Ep. #399: Jordan Shallow on Chiropractic for Weightlifters

Jordan: Most people’s injuries happen when their strength outruns their stability. That’s like a fundamental principle to a lot of this stuff is where people that put the cart before the horse, they realize that stability is the governing factor of output. So if you really want to get stronger, It’s about expressing the strength you have, not trying to beat your head against the wall and just load more weight.

Mike: Hello and welcome to another episode of the muscle for life podcast. I am Mike Matthews, of course. And this time we’re talking chiropractic. This is a controversial subject, particularly in the fitness community, because on one hand, you have people who claim that chiropractic can fix all kinds of aches and pains and ailments ranging from low back problems to indigestion, headaches, brain fog, and much, much more.

While on the other hand, You have people who say that chiropractic is pseudoscientific and it is just a sham run by greedy charlatans and it provides no value beyond The placebo effect and if you poke around on the internet, unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of evidence of the latter, what with the myriad gurus out there who use their doctor of chiropractic credentials to mislead people into thinking that they are actually medical doctors and thus experts on anything and everything related to health and wellness, which of course segues into many pills, powders, and PDFs for people to buy.

So what’s the real story here? Is chiropractic a science or is it a sham? That is what prompted me to invite Jordan Shallow on the show. Jordan is a buddy of mine and he’s also a licensed chiropractor and a high level strength coach doing work at Stanford University as well as a super strong dude.

He’s a Competitive power lifter who can deadlift more than I could ever hope to deadlift. And in this interview, Jordan helps shed light on the pros and cons of chiropractic, how it actually works, why people use it and how it can and cannot benefit you and more. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills.

But I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically my fish oil supplement Triton. Now Triton is a high potency, high purity, 100 percent re esterified triglyceride fish oil with added vitamin E to prevent oxidation and rancidity and natural lemon oil.

To prevent the noxious fish oil burps that we all know and hate. Furthermore, Triton is made from sustainably fished deep water anchovies and sardines and is molecularly distilled to remove natural toxins and contaminants. So if you want to optimize your mental and physical health and performance and reduce the risk of disease and dysfunction, then you want to head over to www.

legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of Triton today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code podcast to checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like this.

You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don’t have to return the products, you don’t have to fill out forms, you don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can’t lose here. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet.

And if for whatever reason they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least let’s get to the show.

Jordan, welcome to my little podcast, man. Thanks for taking the time. 

Jordan: No, man. I appreciate it. This is a long time in the works. Good to hear from you. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Jordan: I missed our last cause I had a cold, 

Mike: but 

Jordan: here I am. I’m not surprised. 

Mike: Yeah. Knock on wood. I don’t think this table is really wood, but I’m knocking on it.

I think I had a kind of a half of a cold. If I can get out of the winter with just one actual cold, no flu or anything else, and my kids really nothing, then I’ll take it. 

Jordan: Yeah, chalk that up as a win, especially when you’re living in the middle of some polar vortex right now. 

Mike: Yeah. So my wife got sick first.

I’m drinking a bottle of water and she’s Oh, don’t drink from that. I’m like, Oh, cool. Here’s a test of my immune system, the easiest way to get sick, share food or beverages with someone who’s sick. All right, so anyways, getting to the point, we’re here to talk about chiropractic, which I’m excited to talk about because it’s something I’m asked about fairly often.

But I’m pretty ignorant. I’m not anti chiropractic. That’s a trendy thing. I feel like in the fitness space, probably mostly due to the various fake doctors around the internet. The chiropractors who try to pretend like they’re MDs and then just give a bunch of stupid advice about all kinds of stupid shit.

However, I do see a chiropractor. Here and there. I have felt like it’s good for maintenance, and I understand a little bit of the basic underlying theory of it, but I’m pretty ignorant, so that’s why I was excited to talk to you because you’re a smart dude and you are multidisciplinary. You’re not just a chiropractor, and you also are coming at this from an angle of a strength athlete, a.

coach. You’re very interested in things that work and that’s how you make your living. Like you wouldn’t be in the position you’re in if you couldn’t make athletes better and help them fix their problems. And so I thought it was interesting that you chose even that chiropractic is in your repertoire. I think a good place to start the discussion would be what is chiropractic.

Exactly. 

Jordan: So chiropractic from a pure definition standpoint is the Latin word for of the hand, right? So that in itself gives you a bit of an umbrella to operate under. And then legally, the umbrella is equally as broad and ambiguous with a lack of regulatory oversight, which leads to the fake Instagram doctors getting away with the nonsense that they seem to perpetuate.

Yeah, chiropractic is a form of manual medicine. You could lump it in with classic osteopathy and you’d put it in with more modern physical therapy. But because you’re given so much legal latitude, it does have a lot of definitions based off the interpretation, the skill set, and Technically like the motivation of whoever the practitioner is, right?

Chiropractic colleges, I believe there’s 17 in the United States, two in Canada, one being English speaking, one being French. Basically their job is to prepare you to pass the national board exam. So whereas if you think of like maybe conventional medicine, like an MD program, a lot of the vetting. For an MD is done prior to getting into medical school.

My sister being a surgeon herself, her process of getting into med school was much more, let’s say egregious or difficult or trying than it was me getting into chiropractic college. The problem with that then becomes. You’re left with the vetting process occurring in the public court of opinion, not necessarily behind the closed doors of an administrative process that’s vetting applicants for school.

So with, a lot of student debt and no real guidance from a business standpoint, chiropractors are thrown out into the wild west of medicine. And a lot of times they take and find the path of least resistance that will make them the most money, which is, you Where a lot of the fundamentals of the basis for the crap that gets perpetuated, a lot of that is just survival instinct as a means of keeping the lights on and keeping the family fed.

Mike: Yeah. It’s understandable. I would say the only critique really that beyond that of it’s understandable, but it’s not okay. And I guess the criticism is there is a better way. You don’t have to be a fraud. You don’t have to be a quack that I see a chiropractor every few months or so once every few months when I go to Florida to visit my family.

And I don’t get that. Vibe from him at all. He doesn’t try to sell me on weird shit. I don’t know. It feels good when he adjusts where he’s Oh, yeah, this is a little bit out and then he’ll adjust it and it just feels better. I’m like, Oh that’s it’s worth something. I haven’t looked into very much beyond that.

Is there a long term value to that? But it’s worth something. I think it’s good segue into adjustments, right? So that’s obviously what most people are going to think of when they think of chiropractors. What is actually going on there? Yeah. What is the point of it? 

Jordan: There’s two, there’s an answer in principle.

And then there’s an answer in practice. And the answer in principle is I don’t know if we know, and that’s if you’re going off research, if you’re going off of very much just I don’t want to say evidence, but definitely research like evidence exists on three pillars, empirical evidence being conventional research, peer reviewed journals, things like that, but then experience of the clinician and also value of the patient.

So I wouldn’t say there’s strong research that really. points us in one direction of a mechanism of correction that we can hang our hat on, but I’ve adapted a theory that has an internal logical consistency. So the best answer I can get, and this is the lens that I look at it through, I can say, all right, Matthews, we’re going to hit a bicep curl or something.

You can voluntarily flex your bicep, or we’re going to do a quad extension. You can voluntarily flex your quad. If I said flex your multifidus, I’d be really interested to see what you come up with. Multifidus is a muscle that spans vertebral segments in the spine that you don’t have any control over. So it’s a weird thing to conceptualize that there’s muscles in the body that you don’t have voluntary access to.

And again, a working theory that I’ve developed, honestly, it was a lot of my work in the corporate sector that forced me to burn off a lot of the dead wood in the chiropractic. I’m going to air quote philosophy. And come up with maybe a more pragmatic explanation of the mechanism of correction.

So imagine there’s a muscle that goes from one bone in your back to the next, that you have no control over. Just like muscles in your arm or your leg. They have stretch reflexes. They have muscle spindles. tendon organs. They have an ability to stretch and contract, albeit involuntary and out of your control.

They still do that. I think is an intrinsic protective mechanism to the spinal cord, right? This very precious cargo that’s housed within these bones. That makes it. Somewhat unique to the rest of the bones in our body that in lies the sophisticated protection where it’s like if bone one and bone to start moving too far apart and there’s a muscle that’s acting as a guy wire and I’m oversimplifying this by referencing just the multifidus.

But, if you think for a second that the best way to herniate a disc would be to flex forward, laterally flex and then rotate. So imagine two points on adjacent bones and the distance you’re creating between those two points. So knowing intuitively that is where. I might be going too far into the weeds here, but that’s where the annulus fibrosus, like the posterior lateral aspect of the annulus fibrosus, which is what encapsulates the disc tissue that goes into the spinal cord when we herniate or sequester a disc or slip a disc for common parlance.

That is the position in which the pressure of those adjacent bones will be pushing that disc tissue into the weakest point of the annulus fibrosus. But at the same time, that’ll create the most distance in the muscles that go from bone one and bone two that are adjacently flexing, laterally flexing and rotating away from each other.

So a lot of times what’s happening is those muscles reactively go into spasm, as would any other muscle that operates with muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organ reflexes. So that’s essentially like what a muscle cramp is. If you get a cramp, it’s not Oh, go eat a fucking banana or some shit.

The research on cramping usually shows that like in isolated muscle groups, there’s some sort of aberrant firing or patterning between the Golgi tendon organ reflex and the muscle spindle. 

Mike: Just to interject those some people listening who don’t know what the Golgi tendon reflex is. Do you want to explain that real quick?

Jordan: Yeah, so like muscle spindles are going to help muscles contract and Golgi tendon reflex are going to help muscles relax, right? So the Golgi tendon organ reflex exists at the end range or at the end of muscles as they go into ligaments into their respective bones. Think of like static stretching, that’s what you’re activating to relax a muscle.

And again, I’m air quoting a lot of this just for the oversimplification. But when you’re stretching, you’re not necessarily changing the structural length of muscle, you’re down regulating the neurological perception of length of that muscle, which is like a really important distinction to make. And you’re doing that via activating this bulging tendon reflex.

Mike: And it’s also, it plays a role antagonist muscle groups in the body, right? If one is flexing, the other is relaxed. 

Jordan: Yeah and that’s the nice thing about voluntary control, right? If I bring my bicep to a fully shortened position, my tricep is in a fully lengthened position, right? That’s that agonist antagonist relationship.

But, With the unique nature of the leverage positions of the muscles of her spine, we don’t necessarily have antagonists to some of these muscles. So the way I look at it is at some point during your day, you’ve created some sort of aberrant distance between vertebra one, vertebra two, usually stemming from an instability of.

Honestly, it’s usually the low back. So like low back or core instability. And I’m very specific when I use the word instability and not weakness. And then those muscles are tasked rather with keeping adjacent position as a means of protecting the spinal cord. When people throw out their box. It’s not muscles that they’ve trained in the gym, like it’s not their lats, it’s not their glutes, it’s not their rhomboids or their middle traps, it’s just like this diffuse, non specific, non localized, because it’s like you have an ability to feel that muscle, but not an ability to control that muscle.

So I think An adjustment is basically an external means of activating stretch reflexes between two adjacent vertebrae that are going to downregulate that perception and that tone of the muscle that’s gone into spasm for whatever reason. 

Mike: And that would be by moving the positions of the vertebrae like back to where they should be?

Jordan: So that’s what I have a problem with. Selling the idea on alignment I think is maybe a little bit facetious and misleading. Every correction is attempted to be made at the neurological level, so we reverse engineer how movements created and we go back to the motor planning centers of the brain that go through the ventral spinal cord out in through like the peripheral nervous system and then cause a voluntary contraction and then sensory feedback loops back so like when the muscle contracts.

The muscle is one step away from the peripheral, which is one step away from the central, which is one step away from that motor planning part of the brain. I believe it’s prefrontal cortex. If you’re trying to get to the nervous system, a lot of times from most other places in the body, starting at the level of the muscle is starting one level closer To the nervous system.

But when it comes to the depth of some of these muscles, like multifidus, inner transverse area, rotatory is like your erectors to a certain extent when you’re transversal spinalis group, all these independently controlled muscles, you don’t necessarily have the ability to stretch and contract like you would a bicep tricep quad hamstring, some sort of agonist antagonist relationship.

So in order to activate the requisite reflex to get that perception to down regulate, And to not have tightness, you need to make a rapid shift in the relative position of one vertebra versus the next where the origin and the insertion of one muscle exists in respects to another. So I think that as a means of framing it will actually leave people getting adjusted less.

It’s not about knowing how to adjust. I don’t have a license to adjust. I have a license to know when to not to. And I think that’s a really important way of framing approaching spinal adjusting as a means of treatment in short term, depending on the demographic of the patient, it can be extremely helpful, depending on what it is exactly you’re adjusting.

But I think long term, if we’re looking to make levels of the changes of the nervous system, we need to start thinking muscles first, because they’re going to give us a little bit more direct access. to the nervous system. So even from an adjustment approach, I’m still looking at the mechanism of correction happening at the muscular level by means of accessing the nervous system.

Mike: That’s interesting. I haven’t heard that before. So again, this is me just being ignorant. Had always been told whenever I had asked chiropractors I’ve seen in the past, it was more about the alignment and just getting the vertebrae to align. But it’s interesting that You’re using that to help certain muscles chill out and help positively impact the body in a muscular and neurological way, as opposed to keep bones perfectly aligned all the time.

That was something I never quite understood where it’s even if I just laid in bed all day, I’m sure whatever you just did in my spine is how long until. Things are misaligned again. And then do I just keep getting adjusted forever? And I know that, this, that I think one of the practices out there that gives chiropractic a bad name is that never ending treatment plan.

Basically, like I knew people when I was younger, who would go to the chiropractor every single day to get adjusted every day. Seven days a week forever. 

Jordan: If you run a good business, you don’t run a good practice necessarily. Because I think being a strength coach, like pain is easy. Performance is hard, right?

If you set the virtue to increasing performance. You’ll get pain. No problem. Like you’ll get rid of pain in a visit or two, honestly, within beginning a session to the end of an initial visit, you can get rid of pain. Like pain is just a perception. Perception is so easily manipulated. Basically, it’s like you don’t pay a plumber to bang on the pipes.

You pay him to know which pipes to bang on. So if you hold people to like just their highest virtue, being out of pain More often than not that should be easy and it should be quick just because you are out of pain doesn’t mean you’re high functioning I think that’s a false equivalency that people make pain is the last symptom to appear in the first one to go away Like just because you’re not in pain doesn’t mean you’re functioning at a hundred percent But it’s then understanding, okay, what is the true function of, in this case, the spine or, as I work with my athletes, what is the true function of the hip?

What is the true function of the shoulder? And I think that’s where the word function you glass over you’ve heard it BOSU ball and TRX and all this nonsense has been selling you on this idea of functional training without, Picking up a textbook or cutting open a dead body to really understand, like, how is this meant to work in network with the rest of the body?

That’s where people should be setting their compass to when it comes to treatment. I think when you set it to pain, you can draw out this course and justify treatment, especially if you’re selling them on this very suggestive model of alignment. Where it’s dude, I don’t care what, how you move when I move you laying face down on a table.

I care how you move with 700 pounds on your back. I care how you move, throw a hundred mile an hour fastballs. If you can tune everyone with that mindset, like that performance is the highest virtue that even if they don’t attain it, setting them on that path is a part of your treatment.

They’ll eclipse pain. No problem. If you’re focused on function and performance first. 

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. Two questions. One in your work that you do with high level athletes, how do you use it in addition to all the other things that you do with them? And then what about for the everyday person is their value in so if someone’s sitting there listening, I can see someone sitting there listening, going, okay, so when should I consider seeing a chiropractor and why two different questions, but those are my next two questions for you.

Jordan: You know what, man, a lot of people have a hard time with the fact that If you’re in a situation where say you get, and I’ll use the word because I find it very predacious, but if you’re duped into one of these, three times a week for the rest of your life and your kid has scoliosis and everyone gets x rays, then you reap what you sow, man.

Like you should not be vetting your healthcare practitioners the same way that you pick diners in a city you’ve never been to. You know what I mean? Yeah. If you’re Yelp chiropractors, it’s Deserve Yelp patients. And if you want to be lumped in that clusterfuck, then by all means, go ahead, like you get what you put in.

People just aren’t willing to put in the work. If you have a problem, usually your problem is you don’t know enough about something. So if you don’t know enough about or don’t take the time to be diligent in vetting your healthcare provider. Then, yeah, you’re gonna end up in the office of someone who’s just trying to keep the lights on.

And that’s my advice to people is 

Mike: how do you do that though? How do you find a good chiro 

Jordan: then? Great resources. I’m part of a network called clinical athlete.com, so clinical athlete is owned by a friend of mine called, his name’s Quint Henick so it’s twofold. I have to pay to be on there.

And then every time that you brings on a new practitioner into the database. He actually personally vets them with an interview. Clinical athlete is just that, right? There are clinicians who are focused on performance based. And think of it this way if an athlete is like a high tuned Ferrari or something like that, and a general population person is a four door sedan, it’s like, if you have the skill set, To operate and improve a high tune car, changing the oil on a civic should be relatively easy.

But if your skill set is only that to which you can change the oil on a civic, you can’t necessarily extrapolate that skill set out to the Ferrari. I always encourage people because on the outward, a lot of people who come see me, like who are general population patients of mine, like a friend will tell me, Oh, go see him.

And they take a look at me and they think of the general bone cracking model. And they go, I don’t want that guy anywhere near my spine. I don’t want him jumping on me. For which rightfully man. At first glance, really want to work with me either. But I just think like the vetting process.

And 

Mike: for those listening, Jordan’s a big boy and he looks intimidating. 

Jordan: I put a lot of the onus back on the level of the consumer. Not that I think chiropractors are innocent, but if we could see a shift in the market, free market is going to dictate how people run their businesses, right? As long as these guys are making, honestly, like I know guys in the bay making millions of dollars a year off rackets like this.

As long as people keep showing up, they’re going to keep doing it. So the vetting process for me is I always look for someone who’s performance based. Think of having a fat personal trainer. I like, I don’t want to have someone whose body is in terrible shape to work on my body, my performance, right?

So it can be difficult because the model has been set in place for so long. So for a resource I send most people to, and I have no affiliation, like I pay just like everyone else, but it is the best consolidated resource for ethical clinicians. And it’s not just chiropractors either. I think.

At the highest level, there’s very little difference in experience and treatment protocols when it comes to physical therapists and chiropractors and osteopaths. I think all three of us, especially when you’re dealing with athletes, we all gravitate towards the same method of treatment.

Short answer, that would be the best way I would go about it is go to clinical athlete and look up who’s around you and then don’t necessarily worry about discipline because it’s not about and even with like friends of mine who are PTs and osteos, it’s not about the like the initials after the name, right?

It’s about the integrity of the name that precedes it. So it’s, we don’t care if so and so went to PT school, so and so went to osteo, it’s like we care about the outcome and the performance of the patient. And that should be the end of the infighting. It’s When you start to hear Oh, Cairo’s, whatever, kill people and all that.

It’s that’s low rent. That is a straw man argument. That’s an ignorant statement from people who are worried about the wrong things. 

Mike: That’s great. Not heard of clinical. I think I pulled it up while you’re talking and checking out. And I think my browser’s blocking. I’m assuming it’s the map I’m using this browser that blocks everything.

So I’m assuming that’s where the list would be. Cause I was like, where’s the list of people? But I think that’s what it is. Yeah. You just go in there. You put in your set. Yeah. Now it finally opened full screen. Yeah, that’s cool. So that’s awesome. That’s a great resource. What type of common.

Issues are out there that for everybody listening where you would say who can benefit from that? Who should go right now to clinical athlete? Would you say anybody who just wants to perform better in the gym? And again, most of the people listening are not athletes and maybe amateur athletes, most of the people are just Everyday people who want to be in shape and they go to the gym, they lift weights, they do some cardio, how would chiropractic what would be your recommendation?

People like that just share. I’ll open with my thought on it has always been, I like to be preventative and proactive in general. I’d rather. Put a little bit of work in something consistently over time to not have a major problem later. And so I see, I think he started in rolfing, been doing what he’s been doing for 30 plus years.

And he’s gotten a couple of degrees and he’s now just a multidisciplinary sounds similar to what you were talking about. Seems like he’s developed his own approach to things based on all the stuff he knows. And I see him once every few weeks and all of us, there’s something wrong with our bodies period.

Nothing’s perfect, especially if you’ve been using it. So I find it helpful. I find that I’ve learned some areas of my body, some issues. I have a bit of hypermobility in my SI joint, bicipital groove on my right side tends to get a bit sticky. There are just things that he works on that make my workouts better.

So I’m like, Oh, that’s enough for me. 

Jordan: Yeah. So I think as far as who would benefit, I think if you’re in the gym and two, three times a week, regardless of how serious you are about, if you’re trying to stay fit, healthy longevity, all that. I think that’s the exact population that would get the most out of it.

When I deal with professional athletes, I’m flying very close to the sun. Peak performance. We’re talking like strongest guys in the world, cross discipline, like the best athletes in their respective sports, they’re teetering on a brink. You’re just trying to make sure they don’t end up with the speed wall.

It’s a risky endeavor, but at lower levels, it’s actually very calculated. If you know what you’re looking for, the biggest pitfall is people always end up. With the gold standard of structural assessment, because they can’t find someone who can tailor a sort of this bespoke gold standard of functional assessment based off of the person that’s right in front of them, right?

So what I mean by that is most people, first thing out the door is x ray or MRI, which is going to be your gold standard structural assessment, the superimposed black and white image of Your spine or your shoulder, your hip, where it’s why don’t you see how the thing functions first? But again, it comes down to that definition.

It comes down to function. Most people, unless they’re performance based, they don’t necessarily know how the shoulders meant to function. How is this meant to work in network with the rest of our body? So we we hang, we hang our hats or we, It’s a bit of a cop out, I think, a lot of times to go down the structural route and then look at okay see here, you have some fraying in your supraspinatus.

That’s why your shoulder hurts. Did you check like his active range of motion? Did you check his stability? Did you check like grip strength overhead? Maybe we can just out function this potentially damaged structure and that’ll get us above pain threshold. If people aren’t really burning the candle at both ends and really putting the foot through the floor when it comes to training.

Those are the people that can actually derive the most benefit from a very accurate and concise functional assessment. That comes with it a plan to improve function, right? That’s all we can really do, right? Once you get into the realm of into fatigable structural damage, it’s like you need a surgeon because we don’t do structure.

We should and we should master function. So that’s how I look at it. I think most people should at least get an idea of your bicipital groove, your SI joint hypermobility like that is. Good information to know. And it’s even better information to know if you have a plan that goes to counteract it, right?

Mike: Yeah. And I don’t in particular again, I see a guy who’s competent, smart, good dude, and seen him several times now, and he’s happy with the progress that’s being made. So I guess we’ll see where it goes from there. I’ve asked him, Hey, should I be doing anything special? I was doing some yoga and I was like, I don’t want to take hours a week to do these classes.

They’re fun and all, but I have a lot of shit I have to do. And so there were a few of the poses in particular that seemed to best address the issues that I was having, particularly with my hips, internal and external rotation was really imbalanced in between both in my left and right sides and bicep or groove stuff.

Cause I had some biceps tendonitis. So I don’t know, maybe a year or so ago, I was like, yeah, I like these poses. I’m just going to do these. And then I added a couple others and it’s like a 10 minute routine every day. And it actually has made quite a big difference. Particularly cause my hips are. At least the function is better now than it was before.

And I’ve noticed that in my squatting and deadlifting. So that’s what I do every day. So we’ll see, where it goes, but I agree with you that I was hoping that, okay, it’s good to get some treatments, but what else can I do? Is it just come get treatments forever or, and I can hear. People thinking that are listening.

What if they can’t afford necessarily to maybe they could afford to do a few trips, but they couldn’t afford to see somebody every other week or every month until the end of time. You know what I mean? 

Jordan: Yeah. It’s a predatory model. And a lot of it comes down to, one of my favorite sayings in just life really is don’t explain with malice.

What can be explained with ignorance? I do think people think, chiropractors think that they are helping people and to their knowledge, the best that they know how to, that’s what they’re doing. I think the projection of snake oil salesmen, there’s people out there who know that they’re being insidious in their approach.

I talked to some of these people and it’s like the George Costanza. Like it’s not a lie if you believe it. And like they’re hook, line and sinker, man. Like you listen to him talk and what did I bump my head? And what fucking rabbit hole did I just end up in? This guy actually thinks that like adjusting C1 is going to cure polio or some shit.

It’s just, but he believes it, man. One of the biggest insults that I can get is Oh, I believe in chiropractic. It’s that’s fantastic. I, what I do exists outside the realm of belief, right? I want it to be objectively, and that’s why I base my metrics off performance. I don’t worry about pain.

Nowhere in my intake form am I worried about a verbal analog scale out of 10. What can’t you do because of this? I can’t put my shirt on. Okay, I want you to do these drills in the next week. You can put your shirt on. We’re going to change the drills to keep it progressing. Okay, cool. At no point am I worried about does it hurt to put your shirt?

So you couldn’t do it. Now you can do it. It’s like that’s progress. A lot of it. You fall into the trap of like people are compassionate. I think on the whole, and chiropractors are no different, the issue is not maliciousness, it’s ignorance. They just don’t necessarily know because they weren’t taught.

Maybe that bone out of place structure first model has gone, or should be gone the way the dodo bird. I 

Mike: mean the adjustment element of it should just be gone. Part of the overall service, but not the only service and not the hammer for every 

Jordan: nail. Yeah. It’s in the education, man. Like the dogmatism, I’ve almost got kicked out of every academic institution I’ve ever gone.

That’s from preschool. Grade school, high school, undergrad, and grad school, because my fourth grade report card reads like the temperament of an angry 65 year old man, like questioning everything very like critics criticism to the point of cynicism where I don’t. Buy this philosophical approach to practice, right?

Like we’re literally and I went to probably what I would consider the best school in America forward thinking chiropractic integrative therapy. But even then, like I do, I’d still have classes called chiropractic philosophy. What are you talking about? Philosophy? Yeah, it’s a crazy fucking story, man.

Like the guy who founded this thing. There was a janitor who was deaf and then he adjusted his neck and then he wasn’t deaf anymore. It’s man, that’s up there with the dude living in the whale for two days or whatever. But it’s here’s the thing. It is not insidious. That’s real.

Like d. Palmer. There are crazy eccentrics, but I think to throw the baby out with the bathwater because of that, I think is pretty negligent approach. It’s an unsophisticated approach. Like you guys bled your first president to death, that medical doctors in the White House, George Washington died of hypovolemia.

He got sick and so they cut him and then he died. It’s not like we’re going to throw away conventional medicine because of people did some crazy shit. So no, I think like doing away with an entire field of manual medicine is really necessary because the guy who founded it and the philosophy that resonates from that, cause it’s only been like a hundred years or so since the field came into its own thing.

It is justified in some of the scrutiny, but I think Those of us who are just looking forward, just try to transcend the bullshit, understanding full well people’s frustration, that even their frustration is founded in just ignorance, really. 

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it?

Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you.

You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. What are your thoughts on mobility stuff, yoga, things that people can do at home? Again, I’m just thinking With people who could, maybe they can’t afford to see a chiropractor, even a practitioner who you would endorse, or there isn’t one available in their area, what are your thoughts on that kind of stuff?

And again, for most people, it’s probably going to be either to reduce pain or prevent pain or to improve function or maintain function. One 

Jordan: takeaway from this for anyone listening, this is like resonating with them. Maybe understanding what tightness is. So I think the idea like mobility has been the buzzword du jour since the Kelly Starrett and the CrossFit world took over the fitness space, right?

Probably about eight years ago or so. I think it sets people up for a false sense of hope. Mobility is not the answer. Mobility is a stepping stone on the way to the answer. So it’s an integrative model based off of mobility, stability, and then strength, right? Where most people look at it just as a spectrum of the big guy linebacker can’t touch his toes, but it’s really strong.

And then the nimble yogi fold himself in a pretzel can’t do a pushup kind of thing. That’s how we exist on this spectrum, but it’s not a spectrum. It’s like a three layer Venn diagram. Think of three spinning plates on sticks, and in the middle is stability. Mobility is great.

But if we can’t control end ranges of motion where we’re structurally unstable with function, then you’re equally as likely to get hurt. I have power lifters I work with who squat over a thousand pounds and getting in and out of vehicles is hard for them. I also have people in Cirque who I could literally fold up and stash away in the overhead bin.

Performer. And the thousand pound plus water are actually both equally as likely to succumb to an injury. It’s not this direct correlation between increased mobility and decreased pain and decrease of injury prevention. It’s an inverted bell curve, if you can imagine that. So the super flexible and the super inflexible actually both succumb to injury at equal rates.

So it’s about figuring out based off assessment where towards that injury The fringes of that inverted bell curve you begin to trend to and then what are the strategies to implement? To bring you to center where that risk is low and you’re at the bottom of that bell. So I think a lot of people, if you are a mobile, sure, stretch, but understand that you’re a mobile for a reason.

Your body’s limiting you to getting into some of these end range positions because it’s uncertain of your ability to functionally stabilize in structurally unstable positions. Let’s take the shoulder, for example, if I try to put my arm all the way over my head. And let’s say a full overhead positions, 180 degrees from a neutral shoulder, hand at your sides.

Let’s say my shoulder mobility was only afforded me like 130 degrees. It’s okay, there’s a reason my body’s inhibiting me this last 50 degrees. So I can stretch into that position. Let’s say I go, I want to do a shoulder day or a chest day. And so I stretch and get my hand at the overhead position.

And for two minutes of the day, I can get my hand there. So then what do I do? I put dumbbells in it. I start to load your body’s freaking out. Your nervous system is like, boy. What the hell are we doing here? And why do we have all this weight? It’s we can’t manage this. What I usually have people do is sitting there at the chair, like even if you’re listening at home, arm at your side, elbow at 90 degrees, make a fist, squeeze as hard as you can.

Take a mental inventory of how hard you can squeeze in that position and then put your arm straight over your head as high as you can. And then do it again. Where is it that you can exert the most force in that grip? 95, 98, 99 percent of people report arm at the side. But the muscles of grip are dictated by the like muscles in the medial epithelium.

So basically your elbow and down. So why is it now the position of the shoulder? Is dictating how much force we can exert in a neutral position arm at your side. You have a lot of structural stability, the two composing bones, or the two comprising bones of the shoulder, the humerus of the scapula have a lot of articulating surface.

It feels very stable. from its structure, you lose that when you go into the overhead position. So if you don’t have the requisite functional stability to make up for what you’re lacking in structural stability in that position, your body’s going to limit how much force you can output and over time limit your ability to get into that position as a general takeaway.

I don’t want people to think that just because they stretch what’s tight, that’ll be the problem. You need to stretch into unstable positions, and then stabilize those positions. So let’s make this really like 

Mike: Yeah, I was gonna ask, how do you do that? Then what are the key factors in play here? 

Jordan: I like the idea of specificity.

I do look at corrective exercise prescription. A pharmacological intervention, right? So I don’t want to take my mom’s satins or whatever, because I don’t need it. So as a general rule of thumb, let’s say someone has tight hips. The hips are a ball and socket joint that move through three planes of glute.

Let’s stretch. Fine. I’m okay with stretching into external rotation. So that’s through one plane. So that’s something like a pigeon pose extension of the hip, which would be something like a couch stretch. So you cover all three planes from a mobility standpoint. Then I want you to stabilize stability from the fundamentals.

Like a physics standpoint is basically you have a base of support and a center of mass. So when you’re standing there with two feet on the ground, you have a pretty wide base of support. And what if you stood on one leg? Now you have a limited base support. So something like a single leg Romanian deadlift, where like you just try and hinge and have your torso approach the floor as your back leg that’s going into extension approaches the ceiling at the same rate.

So keep a neutral spine, see how well you can stabilize. You’d be astonished at how poorly people operate on one leg. Even though as they walk around all day, they spend the majority of their gait cycle on one leg. That is how you appraise gait cycle is hip function, right? So if you get someone to do a single leg RDL, you’re basically taking the isolated functional assessment of gait cycle and putting it under a microscope.

And then you’re seeing like, okay, Because this person is very unstable in this position, that instability still exists from a functional standpoint. It’s just being made up for by structure. But guess what gets hurt when you’re squatting? Guess what gets hurt when you’re deadlifting? Your structure, right?

Structure is your SI joint. Structure is your lumbar disc. Structure is your hip labrum. Structure is your medial meniscus and lateral meniscus of your knees. So it’s imagine if we could own those positions when we put the function under a microscope and we could build that function to a point when we are in structurally stable positions, we know we have the functional stability to buffer any force to keep it out of the structure.

So I can use the a single leg RDL is pretty much its goal is to use the glute knee, which is your primary lateral stabilizer to stabilize the hip lateral stability. That’s all you’re really looking to do if you don’t have that, but you can hide that dysfunction in a squatting pattern at some point and under enough load.

Something of your structure will not have the tissue tolerance to manage that force. So it’s not about taking the weight off the bar necessarily. It’s about putting the force in places where the tolerance is scalable. Like the tolerance of your SI joint, roughly speaking, is not necessarily something that you can build to be resilient.

You can build the muscles around it to be resilient so that the force never increases at the level of the SI joint. But the SI joint itself is, it’s fairly hardwired as it comes to like it’s structural integrity. 

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. What are some other exercises? I don’t want to call them quote unquote functional exercises, but you got what I’m saying.

What are some other exercises that you are. Using fairly often to improve stability. The main points, for weightlifters, it’d be the hips. It would be the shoulders. 

Jordan: I’ll go real systematic for you. Cause this is basically the outline of my book is this. So it’s think of going to a physical therapist, going to a chiropractor and being told, Oh, I’m sorry, you have weak glutes, right?

How many people have heard that you have weak glutes? So then they put a band around their knees and they start marching laterally around the gym or you have a weak core That’s another one. So you’re doing the big three and you and all these curl ups and sit ups Or you have a weak rotator cuff.

There’s a trend here. It’s not weakness. It’s instability. The shoulder, the spine, the hip are hubs of stability, not hubs of strength. You can strengthen a weak glute. It doesn’t matter. It’s think of it this way. I’m a 275 pound powerlifter. If I start to improve my five minute mile, and then I’m wondering why my squats not going up.

Oh, no shit, right? It’s a totally different system. It’s a totally different means of adaptation. Like an adaptation has to be very specific to the imposed event. So I wouldn’t be bewildered at that fact if I went running and my squat went down, but we’re really flustered, especially as athletes where I build strength in a rotator cuff, I build strength in a glute, I build strength in a core.

By adding resistance is going through a range of motion and I don’t see an improvement of stability. It’s not weakness. It’s the problem. It’s instability. It’s a totally different adaptation. It’s not like people run and then think they’re going to get stronger or squat and they think they become better runners.

It’s equally as different as strength and endurance is strength and stability. But what do people do? Booty bands, hip circles, fucking TheraBand, rotator cuff. Crossover symmetry, all this jazz, which is there’s a place for it. Sure. Don’t get me wrong. I think like low training age, post op building strength.

Do you speak another language? 

Mike: I’m learning German. So I am Bissian. 

Jordan: Okay. German’s tough. Imagine you spoke Italian, right? You were Italian and we’re like, all right, Matthews, let’s hit up Barcelona for a weekend. It’s like, all right, Italian. We’re good. We can get on a train. We can order lunch.

We’ll be sweet. That’s where building strength in muscles of stability work for the general population. The general population are tourists to physical activity, so they don’t have to be necessarily physically literate in their adaptations that they’re making. They’re just here for the weekend. You and me permanent fucking residents. This is my mailing address, dude. I live, breathe and sleep the shit. That’s like me knowing Italian going to Barcelona and then living there. It’s okay, I want to be literate and fluent in the physical adaptations I need to make. I need to speak the right language.

Otherwise, I’m going to get left behind. So understanding that at the level of the shoulder. So an example, kettlebell bottom under press kettlebell windmill, stabilize the scapula using the serratus anterior. Okay. kettlebell bottom underpress when executed properly stabilize the glenohumeral joint using the rotator cuff.

That’s your upper body stuff. If you can’t do it because of mobility, increase your mobility until you can get to that position for the core planks, reverse GHR sit ups, ab wheel. It’s about anti extension, right? It’s not about doing sit ups and flexing and extending the lumbar spine. It’s about resisting movement, right?

That’s the fundamental difference between strength and stability. Strength is exerting force. Stability is resisting force, right? So it’s a matter of. Understanding at each one of these levels, what is the goal I’m trying to achieve? What is the adaptation I’m trying to make? And at the level of the hip, single leg RDL, walking lunges, hip airplanes, those to me, if you can start to master proper execution of those movements, and actually begin to create some joint stability at end range, you are going to exponentially decrease the likelihood of injury at all three levels of those joints because that’s how each one of those is meant to function.

The function of the core isn’t to flex the lumbar spine, it’s to act as an anti extender. Function of the infraspinatus isn’t to externally rotate the shoulder, it’s to stabilize the glenohumeral joint. The function of the glute med isn’t to abduct against resistance and it’ll strengthen abduction external rotation.

It’s to stabilize the hip laterally through gait cycle. So it’s understanding that fundamental. Yeah. 

Mike: That’s a fantastic point. I’m assuming even the everyday person would experience, if not increases in performance, they would progress better over time because they’re. Neurological systems wouldn’t be okay with them continuing to load, I would assume, right?

So if you have more joint stability, there are systems, or if you don’t have enough joint stability, I’m sure there are systems that basically where the body is doing everything it can to not get hurt. I’m sure you can force it to that point, unless I’m wrong. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?

That’s just me rambling, but 

Jordan: Yeah, no, I think most people, when they train in externally stabilized positions, right? So they’re sitting on the preacher curl. They’re laying on the bench press. So from an exercise programming standpoint, think of the law of conservation of energy, right?

Like matter could never be created or destroyed, just transferred from one to another. That’s how you should look at maybe organizing your program. It’s okay. If you understand the function of the shoulder, understand the function of the spine and the hip, you need to appease that function. under load while you’re training to a certain extent, whether it’s fragmented, like think of the bench press.

My serratus is totally inhibited when I bench press. Why? Serratus and rhomboids are opposing muscles. So when I retract my shoulder blades, my serratus is turned off. Plus my scapula is being stabilized by the bench I’m laying on. Okay, I’m not saying don’t bench press. I’m saying at some point you need to integrate that proper shoulder function.

You can’t destroy that moment. You need to transfer it, put in windmills, put in. Landmine presses put in something where you can actually integrate that upward rotation of the scapula, right? Most people’s injuries happen when their strength outruns their stability, right? That’s like a fundamental principle to a lot of this stuff is where people that put the cart before the horse, they realize that the stability is the governing factor of output.

So if you really want to get stronger, it’s about expressing the strength you have, not trying to beat your head against the wall and just load more weight. Most people would seek to benefit so much more from increasing that internal stability than just trying to. Load the bar with more weight. 

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense.

And what are your thoughts on more whole body exercises? And how do they contribute to stability like the squat or the deadlift? 

Jordan: No. So this is where I get a lot of pushback. Like the squat is not functional. The squat or the deadlift is not functional. They are economical means in which you can load a lot of weight.

Hip function is gait cycle. It’s an equal lesson evolutionary biology and biomechanics. If you look at the study of like behaviorism, there’s the clinical behaviorists and then there’s the ecologists. The difference between the two is clinical behaviorists, they looked at Purely humans and cats and giraffes.

Everything is just consciousness is just a vessel that creates output from input. That’s how a lot of biomechanists look at squatting, look at deadlifting, and they don’t necessarily respect the environment where ethologists, that’s like like your Jane Goodall’s, go out into the environment and see how that affects the parameters of the load.

So I think for me, it’s wanting a deadlift. I’m not saying don’t do them. I’m not saying they’re not great exercises. I’m saying as a. pertains to actual function of the hips. It’s not functional. Function is gait cycle, pure and simple. If you ask me, what is the athlete that gets the most out of their hips?

You sample 100%. There’s no one that comes close to the output that this guy gets at his hips. And I just think, people put up like, oh, like the little baby or whatever, that little ginger baby, you know what I’m talking about? It’s like in the squat and then it’s all labeled. It’s fuck that.

Oh yeah. I’m so stupid. Little fucking ginger baby. It doesn’t make any sense. He has 300 bones as a dude. I got a big fucking head. My head is not the third of the size of my body. That is by no means an argument for squatting being functional. That’s stupid. Or like the sagittal plane drawing.

There’s some fitness industry people who claim that their terrible squat is based off their astronomically large, long femurs. It’s no one’s legs are as long as you’re proclaiming your legs to be. And they put up that little sagittal plane analysis, right? The little stick figure drawing, it’s dude, this is a static two dimensional depiction of movement that exists in three dimensions.

All I can see really from that little drawing stick figure, the angles you drew to justify your shitty squat. It’s a quantitative analysis. It’s okay, is your hip below parallel? Yes. Cool. What’s the intention of external rotation and abduction at the hip to stabilize the SI joint, stabilize this more occipital joint.

There’s something to be said about. Differentiating between physics and biomechanics. Like a lot of people think that they’re talking about biomechanics, but they’re talking about physics. So like the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but that’s not how our body works. No matter how many little stick figures you draw biomechanics is have you ever seen lightning hit something?

I have seen videos of it, but yeah, that’s how our body works. It’s about the path of least resistance. That’s how our nervous system recruits. And it’s guess what, man? If you haven’t trained the proper function of your hips, That path is not going through your glute med. I don’t care how fucking strong it is.

That path is going to find its way through the SI joint. That path is going to find its way through the medial meniscus when your knee knocks in. You can drive your knees out into a band, but if you can’t stand on one leg. You shouldn’t be squatting with two. 

Mike: That’s interesting. I’ve not run across, maybe this is again, just me being ignorant of these kinds of things, but I’m really enjoying this conversation myself because you’re just answering questions I’ve had that I’ve not come across great information on because I’ve come across a lot of stuff that you’ve mentioned, which is a lot of, it’s what just makes the rounds on social media or the blogosphere.

It really makes sense. I’m sold. I want to ask you after what I should, it could just be adding the few exercises that you mentioned, but I’d love to do it. And for other reason than it just makes sense. And it seems like the right thing to do. And again, I’m all about being proactive, but I’d also be curious to see.

How it impacts my non functional stuff that we do for fun. 

Jordan: It’s amazing how quick this stuff works without sounding like a salesman, and that will give you a logical reason as to why. If I don’t train for strength, I can depreciate my strength very quickly. Why? Because it’s very inefficient. To have the neurological capacity to lift what I lift without fucking blowing my own horn.

You don’t need to do what I do. It’s wildly dangerous, it’s wildly inefficient from a day to day level. To recruit motor units to that frequency and magnitude is tirelessly inefficient. Juxtaposed to efficient lifestyle, you’ve probably experienced this. Dude, if you take three or four days off the gym, how much weight do you lose?

Mike: To be honest? I none really, maybe, 

Jordan: maybe a 

Mike: little bit. 

Jordan: Not really. Oh man. If I take four or five days off the gym, I can lose eight pounds. 

Mike: Really? 

Jordan: Yeah. I’ll go from 275 down to the high two sixties. If I take a few days. 

Mike: Wow. To be fair, I’m 195. I’m a little guy. I’m not that strong either.

Jordan: The strategies I’ve had to lay down based off of the training I’ve done are systemically inefficient for my body. That’s why I’ve approached diminishing returns. 

Mike: Yeah. Your body is like actively fighting you at this point. 

Jordan: Oh yeah. It fucking hates me. And rightfully man, I put it through the ringer day in, day out.

But when it comes to stability is actually makes me more efficient. So stability is this really neat adaptation that once you credit the account, man, you can live off the interest. Interesting. Like my warmups now are so short. You’re so short. Basically, can I get into an end range of motion?

Can I get into there actively without having to stretch? If I can’t, I’m sitting on a flight from 17 and a half hours from Melbourne to Dallas a couple of weeks ago. It’s like I got off that flight. I wasn’t touching my toes. So it’s okay, single leg RDL is not going to be the first thing I do in the warm up.

I’m going to stretch my hips. Get into that position. Once I can solidify that position, own it, stabilize it, then I can load it. Yeah. Done. Warm up. When I first started, I go through a round of static stretching. I’d go out on a foam roller. I would use some bands, do some PNF style stretching to get into these unstable positions, then stabilize those positions.

Mike: This might be a dumb question, but what do you mean by stabilizing the position once you’ve gotten into it? 

Jordan: Think of the single leg RDL. If anyone’s listening right now and it’s safe to do stand on one leg and hinge, trying like drive your non loaded leg to the ceiling while keeping that foot pointed to the ground, the toe pointed to the ground and see what happens.

Thanks. Watch your foot. Just start to shake your plant foot. Just start to acute onset Parkinson’s just start to find itself and grab the floor. You should get to a point where that should be locked in, right? You should be able to resist force of your own body weight, especially if you’re going to try to be loading weight more than your own body weight.

And so that’s stability. Like when you do the kettlebell bottom under press, it’ll be real obvious. Cause you’ll get to the top of the movement and people will always report like, Oh, my wrist is weak because the kettlebell will go from that bottom under position where you’re like grabbing the handle with the bell on top.

And then the bell will fall down and hit you in the wrist. It’s it has nothing to do with your grip. It’s just, you don’t have enough stability in the shoulder to actually express the strength at your hand. So if you scale the weight back. Go through that full range where you’re stabilizing into that end range of motion with an unstable load.

That’s why you grab the kettlebell the way you do. It’s not so much resistance as it’s the deviation of the combined center of mass of your arm and the kettlebell outside of the base support, which in that case is your shoulder. So that’s how you can always frame it. What’s my basis support?

Where’s my combined center? The more you can deviate, the more you can elicit a stimulus of instability. 

Mike: I got better at that when I was doing yoga, actually. Cause you know, some of those poses were a bit difficult at first standing on one leg and trying to twist around yourself. And yeah, I can attest to, I got better as I continued to do it.

It positively impacted my training and even those points of becoming stable on each leg individually. I didn’t know exactly and how you’ve explained it, why that was, but I did notice that. 

Jordan: Yeah. Yoga is good, but you’re riding the bus, dude. Like you’re not a control and everyone’s going to the same place where I think specificity really matters.

Again, broad spec stuff for gen population. If you’re not doing yoga and you’re experiencing pain, before you go to a chiropractor, do three yoga sessions, see how you feel. If you’re someone who’s like competitive in something and you need those adaptations to be specific and you need them to be expedited, go see someone who has that, the functional roadmap that can assess and then intervene very accurately, very specifically to the, your limitations and specific ranges that are limited.

And then a progression of instability to stabilize those end ranges once you attain. 

Mike: That’s great. I like that. Those are all the questions I had for you. Is there anything else that is floating around that you wanted to add? Or should we just wrap up? 

Jordan: I just like to impart on people just to be critical, man.

Like question the shit I said, that’s how I learned all this. I started my career working at Apple world headquarters as a corporate chiropractor. I was 25 years old, fresh out of school with the only argument I had When being pressed with any of the bullshit I was espousing was this weird chiropractic meets God of the gaps theory where it’s the adjustment works in mysterious ways.

It’s dude, that doesn’t fucking fly when you’re looking at the barrel of an MIT double PhD computer scientist, man and they’re not malicious. They’re just inquisitive fucking giant genius kids that are like, yeah, but why? Yeah, but why? And I was like, dude, I’m getting grilled. I have no fucking idea.

I had to burn off the deadwood that I spent a quarter of a million dollars fucking learning and then rebuild up with what I knew at least have this logical consistency. Be critical to the point of being cynical. Vet your resources. Don’t get your information from 60 second red x green check fucking videos online like It’s way more sophisticated than people get it.

People will accuse me like to overcomplicate things. It’s no. I don’t need to dumb this down. You need to smart and the fuck up if it means something to you. This is the requisite level of detail. If your body is a very complicated fucking system, right? So it’s just, if there’s no takeaway outside of like mobility, stability, strength, the difference between stability, strength, It’s just in everything, man.

Be critical. Don’t just buy hook, line, and sinker. Even with the shit I said, poke holes in it. That’s why I present now. I do a lot of my work just lecturing. Around the world. And I’ll get on a plane and go wherever. If it means I can come across a question I’ve never heard because that’s what I want.

I want better questions. I don’t want to give people answers. If that’s how you’re really going to learn. I just read it when I write holidays books. You can’t learn that to which you already know, just constantly just appraise the shit you think, and everything that comes through your windshield, man, look at it like hypercritically and try and poke holes in it.

And if it’s still fucking floats, then you know, that it’s seaworthy, that idea. Hold weight and then go forward from there and try to build off of that. 

Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think one of the issues that many people run into, however, is one, there’s a time factor, right? So let’s say you just have an everyday person who’s busy, they have a job and they have a family and they have other obligations and they have a few hours to give to fitness every week.

And outside of that, they maybe have a few hours they could give to educating themselves about anything. And then if they are someone who is conscientious in general, they probably are also trying to weigh the priorities there. And to even understand a lot of the things that you’re talking about, it actually requires quite a bit of time and quite a bit of effort.

I do agree. That’s one thing you could just say then fucking do it. We have very similar personalities. So I do totally understand where you’re coming from. I just know having worked with a lot of people that one of the things that I would say as take someone like you With the amount of knowledge that you have the next, like the God tier for someone like you is to be able to explain key concepts in simple terms that anyone can understand.

And Richard Feynman’s whole thing was. Basically, the point of it was, if you couldn’t explain it in terms that an eight year old can understand, you don’t understand it well enough yourself, and you need to be able to break it down to that level. And I don’t say this as a criticism of you. I’m just speaking from having worked with a lot of everyday people who, remember some Maybe they’re not great learners, and that could be for various different reasons.

It could be IQ. It could be they had a terrible time in school. They don’t like learning, or it could be they don’t have good systems for learning. For example, jargon alone can be a huge obstacle that Many people are not aware of that. They don’t understand even the proper definitions of the terms being used.

They don’t realize that how important that is. So they don’t really spend time in dictionaries or glossaries, and they just try to come to their own understanding based on context. And then they completely misunderstand whatever it is that was being explained. And then when they go try to implement What they just incorrectly learn, they get shitty results.

I would say one of the things that a lot of the bullshit artists do well, and they do better than the people, many of the people who are true experts and who should be getting all of the attention is, At least to communicate clearly and they’re usually better at selling, but they’re also better at just telling people things they can understand when somebody feels like they’ve understood something.

It just makes them feel good. It makes them drawn to the people who. Make them feel good. In many cases, that is the bullshit, at least in the fitness space. That’s definitely the case. A lot of the bullshitters are the better marketers and in some ways, the better communicators. Anyway, that’s just me saying things, but I do agree with what you’re saying.

Jordan: It’s the Dunning Kruger effect, right? Most successful people are the people who know enough, but not enough to know that they don’t know everything, 

Mike: right? 

Jordan: It’s humbling. Once you cross that abyss and you realize Holy shit, like there’s so much out there. Yeah. But again, it’s if you are ignorant to that distant horizon, you can say things with such conviction that makes it believable.

What alleviates anxiety is authority, right? So if you can speak from a pedestal of authority into your point, if you can say it in a way that makes sense to people, then they’re in for client sinker. I, I think there, and I’ve seen it in the past three or four years, there is an emerging market for deeper level thought process.

People are starting to get wise to the charlatans, starting to get wise to the ploys and the tricks and the tactics. So I think We’re starting to see a higher caliber of just thinking starting to percolate its way through or start to rise to the top, if you will. I’m optimistic there’ll always be a market for your draws or size or whatever the fuck your shake weights.

Sure. But that’s a high acquisition model, man. Frankly, I don’t want those people as patients. I don’t want those people as consumers or readers. I don’t want to pander to that audience. What my focus now is bringing it to people who can bring it to the end user. I think I can explain it to someone with a high base competency.

Who then with their skill set can bring that part of this information to more people than I could have 1 on 1, right? So if I can teach teachers how to teach trainers or teach curriculum, how to impart this on their students or on their athletes or on their clients. I think we can get this information into the programs and into the lives of more people and hopefully start to have a positive impact that way.

Mike: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That’s just knowing who you are communicating to and what you’re trying to accomplish. And based on that, your approach makes perfect sense. So that’s all I had. This was a great discussion. I really enjoyed it. Why don’t we just wrap up with where people can find you and your work?

I know you have a lot of seminars, but you’re doing a lot of things. So what should people know about? 

Jordan: Yeah. Okay. So podcast is you enjoy the demented ramblings. We go even deeper. My business partner and I so our podcast is Rx radio. So Rx, a posh VD radio on iTunes and Spotify. Bye. On Instagram, it’s the underscore muscle underscore doc.

D O C. I will be traveling. Ben Pekulski and I have seminars in Tampa and Toronto. So Tampa Bay is going to be the March 23rd, 24th weekend. And then Toronto is April 3rd at Fortis East in Toronto. I will be teaching two continuing education courses for good life fitness across Canada, starting from May onward down to the rest of the year.

First dates being in. Bradford, Whitby, and Toronto, with a dozen or so more dates to come close out the rest of the calendar year. Inquiries on private seminars, email jordan at themuscledoc. com I think that’s it. Oh, exercise programming, so I’m on a website called www. pre script. com this is an integrated programming platform that it takes the guesswork of everything I just talked about out of exercise programming.

So we have a power lifting and Olympic lifting vein of programming that my business partner and I drew out and preemptively planned with our library of video corrective exercises and movement preparation work where people go wrong. So basically answering that question of, if you don’t have enough time.

It’s still want to be proactive in your approach and put some of these theories into practice. We did that for you through our app and our online community with prescript. So that’s our main players is RX radio on. I can spotify five on Instagram, Jordan the underscore muscle underscore doc, and then programming www dot pre dash script.

com. 

Mike: Awesome. Thanks again for taking the time, Jordan. That was great. I really appreciate it. 

Jordan: Yeah, man. Pleasure. Thanks for having me on. 

Mike: Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out. It also increases its search visibility. And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at Mike. at Musclefullife. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. And Specifically, my fish oil supplement, Triton. Now, Triton is a high potency, high purity, 100 percent re esterified triglyceride fish oil with added vitamin E to prevent oxidation and rancidity and natural lemon oil.

To prevent the noxious fish oil burps that we all know and hate. Furthermore, Triton is made from sustainably fished deep water anchovies and sardines and is molecularly distilled to remove natural toxins and contaminants. So if you want to optimize your mental and physical health and performance and reduce the risk of disease and dysfunction, then you want to head over to www.

legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of Triton today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code podcast to checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like.

You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don’t have to return the products. You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can’t lose here. Head over to www. LegionAthletics. com now, place your order, and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet.

And if for whatever reason, they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot.