Physicology 101 - Michael Koth

Physicology, simply put, is the emotional study of the body. The chopwood carry water, old dogs that are just going to hit the gym, right? The grinded out kind of people and the medical community now to play have to play nice in the sandbox together. What does that look like? Well, uh that's where we stand right now. Physicology sees it very intricately. What I would like to see is everybody start paying attention and bring their own voice into them.

Hey fitness friends, welcome back to the Future Fitness podcast and interview stories to future for this is episode number 62. Talk to Michael Doctor. So he's an author. Um you also have the website myfyscology.com or physicology. Before you want to see more about physical. So if you like what we're doing here, I can need your help or something about help all the time. Um please go to iTunes or subscribe to this podcast. That'd be fantastic. And if you feel the desire to do so, a favorable review would be warmly welcomed as well. So just go to iTunes or subscribe or that'd be fantastic. So what is physicology? Well, you're about to find out number one. But it's really uncovering emotional points, uh, which is leading to physical things. I'm gonna put up with the battle as simple as possible, but uh we've got a book. Uh it's called right. My physicology self-reflection journal uh was released on the last year. Um, and it has its website, my physicology.com. If you want to walk onto it, um yeah, it's just uh interesting field, so I hope you enjoy it. Uh it's definitely something for physical health professionals to be aware of, and I hope you enjoy the value of coming within this episode. Without further ado, Michael Koff, enjoy the episode. Everybody, welcome back to the Future of Fitness Podcast and Interview Series. I'm your host, Eric, and today I have Michael Kofe. He is the founder of Physicology. Michael, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Eric. Really appreciate being here.

I'm uh I'm excited. I love talking about, you know, obviously this this one very much falls into the format and the title of the show, The Future of Fitness, because you're you're starting um, you know, I guess um a thought movement within the industry, right? Yes, exactly. Before we get on to to physicology, let's um let's give the listeners a little bit of your background. I know it's extensive in fitness and health. So give us you know a snapshot of what that looks like.

Okay. Uh let's see. I started fitness training in 1975 at Gold's Gym in Venice. I learned from some of the old traditional guys. A guy named Jim Morris actually taught me how to how to do training. Um, he was a three-time Mr. Olympia and various other titles as he extended that. Um, it actually was before the word fitness training came to be. That wasn't put on the list of jobs until 1980 by President Reagan. So uh yeah, so it was called just uh, let's see, my first job I was called a floor monitor. So been around the business for a while.

Yeah, so you you've been in the industry for a while. Um you've seen things change. Uh the fitness industry is young, right? Overall in other industries, so you've seen a lot of change. Um let's get into let's let's cut right to the crux of it. So tell us what physicology is and and how how it began.

Okay. Uh physicology, simply put, is the emotional study of the body. Okay. Um, it it that's really what it means if you broke it down to Latin. Um, what I've done with it over time, and this was accrued over over an extensive amount of time. I use brain mapping, the neurological grid of the body, and cellular emotion. Uh, there's all those components were developed by differing people. Uh, I was blessed to be able to study with them over time. Uh, how it happened for me, although experientially, which was predominantly the reasoning behind it. Um, I just started noticing when I was working with people that they would talk about the same things when we were hitting certain areas of the body in fitness training. Uh, for example, uh doing pec deck for chest for chest exercise. Um, people would talk emotionally, you know, because we're working around the heart, so to speak. And so I just started noticing some of that at first, couple that with some of my experience, and and I started jotting down and writing patterns of of what I saw working with people. I've been blessed over the years to work with many, many different people uh throughout throughout the past four plus decades. Um, and it it started be formulating into something more than just a thought. Uh putting it into practice, I started working with it, it uh adding my own education to that. I went back to school about, oh I guess about 18 years ago, uh and studied psychology, went through and got my doctoral degree from a place called Pacifica Graduate Institute. And then I also studied through UCLA at a place called the Center for Human Development under a man named Dan Siegel, where who wrote a book called Developing Mind in cognitive neuroscience and saw a lot of the research that was going on there and put some of the cutting edge ideas that they had together with more the chopwood carry water brass tacks of fitness training. And that's really how physicology came to be.

I love that. Chopwood carry water.

Yeah, you know, like the going to the gym every day, the you know, what we do, right? Those of us that have been in the bang it out. Yeah, you just have to bang it out every single day, no matter what, right?

Yeah.

So so that.

Yeah. So um, you know, we we've talked a couple times, and yeah, I'm finally starting to get a little bit of a grasp on what physicology is. And you know, my my brain is starting to wrap wrap around it a wee bit. Yeah. So, you know, I'm guessing people are listening are probably still um a little um unsure of exactly what it is. Can you give us like maybe some some practical examples of of how physicology has come into play, something you study, something that we can really grab onto and digest?

Let's let's go to nutrition, let's go to food. Okay. Okay, so think of your intestines as a brain.

Yep.

Okay, because it is. There's some research out now that's talking about that a little bit, maybe in the past 10 years, but it's a brain, okay. And so let's take our main brain, this one up here, and split it into two, right and left, right? We have books out like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, those sort of things, right? But if so, go with it for a second, where our right brain is first online ingestation, right? The right brain and the and the intestines are connected together automatically all the time. The messenger to that is the esophagus. So the messenger between is really a relay messenger that's in constant dialogue between the two brains, right? So so the the brain in our in our stomach only has one way of dialoguing with us, and that's through somatic expression, right? Which means the things that manifest in our body, how we feel it, how we experience it, how it talks to us. Oh, I've got a sore back, my shoulders sore. So any anything like that, right? But in in neurological research, the the intestines basically are or the right brain is not it's not controlled through linear space and time dictation. In other words, how we see the outside world. It's chaos theory, it's quantum spiral, anything that's not contained, right? So that's our intestinal brain, that's inside the body, right? So when we talk about nutritional choices or implementing struction with structure with our nutrition, we're trying to get the brains to talk to each other through our behavioral choices, right? And we see what just what that creates, the you know, the umpteen diseases or disorders or anything like that that starts talking to us in a negative way, um what how we create that, right? So that's a good place to start because I like to see us as I tell everybody that I work with, look, you're the boss, you live in there, right? I need you to tell me your experience, like how you experience living in your own body. It's like stepping into a car, grabbing the steering wheel, putting the key, and then starting it up and driving it, right? It's the body's the same in the way that I see things. Does it make sense?

Yeah, it's getting there. Give me another example.

Okay. Uh let's go with uh let's go with an experience of mine, okay?

Okay.

Uh about five years ago, uh I was working in community mental health and I thought I was depressed. And I uh as it turned out, I'll I'll cliff notes this story, but I had a series of three strokes that I didn't know I had until the last one. I lost my vision, uh, I couldn't feel the left side of my body, uh, I ended up homeless. I lost everything. I couldn't rational, I couldn't think rationally at all. The only thing that came to mind to do was to go to the gym and try to recover. So I started going to the gym two to three times a day. I'd walk for a couple of minutes, I'd get lost getting there, uh, you know, but I did everything I knew to do to practice physicology just for recovery. At this point in time, I wasn't thinking about physicology, I was really just thinking about staying alive, right? So I had to implement my structure. I ate every three hours, I tried to do solid proteins, get my nutrients, all the things that we we hear about, right? But I put it in really specific practice, right? And from that point, five years later, I'm recovered. Uh no doctor would would have thought that at all. Um, even my vision is is back, and that they didn't expect any of that. So that's one example where it really synchronized everything for me, right? And so, to be really honest with that, one of the things that was going on for me prior to that is I was more of a thought process person, not a feeling person. Um, and I didn't even know that that was going on. And so the strokes for me became a correction, right? Things since then have been functioning in a much more fluid way, a much a way that's that I couldn't have even thought about before. But in my younger years, I had a lot of trauma. Uh it's stored in my body, and at some point the body's gonna try to correct itself.

Wow. Wow, that's a that's a story. I mean, yeah. That is uh so when you look at the study of physicology, so when did it actually start? When did this whole thing start?

Well, uh, let's see. Um, that's a good question because it it started over time. I've got an another story for that. I was about 20, 21 years old, and I was in rehab. Um you know, and and uh I was given a diagnosis of bipolar, right? So I could read in a book what bipolar meant, but I didn't understand it, not really. And so I don't really know what possessed me to do this, but I got a calendar and two magic markers, and I started putting blue for a good day and red for a bad day, and I did it for about six months. And as it turned out, my patterns were 25 good days to five not good days. And I was like, well, that sounds like the feminine process, right? It's like they have 25 to 5, usually from my experience of it, and I really wasn't quite sure, so it came up experientially. I was online one day, I was looking at just just browsing through, and I was reading about the Big Bang Theory. I came on something and it talked about expansion and consolidation, and expansion and consolidation and how the universe was developed. And then I ended up in photosynthesis with the cell, and I started noticing the same patterns of all of this. And one thing led to another, and it was like, oh, okay, so we do this in the cell, you know, we we do this in our systems inside the body, it it's all inside and outside. And that was really where I started formulating what it what it was. It still wasn't really, you know, it's still a work in progress. It's still a work in progress with regards to the the vast the vast properties of what the what the body is and can do. I don't think any of us really even, we've just barely hit the tip of an iceberg of that, right? Yeah. So, you know, it it's really been an organic process for me since about then.

Wow. Yeah, I mean, just when you talk about I I always get really excited about the the research that's going on with gut function, you know, what's happening there. I mean, that's incredible. I I I come from a family of people who have gut issues. Yeah, you know, I spare people the details, but it's been as soon as I notice it's direct, just an absolute concrete correlation and connection between my emotional health and what's going on in my gut.

Exactly.

And uh so I think that's one practical thing. So when you look at the work you're doing and the collective work of people within physicology, um when you're looking down the road, how do you see this starting to be applied uh by the fitness industry or the health industry? How do you see it starting to integrate into people's lives?

Well, you know, to put it into practice, anybody can do it, first off, right? Because we all have a body, we all live in one. And quite frankly, we're all the boss of our own, right? So it's like, you know, it's ultimately our responsibility for that. Um, the some of the challenging things, like I I tell people that I signed up for the human school for slow learners, so I needed really big lessons to understand, right? And still I wonder sometimes, right? It's like, boy, really, was I just that blatantly idiotic, you know, but it's like, so that's how I learned, like, really blatant. I suggest people kind of get on board a little bit before they create that because it's very easy to do. Um, but you know, be I mean, it's mindfulness, really. It's about paying attention to what what we feel in our body and and not kind of chalking it off, you know. Like, I'll use guys, like we're supposed to put on game face the way I was raised. You don't show feelings, you don't write all of that stuff. And even though we're slowly but surely coming out of that, you look at heart attack rates, stroke rates, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, men are all higher than women, right? And a question I ask people that almost nobody can answer. Eric, do you know how many times of month men have? We have four, right? Two out of every seven days, men are hardwired for procreation purposes. So we get a hormonal flush that causes us to get the nicknames, oh, men are all dogs, or they think below the belt. Well, that's our times of month. We have four of them, right? And if you look at some of the processes of men versus women, uh one of them that I like to use is uh dairy products, right? We uh men between 20, we we break it down in our bone marrow. Women break it down in their chest process, right? So between 25 and 32 in men, the skeletal structure starts to slow down, if not stop, right? So that's the first system in that goes offline. So after 35, we need calcium, but we don't have any place to process dairy. So you look at what happens with the men's body, and I'm speaking generally right now, but if you look at statistical data or medical data, men are always higher in all of these areas, right? And it's like what I believe to be true is one of the pro one of the one of the effects of that or the reasons for that is what we're talking about right now, right? It's something that can be practically shifted. Now, I'm not telling people not to not to eat eat any dairy products or something like that, but I am saying be very mindful of this. And if you have a sensitivity to that, if you notice it within yourself, pay attention, right? The body's trying to tell you something, and the only way it can tell you if you're not getting it is a stronger lesson, right? A stronger message, which is going to be some effect. That's the only way it's got.

Yeah.

Yeah. Mike, I are you starting, are you guys doing any kind of clinical research or doing any kind of studies right now to start, you know, building empirical data and things like that?

What I'm right on the precipice of that right now. I put together, I put together, I want to start to do um group work, right? I'm in twofold. I want to work with uh diabetes and stress and anxiety. So, for example, uh, the because there are two very blatant ones. There's over 200 known degenerative illnesses through stress and anxiety, right? And so I wanted to kind of just diversify whereby we could collect some data with, say, for example, a class with diabetes. Well, what would that look like? Well, that would be some exercise, some strength training, and some some group process and group talking about doing it together, right? I'm very big on nobody does this alone. You know, I certainly didn't. I needed an army of people to recover from my strokes and still need even more of an army of people to even even even launch physicology, right? It's it's not a I I I thing, it's a we we we thing. And so, you know, I encourage anybody that's interested in this to join in, right? I'm the more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned with this. And I'm always open to other people's information, other people's ideas, like how might that fit within? Because, you know, I don't see uh physicology as a I see it more fluid, that it's that it's a it's an integrative process, right? We're integrating every pretty much everything that functions within the body emotion, thought process, behavior, all of those things. And those are very vast topics, so lots of room, right?

Yeah. Yeah, and have you um what resources do you have available? Have you written anything or do you have studies out or something?

Here, right here, one thing. Happen to have it right here. I I just thought you might ask me that, but it's like um on my site is myphysicology.com. Okay. Um what I just lifted up was uh was uh a work journal that gives people an opportunity to do their own writing. I ask some questions, I just try to stimulate some thought process. Um and then if people want to, they can they can send their writing to me and I can I'll give them some feedback and some ideas. Um, it's very much a collaborative process for me. Like it's not me saying this is what you need to do. It's not about that. It's about you finding your way, right? It's just like how I work with people with their nutrition, for example. It's like I'll tell them, okay, think of this as a brain and your intestines as a brain and the esophagus as the messenger, and it takes about three hours to digest food. So your body's gonna need something every three hours, right? And if it doesn't, it's gonna start to feed off your own muscle tissue, which is going directly against what we're trying to do, right? So I'll tell them that, and then it's like, okay, there's one gram of protein per pound of the body of your of your goal weight for what you would like to do on strength training days. I mean, it's all that basic information, right? But how we get there, that's each person's individual process and their own journey with it, right? And so it's like, you know, for me it happened where I needed to deconstruct old thinking, right? It's like, you know, mom and dad did the best that they could, but I see it as when we go go and buy it, purchase a new car, um, the second we drive it off the lot, it's depreciated. Um, so is the information we get. By the time we're getting the information, it's already, it's already a day late and a dollar short, right? So in that area, it's got to be experiential in trial and error, right? So that's that's how I work with it. But if people want to get involved, it's myphysicology.com currently, right now. All my information's there, the site is there, there's options to participate if you would like to. And I'm just really getting started with this in these ways. So I'm also open to suggestions for those that might be interested in moving further with it. It's it's kind of a tabula rasa right now. So I'm I'm all for it.

What will people find when they go there? Like, I'm wondering, um, and I haven't looked at your site, I will write after this, but am I or the book or the site? Like, do you have um exercises that you have people do just to start building awareness or that mindfulness uh around what's going on with their emotions and their physical their physical?

Yeah, well, the first thing that I would suggest they do, and I'm giving it away right now in the book, you can download it from uh free on the on the site. Um write write out your own ideas in the in the work journal, right? The the book I hung I ended up it was is the is the work journal for the book that's gonna be coming out. I have a book coming out, it's called It's Not Rock. Rocket science, right? Even though part of the book is going to be about kind of rocket science, it doesn't do us any good unless it's in terms that we can all work with, right? And so I figured somebody had to do the doctoral thing and get all of that stuff, that's fine. I don't talk in those terms too most often. But just to get it going, that's kind of the thing you could do your own process in the workbook journal, and then we can move forward from there. So that would be the first thing. And then from that point on, you know, I'm available to talk in this way, or if you want a phone call or dialogue that way, that's also available on the site. And then we could talk about specific tailored, tailored exercise or tailored programs for each person.

Interesting. Very cool. So myphysicology.com.

Yep. That's it.

Well, this is interesting. It's like, you know, it's all stuff that we're we're semi-aware of, but now to kind of into and if you know, give something a name seems to always be a very powerful thing, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So uh very cool. So everybody, uh anything else, Michael, that that you think is, you know, especially for the fitness professional that that they should check out or reason.

Well, I think you know, for the for the fitness professional, for that particular um part of part of culture, um, what I see is exactly what physicology is doing is it's an integrative process. We we see things that were broken apart in special, you know, you have psychology, physiology, neurology, psychology, all of these differing things, sociology, um, and and they've all been studied separately. And I think we're moving into an era we can see it in music where we have country western and rap songs combined, or or you know, any number of differing things, right? Uh that are you can see it in that way, and I think it's happening in our industry too. So, what would that mean? Well, that'll mean like the chopwood carry water, old dogs that are just going to hit the gym, right? The grinded out kind of people, and the medical community now to play have to play nice in the sandbox together.

Yeah.

What does that look like? Well, uh that's where we stand right now. But physicology sees it very intricately, you know, in many, you know, from a cellular standpoint, that's fine. But we still it, you know, what I would like to see is everybody start paying attention and bring their own voice into this so that it becomes a something.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it's it's the fitness professional and the and the health medical professional are now being forced together due to the technological advances of the data that's available, right? Absolutely. Um, it's it's an interesting time. And uh, I mean, this is an interesting study. So yeah, I I think it's great. I I appreciate coming on, Michael. Um, so everybody, this is Michael Coth, and you can find him uh at myphysicology.com. And uh thank you for your time. Thank you for the the research you're doing. It's always cool to to see new things being forged, and even if it's a combination of old things and new life, you know, that's really cool. So uh yeah, thank you. Thank you for coming.

I really appreciate the opportunity. You're awesome. Thank you very, very much.

All right, we'll talk soon, Michael.

Okay, thank you. Bye.

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