EP096: Functional and Regenerative Fitness with The Fitness Doctor, Robbie Stahl, and Sachin Patel

Welcome to the Perfect Practice podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel is a functional medicine and success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hello my friends and welcome to Perfect Practice. Today with me I have the fitness Dr. Robbie Stahl. Robbie and I have become great friends over the last few months. We're fellow members and brethren in Genius Network. So, you know, he's next level. We only hang out with next level people in Genius Network. And he's going to be sharing with us something that I feel is truly powerful and something that is often overlooked and something that I am even guilty of overlooking, which is functional fitness, regenerative fitness, really using and viewing exercise as a tool to take our body and take our health really to that next level. So the insights that I have received, you know, just in our conversations together have been so powerful, brother. So I'm excited to have you here. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Satchin. And you know, thank you for the connection because you know, when you and I started talking, you say so many profound philosophical things that come from experience, having gained a great amount of knowledge, applying that knowledge and coming back with wisdom. So my level of connection with you and things you say, which I will list some of those things in our talk today, I'm just, I have tremendous gratitude for you and all the work you're doing with, with the holistic and naturopathic healthcare world. I think it's just absolutely amazing. So I'm honored to be here.

Thank you, my friend. So I know just like, just like me, you have a wrong that you want to right. And you know, for, for me, that wrong that I want to right is people are disempowered when it comes to their health and they have no idea how to take really, really good care of themselves. And, and exercise is a way for us to do that if we're taught how to do it correctly. And even as a chiropractor, somebody who's very focused on the mechanics of movement, there's so much that we've learned since I graduated and there's so many things that we're going to continue to learn. But you've evolved your training in such a way that it really takes people's not just their physical body to a whole new level, but their physiology to a whole new level. So I'd love to hear what is the wrong that you're trying to right.

The wrong I'm trying to right is that really we need to exercise in a way. If we start thinking about artificial foods and natural foods and you think about those type of concepts, well, the same thing happens in exercise. So from the Arnold Schwarzenegger days and before, we've really learned to train in a very dysfunctional way that's based on one performance. Not that performance is bad, but, but we'll get into how it's good and how it's bad or their body composition. So what happens is people think that their performance isn't good enough or and I don't just mean they're a couch potato and they need to be fit. They look for this nth degree of physical fitness which can be done right, but performance and body composition or I'm not happy with my body so I want to look better. And in that process, one of the things that you say that is so profound and we're going to refer to this a few times today, that's everything that happens in one's life is created twice. Everything's created twice, first in your mind and then into your reality and actions if you so choose to take the actions that are in that mind. Right. So you know, and so first they feel, oh, I'm not good enough. So then they yearn for this thing to be good and they end up going after it in the wrong way. So the wrong I want to write is number one is bringing self love, humble humility, connected with the universe type of self love and respect for oneself. And through that process and proper mental filtering, getting into developing the body in the ideal respectful way as well. And that's really what it is. And I think then as we go forward here, we can talk about some of those things. Like what exactly does that mean, right? What is non functional? What is functional?

You know, I used to work at a gym and being around personal trainers, spending a lot of time in the gym, working out myself, you know, I injured myself from doing the wrong exercises or watching what other people were doing. And they may have been right. Those movements may have been right for their goals and their objectives, but maybe not right for my goals and my objectives. And I know that when you hang around certain people, it's all about looks, right? It's all about show, not necessarily about function.

So.

So was there something that happened in your career or you know, to you that, you know, really ignited you to look at the body from a different lens?

Absolutely. I was not always the biomechanical expert, but I always had a huge passion in exercise physiology and biomechanics and nutrition and psychology as well actually. So what ended up happening, I ended up coming full circle and being filtered through all the what not to do process before really learning. Well, here's the most amazing thing to do. Long story short, my exercise science journey started at 12 years old when I read my first exercise science textbook from college. And then after that I had a huge passion in fitness. Constantly studying, went to school to be a physical therapist. Got out of school and decided, you know what, really what I want to do is fitness because I just think there's better passion and more motivation, especially at that point in my life. So I got into bodybuilding because of course as an 18 year old boy I wasn't big enough or strong enough and probably wouldn't have mattered how big or how strong I was. But I was somewhat thin. I was lean, but pretty thin. Spent 8 to 10 years gaining massive amounts of strength. You know, I've done a 435 pound bench press weighing 205 pounds. I've squatted 500 pounds, deadlifted 500 pounds, done three sets of pull ups over 30 reps with only a 60 second rest between so 33, 32 and 31. I'm telling you all this performance stuff so that you and those listening, you know that I have done all that. I have done the high performance stuff. I have gotten on stage and competed as a bodybuilder and placed very high. I've done all that stuff. And in the process I learned how broken people get doing that kind of stuff. And I developed massive back pain and issues in my hips and all kinds. And I was training with good form, I wasn't doing goofy stuff, I was training with good form. And the reality is that stuff works. You can kind of get away with it. A lot of people can. I'd say maybe 70% of people can get away with that while they're in their teens and 20s. But you know what, once you hit 30, especially 40 and absolutely beyond 50, you have to learn to train in such a way that your creator intended you to move. And that means within alignment, within positioning, that is not going to cause degeneration to your body and is not going to cause the force that you're executing to escape from the joint. So let me give you an example of the type of thing, uh, really how this shows up. If you're squatting the kind of weight of 500 pounds and you're lifting heavy loads, when you go to that much fatigue, you are not going to keep absolute perfect alignment and that amount of load and stress on your body. It's a mechanical structure. You're going to have breakdown putting that kind of load and stress, especially for year after year after year on your body. So if you do a squat, for example, and the knees stay in line between the feet, so the knees here, and it stays in line between the foot and you squat, all the load from the glutes and the thighs is being executed through the ground. But if you let that knee fall in, for example, what's starting to happen is the force from the muscle is attenuating or stopping at the joint and that is causing sheer stress at the joint and you're losing force and strength. Now that's a more simple example. But believe me when I tell you this happens throughout the whole entire body. And to try to control all of those things and all the exercise you do must be very intentful. In other words, you must specifically be working on what I call biomechanical optimization. So all of the training that you do is structured around biomechanic optimizing the bio mechanics of your body, trying to keep your body in perfect alignment. And here, here's really the reason why, because this gets a little technical, but here's the simple reason why is the position you train the muscle in is the position the muscle will strengthen in. So if you're getting kind of out of alignment and improper tweaks and turns in your body and going to high fatigue exercise, what happens is the muscle begins to learn to, oh, I need to strengthen in this dysfunctional position. Which doesn't make you stronger in the dysfunctional position. What it does is it makes you go to that. So now the way you're training, when you go and run a mountain or play with the kids or doing something like that type of activity recreationally, you're more likely to get injured. And the reason why you're more likely to get injured is because you trained your body in such a way that it learned to go to dysfunctional position. So when it needs to support, it's going to go to that dysfunctional position. So that's, you know, and to go further, what happens is your neurological system is constantly checking what position are you in? What is the length of the tissue? Where are we strongest in the position? So depending on where your body's checking, so depending on where, how you sit, how you sleep, how you walk, how you do all your daily activities, your neurological system is sensing and picking up how it should align your body based on what you're doing. And then when you go to exercise, you're adding a performance level of seeing how your body should function. So when you learn to sit properly, sleep properly, do everything properly and exercise performance properly, then you have a structure that's optimal. And what happens with that is you lose all that muscle guarding, the pain and the stiffness and the body and the muscle. You lose that because you're functioning in the position the neurological system wants you to be within. So it's not feeling unstable, it's not feeling endangered from that external environment of doing dysfunctional exercise and functioning daily in dysfunctional positions.

I guess that guarding to me sounds almost like a fear type of physiology. Is there any correlation between that and stress on the nervous system if our bodies always guarding like that?

Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. And usually, you know, you can't separate the mechanical physiological function of the body from the psychosomatic connection. So the, the emotional connection of the body and the brain and the whole entire neurological system with all the tissues, they're one and the same. There's, there's many debates about, oh, is it your mind and your emotions or is it the body? And it's like, no, it's, it's all of it. You know, doctors know that your body doesn't function by one system. That's just not the way it works. And so yeah, by muscle guarding it can have be affected by emotions and such. And when you train your body like that and you get out of alignment and you're feeling stiff, then it will also go back to cause sympathetic nervous system overtone and feel stress and then that's going to cause stress on your nervous system and then therefore come back to, to your emotions as well. So we can have the feedback loop going from physical to emotional, mental, or we can have the feedback loop going from mental emotional back down to the physical mechanical structure. So yeah, and you know what's interesting, Sachin, and you know, I'm hopefully I'm not rambling on your show but really wants.

Great, I love it.

Good. Awesome. Just really want to get across these important points because now, Sachin, what we've learned is like, you know, we're the premier experts in mechanics, but you know what we're starting to incorporate is a lot of mental, emotional work into the physical training because we can't separate the mind from the body. So let's make both awesome in the same session, in the same course of exercise activity. So now what we're doing is we're doing mental training to release those stress mechanisms in the mind and the tissues, and then also empower the individual with love, connection, gratitude, and proper breathing and breath work, all along with the alignment of the body. So then the whole system really gets proper health and optimism.

I love it. And as much as I hate to admit this, this is like, very revolutionary thinking in the personal training and physical training space. So have you. You must. Obviously, you're a trailblazer in this area. Do you encounter any pushback from other trainers or clients when you explain these things, or are people just all in, ready to go?

Yeah, sometimes when I talk to people, their eyes glaze over. So I've learned to try to try to simplify my message. I know a lot of people listening to this show are doctors, so they can connect with some of the vernacular I'm using. But the. Yeah, yeah, sometimes the eyes glaze over. And if they're on my team, they know they're connected. They want to do that because they're here for a reason. All my people are in love in a client trainer relationship type of way with our clients. And they want absolutely to make our clients optimize, like an asset. That's how we look at them, like they're. They're appreciating asset. How much value can we bring build into our clients? And so, no, everyone on my team is, like, completely keyed in, but they're your people.

Right? Like, this is what they're looking for. So it makes total sense to them. You know, before we started recording, you mentioned, and you kind of gave me a really good, you know, comparison. If somebody was laid up in a hospital and they were eating super healthy but not moving versus somebody who was moving and maybe not eating the healthiest, what would the outcomes be after, let's say, a few days, a few weeks, and even a few months between those two different approaches?

Yeah, and I love that example and thought process. But before we get into it, both are important. Right. We don't want to do one or the other, but if we want to, like, single one thing out and say, like, what's the value of this? And what's the value of this? Then we can look at these extremes. All right, so nutrition versus exercise, both should be on point. But if we look at them separately, lay in the hospital bed, awesome diet, no movement, what's going to happen is similar as when astronauts go into space. They don't have load and stress on their body because they lost gravitational pull. And the same thing when you go to resting, what happens is the cells and the muscle cells begin to atrophy and our body is really like an energy processing station. So when you optimize that energy processing station with all the right movement and mechanics and cell signaling, then you're going to have an optimal body. And what happens is if you don't move, the cells actually begin through protein signaling. They begin to. So the cells send out a message and the messages that they be much more inflammatory and you begin to have more cell death. And all the while our stem cells are analyzing what's going on in the active cell environment. So now our stem cells start to get programmed for a dysfunctional non moving environment as well. And the whole entire body down regulates, down regulates cardiovascular ability to pump blood, to be able to breathe, to be able to carry oxygen to the cells. Because all of these things are stimulated by usage. You know, in simple terms you use lose it. And if you're not moving, you're gonna lose so much. But there's many, many things going on in the microworld to cause that damage. Whereas if you have kind of a crappy diet, let's say a pretty crappy. Right, because we're comparing one extreme example, no movement in hospital. So let's say someone's eating like all McDonald's and just crap food, but they, they are still getting in some fats and some proteins and bunch of sugar and craps and carbs, but they're moving. So they're going to get the value and benefit of the cells signaling the body to have increased mitochondria mitochondrial function, which is the powerhouse of the cell to produce energy drawing an oxygen, you're going to be moving blood flow through. Yeah, you might be building up arteriosclerosis and other issues and plaque on the arteries even though you're doing exercise. But you're going to drastically have an upregulated physiological structure from all that physical activity work you' so that shows you how powerful exercise is. You can't just eat healthy and then leave the body mechanics to chance. The goal is to live to ripe old age and then be super functional at that age. So make every day amazing and get much older, 70s, 80s, 90s and still be super functional. If you don't take care of your body Mechanics, you're not going to be able to move very well. And then your whole body will begin to downregulate because you'll begin to lose that function. And all that cell signaling that's going on. And because the cells are becoming dysfunctional and not capable, the whole body is going to be felt that way. And then the person's can't do list grows and it's just a downhill cycle. And that's really how I believe people end up dying. And we should all live to over age 100 if we optimize those things. Which then gets into the discussion of how intense should we actually exercise. Right.

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely something I want to get to before we get there. I had a question for you that was coming up for me. What's your favorite muscle?

That's an interesting question, Sachin. I don't think I've ever had someone ask me that before. My favorite muscle, as a biomechanist, it's very difficult to answer because it's all about symmetry. Everything we do is about symmetry and balance. So, man, if I can kind of pick a segment of muscles, I'm going to pick the core musculature. So I'm going to pick like transverse abs, obliques and like thoracolumbar fascia. Yeah. Which is pretty. Which is a pretty nerdy answer.

In my head. I thought you would have said diaphragm because I know how much you emphasize breathing, proper breathing technique, and how that's so relevant to the sympathetics and parasympathetics and how it is also one of the core muscles. Right. It helps stabilize our core. So I guess I was pretty close.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let's put that one at number two. It is crucially important. Yeah.

So I feel like, you know, as a functional medicine practitioner, you know, we're really looking at the fitness of the cell. Right. And I feel like as a, also as somebody who believes in kind of a fractional approach to the body, the fitness of our cell is going to in some way translate and correlate to the fitness of our body. And the fitness of our body is going to also correlate to the fitness of our cells. So I love seeing that connection so well laid out. When people come to you, what are some common kind of trouble areas or problem areas that they usually have? I know that as a chiropractor we used to see a lot of upper cross syndrome, lower cross syndro syndrome, shoulder injuries, you know, especially rotator cuff type stuff going on what, what are common issues or injuries or imbalances that you see?

Yeah, shoulders is huge. That's, that's probably the number one low, like low back and shoulders and very common also foot and ankle issues as well. That's, that's one of the high percentage of issues that we deal with as well. But shoulders has really become our sweet spot. We actually have a hundred percent success rate on shoulder fixing for simple terms. So we have people, we have many people who have come to us working with physical therapists and other mechanical professionals for a long period of time and have not been able to really have a solution. And we're able to fix them to the degree that, I mean, we've even had clients who have had like 7 centimeter tears through the supraspinatus, the infraspinatus, into the teres minor. So the rotator cuff muscles within the shoulder and couldn't even wash their hair. And within a month gaining much greater mobility. Now, of course the tissue is not going to reattach and repair and oh, they're not going to become perfect. But the level of function is drastically improved to where the individual feels like, you know what, I don't need that surgery. And just for anyone listening to this, one thing that should be really important noted is if you do have a muscle or tendon tear, there's a short period of time where you can actually get surgery and have a very high likelihood of positive outcomes. And so it's not that you should just skip surgery. It actually could be a really good idea many times. But these individuals sometimes have really gone past that window of high likelihood of positive outcomes. Because when you tear a tissue, what happens is a fatty deposit begins to grow around the tendon and such, and then the attachment for the surgeon becomes much more difficult and they have to use many more advanced strategies to get that to reattach. And sometimes the result isn't good. But in terms of shoulders, the big key is there's multitude of things that really optimizes shoulder function. And most people have some mechanical deficiency in the way the shoulder is functioning. And we optimize those things. The result results are just amazing, especially in the shoulder. We find this in the low back as well. But I think one of the things that happens is people are not walking around on their hands. So we get to control the loads and stress they do primarily with exercise. And we're not really at a disadvantage when they're outside of our care. So with the lower back, you're sitting, you're standing, you're sleeping, you're doing all these things. And we have to really try to control everything the person's doing to improve low back. So our results there have been awesome, but not as high as the 100% success rate of shoulders just because of that lack of that variable, that uncontrolled variable.

Yeah. And I would say that the shoulders are probably the most complicated joints in the body.

Right.

They have so much mobility, so much instability that comes along with that. And it's this really fine orchestra of rotator cuff muscles, secondary rotator cuff muscles like the long head of the biceps that, that can really compensate when necessary. But we've got to learn how to activate them. We've got to learn how to turn on and shut off certain muscles as we go through certain movement patterns. And I love that you can get such amazing results because these are not easy joints to. It's easy to maybe alleviate the pain because you can always inject people and give them painkillers and reduce the swelling and inflammation. But to get the shoulder functional again is a tall order. So I'm sorry, thrilled that you're getting such excellent results from, from a curiosity perspective, like what would that look like? So let's say somebody comes to you. Let's say I'm a new client and I know you and I are going to go through this process. So let's say I'm a new client. How, like how would that process look a little bit different than say seeing your typical trainer?

Well, the typical trainer is armed with at the highest level something like a functional movement screen or other movement assessment where there's very few movement assessments that they're really doing. And our system is based off of 27 different movement assessments and a software that took me three actual years of work over a five year period to create. So what we do is we analyze from head to toe all the mechanical function, find all the motor control deficiencies, mobility deficiencies, stability deficiencies and then custom create their exercise prescription to that. But what I'm really excited about, Sachin, is now with you, we're going to be releasing a group level of that so that you're not, you don't have to pay an exorbitant fee to get world class fitness training, but you can actually get that at a reasonable price rate. And what we're doing and what the difference is there is. For example, let's start with mobility, right? There's three major factors to have an optimal functioning body. The first is mobility, right. If you can't move, then all the other factors don't matter. So first is you have to have enough mobility. That's why when you really get injured and you go to physical therapist, the first thing they do is work on mobility. The next thing is, now that you have some mobility, you need to have proper motor control. So that's the second thing. And the third thing is stability, that you have proper stabilization, that you have strength in the movement. So in mobility, for example, like yoga, I love yoga. I do yoga. The guided breath work and mobility and stretching exercises is awesome. But how do you know and how do they know which muscles are maybe hyper mobile or excessively mobile and which tissues and segments of the body are not mobile enough? And maybe that routine you're doing is actually causing misalignment to your body because you're doing excessive work in areas you're already hypermobile in and you're not doing enough work in the areas where you have lack of mobility in.

So tell me what that would look or potentially feel like. So what would we feel in our bodies or maybe what would we see in the mirror or in the movement ranges that we're going through? Describe that part to me so that people can kind of self identify if they have that dysfunction or not.

Yep. And that's. It's. So I'm going to give you the exact answer, but I'll first tell you it's a little bit complex, but we make it very simple. And the reason why it's very complex is because for each joint you want to have an ideal or close to ideal range of motion. So my answer comes back to. Okay, well, if we're looking at how much mobility your ankle should have, the answer is 31 degrees. So you should have 31 degrees of dorsiflexion, or the ability to draw the foot back towards the shin at the hamstring with the knee extended. You should be able to be close to or within 15% of 90 degrees. For, for bringing the leg up, laying on your back knee straight, and bring your leg all the way up. I'm not going to give you all the numbers here, but and then just give you some examples in hip rotation. So your ability to rotate your hip internally should be close to or near 30 degrees and externally should be 40 degrees. So now you have enough data and we actually walk clients through this. And we're going to be walking clients through this in the process that your doctors are going to have extra access to, free access to. And so that is, we will show them how to test this simply and Then they'll know, oh, I have good mobility there. I'm not really too concerned. Oh, that number was really off and ooh, my left side on this number was deficient and the right side was sufficient enough. Oh, now we really have an issue because when you have those asymmetries, that causes those tweaks and twists in the body, which leads to joint degeneration and thereafter arthritis. And what it feels like early on is muscle guarding and pain and stiffness. So we actually find those things out early, optimize your mobility on exact metric scale so that when we go on to item number two, which is motor control, you have sufficient range of motion and tissue length to keep yourself in good motor control. And mobility is not the factor that's getting in the way. So once we get into the motor control factor, we've signified 11 different motor control factors that one must learn and optimize during exercise. So when they do these 11 different motor control factors and really focus on that in all of their exercises, little by little, you learn those over sessions. It's not all in one session. Then what happens is now you start to function optimally, you have optimal mobility and then for stability or strength and support of your body, we look at things in a very functional way. So most trainers might, you know, if they have some strength tests, like, okay, how much can you bench press? 10 reps? Well, you know, if you can only lift 10 pounds, that's an issue. But if you can lift like even £100 or £150, you're not really going to gain any more health benefits, really, by more than a tiny little margin. In fact, there's going to come in negative results too. To go from 150 pound bench press to a 300 pound bench press. Yeah, you're going to look cooler in the mirror, you're going to impress your friends and there's some benefits to that, but we can help you get there in a more efficient way. So what we look at is what are the ideal, what is the way your body really should function? If we look at it from a mechanical perspective, what are the things that you should be able to do? So, for example, push ups, for a man, in terms of health optimization, you don't really need to do more than 10 push ups from your feet with absolute perfect form to have enough strength in those muscles. Not saying we can't go past that, not saying we won't get you to 50 and 70 pushups, but I am saying that in terms of the way you train that's really nearing health optimization benefits then in terms of your row. So you're pulling muscles, you should be able to do double. So you should be able to do 100% more with your row now having that relationship between your push muscles and your pull. Now you're an optimal human now you're going to feel great because your back should be much stronger than your chest. So, you know, that's the type of way that we look at that.

Yeah. Fun fact for everyone. If you ever get struck by lightning, your shoulders dislocate backwards because you're so strong in the back. And when those back muscles fully contract, your shoulder dislocates forward or backwards instead of forwards. So I always thought that was really fascinating when I heard about that. So, yeah, big imbalances there, right. Especially we're sitting a lot more now where everything's in front of us. So we're constantly reaching and we're just reaching for things. We're not necessarily having to pull them back towards us. Right. That's more of a movement that we might be doing in the gym and, you know, certain, certainly under certain conditions. But that's something that I know is often overlooked. We call them the beach muscles.

Right.

People tend to work out the stuff they can see. And the back is not something unless you have really good lats. You can see them from the front. But, you know, some of those muscles are difficult for people to see. So it's a mistake that we often make. We love working out the biceps, right. The quads, the abs and the chest and everything gets tightened and curled forward. But it's really the back that needs to be twice as strong. Right. So I love that. What are some of the. Aside from the physical benefits that people receive, right. Better movement, more balanced movement. What are some of the physiological improvements that people report back to you? Do you ever get somebody coming in and say, you know what, Robby, my digestion has improved or my sleep has improved or this pain that I was having in my gallbladder liver area is gone. Now does that ever happen?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The sleep drastically improves even in, for example, Parkinson's patients. A friend of mine, Dr. Danny from NAU, did research even on this recently. And so doing high intensity exercise even with Parkinson's patients shows significant improvements in sleep with the 30 minute exercise bout. And that of course shows up in our clients and they share with us that. And the biggest thing that we hear is that they feel 20 years younger. That's really the biggest thing that we see is they end up feeling 20 years younger because they're upregulating or improving their ability to drive oxygen to their cells, which then gives them a feeling of more energy. They end up thinking more clearly their, their neuronal health. So their, their cells in their brain are firing more efficiently because they're also functioning with energy more efficiently. And so they feel those things. They feel less pain, less stiffness. They feel like they can are more capable in life to be able to grab a milk jug out of the refrigerator, you know, and hold it even far out away from them. They are able to open jars easier. Like these are some of the, the extrinsic things that they really see happening around in their life. They can play with their grandkids and not get exhausted and keep up with those little ones or their kids or they can go skiing and their knees don't hurt and they're able to live so much more life. They show up to meetings and now they look 10x better in their business attire and they feel a stronger presence and they end up making more money because they feel more powerful. And if you're a buff dude or, or fit girl and you show up to a meeting and you're like training in the wrong way and you feel like stiffness and stuff, yeah, you look amazing. Other people might think, yeah, she looks really fit. He looks really. But you're not going to feel that because you don't, you can't just look that. You have to feel and function that. And so what we get back mostly is the level of feel and function increase over any other fitness thing they've ever done in their life. That's the biggest thing that we see.

I love that. So powerful, man. So powerful. I love how our communication style is very similar. The way we look at the body, there's a lot of overlap and there's a lot of uniqueness to your message as well. I'm curious, what are some of your favorite books?

My favorite book. So quick side note on that. I've been studying personal development since I was 19 years old. I used to be in Highway University. In other words, anywhere I would drive, always listening to audiobooks and self development programs. Last year, two years ago, I read a book that ended up becoming my number one out of everything I've gone through. And that book is the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I that was the most profound book that I've ever read. I think that was absolutely amazing.

Fun fact, that was the first audiobook I ever bought.

Oh wow.

Hour of now.

Wow.

I'll confess, this was when I still had some hair left and no grays in my beard at that time. It was before I actually got married to my wife. So we're talking about almost 15, 16 years ago. However, I wasn't ready for that book and I bought because I was big fan and student of Highway University as well. And so I bought it to listen to in my car, but my car could only play it at single speed and audiobooks when listened to at single speed are more like lullabies. So I couldn't really get myself into it. So I'm going to read that book again. I know my wife has a physical copy of it, so maybe I'll read the physical copy, but maybe I'll download it on audible and listen to it at double speed or something so that I could tune back into that.

You don't have adhd, do you Satchin?

Oh no. What makes it.

Yeah, well, when I first listened, I listened to it through audiobook and then read the book and I thought what I called it was a subconscious audiobook because of the way that Eckhart Tolle talks. And yeah, it's very soothing. Very, very soothing.

I love it. I love it. So I know we've got some cool stuff planned for people in our mentorship. I'm excited to put some of that behind the scenes together with you and Patty. It's so fun to see you both work together and collaborate with one another. How can others who are listening and tuning into this learn more about the work that you're doing and connect with you?

The best way to connect with me would just you can email me at Robby R O B b I e fitnessdoctor.com you can learn some more about what we do@thefitnessdoctor.com Although this site specifically portrays what we do in an individual level and we're now expanding and bringing that to many more people through a group and community structure which we believe will be much more fun, even more interesting, even more impactful because tying back to something you say, Satchin, which is the doctor of the future is the patient. And in this process we make the client in a very fun way, their own fitness doctor because they understand what should happen. And so by going through our process, every exercise and physical activity they do for the rest of their life will become better just by being with us for few to several months.

One thing I learned taking applied kinesiology is that there was a muscle correlated with every visceral organ. Have you ever read Dr. Goodhart's work?

I have not, no.

So if we wanted to, let's say muscle test for low testosterone, we would test the glutes. If we wanted to muscle test, let's say the liver, there were specific, there's a specific muscle associated with it. So it'd be interesting to see if there is an exercise prescription or a way to assess the corresponding muscle tissues. And maybe you're already doing that in many ways. But I can see for practitioners that, hey, if a client's coming in and they've got liver dysfunction or they've got GI dysfunction, that there's specific stretches or movements or you know, out of your assessment of those 11 different postures and movement ranges, if those could be identified, and it'd be really neat if you could identify and correlate where those dysfunctions are with some of their functional lab testing. Like, how neat would that be?

Yeah, I think that would be amazing. But I have to share a kind of business breakthrough for all the doctors also. What I learned by literally doing an OCD level system and building our own software for all this process and you know, it takes us five months to onboard one trainer that can only see 15 clients because of how heavy and analysis our system was and is. And we still provide that to individuals. But what I found is you can have, you can have paralysis by analysis. Right. And so what we end up finding is that our solutions side, prescriptive side, is does eval and prescription at the same time. Really. Because if you find that you're excessively deficient or something's hard, it's telling. This is an analysis. This is telling you, hey, this is an area you really need to work on. Like, you know, if you're having trouble with your external rotation or your shoulder, but you can bench press £200, like that's a huge problem. You need to focus more on external rotation. So you end up getting the analysis. And if you optimize all the mechanics of the body then, and you get the benefits of all those things and you find that out by going through a system that's based on biomechanical optimization. Now with the mobility, it's good to actually test and use a specific metric. And we do that, but we found that, you know, through an optimization solution based process. And of course, you know, with like blood work, you can't just look at a person and see like what their numbers are. So there are some things where you just can't use what I'm saying. But in the physical world with exercise, we found that by focusing and at amazing level on our solution, our prescription based process, it's almost like a self analysis along with the solution at the same time. Yeah, yeah.

One thing I'd love to do after this call is I'm going to send you an assessment form that we use and it'd be interesting maybe with some of your clients that you're close with, to give them the questionnaire because it breaks down their symptoms based on what organ system is out of balance and to see if there's a correlation between the systems that you found out of imbalance and to draw a conclusion or at least see if there's any correlation between the two because then this could serve into a diagnostic tool not just for the physical body, but for the biochemical and cellular function in the body too. All right, I love where this conversation can go, man. It's fantastic to be able to chat with you and, and share the amazing work that you're doing. I did want to also highlight that you're located in the Phoenix, Arizona area, but you work with clients all over the world. Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, all over the world. As long as you speak English or Portuguese, we can give you amazing service. Yep.

Thank you, my friend. Any closing words for our audience that's.

Tuned in today that biomechanical optimization is the way to go with your exercise. And really, you know the. When you learn what that means and you practice it in yourself, it's an eye opener and I think it will forever help people in all physical activity and motion in their health by learning that.

Well, there you have it, folks, the fitness doctor Robbie Stahl. Thank you, Robbie, for joining me today. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and also I am so thankful and have so much gratitude and anticipation for the work that we're doing together. So thank you for really opening up your heart and opening up your vision to impact as many lives as you can.

Much love to you, brother. Much gratitude and I'm super excited.

All right, well, thank you for tuning in, everyone, and here's to your best health and to your best practice. Talk to you all soon. Bye for now.