Eric Cressey - 110 MPH Fastballs, Youth Specialization, and Cutting Through YouTube Garbage

[00:00:02] Hey friends, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness and wellness industry podcast for over five years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the honor of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. If you like the show, we'd love it if you took three minutes of your day to leave us a nice, supportive review wherever you consume your podcasts. If you're interested in staying up to date with the Future of Fitness, go to

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[00:02:29] They've invested a ton into this platform and now they're bringing that European engineering excellence to America. The migration experts have arrived. Check out perfectgym.com where enterprise level sophistication meets operator freedom. All right, here we go. Eric Malzone, welcome back to the Future of Fitness, man. It's great to see you. Thank you for having me, man. This is always a highlight for the calendar.

[00:02:55] Yeah, this is a treat. It really is. I mean, I learned so much from me and our audience always really receives these well. Like, they really like the interviews. And I think the industry likes to hear from sports performance. I always say this when we talk about you guys being the tip of the spear. Like, so much innovation happens where you are, you know, with the Yankees at Cressy Sports Performance, all those things. So we can learn a lot. And I think it's really nice to kind of take it and bubble it down for everybody else. And we've got some really cool stuff to talk about. First of all, you have an app coming out.

[00:03:24] I'm excited to chat about that in this conversation. We're going to talk a little bit about, you know, injury prevention, wearable data, this recovery tech explosion, the mental performance market, which I think is really kind of a, it's not talked about nearly enough. And probably for good reason that we'll get into. And then, of course, artificial intelligence. I think people will be dying to know, like, how does Eric Malzone use AI within your practice? So, yeah, man, I don't know. Any one of those sound good? Because I have a couple I really like to dive into.

[00:03:50] Yeah. Let's hit all of them, man. I think we can. We'll raise over the ones if they don't find us to be very compelled to talk about them more as we go on. But I think we'll probably be able to accomplish them. Well, let's start here. How has it been your last year, dude? How are things with the Yankees? How are things with Cressy? Yeah, good, man. We definitely, I think the last time we talked was 2022. So we've got close to four years of experiences to kind of powwow on. You know, I think speaking, you know, big picture in baseball, right? The trend has continued, right?

[00:04:19] Guys are throwing harder than ever. It goes up every single year. The game has gotten more and more specialized across all levels. Injury rates have continued to skyrocket. I would actually argue they, in some places, they've flattened out and people have just found new ways to get hurt. So we have an era of sports medicine really trying to keep up. So the surgeries are getting better, but people are just, you know, kind of, you know, having troubles in different areas too. So it's baseball still in a really challenging time.

[00:04:47] And, you know, it's interesting for me, like probably since the last time we talked, like my oldest daughters had, you know, twin 11-year-olds and a seven-year-old. So when we talked, you know, call it close to, you know, four years ago, seven is a lot different than 11. Like at seven, you're not getting the parental pressure that you, you know, you see in this like specialization world and the push to play travel and to, it's real.

[00:05:11] And, you know, I can, I always kind of spoke from the sidelines as someone who was in the industry, but didn't have kids of my own that were in that, those challenging circumstances. And now we've got an 11-year-old that absolutely loves gymnastics. And gymnastics is, you know, right up there with probably figure skating as the two sports where it's like, you better be good early or else you're done. But I see it with all of our friends with everything from, you know, baseball and softball to any of a number of different sports.

[00:05:37] So I'm kind of living it as a professional and I'm also, you know, living it as a, as a dad. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's, let's dive into that. I mean, you, when you were on here last, you mentioned that at some point we'll see 110 mile per hour fastball. That stuck with me for sure. So what, you know, when we look at, we can maybe just talk about velocity arms and the race there for velocity training, all the things that go around it. You know, maybe walk me through like what's actually working in velocity development, you know, without completely blowing up people's arms.

[00:06:06] And, you know, every sports, sports performance facility in America is trying to offer this stuff now. And the liability stakes are pretty big and there's just a, you know, a lot of innovation going on there. So yeah, give us, give us the download there. Yeah. I'll give you an analogy, right? Let's say you have to, you have to be somewhere that's an hour away from where you are, right? By car, right? You could get there in 40 minutes driving really, really fast and recklessly, right? You could hire a car service. You call an Uber. You could rent a helicopter. You could take a private jet.

[00:06:36] You could find a river and get there by boat. You could walk. There's all these different ways to do it, right? And all of them confer some different level of risk, right? Like I could take a nap in the back seat and have my seven-year-old drive. Like that might not work, right? So I think velocity training, you say, hey, what's working? A lot of things work to throw hard, right? You know, I could just get on a crazy velocity specialization program. And yeah, you will throw harder if you practice throwing harder and harder and harder and harder. It's going to work, right?

[00:07:05] The problem is what's the level of risk that's conferred on the athlete? And I think that's unfortunate where the industry is at is we have a lot of people that don't have a whole lot of filters. And it's very different to train velocity than it is to test velocity. And you've been around this world, right? Elite sprinters, like they don't go out and run 100 meters very often, right? Like they peak for months to do that, right? There's a lot of submaximal work. There's tons of starts. They're working on a variety of different things.

[00:07:34] We have this world where unfortunately we've conditioned these kids to like test and test. They want to PR all the time. And unfortunately, you know, that doesn't work with scatally mature athletes who are competing at the highest level, who have high quality nutrition, high quality recovery, the best travel schedule in the world. They have massage therapists. They have physical therapists. They have ATCs. They can get dry needle in cup and grass and they can, you know, sit in the hyperbaric chamber. They have everything at their fingertips. But we're asking a lot of these really young kids to do some crazy stuff.

[00:08:03] And, you know, it's really scary as well is we're not giving them the resources that they necessarily need to, you know, necessarily get diagnosed or treated when something is wrong. So I'll give you an example. I have a really close friend. I've known him and his family for, you know, close to 20 years now. I knew him before he had kids and now he's got a 15-year-old son. I've known this kid since he was, you know, four years old. Just they're far away from us, never trained him or anything like that. But this kid had an elbow issue. He was doing like some weighted ball training, did like an aggressive pull-down throw,

[00:08:33] and the backside of his elbow just flared up. So it kind of had this like vibe of, you know, a little undersurface impingement, maybe ulnar neuritis. You know, I'm trying to help him out from afar. And I said, listen, like my rule with kids this age, and at the time he was 14, is like just get an x-ray. Just rule it out. Like get in. But I also said, listen, like elbows are really specialized. Just be careful about who you go to because not a lot of sports medicine professionals, they specialize in elbows, right? You get on knees and shoulder guys who just like dabble in elbows on the side.

[00:09:00] But you wouldn't see like a shoulder specialist who's like, I do foot and ankle, right? They punt those to the specialist. So elbows really get lost, you know, in the shuffle a lot. There's only like four or five guys in the country, if you're a major league baseball player, that you would trust to do a Tommy John surgery for you. So I was like, just don't settle. So long story short, goes to Cecil Osser, Doko Doc. You know, they didn't even do an x-ray. They did a physical exam. And like, oh, you know, it's probably just a little inflammation, a little little league elbow. You know, take four weeks off. Go do some physical therapy.

[00:09:30] Physical therapist agreed with it. Started a return to program. Things still hurt. Went to a different physical therapist. They gave him some different exercises. Went to another doctor when that didn't work. That doctor did an x-ray, didn't see anything. And the kid came down. He was not playing. He was still hurting. They were down in town to play an return down here. And, you know, my friend was just like, hey, can you take a look at him? So they came by about 10 days ago. And I put him on the table. And it just didn't add up, right?

[00:09:56] There were a couple of different provocative tests that didn't make sense to me, right? He was too young to have a UCL tear. But he was too old to have. It didn't make sense for him to have rested so long for it not to get better. So I took him through a few different things. And I'm like, I just don't like it. It's like, listen, go see our team doctor. Like, I'll put in a call today, take the trip to New York. He saw him this morning. He's got an Elecronon stress reaction.

[00:10:23] It got missed by two doctors, two physical therapists, and picked up by a strength coach, right? Like, just not, you know, meticulously, but it didn't add up, right? Sure, I had the benefit of hindsight. But this guy had to go from, you know, a two-hour flight to New York. And, you know, Dr. Ahmad did an amazing job and picked it up really, really quickly. I'm doing some fall-up skating, but the kid probably needs a screw in his elbow. And the challenge in a conversation like this is this has already cost him six months, right?

[00:10:52] He's going to get the screw, put in that, cost him a bunch more time. Like, that's a big, big deal because that kid's lost a year plus of development. But I take it back even further. What was the cost? Like, why was this kid at age 14 doing this stuff, right? When the number one goal at that age is still to make sure they have fun and that they come back and play the next year, right? That kid's going to have an elbow scar for the rest of his life. So I just, I think we're really missing the boat with our young athletes. And it fits into this what's working philosophy.

[00:11:21] Well, what works is eating better, getting good sleep, good quality strength training, learning to throw a med ball correctly, learning to optimize mechanics, learning to play catch. Like, you got to watch some of these guys play baseball and catch play on the sidelines is actually brutal to watch. They're throwing balls into the stands. Like, they're not paying attention to how they're like a four-seam fastball. Yeah, it's pretty brutal until you get to higher levels of baseball or, you know, college when they take a lot more pride in it.

[00:11:49] So we've just created this world of like showcases and play, play, play, play. There's really no long-term model in place. And it's actually really funny. I put a post out like, you know, if you're not careful, your preteen could wind up playing 150 games. And people are like, no, that's totally untrue. And all the people that are arguing there are ones from like, you know, Virginia and Kansas City and Minnesota. I'm like, yeah, you have the weather to protect you. My daughters, if I wanted to, could go out and play 150 softball games right now. They could join a travel team. They could play rec on the side.

[00:12:19] And then they could play for multiple teams at the same time. You have kids that are like getting paid to go sit in other teams' dugouts just to help brand these organizations. The situation is just so bad. So like you asked the question, what's working for velocity development? Like all the normal foundational stuff that's always worked, like learning to be more efficient, whether it's throwing in a biomechanics lab or just getting your lower half stronger. The problem is people aren't interested in being patient, right? They're interested in whatever is the sexiest thing.

[00:12:48] And they're going out and they're chasing it. Unfortunately, the increases are coming without much sustainability. But what's really, really fascinating is if you go and you really look at the hardest throwers in Major League Baseball, guys get to age 26, 27, and they haven't blown out their elbows, they usually last. They usually stick around pretty long. Some of these like big time arms. I mean, look at Aroldis Chapman. The guy's been throwing 100 plus forever, right? There's certainly an element of like efficiency in his delivery.

[00:13:16] You know, like you never saw him doing crazy things with weighted ball programs and, you know, stuff that just didn't line up for him. So it just goes to show you that, you know, there is a right way to do this. I think we just as a community in this like sports performance world, we have to advocate for players a little bit more. And really, unfortunately, like it's we're protecting against downside.

[00:13:36] It's the 10% of the most poorly informed decisions, whether it's the way you train, the way you manage volume, the way you refuse to say no when people want you to throw in a showcase every week. It's it's not a great time. You know, this this first the youth sports health issue came in my my radar when I first read the sports gene. Yeah, when you compared, you know, Wayne Gretzky to Tiger Woods and like their development as athletes and Wayne Gretzky kind of specialize, at least according to the story.

[00:14:06] Yeah. Late. Right. Tiger Woods, of course, I think he was on, you know, the the Tonight Show at like age three. Yeah. Right. Like he was just this young phenom. And now, you know, in recent news, we kind of see what's what's happening to Tiger Woods and that that breakdown in many ways. So, I mean, over that time, it just seems to have gotten worse. I mean, is there any hope that maybe this will get better soon? Are you seeing any signs that maybe people are like, OK, this is getting ridiculous. Let's slow down. I think it's true of a lot of things in the world, like politicians investing in stocks or anything like that.

[00:14:35] Like you always find all the money. And when a lot of people need to make a living, they're not going to really think about the consequences of actions, particularly because the consequences are all are typically perceived much, much later on. You know, so I think that's the really hard part. It's going to be really hard to put the the toothpaste back in the toothpaste, you know, like with this stuff.

[00:14:56] I do think there are certain things that are happening, like MLB put in a recovery period policy where their scouts aren't allowed to tend showcases for basically players between ages 16 and 21 during very specified times in the late fall into winter. And I think that's an important guardrail. Something like that, you're going to see the outcomes help three to four years down the road. So it's it's hard. I think, you know, it's a it's a very challenging discussion. Like, no, I don't think it's going to easily get better.

[00:15:25] I and I honestly I hate to be the one that criticizes when I don't have a better solution. But things are really bad. It's it's it really comes down to parents on a very individual level being willing to advocate for their kids. Right. And like if you look at our cell phone usage in kids. Right. We can all agree like a fifth grader should not have a cell phone. Right.

[00:15:45] Every bit of research shows from like a mental health standpoint, like levels of cognition, learning effects, how it impacts sleep, just interpersonal interactions. Like it's not right. In fact, there's this huge campaign nationwide. It's called wait till eighth. Right. Don't get a cell phone until you're done with eighth grade. Right. Like I'm fully behind it. Our school has supported it. Like, you know, our close friend group, like we're all very much in agreement. But there are going to be people that give in and let their kids get phones much earlier. Right. Because it's easier. Right.

[00:16:15] Like you can if you're sick of your kid yelling, you just give them the phone, you get peace and quiet for an hour. And but there's a long term consequence of that. Right. What are they going to be exposed to? Are they going to get bullied? Like there's there's so many layers. It's really going to miss out on. And I think you sports are very much the same. Right. You don't let your kids eat candy for dinner, even if they would ask for it every single night. And I think we have to take that same level of no, you know, to you sports is like, we're not going to play for this.

[00:16:44] We're not going to go to travel events more than an hour away. We're not going to, you know, miss, you know, every weekend because you had to go to Georgia to get eight plate appearances, which you realize very quickly is a lot of the specialization is it's not driven at all. By by research. Like it actually doesn't work. Like if you think about it, if I have I have 11 year old daughters. Right. And tonight, a good friend of mine, we both have three daughters. We're going to take our daughters and we're going to go hit in the cages at our facility. Right. They don't have practice.

[00:17:14] We're going to just go and we're going to play. We're going to have fun. They're going to play catch, do ground balls, have pop up contests, all that stuff. We're going to play like they could probably go down there and we could get 20 plate appearances each against us. They could pitch to each other. They're going to do everything. There are people that will literally spend four grand to go to like Alabama to play a weekend tournament and get those.

[00:17:34] And I understand there's gameplay and all that stuff, but like it's just you're better off saving it, having a family weekend, go play tennis, soccer, basketball, ultimate Frisbee, capture the flag, all those different things at that age. Get involved in a good resistance training program. Like start just getting curious about going to the gym with mommy and daddy. Like those things will be far, far more likely to help you succeed long term because what's also not going to happen is you're not going to get, you're not going to get resentful of your sport.

[00:18:04] Like there are a lot of kids that don't want to go on the road every week. I have a daughter that would just hang out at the house and read for seven hours a day if he would let her. And we certainly encouraged, you know, the reading lot stuff. But to some, you still have to be active. We're going to find things that we can all do together. And you get these kids that ultimately it's just, it's not fun anymore. And I, having a daughter in gymnastics is probably the thing that's helped me to realize this the most because the attrition rate is, is, is astronomical. It's faster than any other sport I've ever been around.

[00:18:34] And it's, and it's a sad commentary. It's a very hard sport. There's attrition because kids get hurt. They have stress fractures, you know, for a lot of kids, like if they, if they hit puberty early, the sport gets much, much harder. So there's just so many variables that, that impact why somebody would continue with it. And I, I hate to say it, but I think in general, the sport doesn't really care when kids step away. And I, it's, it's actually fascinating. I have a family member who owned a gymnastics center up in the state of Maine. And, you know, she did an amazing job and these kids like loved her.

[00:19:01] And she said, the truth is we know that like kids are often just going to use this as a stepping stone to other sports. And I'm like, that's great. You know, if you go on, you get exposed to it, you enjoy it. What's wrong with that? You want to play soccer or play basketball? Like that's good. That's their choice. But you don't want them stepping away because they hate it or because they're hurt. That's, that's where we get into more problems. What about the coach, Eric? Like a lot of people listen to this, you know, own a facility or coach themselves.

[00:19:26] Like what role, how can they, you know, maybe reposition this philosophically with, with the kids that they coach and work with? Are we speaking specifically to baseball or to the, I guess the world overall? The greater coaching community, you know, any sport, maybe, you know, even just, you know, personal trainers who work with youth athletes, the whole gambit. I think it's hard because there's two very distinct places, right? You're either a skill coach or you're a physical preparation coach, right? You're a tradition coach, physical therapist, athletic trainer, something in that world.

[00:19:53] Like I think in general, the folks in, in that supportive discipline world of ATCs and strength and conditioning coaches, like they've largely championed these efforts. They've been heavily, heavily behind this idea of play multiple sports, something up with strength and conditioning appropriately, you know, and, and, and be as active as you possibly can. And strength and conditioning, frankly, is like the best multi-sport participation you'd get under one roof, right? You can make things entirely different every day.

[00:20:19] Like nobody really gets overuse injuries in their teenage years from strength and conditioning unless you're on one of the most poorly designed programs in history. I think the people we have to get through to are, frankly, the skill coaches. And the thing that's really hard is a lot of them are volunteers. A lot of them are parents who don't know any better or they're parents that do know better and they're just not empowered to make those decisions for anyone other than their kids. So I think at the end of the day, it's, it's sad to say it all comes down to just really hard conversations.

[00:20:46] But I do think the educational side of things, like I love hearing people in positions of authority speak out about this. Like I, I obviously have our facility. I have my Yankees involvement. I've tried to champion this from the rooftop. Like I want everybody on the planet to know that Aaron judge played three sports. You know, people should know that when he got to Fresno state, like his first semester on campus, he wasn't sure he was good enough to play college baseball. And I was the best hitter on the planet. Like those are discussions that you don't often hear about.

[00:21:15] You hear way too much. Every time there's the Olympics, we hear about this kid who was destined for glory. It's the same kind of Tiger Woods story. The media picks up on it and they love it. They don't love it. How many kids played that card and absolutely hated their sport, absolutely hated their parents and they're not active and they're, you know, they have mental health challenges much, much later on. Like if you walk into a typical big league locker room, it's full of late bloomers. It's full of kids that played multiple sports.

[00:21:43] It's full of kids that were late round picks and, you know, no one thought they were going to be great. And then, you know, it made up an adjustment that in some ways was rooted in their athleticism from playing multiple sports. Like these are things that I see all the time. And it's just, it's so comical to me that no one has ever like just worked backwards from the fact like, wow, all these professional baseball players were multiple sport athletes like growing up. And there are people that say it's like survivorship bias. Like, hey, they were going to be great athletes regardless.

[00:22:12] I'm like, yeah, like maybe LeBron James would have been an NFL tight end if he had wanted to be like, that's the, that's the 1%. There are a lot of guys that have, that have landed in professional baseball through, you know, really working hard on their athleticism for a long time. They just didn't roll out of the womb at, you know, as professional athletes. Yeah. And there are a lot of great stories like that and they just don't get uncovered. And I think a lot of it is the media like that, that Olympic example is so, so critical. They love, especially in gymnastics, be like they, they love showing them as a kid doing the sport, right?

[00:22:40] Like age four or five and just the commitment and the, you know, and then, but it's a lot of them are, you know, behind the scenes, just train racks to it. And it's funny that I've actually become, you know, pretty good friends with a, with a former Olympic gold medalist gymnast who won't allow their children to do gymnastics because it was such a dysfunctional sport. Like that, that should tell you, and then you just, you know, you're kind of in these worlds and, you know, one person meets another person and they share these things. It was not at all a, a productive path.

[00:23:07] Like she would support them participating if they enjoyed it, but not on the level of crazy specialization it took to be that person. Like you really have four or five kids that are going to go to the Olympics for the United States every four years. Like all the rest, like maybe they do college gymnastics. Maybe they just have a great experience with it. It's just, it's, it's, it's a sad truth, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. No, I want to switch onto a slightly different topic, but I think it also relates very directly is I think we're in this new age of quantified self, right? Whether it's 2.0 or 3.0, I'm not sure.

[00:23:37] I just kind of made it all up, but you know, where there's so much data flowing at people and that's, this is consumers, right? It's not just athletes. I'm sure athletes are at a heightened level of, of diagnostics, right? From wearables to your bed, to your toilet is even giving you data nowadays. So like when you look at how all this biometric data is coming in play for you guys, what can you trust? What's been proven to be useful? What are athletes actually willing to share? Right. So what, what are some of the biggest tools that you guys are lever leveraging there?

[00:24:04] I mean, the first thing I would say is every athlete is different. Like I've dealt with athletes who want no information just because it overwhelms them and they've learned that about themselves and it's better if they can outsource that information and just get a fist bump from a coach that says everything's trending great. Keep it up. Right. And I've also seen athletes that are like, we train Matt Fitzpatrick at our, at our gym. Matt is the most objectively driven, you know, golfer probably in the history of the PGA Tour.

[00:24:32] Matt has documented so much stuff and he's built out a team around him that supports that, gives him great data. And he is phenomenal at filtering that information. Like he wants to know what his force plate readings are. Like he's very, very calculated and everything. Not everybody's like that. So it's, it is a, it's a continuum. So that's where the relationship comes in is like knowing what to give people. No, like you, you can't overwhelm somebody with a brand new scouting report or something like that, like an hour before first pitch.

[00:24:59] And everyone does kind of like trend differently in that regard. I think, you know, it's, it's hard as an industry because the information is coming so fast, right? There are so many different data points you can have access to. And one of the things that's always stood out to my business partner when we founded CSP Florida, he's now the major league pitching coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Brian Kaplan. And he would always tell our pitchers, he's like, you can't be analytical and competitive at the same time, right?

[00:25:26] Like when you go out to the mound to pitch in a game, the most important thing is to be confident in the preparation you're done. Like to that point. Otherwise it's like, it's like flossing on the way to the dentist, right? It's just not going to work. So I think what we see all too often is when you see athletes that just get overwhelmed with this stuff, like they lose the ability to be competitive, right? Maybe they become very internally focused or they become too outcome driven versus just like narrowing the scope, focusing on the process and effectively competing.

[00:25:56] So I think we have to be very careful with that. That said, as a, as a coach, the data is incredible. Like what we have access to, and it's been a huge spend for us. Like, you know, when athletes come into our facility, like, you know, we're obviously doing all these classic orthopedic range of motion screens and more subjective, you know, appreciations of static posture, some, you know, movement screens we go through, but we can test their shoulder strength on like the Hawken dynamic true strength, right? We can do force plate jumps.

[00:26:25] We can tell a ton from those, everything from asymmetry to how they need to be trained, how they produce force. We can use our proteus to assess rotational capacity, right? So we'll have these guys that are force plate legends and then they throw 81 and it doesn't line up because they're not efficient rotators. You know, we have the 1080, which, you know, doesn't just allow us like to force velocity profile speed training. Like, you know, is this guy better at top speed or is he, is he better at, you know, his acceleration stuff? Like we can look at asymmetry in the sprint.

[00:26:53] Like as an example, we had an athlete who got a shoulder surgery on his left shoulder and his right stride length was shorter. Why? Because he couldn't swing his arm. So like literally a left shoulder injury could create a right hamstring problem and you can appreciate these things. So it's very eyeopening. Wow. But you don't just collect data to intervene. You collect data, you collect data to evaluate, to drive an intervention and then to evaluate the success of that intervention.

[00:27:19] Like those are the things that a lot of people just collect data because it's cool to collect data and they don't actually use it enough. My rule of thumb is if we're testing something, it has to be something that informs something we do in our program. Whether we're already doing that, whether we need to change it, all that stuff is really powerful. But probably the single biggest thing we've done with respect to data is we put in a biomechanics lab in our facility. There's a massive expenditure. You know, our guys can come in and throw off a force plate mount. There's 10 cameras around them.

[00:27:49] They can give them lots of sequencing and a lot of stuff. It is eyeopening what you see. You see major league baseball players who are putting, you know, less force into the ground than a high school kid who's throwing eight miles an hour harder, right? And you realize that it's because they sequence differently. They're very, very efficient in their motions. Like some of this stuff has actually been eyeopening. And what it's allowed us to do is I think better leverage like the archetype driven approach to developing players.

[00:28:15] So in other words, if you're a wide infrasternal angle with these force plate characteristics and you're not throwing as hard as this guy is, like we try to find your comp, right? Who pitches like you, who has a delivery similar to you, a pitch miss like you. And then we can put you side by side and say like, what is it that that athlete's doing that you're not doing? Here's the paragon that you need to get to. And the larger the data set is, the easier that gets to be.

[00:28:42] And we see this a lot in major league baseball, but it always happened very casually, right? Like, you know, you always hear the story about Roy Halladay meeting Mariano Rivera at the all-star game and learning his cutter. Like that's always happened, you know, the major league baseball player running a new changeup from a kid in low A just because he saw him throwing it outside our facility. We can make it much more streamlined with better tech. Like the track man, the endotronic cameras, the biomechanics app, all this stuff can allow us to do it so much faster.

[00:29:09] Whereas in the past it was like, here's a bucket of baseballs, go throw sliders. Hopefully you don't blow out. Let's see if they're any more good and we'll try to reverse engineer it. Right. You know, the recovery technology is coming so far too. I remember asking you this years ago. I'm like, you know, players at the professional level and any sport are getting bigger, stronger, faster. Like at what point, like how far can we go as a species as these people just continue to evolve at this like superhuman capacity, right? And you said it's recovery. It's like how fast can they recover, right?

[00:29:39] So from recovery technology standpoint, what's kind of new and worthwhile from your perspective? Yeah, I think for me, like I'll say this, I'm putting a sauna in our house. Like if you look at sauna and the quest for longevity, the research is absurdly compelled. Like it works. Guys love it. It's not just that it's objectively proven in the research. It's also that the guys report feeling very, very different.

[00:30:06] So that's something that's going to go inside our house, you know, and I wish I'd had more access to it in the years, you know, previously. You know, I think I am a little bit out on how far the industry has gone with respect to like cold plunges and stuff like that. I think they've been heavily overused. I think my perspective is a little skewed. I'm an early riser. I wake up in the morning and I'm ready to go. I know I've got two hours to get work done before our daughters are up. There's no time for a morning ritual or, you know, a 30-minute coffee prep routine or anything like that.

[00:30:34] Like I want to get up, feed the dog, open the door to let him go out. I'm working. I think other people tend to be very like low cortisol in the morning. And those are probably your people that thrive with that early morning hop in the ice tub. It tends to spike them a little bit better. They feel like they're ready to go. So I haven't necessarily bought into that. It's part of the fact that I live in Florida. It's hot. Like that would be a place. And I think it tends to work really, really well for maybe recovery. If you have a game at, you know, 7 p.m.

[00:31:02] and you've got to come back and play a one o'clock game, like hop in an ice tub might allow you to come back around. The research does seem to be pretty compelling, but it does actually interfere with your ability to keep muscle mass on athletes over a longer season, right? So maybe we use ice baths for recovery in a pinch, but we don't make it a crutch that we have to use every single day. Like certainly the research on ice baths for cooling core body temperature quickly.

[00:31:25] I mean, that's been around since, you know, I studied in Dr. Doug Casson, Dr. Larry Armstrong's lab at the University of Connecticut in the early 2000s. And they were at the forefront of, you know, exertional heat and illnesses and firefighters and NFL players and stuff like that. Like that's very validated, but I'm not sure that, you know, we need to go so gung ho with ice. In general, I don't tell athletes to ice. Like we've had way more success with things like Mark Pro and a newbie and all these different approaches.

[00:31:54] These rapid reboot recovery, some more compressive with, you know, a little bit of like the massage element to it. I love manual therapy. You know, the research is really challenging with manual therapy, but it's been on tape paintings for 5,000 years. I think it stood the test of time pretty well. You know, there was a study a while ago that showed that Olympians that got more massage were less likely to perform at a high level. And I would say maybe it's that lazy athletes who didn't try hard are more likely to lay on a table and get massaged.

[00:32:22] Or athletes that are injured are more likely to ask for more manual therapy. So maybe they were hurt and that's what interfered with their performance. So the studies are really, really hard. I can tell you that when athletes seek out manual therapy, the regenerative capacities do seem to be better. I think you have to find what's right for people. I personally don't really respond well to dry needling. It never has made a big difference for me. You put a cup on my left pec and drag it. I feel like a million bucks for six weeks. So I think everybody does respond a little bit differently.

[00:32:52] So you've got to figure out the right mix for different people. And then certainly, you know, you can't go wrong with sleep trackers unless you're someone that gets neurotic about it. But they do make people more mindful. The number of the things we can do to improve sleep is to talk about sleep, make it okay for athletes to extend sleep, try to create a better sleep environment. I'll certainly track it. And then obviously the nutritional side of things, I think, goes a long way in this recovery world. But am I like gung-ho about any specific recovery modality? No.

[00:33:21] I think, you know, top tier are always the basics of sleep hydration and quality nutrition and then kind of work backwards from there. Yeah. You know, you brought up some really interesting perspectives there too. It's like understanding yourself. Like I'm a high cortisol person too. I don't need, when I'm up in the morning, like I'll journal, I'll stretch and I'm like, let's go. And then that's like the next three hours and the most productive. And then I can worry about everything else after that. And I think the self-experimentation, like people are getting data, especially from a consumer angle, again, all this wearable data, but then they have the now what problem.

[00:33:50] Like, okay, well, great. My sleep sucks. Now what? We'll run some experiments, right? Figure it out. Like try different bedtime rituals or, you know, for me, I got a anti-snoring device. Changed my life, right? I didn't get a CPAP. It was one of those dental ones. Good enough. Like changed my life. And you can start to see that data, Mel, but you have to like do something with it. And I think that's a lot of things like as AI starts to evolve and people start leveraging it more for their data personally, we're going to start to see more self-experimentation, whether that's good or bad. I don't know. We'll find out.

[00:34:19] But those are really good perspectives. I think people should pull away from that. Yeah, I agree 100%. It's funny you mention that. Our director at our Massachusetts facility, I'm sorry, I'm wearing an order ring as I talk about this, but he wore one as well. And he's like, I tried everything under the sun to change my ordering data. And the only thing that made a difference for me was how late I ate in a day. If I ate after 8 p.m., my sleep was crap. He's like, if I just cut things off after dinner, I was good to go. And I'm like, that's what this is about. It's about experiencing it.

[00:34:47] But the question then becomes like, do you learn all those lessons? Do you need to keep wearing it, right? Do you need to keep freaking yourself out about it? For me, the number one thing I learned from wearing this is that if I get to bed early, my sleep is awesome. If I get to bed at midnight, I don't make up those good hours. If you look at my deep sleep numbers, I'm what you would call an efficient sleeper. I can sleep five and a half hours a night, but I get an hour and 30 minutes of deep sleep in it, which is kind of unheard of.

[00:35:12] I just figured out how to be an efficient sleeper, but it doesn't work that way if I try to sleep 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. If I go to bed at 10, 15, 10, 30, and I can go till 5, 5, 30, I'm in a great spot. So I think you learn about what is important to you. It can be very, very insightful. And then after that, maybe you just use it periodically or you just phase it out because you've learned the important lessons. Yeah. You know, into our next topic here, I've been focusing a lot on mental fitness or whatever you want to call it, right?

[00:35:40] Just particularly, I think men in my age group tend to like, it starts to become a forefront right around your middle age, 50-ish. And you're like, wow, things start to slip. So I've gotten coaches, I've researched it, I've done all these things as far as my own mental fitness, my mental performance. How do I show up every day? How am I showing up for myself? And I feel like it's starting to become one of those things where it's becoming much more, people talk about it a little bit more now than they used to. And mental performance is everything as an athlete. I remember when I was young, seeing my brother, who was a high-level swimmer, I hired him a mental performance coach and him going through this.

[00:36:09] And I'm like, whoa, that blew my mind because I was like 10 years old. I'm like, what's going on in that room? Like, what are they talking about? So how is mental performance starting to change and evolve within the pro ranks or even just, you know, with your experience? Yeah. You know, I'm super spoiled. I've gotten to know Chad Bowling really well. Chad's our mental performance coordinator with the New York Yankees. And Chad also works in Dallas Cowboys and Dallas Stars. It says a lot that you have a mental performance coordinator. Oh, he's a legend. Like, he's been there for a really long time.

[00:36:38] I mean, he's worked with the big dogs across multiple sports. And, you know, he's also worked in the private sector with tennis players, you name it. Just incredibly, incredibly good. I've learned so much from him about, you know, what high performance really takes. But you know one of the really interesting things is, is this market has gotten saturated fast. I would argue saturated fast in any other sport. And the reason is there's no true roadmap to doing it. It's actually a very low barrier to entry industry, right? You have people who are coming from a clinical realm.

[00:37:07] They're, you know, they're psychiatrists, right? They can prescribe medications that are doing this. You have other people that are psychologists that are doing it. You know, we have social workers who, you know, we were previous athletes that took a light into it. We see athletes who retired and took a big interest in it. There's all these different ways to really tag. It's honestly somewhat similar to like sports vision where you have like optometrists that have done it. And they're, you know, they started out working with kids with eye turns who needed to patch and things like that.

[00:37:33] And then you have other people that were like baseball players who had drills on field where they were counting out numbers that they saw in the baseballs. So there's very different perspectives on how this, but it's challenging because there's a very low barrier to entry. Like, I think it goes without saying, you know, in today's world of mental health struggles, it's great if you're talking to somebody that just recognizing that someone can help you is top tier. And I don't think athletes are excluded from that discussion, right?

[00:37:58] Parents struggle, you know, staff members struggle, employers struggle, entrepreneurship is very, very lonely. Like we know these things. So it's good for people to have mental health resources. The hard part is knowing who's good. It's really hard to say. It's kind of like, well, if your performance improved and you're not sad anymore, it was probably helpful. Right. What's the diagnostic? Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard to, you know, pay somebody two grand on retainer every month and then hope it's going to work out that way.

[00:38:23] So I think it comes back to just how, you know, you were picking a new tennis instructor, you're going to a new dentist or anything like that. It's, it's word of mouth. It's talking to people who have you worked with, you know, what have they done with you? Because there's different ways to do it. Like there's, you know, there's people that are struggling in the high performance world because they, they're arguing with their wife and they can't focus on getting to work. Right. There are also people that struggle in that world because they get on a mound in a major league stadium.

[00:38:49] There's 45,000 people yelling at them and they don't feel prepared for that audience independent of what's going on at home. So I think everyone has different struggles. And the hard part is that the algorithm for helping them in this world of, you know, mental skills, coaching, high performance, there isn't like a real path to it. There are some academic programs I know that have helped people, but you know, you, when you get around some of the really, really good ones, you realize like it's, everyone's kind of attacking this very, very differently.

[00:39:15] So it's not a super regulated industry, but there are people that are delivering a lot of benefits in that world. You know, I'm always, I'm also always mindful of, you've seen the research on, there was one study that showed that 46% of financial planners had zero retirement savings. That was like a, that was a real, and I think sometimes, yeah, it's sometimes that way in the mental skills world is that somebody goes through their challenges.

[00:39:40] Maybe they find a fix for it and then automatically they think they're capable of like going and fixing others. And these, these challenges are rooted in a lot of different, you know, troubles. Like it's not easy to be working in the clinical room with psychology. There's, there's, there's a deep dive that needs to be taken. So I think we probably unfortunately do have a little bit too many flat by night operations in it, but we also see that in the fitness community. I think we probably see it just about every discipline. So I'm not sure I have a great answer for you, but that's what I'm saying.

[00:40:07] I know that I probably get five emails a month from mental skills folks that want to work with our athletes. Like they're, they're putting themselves out there. So it is an industry that's, that's growing. Whether those people are busy, whether they're actually helping that, that nervous wreck, 13 year old swimmer who's, you know, afraid of competing. I don't know, but it is a real thing now. It's something I'm glad you're asking about. Yeah. Well, it's something that I hope if people are listening that, you know, I caught up with a friend yesterday. We used to work together. Now he runs a coaching group for men, primarily men, business owners.

[00:40:36] A lot of them used to be athletes, right? Yeah. You know, the type. Yeah. And, you know, the biggest thing is like, it's really hard for him to grow as a business because no one does referrals. No one's going to be like, Hey, I had all these, I was mentally fucked up. And, you know, I, you know, I was, I was having these issues. I'm struggling. So I noticed you seem to be having the same problems too, Eric. And maybe you should talk. That doesn't happen. Talk to him. You should talk to him. So I think that's something too, is like, if people are listening, it's like, you know, if you have a friend or maybe you're going through the things or ask, you know, ask for help or

[00:41:06] talk about how you got help. And I think those two things can be very powerful. Even if it's just one person who's listening, it was like, yeah, because I did. And it was very hard for me, but it turned out a year and a half later, you know, three Andy Patronic and the work I do with him that I'm, I'm in a much better place all around, better entrepreneur, better husband. Yeah. Better son, better uncle, everything. I love it. You know, I think is important in those spaces too, is, is outlining what the commitment is. Right. Like, obviously, like if you want to be successful at one session, you might, you might walk away

[00:41:34] from that session feeling good, but it's, it's not going to be transformative in your behavior. You need to have repeat offerings. I get really leery of the people like, oh, it's a one-year contract. You're paying me on retainer. And some of the numbers that are being quoted to elite athletes in the mental performance space are nothing short of like astounding, like stuff that I, I was shocked when I've seen it, like people who are paying more for their mental skills coach than they would pay in three years. We have off season training at our facility.

[00:42:01] And I just, I don't believe, Pat Rigsby is a good friend and Pat has this, this line on value, value extraction. I never want an athlete at our facility to feel like we're extracting value. Like, Hey, we're only going to spend a little bit of time together. I want to make as much money on you as I can. That's not who we are. We're value addition. We want to always try to over deliver on value weather relative to what's expected. And I think in this space, that's the stuff that scares me a lot. So I think you have to find that middle tier of commitment. Like maybe it's a three month commitment of, Hey, we're going to, you know, we're going

[00:42:30] to have a session every week, every other week for an extended period of time. We're going to evaluate how this is going. I, the one year commitments super questionable for me. Maybe that's just the businessman in me. Yeah, no, it's a good point. It's a good point. So one of the, I want to make sure you have some time for this is artificial intelligence and how it's changing your job. You know, it's not just our industry. It's not just sports performance, but the whole world is changing really fast and we're just changing with it. Right. So I guess, you know, I want to talk about your app too, what you guys are doing there.

[00:42:57] So maybe it all, it all comes in together, but how are you leveraging artificial intelligence right now? You know, how does Eric Cressy maybe on a day-to-day basis use it and what do you have, what do you find effective? I talked to Galpin about this on this podcast about a year ago and he's, you know, essentially they've downloaded Galpin's brain from all the podcasts and everything he's done. They use it that way and they're doing a lot of really cool, you know, research applications for it. So what do you, what do you say? Yeah. I think the place where we're probably seeing it the most beneficial is in our sports science realm.

[00:43:24] It's just being able to handle a large volume of data and efficiently do some stuff. So like as a con, as an example, Yoss is our, our sports science coordinator at CSP and he's, he's very, very good with this stuff. And so like we have a collection of athletes that come in for assessments. We get a sports science report every night sent out to our staff, right? It's the force plate graphs. It basically summarizes all the findings and, you know, basically makes recommendations in terms of force velocity profiling, stuff like that. We can do that for 1080. We can do it for Proteus.

[00:43:54] We can do it for our force plates. We do it for our shoulder strengths. It immediately batches them into percentile rankings. So for 17 year old high school kid with shoulder pain comes in and he's in the first percentile for shoulder ER strength. Like we can show, Hey, this is what it looks like in our pro data set. This is where you're falling short. And, and AI has just allowed him to do that all faster. Like you take the numbers in, in, in a CSV format, you put it in, it's in a perfect visual. And what would have taken literally hours every night is something that we can get in 30 seconds of work for him.

[00:44:24] Why is it really going to do is put the attachments on the email that goes out to our staff. So that has been super compelling. It doesn't cheapen the experience for anybody. We, where we really avoided using AI is it doesn't write programs. It doesn't replace our authentic voice, right? It doesn't write articles. It doesn't do podcasts. It doesn't do social media postings, things like that. I think that's where people get lost. Like you can all tell when an AI generated email comes your way. It's got all the dashes in it. It's the double dash. Yeah.

[00:44:53] It's just, it's just, it's a terrible look, right? We get spammed with those, unfortunately, pretty regularly. So what I've never allowed it to do is cheapen our unique voice. Like that's something that's really important to me. I also think in this fitness space, like community is, is the single most important thing we do, right? Expertise is important, but I think at the end of the day, people want to experience, they want to be around other people. That's important to them. And creating the environment has always been, you know, foremost among us. So that maybe that's why I've been a bit of a late adopter for AI, but you know,

[00:45:23] certainly we're seeing more and more places like our, our girls softball team. Like it's crazy. Like you can, you can make a team song that includes all of the girls names. You can, we did a rap and a country version and they were done in like 30 minutes. It's absolutely insane. Like I was, I was joking. My mom is a retired high school principal and she, I can always remember my childhood that she, she taught ninth grade English. So as I went up to go to bed, she'd be like correcting papers in bed, hard copy stuff,

[00:45:52] not even emailed. And I was like, mom, nobody would actually write papers anymore. AI would write everything. Like you would have to be spending your entire day wondering whether a machine did this or whether the kid that you interact with in class did this every day. It's just, it's so much different. I worry a lot about people struggling to understand nuance in this world where there's a quick answer, a quick fix right away. If there's one thing I think I've done really well in my career that I'm really proud of is I made a point of being a generalist first.

[00:46:22] And I think where the success for our business has come is understanding how to put all the pieces of the parts together and come away with a solution, make inferences, try to, try to solve that puzzle. And I don't know that that's always going to happen in this world. I think people will, will probably take the quickest answer instead of the one that maybe has the most nuance. And I see this a lot in baseball, you know, where people are like, oh, you know, you have a great slider. Why don't you throw it 80% of the time? And well, like that might not work because that slider is often set up by another pitch.

[00:46:52] That pitcher may not be confident enough to throw that slider where it's three, two and the base is loaded. So you always have to pull more information. I guess AI does get better as you provide more information. So I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm also cautiously pessimistic about where it'll take us as an industry. Yeah. I think you have to be both. You know, it's, it's fun. I recently listened to a couple interviews with a guy who did the social media dilemma. He came out with like, I think it's the AI dilemma or something like that.

[00:47:16] And Tristan, I forget his last name, but it's, it's alarming, but it's also like we can do stuff about it. Like we need guardrails on it, but it's just a matter of, do we have the will to do it? Like one of the things you talked about, you know, to, to your teacher examples, like I think it's Japan will shut down. All AI platforms will shut down during the month of finals for the kids. Yeah. So they know not only when they're not able to, they can't access during that time, but they know it ahead of time. So they actually have to learn the materials. Right. So it's like you follow the incentives, don't, you can easily predict the outcome.

[00:47:46] So I don't know, man, that's my biggest thing is like, are we really paying attention to it? Are we just kind of, you know, it's interesting too, if like, if I have a, if I have a new evaluation that comes in, you can't do this as much at younger ages, but if I get a pro athlete that's coming in, I can go to Grok on, on X and I can say, you know, let's say his name's Joe Smith. What's Joe Smith's injury history. And I can plug that in there and it, it's not going to be perfect. Like it's not going to give me a lot of the day-to-day stuff that doesn't get announced or any of the athlete kept from being public.

[00:48:14] But if there was something that was like an ESPN feed or sports injury solutions or anything like that, it's usually going to pick it up and pretty accurate. So like I can go into evaluations more prepared for, Hey, Hey, I noticed you had a knee sprain in 2022. Can you tell me more about that? Like we're, I don't know if you've been in this space, but athletes always under report on health histories. Like you have to scratch and claw to get information. I'm like, especially with like medications and things like that. But if you can have that walking in, it's, it's actually pretty powerful. Yeah.

[00:48:43] Well, tell me about the app. What do you, what do you guys do? Sure. So I think one of the things that we wrestled with over the years is we would, we would have a lot of athletes who would come to see us, whether it was our Florida or a Massachusetts facility. You know, we do a, I think a good job with assessment programming and get them in a good place. And you know, when they'd be on their own at home, we'd send them this lengthy video database, right? It was this like Microsoft Excel monstrosity. It was, you know, 2000 exercises at one point. There was like a password associated with all that stuff.

[00:49:11] And it just, it, it snowballed into something that was very untenable and not really user-friendly where you like had to open a document, click a link, go to a, you know, Safari page on your phone and everything. So we wanted to streamline it. And then more importantly, we want it to be like a, a much more curated version of YouTube where you didn't have to sift through bad techniques and things like that. And so we started to create this app really internally for our staff and started getting more and more feedback from clients and staff that would play very, very well for a larger audience. We built that out over the course of time.

[00:49:39] It's, it's me and a few of our coaches that have really done all the videos for it. You know, it'll lead to bigger things through this app, but it's really a, it's a, a very fancy video database. It's called CSP Amplify. The idea is to amplify our reach. I think also having done this for long enough, I think we see a lot of strength coaches, personal trainers who are, they're looking for variety, right? They're, they're trying to figure out some creative things that they can do. Maybe it's coaching something a little bit differently or adding unique exercises to their athletes program.

[00:50:07] So, you know, you're looking, there's 60 something med ball exercises, things like that, just to interject a little variety where appropriate. And thus far the feedback has been really, really good. So we're excited to kind of keep building on. Yeah. I think the biggest value, well, one of the biggest values there is they know it's coming from you. Like, I think that's the goal is to curate it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that, that's, I can't be understated or overstated. Like that's, that's a really big deal because there's just, there's just slot everywhere. You know, there's even like fitness influencers on LinkedIn, which is like the only social platform I live on.

[00:50:36] Like, we did a crappy movement. We did a, we did a product, Mike Robertson and I back in 2005, we made some mobility, filmed it in November of 05, released it either December, January that year. And I'll never forget. So I, I, I did a lot of research around like adductors, right? Kind of like hockey players, groin strains, things like that. And one of the things that we know is we have, you know, the adductors, the groin muscles, right? There's five of them. Some of them flex the hip and some of them extend the hip. Right? So I just postulate that when you're doing like flexibility stuff for your adductors,

[00:51:06] you need to make sure you work through full flexion extension and just made up this exercise. We call it split stance, kneeling adductor mobs. That thing came out in November and I'll never forget. It was probably like six or seven months later. It was an NFL preseason game and the sideline reporters do an interview. There's somebody doing split stance, kneeling adductor mobs. It was like, I think it was the Giants game, like right behind them. I'm like, holy crap. Like there's reach. But now here we are. I mean, we still use that exercise to this day. It's 21 years later.

[00:51:34] If you go on YouTube, you will see the worst possible technique imaginable, right? You'll see people doing it with a cringy arched back, you know, a huge forward head posture. They won't be doing it correctly. So it's kind of like this game of telephone where the further you get away from where you learn it, the more it gets just a little bit more bastardized as you go. So that was one of the rationales for this is just to like legitimize what was actually in there and help people sift through what's not so good out there in the public eye. Yeah.

[00:52:01] You really want to have some fun is search Turkish get up on YouTube and see what you get. It's a, it's, it's a journey. Is this four kg kettlebell? Cause you can get over terrible technique. No one, none of those things when you grab like the 24 kg one. Yeah. So is it going to be, where's it going to be? Is it going to be in the app store or are you guys going to be available through your website? That's best probably just to go to ericcressy.com and they can, they can find an access point there. It's always a pleasure. Really, really appreciate it. These are, I always get so much out of these and I think the industry does too.

[00:52:31] So what do you need right now? Is there anything that, you know, if people are going to reach out about anything, anything specific that you need help with? You just spread the word about the app. I appreciate it. Folks, I mean, it's ericcressy.com or ericcressy on social media, but appreciate the questions, man. You always come super prepared to these and I always enjoy the conversation. So thanks for putting in the work and thanks for all you do to spread the good word and really support the industry a lot. You can tell you're really paying it forward and you're helping people be better at their jobs. So thank you for all you do. Right on, man.

[00:53:01] I appreciate that. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Eric Cressy. Thanks. Cool. Crush it, man. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Fitness. If you did, I'm going to ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, CastBox, whatever it may be.

[00:53:29] Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me. Simply go to thefutureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners.

[00:53:58] So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.