Gray Cook - Movement Health Is the Missing Vital Sign

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 supporter review wherever you consume your podcast. If you're interested in staying up to date with the future of fitness, go to future of fitness.co to subscribe and get weekly summaries dropped into your inbox. Now on to the show. One theme keeps coming up: the right technology can make or break your business. That's why I'm thrilled to introduce our new presenting sponsor, Perfect Gym. Perfect Gym isn't just another gym management system. They are part of the Sport Alliance Group, Europe's leading fitness software company that has officially entered the US market. Now, I've seen this movie before, but here's the difference. They've opened up a U.S. headquarters in Boston because they understand that the American market deserves dedicated, localized support. After digging into the platform, one benefit especially stood out. They are simplifying the nightmare that keeps business owners up at night migrations. These guys were able to migrate one mega client with more than 250 locations in six different countries in just 20 days between two payment runs. No disrupting operations, no member loss, one seamless operation that simply works. Now, if you have ever switched platforms, you know how terrifying that process can be and how truly impressive that feed is. At a high level, here's their secret sauce. They give the power back to the operator. Instead of forcing you into their closed ecosystem, their Perfect Gym Marketplace connects with over 120 integration partners. So want to use your own app, your preferred payment processor, class pass for booking? No problem. Whether you're running a single studio or managing a multi-location enterprise, Perfect Gym was built from the ground up for multi-club operations. 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. Today's episode of the Future of Fitness is brought to you by Flex, the only HSA FSA payments infrastructure built specifically for leading fitness and wellness brands. I have been so impressed with the Flex team and their vision to transform how people pay for fitness. They built a platform that makes HSA and FSA spending seamless, unlocking a new revenue stream for brands and giving consumers easier access to products and services that keep them healthy. Here's why this matters. Flex helps fitness brands increase average order value by up to 50% and boost checkout conversion by 30%. That is not just incremental growth, that is transformational revenue powered by consumer dollars that are already set aside for health and wellness. What excites me the most is that Flex is changing the game for the entire industry. They're bridging the gap between healthcare and fitness by making it simple for consumers to spend their pre-tax dollars on the products and services that help them feel and perform their best. Flex works with fitness leaders like iFit, Johnson Fitness, Tempo, and Allo Moves. Honestly, this is a no-brainer, and I rarely say that. If you want to see how Flex can drive growth for your fitness brand, visit with Flex.com. That is with Flex.com. Now onto the show. All right, we are live. The man, the legend, Gray Cook. Welcome to the future of fitness.

Thank you, man. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll I'll flatter you. Don't worry. You don't have to do it yourself. Um, Ben, it's it's a real treat. I uh, you know, I've as we were just talking about earlier FMS has come into my life as a coach, as an athlete, as now just a wannabe athlete, right, throughout my entire time or within this industry. And and you know, the work that you've done, you know, I put you up there on kind of like the the Mount Rushmore of coaches and coaching education because you came up with something very unique, something very applicable, something very valuable to the industry. And I'm not gonna, you know, go over your background or anything like that. I would encourage people just to you probably have a Wikipedia page. Well, maybe start with this, Gray. What have you personally been up to the last two, three years? Maybe give us an update on on where your mind is at, what you've been doing with FMS, and then we'll take it from there. And before you start talking, I'm gonna set the table with there's some really interesting things I want to talk to you about, which is number one, why isn't movement health way up there with all the other forms of of health that we discuss openly and you know consistently throughout our conversations in this industry and outside of this industry and at in the homes and at the dinner tables? And then what's going on with the coaching industry, right? Like, is it changing and morphing? Is it as what it was, like what I consider the golden days of you know, the early 2000s where everyone wanted to seek education and and be the best? So a lot of stuff to talk, but with let's do with that. Give us a little update. What are you been up to, man? What's uh what's new in Great Cooks World?

I've been on a both personal and professional journey to actually vet what the word wellness means in my own personal life. I'm 59 frickin' years old and I have hardware, I have mesh, have multiple fractures, and and most of it is due to my lack of awareness and stupidity being trying to be Tarzan, but not doing everything Tarzan did to become Tarzan, right? I want to be Tarzan tomorrow, not a month from now. But also, I am at that friction part of my career where I was with the word function when I was 25. I graduated University of Miami with a degree in physical therapy and a certified strength conditioning specialist in 1990. And within seven years of that, I had already sort of sort of pioneered the movement screening concept because I was conflicted. I was I had people on my table. I had already evolved, done my residency, become a board certified specialist in orthopedics, come back to my hometown and I was seeing people on the table and said, if I could have been your coach or trainer three weeks ago, I wouldn't have to be your therapist today. And that, and and and if I listened to my, if if the 30-year-old gray cook listened to the almost 60-year-old grade cook, I was lecturing at Performed Better a couple of weeks ago, Long Beach, California. And I literally try to lecture to a younger version of myself because I was cocky and I was at least well educated and I was intelligent, but I was still working on my wisdom. And that's where we could go for the new state of coaching. But having to confront some of my own challenges and then looking at some of the challenges I have as a business owner, as an educator, as an author, and as a clinician right across the street where I work sometimes, it's becoming aware of my own problem and then committing to actually go upstream of that. Musculoskeletal medicine, orthopedics is not where metabolics is because nobody has sought to go upstream. Okay, so we don't do a good job of going upstream in the metabolic world either, because 80% of the people that are deemed pre-diabetic wind up being type 2 diabetic. So to me, there's bad math there. We need to get a trigger on your insulin, on your weight, on your activity level, and on some other indicators. Because if prediabetes winds up mostly being diabetes, then you got to move that line. And nobody ever thought that line was there for an ACL in an athlete or low back pain in a firefighter. But believe it or not, we've spent the last three years identifying 15 hard risk factors that hold up like your freaking vital signs do. Your vital signs don't say you're gonna die tomorrow. They say your likelihood of dying tomorrow is way more than that dude's is. That's that's all those vital signs say. And people have largely either waited till there's pain to ask the movement question, or they assume that if I just do it more, it'll work itself out, which is the sport of exercise. Neither are true. And that's why the the principle that I got up on my wall every day is first move well, then move often. Move well has a period behind it, meaning there are metrics that should say well or not well, meaning what gets measured gets done in business. And if we don't measure movement, we can all assume we contributed to it. If we never do the survey at our restaurant, we can all assume we're a good chef or cook. But we got to have those feedback loops because the population is changing quicker than our metrics are catching up. And and I think we're both a fan of aura rings. What is your biggest burden if you could fix one thing and make one metric better on your aura ring? What would it be? Like what if I want to improve one personal metric? Or like would you rather have a better daily average HRV? Or have you already figured out that as long as you fix your sleep, your HRV is good? Would you rather have an extra 2,000 steps in your day and you can't find time for it? What is the thing that you wish your aura ring would give you a crown for that you never get a crown for? Or are you that dude?

I'm not that dude. I mean, my uh, you know, my HRV is something that I'm always trying to train. And, you know, one of our mutual colleagues, Joel Jameson, I talk to him quite often about, you know, how to train HRV. And I that that's the one thing because I know, and I see it, you know, not to get to my personal metrics, but I can see it throughout the year of in the winter, my cardio respiratory training goes down, my skiing goes up, but my HRV is tanks. And then right around this time of year, I my HRV is tip top, and then it's gonna slowly decline through December into January, and then it'll rise again. So that's the one thing, but I know why. I think I'm lucky in the fact that I'm a little more educated than Commons Consumer, but that's that would be one thing. I don't know if that's answering your question the way you want, but that's that's the one thing.

I asked this question. I had a pro golfer who was on tour and he came through our area just to sort of get I'm Jiffy Loop for pro athletes sometimes when they're on the tour and they just come through and we put them on the rack, and it's like, you know, yeah, you're way past your old change, dude. Anyway, he said, you know, I used to have a wearable, my sleep is great, so I don't really pay attention to it anymore. Now, I'm a big fan of Aura, but I don't care whether it's a Whoop Band or a Garmin Watch or an Apple. Whatever you will use as a dashboard is okay with me, especially if you're not OCD about it, but you will acknowledge I have huge problems with sleep. He said, I got great sleep, so I put it away. I'm like, hey, can we look back at your records? This guy to be a pro athlete, a PGA professional, a touring professional, doesn't really have a great HRV. And I gotta look at that. When I'm working with pro athletes, I gotta look at the way they show up because their state of recovery may determine what test I do today or not. Otherwise, I got a bad test, right? If if my dad shows up for a cardiovascular stress test and he's got an arthritic flare up in his hip causing him to limp, then he's actually already at a much higher level due to the pain and the inefficiency of the limp. It's gonna look like he's got a cardiovascular issue because he's not gonna handle much of an incline load on his treadmill. And in two clicks, he's gonna be on statins when all he really needed was a decompression program for his hip and maybe a better anti-inflammatory strategy. But you can see how missing the movement metric gets us into a metabolic question when I see a lot of my type two diabetics control their diabetes. Their osteoarthritis is now manageable and they were heading for a total joint. And it's not the 30 pounds they lost that mechanically made the knee less burdened because the other knees got the same 30 pounds. It is the efficient metabolism that deflames itself quicker. We can't control inflammation, you know, unless we pick our activities and our lifestyles better. And and so that that made me ask him, okay, how often do you have pain? And he said, after a tournament, I got about three days of residual pain. It's harder to get to sleep on this shoulder. I toss and turn a little bit. And that's what we said. He assumed the only thing that influenced his HRV was sleep, maybe diet, maybe consistency. No. 30% of the people we screen have pain with one of our simple movement patterns, which means you're either working around something or exercising through it. That's cortisol, that's shitty sleep, that's a lower HRV. And most people think covering it up solves the problem. Pain is simply an indicator. It's not the enemy that there is disharmony or future harm around the corner. And it's been so easy to manage pain from the new CB gummy bears we got to the opioids that we just threw in the trash can, that people never ask, since I can feel better today, I won't investigate the upstream causes of this. You know, so, so I literally, if you're not, if you're in this the wellness, fitness, healthcare space, don't measure how much stress somebody can handle if you don't know how well recovered they are, because you may be working on the wrong side of the equation. Our job is not to dispense exercise like a vending machine for entertainment value. It's to get people to homeostasis in their recovery and homeostasis in their physical stress. And I meet runners that are five miles too deep into the stress and we cut them back. Dude, all we do is reduce mileage and their movement screen goes up. They move better through their joints. And they were literally just writing a cardio check their chassis couldn't handle. That was it. And I'm like, if you need to express your cardio more than this, we'll do it in another way. But that's all the impact you can handle. And if you can get by with that, you don't need me anymore. So it's it's the first order of to me, wellness is balancing the equation of stress recovery. And when you ask people the question, are you overstressed or under recovered? It's interesting to hear their answer. But the argument is if there's ever a question, stabilize recovery, let's do us some type of stress, mobility, stability, cardio, strength test at your homeostasis, and now we'll know if you're deficient or not. Most people are being tested and evaluated every day, under-recovered, inflamed, and in pain. And we make programming and dietary decisions on that state of readiness, not the one that you can adapt from.

So and why why do you think this is the case that this is so commonly overlooked? Is it is it lack of a repeatable and accessible assessment? Is it education? Is it laziness? Is it like what is it that is holding us back from having this? Because that makes total sense. Like, I've never heard anyone on this podcast talk about, you know, a movement mobility issue related to someone's potential to be on statins. No one talks about that.

Right.

Yet it's one decision away. My dad fails that stress test, he's entering into a metabolic protocol that had a musculoskeletal easy ID. All you had to do is ask him, can you can you squat, touch your toes, turn to the left and right? And if any of those hurt, don't put him on the treadmill today because he's gonna post a test that's gonna get him medicated unnecessarily. So that's that is a a hypothetical scenario. But to believe it or not, the solution was about six podcasts back on your podcast. You and Paul Byrne, I heard you say it. He said this. We got to set some baselines. People set the exercise endurance baseline, the strength baseline, the BMI baseline. They set the baselines and the two they don't set. Show me where your recovery is and show me how you move. And unfortunately, pharmaceuticals can't cover those up too much. As far as I know, and I'm not Gary Breca here, but I was on the phone with him a couple of weeks ago, HRV has no placebo effect. If you post a valid, better, well-measured HRV, you didn't get there wrong. If you consistently post a good movement screen, you're doing something right. And so these are two things we can't get away from. And I tell people, my best indicator for a warm-up for my pro athletes, because I'm often pulled into a case, this guy's got to actually do some corrective exercise. Well, that's gonna interfere with his workout, his performance stuff. No, it won't. Watch what I do. He needs a 10-minute warm-up. I can fit his calibration, his correction into that 10-minute warm-up. Not only will it post a better state of readiness, it will chip away at the risk factor of dorsiflexion limitation. So the you have no excuse for not letting me own your warm-up, especially if you're not going to allocate extra time to a corrective strategy. The way this works is what's my feedback loop that I picked a better warm-up than you as a coach and her as a trainer? We literally do something you can't fake. You can't fake your HRV. And believe it or not, you can't fake your balance. So when I do a single leg stance test by a criterion like a motor control screen, it's a shoes-on, three minute in, three-minute out test that anybody could do. And if I make you have better, non-focused balance, that means you're not concentrating on having better balance. This ain't hitting a 30-yard putt. This is this is an authentic subcortical activity. You're doing this at your brainstem level. So you're either sending and receiving better proprioception action or you're not. If I can make your balance better in six to ten minutes and I didn't practice balance directly, then it could be said by most logical people, I unburdened your system and you showed up less ready than you are right now. When we see better balance measures, they're associated with better reaction time, better mobility, better stability, better movement homeostasis. So if you and I can talk about metabolic homeostasis and we're in the exercise industry and we don't know, we don't have a baseline for movement homeostasis, then we're all just going to be guessing. So whenever I used to get in conversations about functional exercise, people would tell me about their functional programming, but there was no baseline for outcomes. So are you telling me that everybody that comes in your eye exam leaves with 2020 vision? No, they don't. So, but if you never measure their vision, then you're gonna assume you're sending everybody out unimpaired. And believe it or not, a high percentage are. So when I moved back to my hometown, I was seven years out as an orthopedist. I said, fitness is missing so much unbelievable business service opportunity. And if it makes it to me in healthcare, it's gonna be mismanaged because I don't have the time to fix the broken thing because the fitness dude missed the breaking thing. Risk factors mean breaking. And my new definition of wellness that I came up with, and by the way, I'm a big fan of Michael Pollan.

I want it, yeah.

I'm gonna give it to you. But I I got this clarity from Michael Pollan. In in his book, Food Rules, eat food, mostly plants, not too much. If there's anybody in food science that argues with that, I'm just gonna go ahead and say they got a different agenda than health right now. That was clean, it was tight, there's no absolute. It's not wellness is how many risk factors you don't have. And I can measure that and we can discuss it, and we can rate and rank it by age and gender and specialty and whatever. So you've got to be more well to play in the NFL than you do to be an accountant, and so people don't understand. That's what FMS has been doing at the NFL and MLB compound. We're not identifying talent. The talent's already there. The 40R dash is already posted, but there's another guy just as fast with four less movement risk factors. Who do you think the GM is talking to us about? Both these guys have equal performance. This one, according to risk factors, is starting with better durability because we know the more musculoskeletal risk factors you have, Under equal exposure, you're probably more likely to have an injury. Now, here's what I can't predict. I don't know whether it's going to be an ankle or a low back, because you might sacrifice your spine to cover your ankle or blow your knee because your ankle's stiff. I don't know where the injury is going to be. You are going to make a musculoskeletal mistake because you're inefficient, you're asymmetrical, you have a mobility or stability challenge, you're going to fatigue early in something your cardio can cover because your VO2 Max can run you right in the ground. I mean, Lance Armstrong had a way better VO2 Max than he had a runner's movement signature, or he'd have won the New York Marathon. So his chassis couldn't carry the impact, but he can definitely produce the wattage on a bike. But that's a myopic view of his 360 health. I honestly think if back to your and Paul's conversation, if whatever fitness venture I had, if I could switch my staff from thinking they're line cooks of exercise to quickly framing up this person's, because that's not a sexy statement. Wellness is how many risk factors you don't have, but risk factors are how many opportunities you have to change this person's life and get the credit for it because you measured it in the beginning. I like that. Yep. But people shy away from that word and they don't know how to market it. And apparently I don't either, because a lot of this message isn't mainstream. But what we did with the movement screen is movement can easily fall into four buckets. And the essence of screening isn't which patterns we pick, it's the buckets we put you in. And what we've said is a two on the movement screen is an acceptable movement pattern, categorically speaking. At no time do we ever ask you to exceed the range of motion that's posted by all our medical entities, like the AMA or the orthopedic association, but we ask you to use these combinations of range of motion and motor control in a squat in a lunge. And I didn't pick these movements because they're prevalent in exercise. I picked them because that's what you and I use to learn to walk. That means your software is originally programmed with roll, creep, crawl, kneel, squat, stand, step, stride, run. That's so your software does that whether you grow up in Asia or on the equator or at the North Pole or in Montana. And so you pre-installed to run, jump, carry, and climb. And these are expressions of movement, and you use these patterns to get there. If you score two on the movement screen, those patterns are still largely intact from your original programming. If you got threes on the movement screen, you are not only acceptable, you've posted what we consider exceptional. You're in a higher percentile compared to a movement cohort. If you score a one, that means you could not complete the movement task. You cannot break parallel on a deep squat. You cannot balance to the depth of your lunge without falling over. You cannot step completely over a hurdle to your own tibule height. We've never found a one to be a competitive advantage. There's no argument or excuse for having a one on the movement screen. You can say, I got a pin in my ankle, at which point we know that's never going to change. So we don't load that pattern. But most of the time, movement patterns can easily change if we either find the impairment, the knee arthritis that's driving it, or the bad motor program that said he doesn't turn to the left anymore because four injuries occurred there. So he's got a parking brake on and stuff like that. A zero on the movement screen means the movement pattern hurt irregardless of how well you performed it. So when we put you in a zero bucket, instead of obsessing about the rest of your screen, it's better just to find out what provoked that pain and to dissect your movement problem by the pattern that caused it, not by the x-ray that showed why. Because if you finish with physical therapy, I don't just need to make your knee bend more. If you can't squat and lunge, then you're probably not going to enjoy moguls. So I can actually get paid to rehab your knee, restore your quad strength, and get your knee more range of motion. But that's not what you asked me for. You want your freaking lunge and your squat back, and you want your plyos back. No, no. Insurance didn't pay me to do that. I had to post, I got you 20 degrees range of motion, your swelling's down, your arthroscopic surgery is considered a success, and your knee doesn't hurt when you're a community ambulator. That's not why you came here. You came here to ski. So we got to bench test that knee. And so if I don't exit through a functional hole hole and restore your function, from now on, you're going to be managing your boots, you're going to wear a knee strap, you're going to pick different skis, you're going to pick different conditions, and you're going to slowly get a smaller skiing life until you don't ski anymore. But nobody's going to blame me for that. And I caused it because I didn't close the case. And if I can't close the case, which sometimes I can't, I tell you exactly why, but we start working right away because, you know, I hate to say this and I know you don't want to hear it, but we're going to go to telemark skis and some cross-country stuff. But believe me, you'll appreciate it when you're 70. And we can still do a little bit of downhill, but more than once a week is going to flare up that knee. I'm perfectly willing to help you manage it that way too. I'm I'm nothing but a movement economist. You got this much time and this much energy, and let's not waste those precious resources.

So I'm I'm listening to you and I'm trying to think of the next question, which is a very hard thing to do because I want to make this question very I want to articulate as best as I can because everything I'm hearing you say, Gray, makes total sense. And from a practitioner standpoint, makes total sense, right? Get the education, do the assessments. Now, here's where the challenge, and you touched on earlier, is like from a packaging standpoint, to a marketing standpoint, to a sales standpoint, where as an operator, this is where I'm putting my operator hat on as a gym owner. And I want to preface this by saying that everyone in this industry feels that we have a right to move towards the forefront of healthcare, right? As an industry, fitness can now kind of start to move there. And you're starting to see a lot of models, right? You're starting to see quote unquote longevity models, right? Like a Miora program at Lifetime where they're incorporating, you know, blood work and all kinds of medications and nutrition guidance and things like that. But no one is getting, for some reason, whether it's the way we framed it or just the kind of collective consciousness of our of our society, is like movement health is not sexy, right? It doesn't sell. And like I've tried it. Like I remember when I when I was a gym. A thousand percent. They do. And and because they're entertaining, right? They make it cool, they simplify it, but still get to that point, and they probably tell you the same thing is like it's still hard to get people to do the 10 baseline things that they outline in their you know, born to move, or you know, with their latest book. I apologize, Kelly and J Star, but like you know what I mean? Like it's even then it's it's difficult for them to get people on board. It makes total sense. What is the problem? Like, what's the holdup here for us?

Our daughters, our daughters are equal age. And so when they were on their standing desk initiative, my wife and I, this was pre-COVID. I'm 59 with a 13-year-old. So we don't know how that one happened, but we took care of when we figured it out, we took care of it. But anyway, I my my youngest daughter wound up at a startup school, a really cool little school, but they did not have formal physical education. Kids just did recess, and it was all the teachers could do to really structure this neat, engaging educational environment. It was doing a little bit better than our public school system. So my wife and I decided, you know, you don't just tithe with a little bit of money back to a charitable organization or your church, your organization. You tithe your time. So most schools can't afford Gray Cook as a PE coach. But if I'm free, you can't fire me and I can quit anytime I want. So I'll be here every Thursday and we're gonna go K through seven. And I was experiencing the same thing that Kelly and Juliet were, but I went a different route, not because I don't think what they're doing is good, but they went to standing desk in ways to make the classroom environment more engaging and just generally increase step count in a day. I literally wanted to attack movement with these kids. And so I said, we're not gonna play games because that's for after school and that's sports. We're going to do Ninja Warrior courses every day. And I called Perform Better and I said, Chris, I need the Gray Cook discount. I need to put about five grand worth of equipment, plow boxes, balance beams, little bitty sandbags, little bitty battling ropes, bunch of buddy lead jump ropes. Just send me the box, send me the bill, we're in. And uh I sent the FMS screen team over. And if you think movement screening is hard at the NFL Combine, try first graders. It's I can't imagine. Anyway, we never did one corrective exercise. We never counted one rep, we never did anything. And we improved the overall balance and mobility of every class K through seven by playing games with balance. If I if kids needed core, we didn't do planks, we did bear crawls through tubes because that's where the beanbag was that they needed to grab. And so everything was a forced use paradigm, but it was gamified. And what I realized is kids were patterning each other.

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They weren't laughing at the kid with bad balance because I wouldn't let them. We all have a bad day. And I made sure that Mr. Cook with the sleeveless shirt and the camo pants and the whistle was sergeanting that. However, everybody watched the kids that balanced right, that bear crawled fast, that could make a big rope wave. And they patterned each other. And I didn't have to instruct anything. And it was a miracle and it happened. And I remember me and Kelly were FaceTime and I'm like, look at this crap, man. This is awesome. You know, and and so what I what I realized is I package wellness in the form of fun for those kids, but they're also plastic and they're not jacked up and they're not full of orthopedic risk factors. However, two-thirds were developmentally delayed. I had 50% of first graders that put on deep squat. That's a problem. Well, it's a private school. So, and it's Virginia, so half of them had on Crocs and the other half had on cowboy boots. So I'm like, all right, everybody take your shoes off, running around barefoot. But here's what happened: I was only there on Thursdays. But by me setting up obstacle courses and showing them things that they could easily practice, like how long they could hang on a bar or their balance. Guess what the games became during recess? They were, I was Mr. Miyagi. They were sanding the fence when I wasn't there. They were painting the fence when I wasn't there. They were sanding the floor, waxing the car. They were playing with the things that engaged them or they wanted to do better on the next race day. So I set the bar a little higher than they wanted to play. They just rose right to it. Greg Rose has done that at TPI because when he does a golf screen on you, here's what you don't understand. You want to see where you rank with golf pros and everybody else at your age and at your level. But the screen that Greg does isn't a golf performance screen. It's a movement screen because if you can't deep squat, you may have early extension or swing. So he related a movement pattern to a swing fall. So there's a whole lot of people over at TPI that reduced their risk factors, but it had nothing to do with living an extra 15 years and playing with their grandkids. They wanted to take five strokes off their game, or they wanted to play two more golf outings a week and their back wouldn't let them. So a lot of people, so whether I make a warrior course for my kids, I mean, take take high ROX right now. It is a better done sport of exercise than I've seen, but there's two ways to train a Hydrox athlete. And I'm watching them both from my dashboard. Let's practice the test every day until you puke, or let's go put on a rub and uh go on multi-terrain. Let's not do everything that looks like that because it's almost like eating chicken breast and rice every day in bodybuilding. Let's let's eat real food, yeah, and lean up naturally. And so I really want to offer the high ROX athlete an opportunity to say, listen, what you're doing is functional exercise, but not everybody comes to that functionally. If your biggest functional barrier is mobility, you can actually pick up a competitive advantage by finding a hot yoga class and paying for some soft tissue. And when you learn to warm up well, if you're tired of paying for soft tissue, you don't have to pay for soft tissue anymore. Do you because nobody's ever going to get a massage before they go to bed? I mean, I can ask for one, you can ask for one, we can give one. You're never going to get one. But nobody's stopping you from dumping that tension and stretching before you go to bed. So if we know you don't rotate to the left, and we got this nice little uh stretch called the Bretzel. If you can't do a brezzle on one side, yeah, I've been doing it daily. Find the side that you you have are more challenged on, but instead of getting in and out like I would have treated you 20 years ago at a kettlebell conference, treat it like yoga. Go to the very first barrier, cycle three diaphragmatic breaths, reposition, pick up some, never fight the tension, never fight the stress. Anywhere you are in the move, do a contract, relax, hold, relax. Play with everything you know in fitness, but don't let up until it's better. Just like my aura ring. I got I got a notification this morning, five-year anniversary with Aura, and they literally told me you've improved your sleep by like 30% since you started. That's my goal. I don't need a step count. I and my HRV is actually fairly good, even when I get moderate sleep. It's when I really crash. But I used to have sleep apnea. I have a double fusion in my neck. So I had a lot of problems that were interrupting my sleep. But until I had a valid daily feedback sleep gauge, I never started chipping away at the things I knew would make incremental progress. And I was just looking for how much melatonin can I take? How cold can I make my mattress? And it's like all these things are corrective, but I wasn't protecting myself from all the shit that's robbing me of sleep in the first place. And I see on YouTube now, everybody's got a way to reduce inflammation from coal plunge to turmeric to whatever. I'm like, yeah, but how much inflammation are you making every day that's unnecessary? Because I'm in the inflammation business. I'm in sports medicine and orthopedics. So everybody I see is inflamed. But I got a chance to manage Michelle Wheat for four years in her pro career with Nike, and she pulled me in as a strength coach and a musculoskeletal therapist. First thing we found was four dietary problems that had her lit up in every joint. Reduce that now I can see the mechanics and the golf swing, get her more stable there. When we were done with her, she was doing Turkish get ups with a bottom-up kettlebell like she'd been hanging out with Pavel for two years. I mean, she was she was jacked. And we weren't squatting big, we weren't deadlifting big, we weren't compromising the wrist. I was training her functionally, but we got her diet and sleep right first because the vessel won't hold the stress otherwise.

So here's what I'm hearing. Thinking about like calls to action or insights that people listening from the industry um can work with, right? Number one is and this has been a common theme recently. And I don't want this to come across as like we're abandoning generations, but start with the youth, right? Like if we can get to the youth now, which we've been avoiding and really ignoring for far too long, right? And there's some good steps going on right now. Presidential fitness test seems to be coming back, all great stuff. But focusing on the youth, I think is a really good, simple call to action because I'm not gonna say people in their 40s and 50s, you should just let them out and just they're don't bother with them, right? They're they're too far gone. That's not what I'm saying.

But they've picked their path. They've they've picked their path.

But it's much more difficult. It's a much more difficult path, right? So, number one is maybe look at the youth. And I love your idea of like, hey, give an hour to physical education in your local schools. I think it's a really strong call to action. In fact, it's kind of motivating me to change my life.

I got way more from it than I gave. I promise you I did. So did my wife. COVID, COVID shut it down. But I have high school kids coming up and hugging my neck right now, saying, I wouldn't play being played in varsity right now if you and Mrs. Cook hadn't shown me how to jump rope when I was seven. I love it. Dude, that I mean, I'm not a missionary, but this kid might have been in a completely different body, having a completely different physical experience on this planet. And all I did was say, you know, I know your screen's fun. This is fun too. Both can coexist. Yeah.

And so you don't have to abandon that, but you know, I think the other thing, and you're pointing out here, which is really good too, is like the TPI example and multiple examples you've given of gamification, right? Giving a score, making it fun, aligning incentives um with people. Because if you just kind of give them a report that says, hey, this is you know your risk assessments, your risk factors, you suck here, here, and here, here you're okay. We're gonna do these exercises. People are like, well, that sounds shitty work. That sounds like awful work, right? But if you align it correctly, like the TPI, like the golf one, golf one's a great one because I golf, I touch on golf. I know a lot of golfers who are like, they will do anything, right? To get their score down by two, uh, two or three, right? They'll do anything, right? Or get you know, 10 yards on their on their drive. Like they'll do anything and do that stuff. So that's a really nice incentive. For the for the general population, finding those incentives are maybe a little bit, you have to dig a layer deeper, right? So if Susie from accounting comes into my gym, right? Um, no particular major interest of athletic pursuits or outdoors or anything, but she just, you know, she's just not happy with the body she's living in, right? But she wants, what does she want? She wants 30 pounds of weight loss, right? She wants to look good in the mirror, she wants um, you know, maybe people to look at her a little bit differently when she walks into the office, right? And this could be uh Joe from payroll as well. But you know, you get my point. It's like, how do we get these people to care about movement health and educate them and then get the coaching industry to follow along to really get in? This is something you've been thinking about for a long time. So, yeah, what about the average George Ann?

Well, let's not assume that we know why she's 30 pounds overweight because we've already got the diet and exercise conversation preloaded. And and literally, I value your opinion. You and I have talked about where my career is gonna go. And and, you know, I don't just want to be an influencer. I feel like I've got this movement slice, and I want to give it to the next generation. I want people to have a little bit cleaner perspective on intake because I honestly think that you can run the profession of exercise like a line cook, or you can run it like a chef. And a chef sizes up the environment, it sizes up the season. If I can get fresh eggs here, then we're gonna have a lot of dishes with eggs. And if the eggs are crap here, we're gonna do without eggs for a while. And that's the way a chef literally organism environment. A chef is a perfect artful expression of you drop me in this environment, I'm gonna make it better because with whatever ingredients we got, we're gonna work with that. We're gonna work with the local flavor. And that's why I've dropped myself into Olympic weightlifting, special operations, the kettlebell community, but I make myself do what they do. I didn't just watch a kettlebell event. I got certified. I didn't just read a book about Pilates, I got Matt certified as an orthopedic specialist. So not only am I consuming The act through this body, I'm analyzing it on the outside. We don't know why she's 30 pounds overweight. And if we and so what I've started doing, and we took what we knew about movement screening and said, okay, my original book, Athletic Body in Balance, 2001, that's what human kinetics asked me to do. Is it possible to do a self-movement screen? Well, if you can weigh yourself and if you can strength test yourself, yeah, you should be able to movement screen yourself. But there's got to be standards because everybody's going to score themselves ambitiously too high or conservatively too low. We got to get an accurate. Well, we came up with a self-movement screen that is camera ready, but I don't need a camera yet. You just got to answer honestly. But if I'm going to cross-section your movement today, which I can do in about eight minutes, then can I ask you some questions? Because remember how I said I never wanted to assess your movement without knowing your state of readiness? So if I ask you questions about your sleep, your nutritional awareness, because I've I've heard you say on a podcast, a lot of people think corn is a vegetable. It's a grain. They can't answer the vegetable question, right? So let me get your activity level, your BMI, your past medical history, a few behavioral health questions. Let me get a 25-second breath hold, a answer the Pittsburgh sleep study about your sleep, and do these five movements. I can literally give you a musculoskeletal risk factor rating. If she is above the cut, if she scores above 75 and wants to lose 30 pounds, you have a lot more options as an exercise professional than if she's below that. How because if she's got some pain with squatting, our old company, Lanya, she should go get that checked out. Dude, she doesn't want to be with me. She wants to be with you. She doesn't want to come to a physical therapist and she doesn't want to make this about knee pain. She's pretty convinced if she can get the 30 pounds off, the knees will feel better anyway. It doesn't matter. How many other movement patterns can we express her energy in while you're coaching up a better lifestyle? Because if the first day she saw you, you know you're not going to have time for a full movement screen, but you already know forward-bending and squatting hurt, but balance is great, shoulder mobility is great, you can work with that. If you also know she's sleeping poorly, whether she wants to buy a wearable or you want to rent her one for a month, how much can happen in a month if you know where her orthopedic no-go zones are, but where her go zones are, and you have a little bit of lifestyle feedback. I just gave you nitrous oxide as a coach. You will, you know, you don't have to throw. I I had this conversation with uh Carlos Santana. The old coaching is we throw out a shitload of exercises and see what you do well and not well, and we make your program from that. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it could be better. 15 minutes could make you look like a genius 80% of the time because they already gave you a movement signature that we've profiled and said, stay on this path until X changes. I'm actually going to be at TSAC, uh, the the NSCA tactical event in San Antonio. And I wish you would be there because I'm going to turn around and tell all these people at the firehouse, at the SWAT team, don't come to me with your low back pain. You have the resources in your gym. You have a peer fitness trainer, you probably have access to a personal trainer. Screen yourself. Don't try to train these patterns. Go work on the dysfunctional patterns, cardio and the safe patterns. And basically, there's a good chance you'll reduce your risk factor so much that if you still have low back pain, you're going to need me anyway. But two-thirds of the time, you've already figured out where your triggers are and you've lowered all of the unnecessary inflammation. So I'm here for the L5 discs. I'm not here for the bad forward-bin, shitty deadlifting mechanics, lack of nutritional awareness. I'm not here for all that because nobody's going to pay me to do all that. They're going to pay me to crack their back, drop a few needles in, and give them the fat talk. So I'm basically saying you can solve most of these problems like low back pain and ACL prevention in the gym. But back to what you and Paul said, if you don't get an additional baseline, you cannot provide an additional service, ethically speaking. But the minute you've got a scientifically validated baseline, and that the self-screen that I spoke about has already been validated against the functional movement screen in the International Journal of Sport Physical Therapy. And it's right on our website. Anybody listening right now, you can basically give your administer that wellness screen to yourself and get your score. If you're a pro, tell us you're a pro and we'll show you how you can try this on a few people. If you're just doing it for your own self-interest, do it that way. Here's my ask back in return. What could I do from your professional opinion and anybody else who goes through it to make my report card look as sexy as TPI? Or to demonstrate that ethically I have to find your risk factors so I can customize your event. But the way I articulate the risk to you needs to be cloaked in opportunity, strategy. They're not hacks because we're not covering up anything. But we can't go right at your knee pain with the CBD cream. You literally need to look. Maybe it's because you're lunging shitty. So lunge shitty in the morning, CBD cream at night, that doesn't end well. And right now, Blue Cross Blue Shield is having more issues with musculoskeletal medicine than metabolic. That means at the dashboard of insurance, there are more musculoskeletal claims than there are diabetes and heart disease. What is causing that? We're putting total knees in 40-year-olds, and we're not giving them an option not to get the knee. They're already thinking the only way they can be out of pain or get back to golf is the total knee. And like one of my patients asked me in the parking lot the other week. They said, uh, Gray, I'm I'm not your patient. I'm I'm coming into the clinic, but my doctor seems to think I need a low back fusion. What do you think? And I'm like, well, I don't have access to your records right now. I remember your case from a while back. I'm not going to give you any advice without you being my patient, but ask me what I would do. I can ethically tell you what I would do. And he said, What would you do? And I said, I'd make that decision 30 pounds from now. I'm a Southern gentleman and I was never taught, I've never talked to people that way, and I wasn't shaming that man. I gave him every bit of kindness. I'm like, there are ways you can get 30 pounds off without exercising or hurting yourself more. And honestly, you're gonna have a different brain and body 30 pounds from now when you make that decision. And if you make a decision to get a fusion, then I'm your therapist. And if you make a decision to strengthen your body after that, I'm your strength coach. I'm here either way for you. But five weeks after that, we cross paths. He's 20 pounds down, and I'd gotten on him about soft drinks, right? Dr. Pepper was his thing, four of them a day. Type two diabetic, four of them a day, farmer, whatever. He says, Hey, Doc, I'm down 20 pounds, but I'm still drinking Dr. Pepper. I'm like, You are? How'd you pull that off? He goes, I only drank one on Sunday with my grandson, and I'm gonna go never quit that one. Now that one's a freebie. But that's your yeah, yeah. And you know, he's not gonna get a fusion. Some would, but my point is, we need more conversations of just radical transparency and algorithmic thinking. That's Ray Dalio, that's not me. But that's exactly what FMS is to me is just let me give you the transparent information because the question you're asking me about your fitness is wrong because you don't have a GPS. You got the map that you looked at on the wall. I got a GPS on you, not not on people like you. I just GPS'd you, you're here, you want to be there. This is the fastest route.

Well, here's here's what I hope happens when people listen to this interview, Gray, is that in this world of the influencer trainer coach, right? Where, you know, I'm not gonna throw the baby out with a bath water. There's been a lot of good things that have come out with like the fitness influencer, which is first of all, a lot more people lifting weights now than five years ago, right? That's a good trend, especially women. But what I'd like to see is maybe people who have followings, who have influence over the people, then maybe they start going a layer deeper into the type of work that you're talking about, where it's not just, you know, you're actually helping people improve their health through a deeper understanding of how their body works. And that if there's one thing I would want people to come out from this this conversation is like get a little bit more education, share that education with people in in the ways that you have. And if everyone does that and moves the needle 0.01% within our industry, if you're a coach or trainer, whether you coach one person or hundreds of people or thousands, right, get a little bit more education, share a little bit more, like go a layer deeper, right? Have a different conversation. Like those types of things I think can go a really long way. And that's what I want. And that's my concern about the coaching industry, which we never have time to get into today, Gray, was like it's it's transmuting into this like this part-time gig economy thing where it's like, okay, well, I do a little bit of training, I do a little bit of influencing, I do a little bit of whatever it may be. But I I worry that the days of 15, 20, 30, 40-year careers, right? Where like I look back at the people I started my OPEX training with a long time ago, and we still talk, right? And they're off doing cool stuff. Like, you know, we're we all kind of found this path within the industry. And I just want to see that happen a little bit more. I mean, I think it starts with a love of the education, a love of the application, and how you can actually change people's lives one-on-one versus how many followers you have, or you know, how many affiliate sales you get, things like that. And I know that's a shallow way to put it, but that's kind of what I'm hoping is maybe we inspire people to go a little bit later deeper. So, final thoughts for you, Gray. Like, um, number one, any final thoughts? Number two is if people are going to reach out to you after listening to this, what would you like them to reach out about?

I literally, I honestly think that that the way we're screening wellness is a huge lead generator. My my entire career in pro sports and working with Navy SEALs and the tip of the spear, the best of the best, has literally been me repackaging wellness as a cool opportunity to stay in the game longer, to serve without pain, to do these things. It is not exclusive to the elite. I also just told you I did it for K through seven. Literally, if I want I want the fitness professionals to lean in. And the reason I wrote the book called The Business of Movement is because I do realize when I ran movement screen workshops for 15 years, meaning I was the dude with the mic in Mawa, New Jersey, in the Holiday Inn with 82 people learning how to movement screen. It was a safe space. We're all not as fit as we'd like our clients to think we are. And she's got a bad core problem, and that dude has had five neck issues. My point is it was a safe space. And I literally tried to cultivate a culture that says we're here to fix each other because we practice on each other so we can serve them. But when I go into a clinic, a team, a studio, an environment, I find out that most people are very closed about their own fitness or musculoskeletal problems. I go into a group of therapists that don't treat each other, or chiropractors that don't treat each other. I'm like, you either don't believe in the food you're serving in this restaurant, or you're telling me there's nothing wrong with you at 42. Both are bullshit. Right? Help each other and going through your own wellness growing pains, fitness growing pains, weight loss growing pains. You literally will learn how to serve better. And that's why the chef tastes the food. They up and down the line, they taste the food. Line cooks don't do that. And we treat exercise that way. So we package it, we put it in protocols, we try to make it proprietary, and then we call it a methodology. And then it becomes CrossFit or it becomes strong first. And these aren't good or bad terms, it's the way you use them. But a lot of people define themselves by the methodology and not the outcome of the methodology. And that's where I had to get, I had a boatload of good methodology in my head, but I got to pick and choose what's going to this person to get the outcome that makes me proud. And so being able to blend those ingredients that are right in our hands, I can coach you on your wearable. I'm I'm not John Berardi, but I can get you right in your nutrition. You know what I'm saying? If you've got medical issues, I want your doctor to be involved from a nutrition standpoint. But I don't think people need to have my background in orthopedics to know that they shouldn't train a painful pattern. And putting somebody on the leg press because it doesn't hurt is still the squatting pattern if it hurts. So let's not reinforce and put strength on dysfunction there. Let's go over here where split squats don't hurt a bit for some reason, and we'll we'll build there. So there's so many options for us to serve each other as the influencers or the physical culture of the coaches, but we don't even talk to each other. And when we do talk, we're philosophizing and saying what we hate and love and talking about packages. We're not talking about, I know your shoulder hurts. Let's do something about that and see if we can get to the bottom of it. And all of a sudden, your shtick with your next two tennis clients just got better.

I love it. Greg, where would you like people to go? Online, reach out to you guys.

Functional movement.com. We try to answer questions. Lee and I have the movement podcast. We just took everything on the FMS menu. And instead of you picking and choosing which functional movement course you take, our two most popular are FMS level one and our medical movement screen for clinicians. We got a flat rate. If you want to see what's behind the curtain at FMS, it's one flat fee. Take every course we got from Indian clubs to our advanced medical stuff, regardless of who you are. And we realize that because most people are getting educated on YouTube these days, and we can't put everything we got on YouTube because of the way it's structured, but we made an academy of all the baseline information. The people who are interested in screening but don't want all the academy courses that we did, that little Simeo app is literally the lead generator because you don't need me to unpack that. You know how to coach sleep, you know how to coach a lunch. All we're doing is giving you that audit before your audit. And I tell you, when we started doing movement screens at Equinox a billion years ago on intake, as opposed to let's take a tour of the facility, the conversion from tour to client happened 50% better when you made it about them and screen them. They don't care what their score is. The lunge gave them an opportunity to talk about skiing or knee pain. And that's why going through a movement experience before we go through an exercise program together is the best lead generator in the world. And for the life of me, I think people ought to set a fee for that. Meaning charge for the movement screen. Greg Rose charges for the golf screen and then he charges for the golf program. And if if you've got a valid screen, now if you just made one up, I probably shouldn't charge for it. But we can give you hard data, referee journal, totally reliable. Just let them do it on intake and it will open up the conversations. There's a good chance you got extra services you could provide. You don't even know they need until you screen them. Awesome. Awesome. We'll go functional movement.com. You can find all that stuff right on the front page is an opportunity for that app. And like I said, we got to be our own therapist and coaches first. So find out where you're in the red, where you're in the yellow, and you're in the green, and start working on it.

Yeah. And I would also encourage people like go go do a training once or twice a year in person. Like go get in a room of coaches and trainers and learn in that environment because it's it'll uh first of all, it's a ton of fun, right? And you learn so much and you make great connections.

And on our website, everybody who's ever had a FMS course or an FSF, a functional movement medicine course, they're on our website. You can connect them by zip code or location. So if you're out there and you just want to get screened by somebody who's got boots on the ground experience, they're there. And I encourage a lot of people, you could take all our stuff online, but I would much rather you spend a half a day with somebody who's providing the service because I don't know who you are. All your clients could be over 60 or under 17. I don't know, but there is a level of screening that's appropriate for that group for what they're looking for. And there's somebody within a hundred miles of you doing it and doing it well.

Man, it's a pleasure. Um, I'm glad I uh I got got you on this podcast finally. It's been uh you know eight years I haven't had you on. It's just kind of shocking, to be honest with you. So I'd love to have you back. And uh, you know, we'll we'll keep in touch, Gray, and we'll get a lot of information out there in the notes for this podcast. But uh thank you, sir. It's been a lot of fun.

No, yeah, I enjoy listening to this podcast. And I I unless I go to conferences in the summer, I get a lot of my insider information from from your conversations. And I appreciate the way that you especially frame some of the I think Maha's an opportunity for fitness more than it is healthcare. Healthcare is getting ready to get their wrist slapped. Fitness can basically overtake it, but here's my point you can't be proactive if you don't know what to be proactive about. You gotta wait for the event or you gotta go upstream. And literally, that's what I want people to hear when they hear a screening opportunity. And my ass back to you, if you go on that little app and I can get a report card, please tell me how I could present that better because I almost wish that I could frame movement as well as aura frames some of the stuff. I'm dyslexic, so I love symbols, I love easy, clear screens, I love graphs and gauges. Let me know I'm doing better or worse. And and I self-regulate from that. My goal is to really our data's clean, but the presentation to your point, it's gotta be different in different groups. It's gotta be different at TPI, and it's got to be different in my gym class. It's the same screen. It really is. Can you get through these movement patterns or not? Tells me a lot. Awesome. Awesome.

Well, thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Great Cook. Thanks. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minute. If you did, I'm gonna 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. 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. 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 the futureoffitness.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. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.