You Have the Wrong Health Goals
– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 143 with Griffin Coombs
Griffin Coombs is a movement, breathing, and wellness coach based in Tangier, Morocco, whose work centers around guiding all types of people to “level up” their bodies by closing gaps in some of the most overlooked areas of their wellbeing.
While it might sound like a disadvantage to grow up without much interest in conventional sports (especially in a town like Boston), this is what allowed Griffin to develop an intentional relationship to physical exercise that emphasizes physical freedom, discipline, and authenticity.
“If your goal isn’t aligned with your well-being, our first job is to change your goal,” says Griffin, and no one leaves one of his training sessions without learning something new about their body. His eclectic and nuanced approach to training is built on the foundational values of focused awareness, holistic understanding, and a health-first mindset – and is supported by a breadth of experience in corrective exercise, yoga, martial arts & combatives, breath training, and several other movement disciplines.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Griffin Coombs about why you should re-evaluate your health goals.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How people who work out shouldn’t focus so much on losing weight.
– Why it’s important for people to understand exactly why they want to change their body.
– How our psychology can affect the perception we have of our bodies.
– How people and trainers might want to rethink mainstream personal training philosophies.
– Why convincing people that barefoot shoes are the best can be challenging at times.
Connect with Griffin:
Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@MovesWithCoombs
Instagram
@moves_with_coombs
Links Mentioned:
Northstarfitness.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Jointhemovementmovement.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Steven Sashen:
If you want to get in shape or change your life in some way, you’re probably going to want to find some sort of coach, some sort of trainer, someone who can help you, and you’re going to want to communicate your goals with them so they can help you reach them. What if that is the worst idea possible? We’re going to dive into that on today’s episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. Usually we talk about things starting feet first because those things are your foundation, but you’re thinking what your goals are is really kind of a foundation there as well. So we’ll be diving into that. This is also the podcast where we break down the propaganda, the mythology, and sometimes frankly, the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, lift, pretty much do whatever you want to do and do it enjoyably and effectively and efficiently.
And did I mention enjoyably? Trick question. I know I did. Because look, it’s the most important thing. If you’re not having fun, do something different till you are otherwise you’re not going to keep it up anyway. I’m Steven Sashen from XeroShoes.com, the host of the Movement Movement podcast. And we call it that because we’re creating, and by we, I mean all of us, creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do and how that can be beneficial.
And the movement part that involves you is really simple. Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Don’t be put off by that. There’s nothing to join, there’s no secret handshake, there’s no money involved. Just means that that’s where you’ll find the previous episodes, the different ways you’re going to engage with us on all the social platforms, all the places you can find the podcast and wherever you go, just give us a thumbs up or a like or a comment or hit the bell icon on YouTube, you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe and let’s see if we can help more and more people in the world live life feet first. Okay, so let us jump in. Griffin, do me a favor, tell people who you are and what you’re doing here.
Griffin Coombs:
So, my name is Griffin Coombs, born and raised in the Boston area. I am now actually living in Tangier, Morocco where I coach movement, breathing and I do wellness consults. So I’m kind of a traditionally trained fitness coach, but I’ve moved into more biomechanics, quality of movement, movement for expression, got into coaching breathing for performance and for health. And now moving … I’m still very much a student of integrative health and wellbeing, but I do do consults in that area as well. I have a professional and academic background of over a decade, almost a decade and a half, geez, how time flies of K12 education. So I’m a-
Steven Sashen:
Wait till you start saying things like when I was a kid 40 years ago. Geez. So having just turned 60, time skews in really crazy ways.
Griffin Coombs:
I’m in my thirties but I’m starting to feel it. Life looks like a lot different than it did in my twenties, so I’m looking forward to the journey.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a good one.
Griffin Coombs:
But yeah, my academic background and full-time professional background for many, many years and I’m still involved, is in K-12 education. So I’ve been a teacher of the performing arts and a school administrator as well. So I very much approach coaching as a teacher or an educator would. So you mix all that together and here I am.
Steven Sashen:
Well, let’s start with the most, I was going to say most interesting thing you said, but that’s not true. But let me start with the thing that you led with, which is very interesting, Morocco. How’d that happen?
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, that happened through the teaching and the education stuff. So I was teaching in public schools in the Boston area and I had always had an interest in living abroad, learning a new culture and kind of immersing myself in a language in a different way of being. And I found out about international schools, American schools abroad. And so I went on the hunt and long story short, I landed in Tangier about five years ago.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my gosh. How splendid. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve discovered from being there?
Griffin Coombs:
God, I can’t even … Well, now, it’s been almost five and a half years, so I can’t remember what was surprising. But there are still things that stand out as I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to. It’s not a very punctual culture and I don’t mean that in an insulting way. I mean that it’s just a very different way. Time is very much a suggestion. And coming from the northeast in America, and I know you’re familiar with this paradigm of just like every minute, you have a meeting. Well, it’s okay, it’s 3:41. So I have four minutes to get a bite to eat to my next meeting and it’s just so not like that here.
Steven Sashen:
I was in Nepal back in, well, here, back in ’89, I was in Nepal, and I remember talking to a guy and he says, “Well, we can get together around one.” And I said, “So one o’clock for real, or one o’clock in Nepali time?”
And Nepali time means one o’clock on Tuesday could be Thursday. So I just remember this one I went to, this was back when there was not really much phone service, certainly in a cell phone service and they wanted you to confirm any flights that were leaving Nepal like four or five days in advance. So I go to the Royal Aaron Nepal office and I said, “I’m here to confirm my Tuesday flight.” They said, “Yeah, your Tuesday flight is on Friday.” What? I said, “Why?” “Because we move it to Friday.”
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. That’s very similar here. I’ve never been in Nepal, but it just sounds, yeah, it echoes of Tangier. It’s like, “I would like the Spanish tortilla, please.” And they’ll say, “We don’t have anymore.” “Okay, why not?” “We just don’t.”
Steven Sashen:
Now, hold on, here’s my favorite version of that is actually from Chinatown in New York. There’s a whole area that’s just nothing about electrical stuff, lighting and whatnot. And I go in and I said, “Hey, I’m looking, I like this light, how much is it?” And the guy says, “What do you want to the regular or candelabra?” I went, “Sorry, wait, what?” He says, “Regular or candelabra?” And took five minutes of that till I got, “Okay, regular or candelabra.” And by the way, for anyone, pardon my impression of this guy. So I figured out, okay, regular or candelabra, I don’t know what’s the difference. “One is a bit more expensive, one is more or less expensive.” I said, “Okay, which one is which?” “Well, this one above is a bigger, lasts longer, cost less.” “Okay, but which one?” “Okay, that’s a regular one.” I said, “Okay, well, I want that one then.” “Yeah, we don’t have that one.”
Griffin Coombs:
I’m laughing so hard at these because it’s just so echoes the life here. But it’s a beautiful life too when you learn to let go. And it’s a Zen teacher in and of itself, this lifestyle.
Steven Sashen:
I love when you go somewhere and you finally get the hint that the way they’re living makes total logical sense in a certain worldview context, completely different than what you’re doing and once you drop the American version, once you recognize, “Hey, that works here,” and get on board with it changes everything.
Griffin Coombs:
Absolutely. A hundred percent, couldn’t agree more.
Steven Sashen:
Sorry, got another flashback. We were in India about 15 years ago for a friend’s wedding and we were staying in a neighborhood where there really weren’t any tourists so there wasn’t the same sort of begging scene. But there was definitely some kids who hit us up for money. And I said to them on the first day, I said, “Look,” and these guys, first of all, they lived in what we would think of as a shack, but this was their home. They did not express any ill will, resentment or problems with it. That was their home. And anyway, I said to these kids, “Look, I’m going to be here for about a week, you’re going to see me almost every day, because you know where I’m going, I know where you are. If you’re going to ask me for money, I want to be very clear. You’re not going to get any money. But if you want to go somewhere and do something, I’m your guy.” So then we just went and explored the city and every now and then I buy them lunch. So it was a blast.
Griffin Coombs:
I should use that here more often. My goodness, it’s been five years and I still haven’t.
Steven Sashen:
I definitely recommend, I was thinking of this, even … I do this in weird places, I was just in Park City, Utah and I do the same kind of thing there. It’s like I’ll walk up to a stranger and just say, “Where should I go? What do you want to do with that? You tell me, I’ll just go wherever you tell me.” And it leads to some entertaining things. Anyway.
Griffin Coombs:
No, I was just going to say that just thinking back to the movement stuff and you asked me what’s surprising here, that was actually a big surprise as well, was that here it’s very much a culture, a fitness culture of 1980s body building. And so if you imagine that the kind of exposure and the paradigm and the zeitgeist, if you will, around movement and fitness, here in Tangier is decades behind where America is or what America’s thinking about right now. So it’s kind of ideas like CrossFit and cross training in general are kind of hugely progressive brand new things where you’re just starting to see it pop up.
And so that’s been a real challenge because here, I have online clients and I also have clients in person here, but it’s really difficult when you get past the language barrier, it’s extra difficult to communicate the nuances of where, not just where the thinking is and what I’m prescribing to a client, but how we arrive to that thinking in the first place because, and I’m sure you’ve been here too, we’ve been through the body building paradigm, the CrossFit paradigm. It’s taken a journey experiencing all of those to get to where my philosophy and my approach are right now. And so you can’t just go up to somebody and say, “Okay, so you want to train with me. Okay, we’re not going to do any barbell lifting or whatever.” And they’re like, “Well, what do you mean I’m not going to do any barbell lifting?” I’m like, “Well, do you have three hours? You want to go get a coffee? And I’ll explain why.” So just the communication piece about it is you’re set even farther back when you’re dealing with these kind of cultural walls.
Steven Sashen:
And by the way, anyone who can see me on screen knows that I’m still a competitive bodybuilder. No. It’s funny. I actually have a couple friends who are still a competing and it’s a crazy, crazy lifestyle. But was there something that led to that you’re aware of? I can’t remember. Was there some pro bodybuilder coming out of Morocco that inspired everyone or is it just that now there’s a little extra time/income and that’s where people have gone because that’s what’s available?
Griffin Coombs:
That’s a really good question. I can’t say for sure, but I’m imagining that the access to technology and the access to what’s the rest of the world doing, it started in Morocco when body building was still very much a big thing. And so the other thing about body building is that it’s a sport that is based on aesthetics. And so if you want to look a certain way and you don’t have access to all the performance based resources, but you know that there’s a picture of Arnold back in the ’80s hanging on your wall and you know that that’s how I want to look, then that’s how you’re going to train.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Well, so that brings us to the thing that I teased with is that people come into pretty much almost any endeavor but fitness in particular with certain ideas about what they want to achieve. And after often some failures at making that happen, get the idea that they need to find some sort of coach, some sort of trainer, and they walk in and say, “Here’s what I want to do.” And the thing that I tease is maybe that’s the worst idea ever. And now I tease that because of a conversation you and I had for moments before we started this. So do you want to chat about this phenomenon of goals, goal setting, and people on both sides of that equation? The people who have these goals and the people who are hired to help those people attain those.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. So yeah, we start with the people who have the goals. And again it comes from when fitness first burst on the scene as something that people do recreationally. It was very much, the paradigm was kind of cardio or aerobic training and body building for muscular strength. And so we have conditioned as a society over decades to equate strength training with body building. And it’s expanded a bit as of late. CrossFit, that was a huge phenomenon that kind of built community around the performance aspect of fitness and how can I get one more rep than I got last time and I got my CrossFit buddies cheering me on as they lie in a pool with their own sweats and whatever. But it’s so deep rooted that the first paradigm is still deep seated in us where, “Well, I need to do some aerobic training to lose weight and then I need to tone up my muscles by doing these lifts. And it’s not just what I need to do, but it’s also how I do it. So I think about I want to work this muscle rather than I want to be stronger at this movement.”
And so I think that people’s goals, the way that they set their goals is limited to weight loss, which muscles they want to build or tone up more and then again, then you have the outliers who are a bit more progressive, but I still think we can talk about that separately but there are goals that are related to performance, but I still don’t necessarily think that you actually want that performance goal. You want it because it’s the cool thing or it was the cool thing and you aren’t really familiar with another way of measuring, let’s say, strength or power or speed or whatever.
But back to the just, I want to lose weight, or I want to build muscle people, we know now that there’s a fluctuation of healthy weight and that if the weight that you want to lose is what would be called subcutaneous fat, the fat right under the skin versus visceral fat, which is the stuff that’s around the organs, is much more detrimental to your health. I think a weight loss goal is a noble goal if you have 50 pounds to lose and you’re obese and you’re totally sedentary. But if you come to me and you say, “Okay, I want to lose 10 pounds,” and you’re generally active and healthy, then that’s where the pushback starts to happen. And I’ll say something like, “Why do you want to lose 10 pounds.” And a common response is, “Well …” Because people are very … they’re quick to pick up on why you’re asking these questions and they don’t want to sound vain. And we’re all vain to some degree. I’m not judging anybody for wanting to look good.
Steven Sashen:
What’s so funny, I am somewhat well known for having no seekers or another way of putting that is the wire between my brain and my mouth is really short. And so if you ask me that question, I’d say, “Well, I got two reasons, three. One is that I would like to have a better strength to weight ratio for sprinting. The second is that I would like to have less to complain about when I look in the mirror. And the third is that I would like my wife to go ‘Oh’ more often and I have no problem admitting the vanity part of it.
Griffin Coombs:
Exactly. And it’s going to be part of it, I think, for everybody. And so I don’t want the vanity to be at the forefront of my client’s goals. But I also, I’m so glad you said that, because I want them to be able to shamelessly admit the vanity part of it, the percentage of it that we all have. So I’m certainly not trying to discount that piece of wanting to lose 10 pounds. And people will try to dance around it and they’ll say something like, “Well, I’m 160 pounds now. When I weighed 150 pounds, that was when I liked the way I looked.” And if they’re afraid of the vanity thing, they’ll say, “I liked the way I felt.” And then I’ll say, “Okay, well let’s say-”
Steven Sashen:
That’s hysterical.
Griffin Coombs:
It’s true. And it’s fine because that’s also true. They’re not lying, they’re just framing it differently. So then I’ll say, “Okay, let’s say that we lost that 10 pounds and you’re down to 150, but you look in the mirror and you don’t look like you did 10 years ago when you were that weight. Or let’s say your body composition is different. You’re at the weight, but your muscle to fat ratio is different or you don’t feel the same. Maybe you don’t have as much energy for one reason or another. Do you still think that’s a good goal? Do you still want to lose the 10 pounds?” And they’ll say, “Well no, not really.” I’ll say, “Okay, so let me ask you this. Is 10 pounds of weight loss really your goal?” The answer is no. Right? The goal is to look a certain way and to feel a certain way.
And so, it’s like, “Would it be reasonable to say that your goal is to increase your energy or to improve your body composition?” And if you want to get into specifics of that, I don’t use high tech tracking equipment. I don’t measure body composition in a typical client, but I do think that a goal doesn’t necessarily have to be super specific, should be somewhat specific. But I think that a reasonable goal is to say, “I want higher energy levels.” And you can track that. You can track your subjective experience daily and look at it over time and say a month later, “Okay, typically my energy’s a lot higher than it was a month ago.” So for me, it’s just about reframing the why behind it because that’s where you always take somebody back to when it comes to behavior change, when it comes to coaching in general. And so you want to make sure you know what that is.
Steven Sashen:
There’s so much to unpack in this. One is I love the idea even with something like daily energy of however you’re tracking that daily. Because that’s one of those things where I talked to somebody about this just the other day in a different context where I said, you want to pay attention on an ongoing basis because at a certain point, the change will have occurred, but it happened so gradually you didn’t notice unless you have something to look back at and go, “Crap, holy, I didn’t realize that I made that kind of progress.” So that’s a very interesting opportunity that most people don’t avail themselves of.
Griffin Coombs:
And it can become your “new normal.” You don’t even realize, you take it for granted. I mean, I’ve actually been in this position and I’ve had clients in the same position where you actually don’t perceive the change at all and you think you’re still exactly where you were three months ago, six months ago, just because you have no reference point to compare it to.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting one. There’s a thing that I’ve done with people in other contexts, it’s the same idea of what you just described, and I want to kind of break it down into the world’s easiest technique, if you will, which is, and I just ask the question and why do you want that? And I just keep asking that same question over and over and over until people get to something that’s so essential they just can’t find another thing. And to your point, it so often has nothing to do with the thing they walked in with. And often the thing that they say they want is the least effective way of getting to what they actually want. And there’s one, even the vanity thing is kind of funny because there’s a lot of it that I’ve discovered, I don’t know if you’ve seen the same, where what people are looking for, what they want is … I’m trying to think of how to describe this.
They think there’s something wrong with them because of whatever the current situation is. But when you really dive in and you find out what they’re really looking for, you’ve simultaneously discovered that the seeming problem they have is just a feature of being human, not a problem that they think is a personal problem of theirs. So something, I’m trying to think of my favorite example. Oh man, I know. It was someone I was taking a walk with, this young woman and I was a young person at the time, so it sounded creepy when I said it the first way, but we were both young people, let’s do it that way.
Griffin Coombs:
I don’t judge.
Steven Sashen:
Other people might. So we’re taking a walk and she says, “I’m just trying to listen to my body so I know what to eat.” And I literally fell on the ground laughing. I said, “Well, I can tell you what your body wants you to eat.” She goes, “What?” I said, “French fries and ice cream. Chocolate cake, if you can get it.” It’s like you want calories and you want things to taste good, that’s what your body’s looking for. But you have this idea that if you could do this thing called listening to your body and I have no idea what the hell that means, that it would direct you to eat certain foods that would then result in you having a different body that you would then be happy with.
And she said, “Well, yeah.” I said, “Yeah, here’s the problem. You won’t find a human being on the planet who’s happy with their body. You can find the best bodies in the world and I guarantee they’re more obsessed about it than you are because humans, we never evolved to look at a glass of water and go, ‘Hey, there’s bacteria in there that if I drink this, it’s going to screw me up.’ We evolved to pay exquisite attention to everything going wrong inside of us because that was the only doctor we had and now everything’s pretty much safe. So we just take that same thinking and apply it to what we see when we look in the mirror.”
Griffin Coombs:
No, that’s an interesting thought. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So, your dislike of the way you look, this is called Human 101. It’s what got us here. So you’re not-
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, I haven’t thought of it that way, but it does make some sense. So let me just make sure that I’m assimilating this correctly. So our paying attention of what might be wrong within us to regulate our health and make sure we don’t die is being applied now to what we see in the mirror because that’s now what we’re looking at all the time.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I mean, the short form is, there’s so many things that we take as, A, personal and, B, proof that there’s something wrong that if we go around and ask everybody on the planet, they’d have the same thing, which means it’s proof that we’re just a functioning human. And if you have that then it’s not as big of a deal.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. So I would agree that to have a sense of self-consciousness is certainly healthy because yeah, I agree that’s part of being human. The other side of it is, of course, the sort of social conditioning around Hollywood and everything that we’re told that we should be. And that’s a whole other discussion. And I know that million people have had it. We all are kind of aware of it. Social media exacerbates it in a lot of ways. So we have to be aware of that too. And so when people want to lose weight, and again, I just want to stress the difference between somebody who needs to lose weight to be healthier versus somebody who’s weight loss is purely aesthetic. If you are hung up on a weight loss goal when you are generally active and healthy and fit and you want to get, “I want to get to under 10% body fat,” and it’s like the goal, it has nothing to do with your physical body, it has to do probably with acceptance, with a feeling of self-worth.
And so, I’m also a lifelong student, forever student of human psychology and human behavior and some, I don’t know, dancing on the edge of esoteric spiritual linking to all this stuff. Just the wellness of the entire human, including your thoughts, your feelings and everything that comes with it. And so it’s very much connected to your physical goals. And so it’s even connected to a performance goal. If you’re kind of obsessing over a performance goal, it’s like, “Well, why do I want to be the best at this?”
At the end of the day, it doesn’t mean we’re going to throw your goal in the trash and say, “I’m not working with you. This is a stupid goal.” But we’re always trying to at least get them to acknowledge why their goal is framed that way. And if they’re not going to get rid of their goal, to at least understand its context and kind of supplement it with the underlying stuff behind the goal. So it’s no longer about the 10 pounds. If you really want the 10 pounds, maybe we can do the 10 pounds. But it’s also, can you acknowledge that the 10 pounds is not just about the number, that your obsession with the number is something more psychological and then the stuff behind the number, the way that you felt and the way that you looked, actually might have nothing to do with the number?
Steven Sashen:
I love it. I can only imagine that every now and then you get a client who as you walk him through this goes, “Yeah, I got to go somewhere else.”
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. And I totally encourage it because so the other side that … What did you say at the beginning or near the beginning?
Steven Sashen:
Well, essentially, we have these goals, we’re going to go find someone. And the question is talk about the person looking for the goals and the person seemingly attempting to help facilitate that or I said it something like that.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it. Thank you for bringing me back there. So there’s of course what we’re conditioned as people who do fitness, who engage in fitness of what we’re supposed to do. But then there’s the mainstream personal training, which basically says your job is to help clients meet their goals. I mean, I remember when I was doing my certification, it was like they’re encouraging us to always hearken back to motivate a client like, “Hey, you want to be able to fit into that red dress for your friend’s wedding? Just picture yourself in that red dress.” And I think that okay, if you’ve got a short term goal like that, again, let’s not necessarily throw it at the window, but we got to acknowledge it and we have to acknowledge its context. And there’s nothing in mainstream personal training that I’m aware of that teaches a trainer how to get to the root of a client’s goal.
Steven Sashen:
Well, interesting thing, I have a friend who’s a big deal psychologist, he’s written, I don’t know, 30 books or something. And I asked him one day, “When there’s something you want to teach or you’re writing a book, do you frame it from the context of what they need to know or hear or what they want to know or hear?” Because they’re often very different things as we’re describing. And he says, “I frame it from what they want to hear. And then I try to pull the rug out from underneath them before they realize that’s what happened.” And that’s what we’re talking about. It’s like the elegance of rug pulling so that people can get to something more essential and potentially more valuable without losing them along the way because it’s like, “No, I got to get my pecks to be an inch bigger.”
Griffin Coombs:
Exactly. I love the elegance of rug pulling. If I ever write a book, that’s the title. I’ll credit you, don’t worry. That’s really interesting, because I mean I’m kind of a hardheaded guy and I’ve learned how to not be such, and I’m sure you as someone who’s a contrarian in the fitness industry as well-
Steven Sashen:
What? Hold on. I got to address that. I’m only contrarian because people have forgotten that the modern athletic shoe is the contrarian position. I’m actually just doing what humans have been doing for 40,000 years. The contrarian position is what people are wearing. But it’s flipped upside down, which is so insane to me that I’m seen as the contrarian.
Griffin Coombs:
I agree. I mean, yeah, I’ve been a barefoot athlete for, I don’t know, over a decade and I’m in total agreement. And when people are talking about, “How do you do that without arch support?” The arch support thing is that, I mean, you’ve been through all of this, I know, but just it’s hard to approach it meeting somebody where they’re at, especially when you’ve had the conversation so many times. And so it takes a lot of patience. It takes practicing the skill of talking to people, of that elegant rug pulling. It’s exactly what it is because I want to dismiss a goal sometimes, especially if I’m in a mood and I’ve had a busy day and you get a client who’s just like, “Okay, I want to whatever, lose the 10 pounds thing or even five or I want to just lose this little pooch here. I just want to kind of tone it up,” and I’m just like, “Oh my God, just focus on your health.” And I’m like, “No.” You got to meet them where they’re at.
Steven Sashen:
There’s a former competitive bodybuilder who I follow online who is pretty much consistently around eight to 9% body fat. And he did an amazing YouTube episode once or YouTube video once where he said, “If you are a guy, your goal should be to be somewhere around 15% body fat. You can maintain that effortlessly, you’ll look fine. No one’s going to notice it in either direction and that’s where you should be.” And now he’s not a competitive bodybuilder, but the guy’s like a competitive cyclist. I mean, he’s burning calories like there’s no tomorrow and he’s just been in the habit of eating and working out in a way that allows him to maintain that eight to 9% for 20 years. It’s a whole different game. And he’s also taking a little tiny amount of testosterone. But I know some guys who are my age and beyond who are juicing like there’s no tomorrow and they think that their world’s going to end if they’re not at 7% body fat.
Griffin Coombs:
Now imagine people who are not competitive or never were competitive and they just believe that they need to be under 10% body fat just to be accepted by whomever.
Steven Sashen:
Well, this goes back to something else you said that I find really interesting about what you’re experiencing in Morocco, but it made me think of CrossFit as well. And just a general thing of this whole competitive aspect, whether it’s just you and you’re competing against who you are now versus who you think you want to be versus things that are literally built to bring out some competitive part of our nature. When I went to a CrossFit gym and they had me do a workout in there, yelling and screaming, I said, “Yeah, that yelling and screaming does not do anything to me because there’s not a real competition.”
So I can’t do fake competitive and even if I was in a real competition with somebody sitting next to me, I don’t really give a crap who that guy is because, I mean, the CrossFit games, there’s no way I would have any interest in that because the way you win is you got to be about 5’10” to 6’1″ and weigh about 195 because otherwise, we lift the same amount of the bar. I’ve got to deadlift the same 300 pounds you do, but I’m 5’4″ and a half, 145 and I can do it, but it’s not the same thing. So I don’t care.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. No, I feel that and I feel, I think I mentioned earlier, CrossFit did a great thing in that it was kind of one of the first systems to ever build community, real community around fitness. And I think there’s a huge value in that. But you mentioned a second ago competing as who you are now, trying to be who you want to be. And so then you have to ask yourself, if you’re an average Joe and you are doing CrossFit wads every single day, is that who you want to be mean? If you picture your perfect life, do you want to be somebody and that’s your workout every day or are you doing that because someone told you that high intensity interval training coupled with Olympic lifting and power lifting and gymnastics and running and swimming and rowing altogether, that makes you fit. And if I don’t do that then I’m not going to be the fittest I can be.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a great question.
Griffin Coombs:
And that’s the narrative you’re telling yourself.
Steven Sashen:
No, no.
Griffin Coombs:
I don’t know.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a brilliant question that I want to reiterate just because I love it so much. It’s like, “Are you doing this because that’s the way you like to do things? Or are you doing it to get to some goal that when you get there you’re probably not going to be satisfied?” And then what? This is backing up to my opening line of if you’re not having fun, do something different until you are, if you find it really enjoyable, knock yourself out. Keeping in mind that at a certain point, you won’t be doing those same lifts and hitting those same numbers because things start going downhill and people don’t like to deal with that one.
Just last week I had dinner with a guy who’s sitting next to me who is a former competitive bodybuilder and I said, “So what do you notice now that you’re in your forties?” He goes, “The legs go, man. There’s nothing you can do about it. The legs go.” And he was simultaneously fully accepting of it but also like, “Damn it.” And it’s something I’ve seen too. You see it with runners is like at a certain age, for whatever reason, we lose muscle mass in our legs faster than anywhere else. It’s crazy and annoying as shit. But it’s just the way it is.
Griffin Coombs:
Something to look forward to.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I was at the senior games when I had just turned 50 and there’s a bunch of 60-year old’s that I was hanging out with and they said, “If you look at the times for All American Times for a hundred meters of the 50 meters for 60 meters, you see that once you get to 60, they start falling off a cliff. I mean, once you get to 60, your speed drops like a rock.” And there’s a couple 80-year old’s standing behind them and they went, “You guys have no idea what you’re talking about. Just wait.”
Griffin Coombs:
And then you’ve got the few centenarians, a hundred-year old’s who are still plugging away.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there was a guy who actually just set the world record in a hundred meters for a hundred-year-old plus, and it was some crazy number. I mean, I’m making it up like 40 seconds. I mean, something really that you look at and go, “You got to be able to do it faster than that.” It’s like, “Yeah, no, not really.” So I mean, my goal as a sprinter, because I really do like it and do hope I get to keep doing it for my whole life, is I just want to keep hitting All American Times.
I don’t care that they keep getting massively slower. If I can just hit those times, that’ll make me really happy. I don’t need to hit the time from someone 10 years younger than me or 20 years younger than me, as long as I’m in that range, that’s enjoyable. But the competition thing, I’m coming back to this, this is really interesting about, I guess the way I’m wondering it is we don’t have normal daily outlets for what seems to be for many people, probably not everybody, some competitive urge. And if we’re not doing it in, say, CrossFit or some sport, then I imagine this is partly what we’re talking about all along is that it becomes an internal competition, which, my God, sounds like a horrible, horrible thing.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. Wow. You just gave me another thing to think about in a different way. You’re two for two. Yeah. So no, again, now let me reframe and process this because this is very, very interesting. So when we lack competition in a traditional sense, we have to find it somewhere and so we bring it inside of ourselves. So in other words, it’s kind of-
Steven Sashen:
By being a fan of a sports team, when people say, “We won or we lost,” it’s like you weren’t on the field.
Griffin Coombs:
You didn’t do anything, man. You just watched.
Steven Sashen:
You sat, drank beer and watched. So I’m not sure you’re attributed to either winning or losing.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, well, yeah. So I mean think that’s plausible. I do because I think there are fewer outlets for people to actively compete. And this might be getting too broad or too kind of philosophical, but I do think that we are just becoming less actively participatory in most things. And so yeah, we’re just kind of passively consuming more and not doing and yeah, there’s a void there that could very well be … Like your need to do something like CrossFit, even if it’s not totally aligned with who you are, what you want, that might very well be a manifestation of some void competition.
Steven Sashen:
I have the idea that it also relates to the growth of certain, I don’t want to call them sports, but I can’t, I mean sports are activities, these in particular. Adults playing kickball, adults playing dodge ball and the fastest growing sport in America, especially for older people, pickle ball, which is basically big table tennis. And these are things that you can have fun, you can get kind of good at, there’s a competitive thing, but they’re not really massively challenging.
Griffin Coombs:
No. And so your life doesn’t have to be built around it if you don’t want it to be. If you want to compete against the people at your CrossFit gym and sorry, CrossFit, we don’t mean to demonize you, it’s just a really great example. But if you’re trying to compete against somebody there, you got to show up daily and you got to do grueling workouts to get better whereas you don’t need to do that if you’re on an adult kickball team or whatever. So I listened to several episodes of your podcast and I just love the intro about keeping it enjoyable because that is … So oftentimes if I’m not training people, I love to do wellness consults and that works better for people and it’s something, I mean, I could just sit and talk to somebody about wellbeing and fitness for hours and hours. I’m like, “You pay me for this? This is amazing.” So one of the thing-
Steven Sashen:
We’ll come back to that.
Griffin Coombs:
If they’re looking for an exercise regimen, then I’ll always tell them, you’ve got to start with something that you enjoy. You just start there and then we’ll fill in the gaps. Whatever your thing, whatever aspect of a fitness your thing addresses, great, we’ll check that off. And then anything that it doesn’t, we’ll fill in the gaps there with kind of the stuff you need to round out your training. But let’s not go the other way around. Let’s not go, “Well, I need to do strength training and then I need to do cardio and I need to, blah, blah, blah. And then maybe if there’s time, I’ll do the dance class that I love or I’ll swim or whatever it is.” It’s got to be the other way around because that’s the thing you’re going to stick with. That’s the compass you’re going to come back to.
Steven Sashen:
And it may be that there’s a, how do I want to call it? A secondary not motivation, secondary inspiration. That is the thing that’s fun. It may be like you mentioned repeatedly about CrossFit, maybe the community aspect, maybe the social aspect. As a sprinter, I have a couple of training partners and it’s not uncommon that on any given day one of us will say, “I’m so glad that you called me to remind do this because otherwise I was going to just sit on the couch.”
And the social thing is hugely important. These are some of my closest friends that I would only see on the track. And I mean, some of them, we socialize with otherwise, but the social component … Sorry, this is flashback city today. When I was in high school, I was a gymnast and we were doing a lot of weightlifting for gymnastics and a friend of mine and I started writing a book about getting in shape and the first chapter was find a partner, find someone that you want to hang out with because this stuff’s a pain in the ass. It’s not going to be fun often. And you need someone [inaudible 00:41:04] hanging out with.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, I’m a lifelong martial artist and I was training in a place in Boston, we were training in Krav Maga, and close combat and we were years and years at this same place and moved up the ranks. And the camaraderie you build with when you go through grueling training with somebody is, yeah, it’s second to none. And then you may socialize with them in other contexts, but when you have this thing that’s kind of part of your foundation of your friendship or your bond. It’s very, very special. And then that’s where healthy competition comes in. Because even when were hard sparring, we weren’t trying to kill each other, but we were sparring hard. I mean we went at it and it was often … It’s like that iron sharpens iron saying where it’s I want you to be better for you, but I also want you to be better because you being better is going to make me better.
It’s going to challenge me more. And it’s just this cycle of encouraging yourself through the other and the other through yourself and just getting better and better and better. And I’ll tell you, my heart rate can be the same, doing a couple rounds on the heavy bag or having a sparring session with somebody and it feels like nothing compared to if I’m doing a conditioning workout that I’m not enjoying. Same heart rate and I just feel like I’m dying. So if you’re doing something that you love and it’s either you’re competing or you’re trying to solve a problem, if you are totally mentally engaged, you’re approaching what psychologists call flow state, I mean, the rate of perceived exertion is just insanely different. I practice animal flow and teach that, which is a ground based movement system. Very, very fun. And the challenge on the nervous system to coordinate and it’s almost, it’s like, I don’t know, break dancing meets dynamic yoga meets … I don’t even know how to describe it but-
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to come up with one. It’s Tai Chi for people who fell down. It’s where-
Griffin Coombs:
Perfect. You could be their marketing guy.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I mean, it’s a whole lot of fun, that’s for sure. God, you gave me one other thought about that. Just fell out of my head. Wait, I want to take a total tangent for the fun of it because you mentioned both at the beginning and again just more recently this idea of wellbeing, coaching and breathing. Can you say more about just what wellbeing coaching is, what that actually means, and however breathing fits into that? Because I know that when someone says something about teaching you to breathe, most people go, “I know how to breathe. You go in, out, in. Either way, it doesn’t really matter.” But I’ve actually been playing with some breathing things lately that are really changing my body. So I’m dying to hear what you are talking about when you say wellbeing coaching and coaching breathing.
Griffin Coombs:
For sure. Yeah, let’s take a turn. So wellbeing coaching or wellness consulting, it’s basically anytime somebody has a goal and assuming that we can confirm that the goal is aligned with their wellbeing and that it’s going to be good for them, or if they’re having a problem or an annoyance that’s not in need of a medical doctor or whatever. It’s the first line of defense for the stuff that … or let me put it a different way. If there’s a spectrum of non-kind of medical needs and on one end of the spectrum would be me and on the other far end of the spectrum would be a doctor of naturopath or a functional medicine doctor. So I’m in no way comparing myself to a doctor. I am not a doctor, but I am a very foundational level health coach.
And so, some things, the issues are if they’re like, “I think I have a food sensitivity or whatever,” I’ll say, “I can give you some insight, but I don’t test for food sensitivity, so you need to go to a next level health coach or a functional medicine doctor.” But it’s basically the categories that I tend to address are movement, nutrition, sleep, stress levels, and breathing. And breathing is one of those things that nobody really understands. I shouldn’t say nobody, most people really don’t understand because we’ve been told the wrong stuff. And I know, I think you have Patrick McEwen on here, huge fan of his work. It’s the same stuff. It’s that taking a deep breath is … That came from when people started to realize that some anxious people would hold their breath and they would just forget to breathe.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Griffin Coombs:
Exactly. And so they would say, “Okay, let’s respond to that by reminding people to breathe fully and breathe deeply through their belly or into the belly.” And that might be an okay cue to start somebody who tends to breathe really shallow or hold their breath. But most of us are over breathing, most of us are breathing too fast, we’re breathing too deep and we have a low tolerance to carbon dioxide in our blood. And carbon dioxide, it’s a byproduct of anything happening. It’s just a byproduct of human metabolism. And so the more stuff we do, the more CO2 buildup, which is why we breathe heavier when we exercise. Yes, we do need more oxygen, but also we need to get rid of excess CO2. It’s like anything. If you eat more than you need, then you’re going to gain weight and you’re not going to feel so great.
It’s like if you breathe more than you need, you’re going to have inefficient oxygen delivery to muscles. You’re going to be overtired, over anxious, you’re not going to feel great. So I coach people a lot. We do a lot of breath work that is sort of based on, I’m not certified through Patrick McEwen’s organization, but I do draw from a lot of his work because I think he’s really probably the best, the leading guy for it right now. And so we do various stuff that’s basically built around down regulating the nervous system and getting out of that perpetual sympathetic drive and bringing back the parasympathetic nervous system, building tolerance to carbon dioxide and just getting your base back to relaxation.
Steven Sashen:
It’s interesting. The thing I’ve been doing that’s been very interesting is from someone else that I interviewed recently, Erin McGuire, who her thing about belly breathing is not actually about your belly, it’s certainly not just expanding your belly but getting … I’m now doing this thing where when I’m breathing, my back is expanding instead of just my belly going out. And what’s been so interesting is when I do this, so I’ve got a mild scoliotic curve because I got other spinal problem.
Anyway, bottom line is there’s always been a spot in the middle of my back that I feel like if I could just crack that thing, my whole life would change. And when I breathe this way, I notice three things happening or no, four. One, that spot in my back starts to release in my upper back. I’m breathing down instead of expanding my belly, it’s just kind of all around. My shoulders drop, my neck lengthens. Those are the top three. And the fourth one is that when I’m done exhaling, it’s like five seconds till I start breathing again. So whole other thing happening with oxygen and carbon dioxide just from getting of those other parts of my body engaged in breathing. It’s been really fascinating.
Griffin Coombs:
I mean, if you engage the biomechanics correctly, then the biochemistry will benefit from it to a degree and then, you kind of play back and forth between which one of those you address. I’m glad you brought that up though. That 360 degree breath is so important. The belly breath, just the belly without incorporating the back is kind of mixed into, again, these over corrections that started as well intentioned corrections. So the other one, it’s linked with a postural correction where people are really hunched, pecks are stuck short, the whole upper back muscles are not engaged, scapular stuck elevated. And so people will tell you as a general cue now, pull your shoulders down and back. But what happens is people do that too much. The scapular, overly retracted, overly depressed. The trap, the upper traps are stuck long and then the ribs are flared and tilted backwards like this, which is going to compress that tissue, it’s going to stick that tissue short in the thoracolumbar junction right below the rib cage.
And then you can’t expand that area. And so all of our air just goes into the expansion at the front. So we have less tone in the front and we’re overtone, we’re tight and angry in the back and we can’t access space with the breath. And then if you learn to do that, like you just said, the reason it’s happening in your upper back or one of the reasons is because you’re allowing the back of the ribcage to lift and create space in that thoracolumbar junction.
And so now the whole ribcage can lift, and you get more of what some call fascial [inaudible 00:50:59], that tissue’s ability to keep the bones in place where they’re supposed to be. And then all of a sudden it’s like, “Actually, my shoulders are supposed to elevate a little bit, but not because I’m hunching them. It’s because my ribs are lifted and naturally bring my shoulders into a state of kind of floating, but in firm way.” I’m so glad you gave that example because just that example alone is how breath starting from the bottom and you’re breathing biomechanics just results in complete postural changes that you might not even been trying to address.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a fun one. Well, and I’m glad we went down that path because that also answers my question about what it means to be doing wellbeing and wellness coaching with people. And this is clearly a part of it. So that was a great example for people. So thank you for that. Glad that happened. Oh my gosh, looking at the time. So what have we left out, if anything? The overly broad, horrible question.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, well, I’m afraid if we go down that road, I’m going to go for another hour. So yeah, I would just say that just to recap that it’s setting wellness goals for yourself, whether they’re fitness or nutrition, weight loss or whatever it is, or should be an exercise in self-development and kind of solo therapy or not solo if you’re working with a coach, right? It’s about what am I really after? It’s about peeling back those layers and ultimately you’ll thank yourself in 20 years when you’re doing stuff that you love and you feel great and you’re living a lifestyle that feels really aligned with who you are and what you want out of your life. It’s going to feel way better than if you’re sitting with a back injury because you’re like, “Yeah, 15 years ago I really wanted to be at 5% body fat and so I was doing Olympic snatches for reps at a CrossFit gym and blew out my back.”
Steven Sashen:
I want to throw in the mild tweet to that, which is along the way, or maybe arguably at the very beginning, it might not feel that freeing because if you keep asking that, why do I want this question? You might get to some thoughts about yourself that you don’t like. You might get to some things about how you feel that there’s something wrong with you, that you don’t live up to something. I mean, it becomes an opportunity to, like you said though, investigate and do this sort of self or partnered therapeutic thing that will definitely pay off, I would argue. And again, if you come to one of those things that is how you’re constantly comparing yourself to what you imagine people think of you because you have no idea what they actually think. That may be somewhat upsetting. And I’m hoping that people also remember the other part of that’s what everybody does.
And so, if you remember that it’s a symptom of being human, not a problem that is unique to you, then maybe that can let things loosen up as well. But that’s going to be a little … And to think that that goes away or that you’ll never have that if you have that realization, I would argue is probably another one of those unrealistic goals like losing 10 pounds. I mean, I have a joke that when I roll out of bed, at some point from the moment that I start to roll out of bed to 30 seconds later or whenever it is that I’m sitting on a toilet, I will check and see, I’ll pinch around my abdomen to see what my body fat feels like as if somehow overnight I dropped 5% body fat, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s such a habit that I just find it hysterical. It’s like, “I don’t really care that I do it. It doesn’t cause me angst. It just kind of amusing that that’s just one of the things that this thing does.”
Griffin Coombs:
And you see it and you acknowledge it and yeah, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get rid of it. It just happens. I mean, it’s the same. I see people at the gyms here doing a workout and then weighing themselves and I’m like …
Steven Sashen:
Look, since I’ve been somewhat self-revelatory, let’s just cut to the chase. After I take my dog for a walk and I come back and poop, that’s when I weigh myself again because I want to know how much weight I lost by pooping.
Griffin Coombs:
There you go which is technically related to nutrition and weight loss if you want to go that way.
Steven Sashen:
It is technically but it’s utterly hysterical. I mean, it cracks me up in my own mind that I do it, but I’ll get on the scale and it’ll say whatever number and I go, “Yeah, but I haven’t taken a dump yet. So it’s really about a half a pound less than that maybe. I’ve been traveling. So it’s been a while, maybe two.” So I mean, it’s this whole thing that I find again, utterly, utterly hysterical.
Griffin Coombs:
If you can laugh at yourself, then you’re … Those who can laugh at themselves, I think are on a good track to being the ones who can eventually gracefully pull the rug out from themselves, from under their own feet and ask themselves those questions. I’m all for it.
Steven Sashen:
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