hundreds of coaches, like, yep, I'm going to experience this. I want to be the local go to for this. I want to be the rugby go to for this. Or the AFL have these coaches who get excited about what they're doing. Doing. And then the athletes, it's, you know, some athletes are excited about what we're doing. Yeah. Things can change quickly and, and it becomes very decentralized because everyone's sort of doing it. It's not just one little system. It's like, you know, I went through at the start acrobat through to intellect. And then these methods with the differential learning and ecological learning, like how to speed up the learning process, range method, dense message. All These methods underpinning to 10x the rate of development of these abilities.
The beautiful thing is you can look at any athlete and like, what is the quality that's going to have the biggest impact?
Yeah.
Bring them up. Same. Same as what strength conditions always been. Are they slow, get them fast, are they weak, get them strong.
All of them with the master of this, like what body parts and structural balance. Like, he had them for 12 weeks a year and in those 12 weeks he would put them back together, but they would last the next year. He would make them stronger, put on Mass. Like 50 kicks were the biggest news. Like, where's the biggest weakness? Okay, let's fix this. Yeah. All athletes now have this weakness of they haven't really worked on their balance.
Yeah.
They haven't really worked on their spinning.
Yeah.
They haven't really worked on details of balls. If they play a handball sport, they don't kick. But then a lot of the best players in the NBA now play tons of soccer. They're all playing soccer by design. Just because they were born morning crochet or whatever in Serbia, that's like what you do there. Yeah.
So this is the biggest martial artists. They're all from Brazil.
You can find, you can try and look for exceptions to the rule. But yeah, this is the biggest weakness right now in, in the athletic world and it's there for, for all athletes.
But when you, when you really think about it, it's not the biggest weakness because the best of the best are always got these qualities. Like I was just. MMA was just probably the perfect clip there for me because mixed martial arts, who are the best? Like generally Brazilians, like some of these Eastern Europeans that you look at Marab, he's a guy from Georgia, he dances all the time. Like he's always dancing.
Yeah. And it's so much fun. Have you seen the Georgian dancing? Yeah, yeah. 70, 80 year olds, they can still dance with.
Bouncing through your knees. Yeah. You look at. Who is it? Yeah, some of the Ukrainians, their Cossacks.
Yeah.
But the way they dance, their whole thing was like, I'm stronger, more athletic, you know.
Yeah. Lomachenko was pretty, pretty complete. Like there's. Yeah. Some athletes who you would say, like they were pretty close to this A through I. Yeah. But I don't know, I don't know if there's any like, I don't know if you did the tumbling, you know, whether a lot of wrestlers are doing the tumbling now, but they're not doing any soccer. So there's almost always like at least some area that they've completely turned their back on when they can dance. But then. Yeah, so that's, that's worth, like and, and you might think it's being pedantic, but when you're in that world of elite sport, you're looking for those fractures. You're looking for the competitive advantage. It's a mental competitive advantage, but it's also like a physiological competitive advantage.
Even just that like, you know, you're searching for the itch. It's like, no, I'm doing something else.
No one else.
Yeah. And you can say it's like, that's why I moved like that, you know, I had son used to say it a lot. He's like, oh, I juggled. That's why I can catch the world like that.
Chess as well, like the strategic, the intellect side is something that often is. It's not, it's not even mentioned. But I've heard it from an MMA coach recently. But yeah, the guys play chess, they think it through better. Like how they're going to, how they're.
Going to win, how they're going to.
Win, what are they going to solve?
I think it's a big, big missing component is like just finding that way and like just piece by piece, by piece. You might be down to your last piece, but if you're able to know how to use that last piece to get the win, you'll win more often.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm never going to be the master of all this. I'm just trying to be a catalyst for other coaches, athletes to create something. I can see the need for, the vision for, the opportunity for. And I love. I'm living it every day to the way that I can with my heart, spirit and health and opportunities. But I'm just like, with CrossFitter, I'm not going to be. I'm a new athlete. 1.0 on Instagram is what I went with, because it's like, I'm starting this thing. But, yeah, the 1.1, the 1.2, the version 17 is going to be, like, so far beyond what we can see today. Like, you know, I have zero doubts that the. The. The space to revolution, especially the more complex sports. Yeah, it's a little bit trickier for the 100 meters and stuff. Like, it's so much about physics and force. Yeah. Don't know. But, yeah, the. The health side of things as well. Like, I'm about talking. Talking to a guy who is dramatically increasing his testosterone level through his protocols. I think there's still. I think there's still so much more to tap into. That's what's exciting. How far can this go?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Sweet. We'll wrap it up. Yeah.
Get you pumped up.
Massive. It's crazy.
