Ninja Warrior Fitness Secrets
– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 154 with Jessie Graff
Jessica Lauren Graff is an American professional stunt performer and sports-focused television personality. She has had training in five other martial arts, holds a black sash in Kung Fu, and is a black belt in Taekwondo. She is a champion gymnast, a pole vaulter, and a professional stunt performer.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Jessie Graff about Ninja Warrior fitness secrets.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How becoming more scientific about your training allows you to continue getting gains after years of training.
– Why persistence and practice are key when you’re trying to achieve any goal.
– How Ninja Warriors must attack each exercise with the same amount of intensity.
– Why it’s important to engage the correct muscles to breathe properly.
– How being the hardest worker might actually be preventing you from succeeding.
Connect with Jessie
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facebook.com/JESSIEgraffPWR
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Jointhemovementmovement.com
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Steven Sashen:
What do you want to do? If you want to become the fittest 50 year old you know? Or 40 year old? Or 60 year old? Or any year old, I don’t really care. We’re going to find out by someone who’s exploring that for herself, but is much more than 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 starting feet first, typically. Because those things are your foundation. We break down the propaganda, the mythology, and frankly, the lies that you’re often told about what it takes to run, or walk, or play, or do yoga or Crossfit, or be a Ninja Warrior, hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And to do that enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. Did I mention enjoyably? It’s a trick question, don’t answer. I know I did.
Because if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep it up anyway. So make sure you’re having fun. I’m Stephen Sashen from XeroShoes.com, the host of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast. We call it that because we’re creating a movement around natural movement, letting your body do what it’s designed to do, not getting in the way. The way you can participate, it’s easy, it’s cheap, in fact, it’s free. Go to WWW.JoinTheMOVEMENTmovement.com. Nothing to do to join. There’s no secret handshake. hat’s just where you’re going to find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can interact with us on social media and all the ways that you can help us by leaving a review, giving us a thumbs up, a five star rating in the places you can do that. I mean you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let us jump in. Jessie Graff. Hey babe, how are you?
Jessie Graff:
I’m great, but I have a quick question. Could we come up with a secret handshake that it’s not mandatory, you don’t have to do it to get in, but if you’re in, anyone who wants to be in, gets to learn it?
Steven Sashen:
You got to do this.
Jessie Graff:
But can it be a kicking thing? Like kick, kick.
Steven Sashen:
Well, we got to make it … I mean, I’m all for it as long as it’s something that humans can do who are not Ninja Warrior people.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah. Okay.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. All right.
Jessie Graff:
I’ll think about it and we’ll work on it in a couple weeks.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know the dance troupe Pilobolus?
Jessie Graff:
Yeah. Yeah. They’re awesome. Circusy stuff, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, I mean, my favorite thing that I say about Pilobolus is I don’t know, which I like better when I watch them perform, when I can see the physics of what they’re doing, or I can’t see the physics of what they’re doing. Because what they do is amazing. We work with them. They just made a video for us that’s really, really fun. So they’d be great people to come up with a wacky secret handshake too. Someday we’ll get you and me together with the gang from Pilobolus and do some ridiculous things.
Jessie Graff:
That sounds amazing. Where are they based?
Steven Sashen:
On the East Coast. I just remembered last night when I was going to bed, I was literally imagining something as a 60 year old, not dancer, what I could do that would be contributing to what they do. Because there’s some strength things that I can do that are still pretty crazy, like human flag kind of thing. But to do a human flag with a person is very entertaining instead of being on a pole and something. Anyway, we’ll work with Pilobolus one day. Yeah, that’d be a hoot.
Jessie Graff:
Cool.
Steven Sashen:
So, Hey Jess, for humans who don’t know who you are, because there are still some, why don’t you tell people who you are and what you do?
Jessie Graff:
Sure. I have been a stunt woman for 16 years. I work on a lot of really fun superhero shows, and of course getting beat up and killed and abused as we do in stunts. But I’ve also been competing on American Ninja Warrior for, I guess I started nine years ago or something. I’ve beaten a lot of records and placed high among the men. Ninja Warrior is the most fun thing ever.
Steven Sashen:
I am so bummed that didn’t exist when I was younger.
Jessie Graff:
Oh yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Except, I’ll ask you this. So one of the reasons that I’m not a total Ninja Warrior kind of person, even now to the extent that I could be, is so much of the stuff that’s in there is grip strength dependent, and that ain’t my thing.
Jessie Graff:
Yet.
Steven Sashen:
So I imagine it was not originally your thing either?
Jessie Graff:
No, no. Yeah, they used to always say the rock climbers had a huge advantage because they’re the ones just, they trained grip strength all time.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, for me, when I started, I saw these guys doing, we call it a cliffhanger, so it’s maybe an inch and a half ledge where you’re just going along this way and you swing and do gaps. Initially I saw the cliffhanger and was like, “People can’t do that.” Then they all did it. And I was like, “Oh, okay, well that must be easier than it looks.” So I got on one and was like, “Nope. Definitely feels impossible. I’m not sure how that’s happening, but if they’re humans and they can do it, I’m made the same way, I should be able to do it too.” It’s so interesting when you discover a muscle group, even as an athlete, just a muscle group that you haven’t activated, that you haven’t taught how to fire at high levels.
So it took at least a year of really, really training that to be able to start performing at a high level and then a long-term commitment to building and now I’m trying to be more scientific about it so that I can continue getting gains after so many years of training it. But yeah, there’s so many, I think, adults who will try a certain exercise and not know how to fire the muscles and think there’s something wrong with them or that they won’t be able to do it. It’s so empowering to understand that that’s normal and that’s how that works and it’s just a kickstart process of having to teach those muscles how to fire and then they can grow dramatically and you’ll be able to do things that seem impossible initially.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there’s another part to that I find interesting, and this is going to lead into eventually our conversation about becoming the fittest 50 year old woman or a person or etc., etc., etc. Which is just the training on some new strength, whether it’s something as simple as a squat or something like the cliffhanger. I’m trying to think of how to frame this. I can’t think of how to ask the question so let me describe it this way.
Jessie Graff:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
One of my favorite exercises, and it’s a really important one for sprinters, is the Nordic hamstring curl. And so for people who don’t know it, you’re kneeling, your feet are being held down, and you keep your body as straight as possible, a little bit of hip bend, and you just lower yourself slowly. So you’re just hinging at your knees, lowering yourself slowly.
Ideally, at first you’ll fall on your face, you’ll get to about a 10 degree angle and then fall and eventually you can get down and get back up. I worked on this for a while doing three sets of eight reps, as best as I could do, for three days a week. I just wasn’t making any progress. Then I went down to doing five sets of five reps once a week and within a month, way, way stronger. Now, some of this is because I’m a 60 year old guy, and I think I was doing this about a year or two ago, but I’m 60 now, and it seems like I just need way more recovery after the right amount of stimulation than I thought. By doing it three times a week, I just wasn’t getting enough time to recover and actually get stronger. So what did you discover for you in the early days when you were doing Ninja Warrior stuff and having to develop new kinds of strength about what worked for you and how has that changed as you’ve progressed and gotten older?
Jessie Graff:
Let’s see. Well, my initial training strategy when I decided I really wanted to start getting strong was based on giving myself a challenge. I’d test myself, let’s say pull-ups or dead hang since that’s Ninja Warrior appropriate. So I’d do as many pull-ups as I could. When I started, it was six. I would hang from a cliffhanger as long as I could. When I started, that was a couple seconds, three seconds maybe. So I would do sort of, it takes about 48 hours to recover from a really good session where you’re going to get sore. If you go overboard, it’s going to take longer. But if you find that perfect amount of, you’ve really pushed yourself but not killed yourself, you give it 48 hours, you go again. So I was on this three day cycle where I would go push day, pull day, leg day, and pull day was the big day because that’s where I’m training for Ninja.
So every set I would be going basically to failure because I’m trying to beat last session’s record. So twice a week I’m going to failure. I was able to improve really quickly that way. So at the end of that year, I’d gone from six pull-ups to, I think I was at 22 pull-ups, and my dead hang had gone to, I don’t know, well over a minute, maybe a minute 30 on this cliffhanger ledge. At the end of the year, I had all these amazing gains and then something went wrong and I got hurt. So I had to take some time off and rebuild and was able to rebuild even faster. So in two to three months of, “Okay, now I’m healthy, now I can rebuild, getting ready for Ninja,” three months, I was stronger than ever.
So building backup from zero up to 25 pull-ups and two minute dead hang and competed and then at the end of the year, something happened again, now I’m injured again. I have to take time off and I lose all the strength and had to have stem cell injections and all this stuff. But now, “Crap, I’ve only got three months to recover and get strong and be ready for next year.” So at the end of that season I built back up, I got up to, I think, 38 pull-ups that year. So it was like I kept getting stronger and I was getting strong so, so fast, but I would always get injured at the end of the year. So season 12, it just exploded. If you think it’s bad getting injured at the end of every season, well, this particular season I tore both shoulders, rotator cuff, rotator cuff plus labrum, inferior glenohumeral ligament, cartilage. That’s like everything. Not everything. And my ACL.
So the end of that year, I needed three surgeries, two shoulder surgeries, one knee surgery. That’s a point where you can’t work around it. You can’t be like, “Oh, I’m going to let my upper body recover and get really good at squats and box jumps and everything.” It’s like, “Okay, you’re just grounded. You’re going to do something else with your time.” So the first certifications I went after were nutrition and corrective exercise specialization. The corrective exercise was so amazing. I learned so much about the type of training I’d been doing and how I’m doing my push days for maintenance to make sure I don’t get unbalanced, and I’m doing my pull days to max out and be the strongest I’ve ever been. Does that sound balanced?
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Jessie Graff:
Sure, I’m doing the same number of days on each exercise, but on push days, I’m making sure I keep up with last week, on pull days I’m trying to beat myself every week. So I could do 20 pushups, which is maybe average for an athletic woman. And 38 pull-ups.
Steven Sashen:
Which is super superhuman-
Jessie Graff:
Which is really good for an athletic guy. So I was obviously unbalanced, my shoulders were coming way out of alignment. So that means my peck miner was super tight. Your lat, which pulls down, attaches to the front of your arm. So everything’s pulling here. Everything pulling back was weak because I wasn’t training it. So now my shoulders are here. Now you’re super spinatus that comes through a little tunnel here.
Steven Sashen:
Oh wait, I’m going to pause-
Jessie Graff:
When you raise-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, so I had an issue with my dog a couple weeks ago where another dog tried to attack my dog and I’m trying to keep that dog away and I had a thought I’ve never imagined I would have, which is, “I might have to kill a dog.” While I’m simultaneously taking my 35 pound built a tank dog on his leash and trying to shove him away. So super spinatus, I know it very well because I tore the crap out of it and I’m dealing with all those things that I can’t do right now. All of this external rotation stuff.
Jessie Graff:
External rotation hurts, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So anyways-
Jessie Graff:
So here’s the interesting thing about the superspinatus. When you think about tearing a tendon, you think about overstretching it and it rips, right? That’s what I always thought. The super spinatus actually is when you raise your arm overhead, it’s getting shorter so it’s not stretched. But because it goes through this little tunnel, it’s getting rubbed. So every time you raise your arm, if you’re in good alignment, it just flows through that tunnel. If your shoulders are rolled forward, which so many of us are not just from doing too many pull ups, but from typing, your shoulders are raised, your pecks are getting tight, you’re texting, you’re hunched over. So now we’re out of alignment. So every time you raise your arm, you’re getting wear and tear as it rubs through this little tunnel.
Now if you’re rubbing like that and weakening this tendon, and then you’re also taking huge impacts like we do on Ninja in the wrong alignment, that’s where it shears and gets cut.
Steven Sashen:
Got it.
Jessie Graff:
So basically learning about this, learning it’s not just about being in the right alignment when I take those impacts, which is important, but it’s about doing all these exercises. It’s not just about doing enough rows to balance my pull-ups, it’s about attacking the rows with the same intensity that I do the pull-ups.
Steven Sashen:
Well I’m curious because, so I’ve had … Look, I know something else about you, you are a former gymnast, as am I. So gymnasts naturally tend to have overdeveloped pecs, internally rotated shoulders. So to a certain extent you might’ve come about that naturally. But one of the things I started playing with to help my shoulders was doing pull ups, but really focusing on just getting that pull part, really getting the back engaged before I did anything with my arms and it really helped my shoulders, so that component too. I mean it’s kind of funny that you’re thinking you have to do rows to compensate for what you’re doing with pull-ups, which is basically just a row from a different angle and if you do it from perspective. So with the … Wait, what was the term you used for what this conditioning was? You were studying nutrition and what did you call it?
Jessie Graff:
Oh, corrective exercise. It’s by NASM, National Academy of Sports Medicine.
Steven Sashen:
So I’m curious, in addition to having that realization about how you were really attacking pull days but not push days, did you discover anything else about the hip bone connected to the knee bone, connected to the whatever bone? So there was something else that wasn’t necessarily your shoulders that impacted your shoulders? Or something else where there was kind of a chain of things that you may have discovered where there was some other link in the chain?
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, yeah. I mean so many. One interesting one is I have some bulging discs in my neck from stunts over and over, of course. But the bulge is that, I think it’s C4/5 is my worst bulge, but I have it at C3/4 as well. But the nerve that innervates your diaphragm, which is your breathing muscle, basically, was the one that’s kind of getting pinched occasionally from my neck injury. Since my diaphragm was sort of atrophying, I was doing most of my breathing with my accessory breathing muscles. Now if every breath is like this now my neck muscles are tightening, which is also pulling my shoulders out of alignment. So a neck injury from 2010 slowly changed my posture, which led to a shoulder injury.
Steven Sashen:
Well I love that you said that because, and part of what made me ask that was something I discovered recently that shocked the crap out of me. So I did a podcast with, I just blanked, Erin McGuire. Definitely Erin, but I’m blanking, I’m not positive on her last name. I’m having a hard time with names lately. One of those 60 year old things. Anyway, she makes a little device, it’s a belt, it’s called the Core 360 Belt. So it’s basically just a … Wait, hold on, I’ve got it right here. I’m going to show it to you.
Jessie Graff:
Does it have tennis balls in it where you feel like your stomach out and make the cylinder.
Steven Sashen:
Yes. Thank you. So here’s the belt. The whole idea is it’s giving you some feedback. So when you’re breathing in, you’re making this cylindrical thing pushing down. What shocked me is I learned how to breathe that way and actually breathe into my back, expand my back as I was breathing. My lower back is doing that thing in between. My shoulders was opening up, my shoulders were not rounding forward, but they were doing something where the alignment changed in my shoulders where everything was just hanging better. So I love that you said this problem with your neck leading to your diaphragm and what that was doing to your breathing. Because I’ve been playing with how the way I’m changing my breathing is impacting my shoulders in a way that I never in a million years imagines. That blew me away. So that strikes me as a corrective exercise-y kind of thing.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, my physical therapist is really into that too. She does dynamic … Whoops, I got this. She does dynamic neuromuscular stabilization and there’s a huge focus on breathing properly. So it’s a cycle too, because once you start breathing like this, now my neck muscles are getting tighter. So my scalenes were always out of control. My sternocleido mastoid, this one was super tight. You could see knots in it. There was a vein or an artery that you could see that was bunched up because everything was so bunched up in my neck, which, how do you think that felt on my actual neck injury? So I’m having constant neck pain, which more and more is pulling my shoulders out of alignment. So it was so interesting when I started trying to breathe properly, if someone says, “Relax your traps,” they’re very different from force your traps to stay down. So I had to strengthen my lower traps and my-
Steven Sashen:
Rhomboids-
Jessie Graff:
Serratus anterior and rhomboids-
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Jessie Graff:
But especially serratus anterior and lower traps because that’s what holds your shoulder blades down. So I couldn’t, even relaxing everything was so tight and overactive here that even if I’m relaxing them, they’re just too short to stay down. So I had to actively pull my shoulder blades down and breathe into my stomach and these muscles, I would get sharp pains on every inhale because they were so tight that they were getting stretched, actively stretched on every inhale unless I allowed my shoulders to come up. So it was a long process of actively, it’s not just relax your upper traps, it’s very actively engage your lower traps and that serratus. It was hard and I had to think about it all the time.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, well because what’ll happen is you get into a pattern and then your brain shuts off the awareness to those things that are tight because it just gets in the loop and you don’t need to pay attention. Just building the neural connections to be able to do that, that’s one part. The other part that I love, what you’re describing, and people misunderstand this quite a bit, is the relationship between strength and flexibility. Where they think flexibility is learning to stretch a muscle rather than one important factor of being strong in the opposing direction. So they think that doing the splits is about just stretching instead of learning how … I don’t know if you ever did this when I was in gymnast mode, I’d sit on the floor with my legs straddle as much as I could and just lift my feet off the ground and just work on basically the quad part of pulling my legs up, which is what allowed me to get the split. So it wasn’t from stretching the muscles, it was from getting stronger in the direction that I was trying to go. People don’t think about that.
Jessie Graff:
At least on a split leap. When I worked on switch leaps, I had to work really actively on contracting my hamstring on the back leg because I could get my front leg up high, but when you’re going switch, switch, I wasn’t hitting a split because my back leg would just drop. So I’d get on the parallel bars and kick my legs and really feel how I had to squeeze my glute and my hamstring super dynamically to follow the momentum and snap it upwards so I could hit that split.
Steven Sashen:
I’ve never thought of this, nor have I ever thought to ask anyone about this, but I remember, so when I was getting out of gymnastics, I was doing ballet and I stopped doing ballet mostly because after a couple weeks I couldn’t find pants that fit me. My legs just blew up. So that was problematic
Jessie Graff:
Screw pants. I wear shorts all the time.
Steven Sashen:
Well I was in North Carolina, it was winter. But I remember doing switch leap and there’s something so amazingly gratifying about that move. I don’t even know how to describe it. There’s just something-
Jessie Graff:
Oh yeah. It just snaps.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I mean because it’s more than just jumping, you’re doing something in the air that’s like fast, and I mean if you do it well, it looks like you’re kind of levitating that. I mean, that’s a really fun one.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I need to work on those again.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so backing up a giant part to our conversation. So in terms of the getting stronger and setting those goals and always trying to improve a little bit each time, which is obviously very important. What else have you discovered about, and let’s just transition into the being a fit 50 year old woman, what else have you discovered, if anything that’s changed over the years about how you train based on either injuries or just things that have changed as you’re gotten older?
Jessie Graff:
Okay, well there’s a couple important things that we might have to-
Steven Sashen:
Unpack first?
Jessie Graff:
We haven’t even talked about knee and ankle and foot stuff because there was just as much discovery there. So yeah, I think part of the issue I had with having all three of these injuries at once is the shoulders were so much more dramatic that I focused all of my attention and efforts into rehabbing my shoulders. An ACL surgery on the knee is a huge reconstruction thing that takes forever to recover. I’ve done that before and it went great and it was amazing. So this time I was all focused on the shoulders and I don’t think I gave my knee the attention that it should have gotten in rehabbing. So much of that is not just like, I mean you don’t focus that much on the knee when you’re rehabbing the knee, they usually focus mostly on hip and glute activation and teaching your knee not to turn inward, but using your glute to turn it outward so that it stays aligned with your second toe.
But in this corrective exercise class, I learned so much about the muscles in your foot and ankle and shin and hip that contribute to knee stability. It’s a very simple test, this overhead squat test where you can look at a person while they do squats with their arms straight up by their ears and based on whether their arms drop or their back arches or their knees turn out, heels come up, feet turn out, you can tell pretty quickly which muscles are overdeveloped and which ones are underdeveloped. So my natural, my feet always want it turn out when I do squats, I know how to force them to stay in line, but by forcing them to stay in line, I now can feel which muscles are tight that are making me want to turn out.
Steven Sashen:
Well let’s pause on that one because I want to give people, this is an assignment to play with. So if somebody wants to try and do this with a little self diagnostic, which is of course, but walk people through what they do, the movement, and what they want to pay attention to, to see if they’re going to find something that’s over underdeveloped or not functioning properly.
Jessie Graff:
Okay, well I would set up a camera that’s going to film you and you’re going to do squats straight on. You might as well look up the overhead squat test online so that you can see it more accurately than if you’re just listening here. But you want to set up the camera first so that you’re not just looking at yourself in the mirror as you do these things, you can look at it a few times. So facing the camera, you’ll basically just put your arms by your head and do a squat, make sure you get down so that your quads are parallel to the floor and stand back up and do this a few times. Then once you’ve done it a few times, you turn 90 degrees so you can see it from the side. Do it a few times there, go to the other side, do it there and turn your back to the camera. Do a few times there. So you want to look at this and-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I want to pause. When you’re doing the squat, I’m thinking there’s kind of two ways of doing the squat. You’ve got your arms over your head, you can kind of drop straight down and keep your torso pretty vertical or you can really hip hinge and then it’s a different thing. Which should people be thinking about more? So hip hinge for people who don’t know, you want to think about if you’re standing in front of your toilet, you’re sitting back, so your butt is going back before you start going down versus just going sort of straight down like your torso is an elevator. So which one of these, or some variation thereof do people want to be thinking about?
Jessie Graff:
You want your torso to stay parallel to your shins. So when you’re standing vertical, if this is my torso and these are my shins, which obviously your thighs are in between, as your knees bend, your shins are going to go forward, your knees are going to lean forward, your shins are going to bend, and your upper body should relatively lean in proportion, which means your hips are bending.
Steven Sashen:
Correct. Okay, great.
Jessie Graff:
So the tricky thing in telling people how to diagnose this is I don’t want to tell them perfect form before they do it because you want to see what your natural accidental tendencies are. But if you’re self-diagnosing-
Steven Sashen:
Sorry about that.
Jessie Graff:
No, it’s just tricky. If you’re self-diagnosing, then you need to know what to look for. So do it a few times first before you start analyzing it. Then maybe film it again from all three of those directions thinking specifically about, “Are my feet hip width apart? Are my feet staying perfectly parallel, like second toe pointing, perfectly forward? Are my knees tracking over my second toe? Am I arching my back?” So if your hips are hinging a ton or if your arms are dropping down forward, you want to be keeping your arms parallel to your torso. So straight line from your hips to your fingertips. Most people, their arms are going to come forward and that’s because of tight lats usually. What else? If your heels are coming off the ground. So try to keep your heels on the ground. If you try to keep your heels on the ground and you feel your feet wanting to turn out, that’s going to be a really tight lateral calf and TFL, which is the muscle attached to the IT band. There’s a couple other things. There’s so many, and I’m restudying this chart I’ve learned.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I’m thinking, pick the top three to five things that somebody might notice or be on the lookout for. So arms dropping is one. What else?
Jessie Graff:
Especially if we’re focusing on lower body, the big one is, are your knees turning in?
Steven Sashen:
Yep.
Jessie Graff:
Are your feet turning out? Are your heels coming up? Especially considering this podcast, focusing on feet.
Steven Sashen:
Ok, well that’s okay-
Jessie Graff:
Those are huge ones.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. So if your knees start to turn in, your knees start to come towards each other, what’s that indicating that somebody might need to pay attention to?
Jessie Graff:
That you need to strengthen your glute medias. Your aductors may be a little too tight, so the muscles on the inside of your thighs that would pull your legs together. But weak glutes is the big one there.
Steven Sashen:
And pretty common.
Jessie Graff:
Very common. Very common. A lot of people do this and it’s a strong indicator that you’re vulnerable to knee injury.
Steven Sashen:
So there was a time I was driving to have brunch with some friends and there’s a woman running down the street who clearly was an accomplished runner. I mean you could tell that part. Except that her knees were practically banging into each other with each step because they turned in so much. All I could think was, “You’ve figured out a way to run, but you’re glutes are out of whack.” I almost wanted to stop and say, “How long until your next injury?” I mean it’s undeniable that if your knees are really coming in that way when you’re walking or running or even squatting, you’re setting yourself up. Most people have no idea because they’ve never seen the … I love that the opening, your first instruction, “Get a camera.” So many people have not the best proprioceptive skills and where they think their body is different than where it actually is. The only way you discover this is with video and some humility.
I remember a guy, he emailed me and he said, “There’s something wrong with the rubber on your shoes because I wore out the heel.” I said, “Well you’re over striding and heel striking because that’s putting friction in that spot.” He goes, “Well, I don’t do that.” I went, “Well, I mean-”
Jessie Graff:
Your shoes say otherwise.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So I said, “Send me a video.” So he sends me a video and it took me 20 minutes with him on Zoom or Skype or whatever we were using of me drawing on the screen until he went, “Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s over striding and heel striking.” Then I swear to God, his next line was, “Yeah, but I don’t do that.” It’s like “This is a video of you made of you, made by you.” Yeah.
Jessie Graff:
Wow, interesting.
Steven Sashen:
It was just very palpable, very powerful for me to see how long it took for him to see that his body was doing something different than what he thought it was doing. That was just incompatible with his self image, which was fascinating.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, that is interesting. The big one I’m focusing on right now that kind of caught me by surprise. A couple weeks ago I was working on some flips. I have this a layout step out and I was landing right leg first and I was kind of getting a little bit of knee pain. So I did some hops in the mirror. I had a friend actually point out to me, she was like, “Hey, you’re over pronating on your landing whenever you land on one foot.” Even if I’m just jumping off a one foot box or jumping really high and I land on one foot, I’m over pronating, which means I’m collapsing my arch or turning my foot out and collapsing my arch. So I started doing this more often and testing, and over pronating is going to basically cause your knee to turn in and put pressure on your knee.
So I’m watching this and doing hops in the mirror and if I hop really high and land on that one foot, it is so hard for me not to collapse my arch.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Jessie Graff:
So even though I’m doing these static exercises, raising my arch and I’m getting pretty strong there, I haven’t been doing the dynamic training focusing on that. So I’m doing, kind of like what I do with my pull-ups where I’ll do my heaviest weighted pull up to see how strong I can get. What’s the heaviest single one where I compromise form a little to do just what’s the heaviest I can do. Then I’ll do my lighter ones with the cable machine. I do way more reps that way, focusing on perfect form, engaging the right things. So having that stuff in the middle where I’m doing all the fun flips and stuff, but not paying attention to the mechanics of my feet I’ve been putting a lot of things at risk.
So I’m kind of putting my flips, unless it’s a standing back tuck where I’m landing with two feet and it’s a very controlled environment, I’m going back to just doing hops in the mirror and just only go to the height where I can control it. I’m having to focus so hard on keeping my foot in perfect alignment. If I keep my arch up, my knee wants to turn in, if I keep my knee out, my foot wants to … It’s so interesting to see. So when I force it, I feel a stretch in my lateral calf because the tight calf is the thing that’s causing my body to want to work around that. Your body will find, anytime there’s pain, it’s going to be like, “Okay, which direction can I go to avoid this pain?” Then you’re going to have certain muscles that then are going to atrophy so the muscle that should be controlling the movement is getting weaker while something else that’s making up for that is getting stronger and pulling everything out of balance.
So just going through things slowly in the mirror, now that I’m strong in these static situations, now I have to build up into smaller dynamic things and strengthen. So for me, that’s a weak posterior tibialis I think.
Steven Sashen:
This is sort of like when people talk about getting ready for barefoot running, there’s a lot of people who try to make a name for themselves by saying, “Well here’s what you need to be able to do to be able to run barefoot.” A lot of the people who had those, “If you can’t do these 10 things, you can’t run barefoot.” I couldn’t do six of them. They were just kind of making something up. But there are a lot of people who think, “Oh, if you just walk barefoot for a while that’s going to prepare you for running.” It’s like, no, no, no, no, no. I mean there’s a value in walking that’s going to build strength for sure research shows as much as doing an exercise program. But that exercise program, like you said, is not the same as the forces you apply when you’re running or when you’re jumping or when you are doing something that’s more aggressive.
To notice those things that show up under the extreme version of what you’re doing, the far end of the bell curve, that’s where things are interesting. You reminded me, I had Dr. Bill Sands who was the head of biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee. He was given a great humor performance facility views at what’s now called Colorado Mesa University. He would film you at 500 frames a second to see what your form was looking like. I said, “Why that fast?” He goes, “Because you can’t learn anything at anything under 250.” Which I thought was ridiculous. But what happened when he was testing me is my right foot, just before it hit the ground, was turning out. You only saw it in the last frame. So if you were shooting at anything under 250 frames a second, wouldn’t have been able to see that. That was the thing, he goes, “Oh, you got a tight hamstring that at a full extension is pulling your foot that way.” So those little things in those extreme versions-
Jessie Graff:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Super interesting. What’s intriguing to me thinking about this is that there’s so few people that you could go see on your own who would know how to diagnose this stuff, let alone what you could do for yourself to diagnose it for yourself. So doing the overhead squat test is a really interesting one. At some point we’ll have to-
Jessie Graff:
So interesting-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, see what else we can find that’s for self-diagnosis.
Jessie Graff:
I’m working on, I need to put some notes together because the class explains so well, the online course, explains so well how to administer the test and then gives, “It means this is tight, this is tight and this is tight.” But I always need to see, “Okay, if you’re saying my TFL is tight and that’s pulling my feet out, show me how that connects. I want to see that pulling.” That’s a gap that I have to put the pieces together myself. I saw this great video on Instagram of basically a cadaver leg so you could see all the muscles of just at the knee and as the knee is straightening and bending. You could see the IT band where it connects and how that connects-
Steven Sashen:
Into the hip.
Jessie Graff:
You couldn’t see the hip. But I was having the hardest time understanding how a tight TFL, tensor fascial latte, the muscle that connects to the IT band. The point of the thing was like, “You can’t roll out your IT band because it’s a tendon.” Well there’s a muscle attached to the tendon. It’s just you don’t want to roll the band, you want to roll that muscle. But I was having a hard time understanding, “How is this muscle in my hip turning my foot out?” When I saw this, it doesn’t connect to your knee, it connects to your fibula. So some of your hamstrings, two of your hamstrings connect to the back of your tibia, the bicep femoris, your other hamstring connects to the other side to your fibula and the IT band connects to your fibula. So a tight bicep femoris and IT band are pulling on the fibula, which is attached to your ankle and pulls things out.
So if your two inner hamstrings are weak and your two outer hamstrings are strong, your foot’s going to turn out. Then you don’t have any support that keeps your knee from turning in. So all the pieces came together just seeing this cadaver leg.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and there’s the flip side, which is you can affect negatively or positively your hip and your glute medias in particular with what your foot is doing, which you could be doing voluntarily or habitually. So that kind of thing where goes from one end to the other and you can start on either end is really, really intriguing. So when people talk to me about having flat feet, it’s one of my favorite things to do. I go, “Stand with your feet on the ground and just tighten your butt and don’t let your feet move and watch what happens.” By tightening your butt, it tries to externally rotate everything that goes all the way down to your feet and suddenly you have a little bit of arch and everyone’s like, What the hell?” It’s like, “Yeah, your arch issue is a butt issue.”
Jessie Graff:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a big part of it usually.
Steven Sashen:
Think it’s a new T-shirt we need to make, Your arch is your butt issue.” It’s very limited run because very few people will care. But I just like the idea of that.
Jessie Graff:
But you can arch your back too. I feel like a lot of people are going to misunderstand. Does that also work? If you’re overarching your back, that’s like a hip flexor issue more than a glute. Well, weak glutes, no. If your hip flexors are too tight-
Steven Sashen:
It could be performance also. There’s a couple things. If you’re arching too much … That’s an interesting one. That balance between your lower back and things both above it and below it, and then of course the flip side, your abs and how that works. It’s an interesting one for me because I’ve got a grade two L5, S1 spondy. So for people who don’t know, that means my lowest lumbar vertebrae is shifted forward 50% from where it’s supposed to be and there’s no disk in between. But the really fun part is the part that would hold that vertebrae in place is not attached to the vertebrae. So I have a pars defect, for medically inclined people. So there’s nothing I can do to pull that vertebrae back in place. So there’s times where a part of my back looks like it’s arched simply because I’ve got a structural issue and I’ve had all these physical therapists say, “Oh, you need to work on your ab strength.” I go, “Put me on any machine and I’ll max it out, that’s not the problem.” So there’s all the idiosyncratic stuff.
That’s crazy too. But the fundamental things, I mean, I like that, it’s as you’re doing your overhead squat test, looking to see what you’re doing with your lower back. I mean it may be for some of these things that just noticing that it’s an non-ideal movement pattern and then just having curiosity to start exploring and seeing what you might need to do to get it into the right position. Or what you’re feeling that feels like it’s a little inactive or too active or something. It may be that our little goal of going, “Oh, when this happens, go take a look at that.” There might be three or four things you need to take a look at.
Jessie Graff:
Oh yeah, very likely.
Steven Sashen:
But I like the self diagnostic aspect.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, and the thing that’s so cool about it is there’s so much pain you can have in your body that feels like, “This is how things are now,” but it can actually be fixed with some strengthening and stretching exercises. There are so many things that can be solved, literally fixed. Or at worst can still be prevented from getting worse by strengthening construction.
Steven Sashen:
I think the strengthening one is highly overlooked. I think people are much more attuned to the idea of, “Hey, let’s stretch something.” But in my experience, I’m imagining yours as well, the strengthening has a bigger impact.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
There’s another part that’s sort of an emotional component that is interesting to me lately. I’ll share this one, I’ll get a little too personal. So I went and got a massage on Saturday and, as is often the case, my upper back and neck is tight and sometimes my upper back’s a little tight because of my lower back issue where my upper back is trying to compensate, blah blah blah. But I had an annoying flashback. There’s a guy that I was introduced to about almost 30 years ago who wanted to do research on stress. He figured, “Let’s not do the emotional part, let’s just look at physical stress.” So he developed a drug, or he modified a drug that he would inject into the muscle spindle fiber, which is the part of the muscle that actually triggers the contraction and it would deactivate the muscle spindle fiber. So you couldn’t contract the muscles around it.
He was just using this to … I mean, I don’t even know if he knew what he was doing at the time. But what he discovered is he decided to inject people in their upper back and neck, or in their traps and upper back because that’s where the muscle spindle fibers are the largest. What he found, much to his surprise-
Jessie Graff:
And overactive.
Steven Sashen:
Correct, and often very overactive. What he found is that when he did this with people and made it so they couldn’t tense their upper back or neck, is that they reported feeling lighter emotionally. Like they were angry about something and now they weren’t. He came to the conclusion that if you are feeling tension in those spots, you’re probably angry about something. The thing you need to do is figure out what that is and address that. So I’m getting this massage and this woman is talking about how tight my back is and for the first time I went, “Shit, I wonder what I’m angry about?”
I’m going to start crying thinking about it. The only thing I could think of, in addition to just the stress of running a business, but it occurred to me on a daily basis when someone is driving under the speed limit in front of me, I would like to have a weapon. What I’ve been doing in the meantime, before I had that realization, was anytime someone’s driving under the speed limit in front of me, I use that as a cue to remind myself to think of at least three things that I’m genuinely grateful for, which makes my upper back relax. So my new mission is to figure this thing out as much as I can given the situation that I’m in. But the emotional component of that is another piece that is interesting and could give some insight into what’s going on. Again, I don’t know if it’s one direction or the other, but usually that extra piece of the puzzle we don’t think about it. I didn’t think about it and I’ve been dealing with this stuff my whole life.
Jessie Graff:
I don’t think about it much either. But I definitely notice that if I get stressed or angry or irritated, my neck hurts way more. For sure.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So that’s a whole other component. So, “Relax and pull them down and back.” So let’s back up to the thing that I teased everybody with at the beginning, and I teased that and I said that because I think someone told me that this is one of your new goals. Do you want to describe what that is and how you are moving towards it by starting by saying, so the goal being, fittest woman at 50? Is that it?
Jessie Graff:
The age is not important. The important thing about the age is that I qualify as a little old lady. I don’t think 50 is going to do it. 70, would I be ideal. But that’s very distant still so it doesn’t register as a goal that I can aim for at the moment. But that’s my ultimate distant thing on the mountain to strive for. So the thing I realized is that I’m all about goals. I am so motivated by goals. If you give me a goal that I’m excited about and I latch onto it, everything turns on fire and I’m like, “I’m going to do this thing. I’m so excited.” I will do whatever discipline, whatever steps I have to take to move towards this goal constantly. I just thrive on every step of that, even if it’s hard.
Every goal I’ve ever had has been, even if it’s long-term, long term being four years or something, it’s always something that’s like, “You have to be the hardest worker, get there fast.” Every single year in Ninja, it’s been like, “You have three months to get as strong as you possibly can. You have a couple years to be as strong as the strongest men on this show.” It’s reaching an absurd level of strength at the expense of overall balance in my body. Yeah, try to stay balanced, try to stay healthy as you can, but it is worth sacrificing any of those things to be the strongest and the best this year. That does not encourage healthy habits, that does not encourage things that will lead to longevity. Now, longevity has never inspired me. It’s sort of like, “Yeah, I’d love to have that, but I’d rather be a world record holder.”
Steven Sashen:
Do you know the Olympic, how to describe this, I can’t think of how to describe it. I’m just going to ask it. This is a question that someone has asked Olympians for decades. If you could take a drug that would guarantee you won a gold medal, but would also guarantee that you would be dead within five years afterwards, would you take it? So before you answer, guess what percentage of people of Olympians up until very recently said yes?
Jessie Graff:
A high percentage? I don’t know.
Steven Sashen:
Like 80.
Jessie Graff:
I would’ve said yes. 80? Yeah. I think for me, looking at it now, I don’t think a gold medal would do it. It would have to be something, have a lasting impact on the world, inspire people for generations. For that, yeah, would I be willing to do that this year and die next year if I could have that kind of impact? Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
I love it.
Jessie Graff:
But one, I’m not going to do anything this year that’s going to have that kind of impact, probably not.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Jessie Graff:
Two, having that as my goal encourages me to train in a way that is not healthy for me long term. So ever since my three big injuries in 2020, I’ve struggled to come up with a goal that would motivate me more toward balance. Yes, I want to be healthy. No, I don’t want to get injured like that again. So I’m trying to focus on balance. But having that vision of what you want to aim for, how could I have a goal that’s not a blaze of glory, but a long-term thing? Being able to do this for a long time is still just sort of like, “Yeah, that’d be cool,” but it doesn’t rival that drive to have that burst of glory. So I found the answer just a couple weeks ago looking at what my mom is doing because, “Cool, I kept up with the guys on some obstacle courses for a while, but have you ever seen a 70 year old woman doing laches in obstacle courses?” If she has a sweater on, you could look at her and be like, “Oh, let me help you down the stairs and stuff.”
Then she takes off her sweatshirt and she’s shredded and she jumps on a bar and does a lache to a cliffhanger. It’s mind blowing. It’s shocking just to look at. But it opens up my mind for, I didn’t know you could get stronger after age 60. I didn’t know you could build muscle. I didn’t know you could accomplish these things. I didn’t know you could have that freedom of movement at that age. Seeing the way she inspires people who look at her, I thought I had five years left of this at best. I didn’t know that you could keep doing this. The way it opens up possibilities for everyone who sees her is something that I want to do. I want to be like that. I want to be that person who’s 70 years old, blowing minds and inspiring the world. So having that visual image of someone that I want to be, it is in the distant future.
But if I want to be able to be that kind of person, it doesn’t mean I have to do bigger things now. It means I have to work really hard to strengthen the areas that I’m weak, that are pulling me out of balance, making me more likely to get injured. If I get hurt, my chances of being a badass 70 year old are going down and I want to be that little old lady who can do 50 pull ups. Like I can’t do 50 pull ups now, but doing 50 pull ups now isn’t going to get me to doing 50 pull ups then. Doing a balanced set of rows and engaging my lower traps and doing pull ups, even if they’re assisted pull ups with perfect form, those are the things that are going to get me to badass 70 year old.
So now that I have that image of what I want to be when I’m deciding, “Am I going to do my hard pull up sets first or my hard row sets first?” Well, I’m more excited about the pull up sets, but if I prioritize the pull up sets and then I’m too tired to do hard sets on my rows, I’m not going to take steps towards being a badass 70 year old so I guess I’ll do the rows first. So I’ll finally have goal that inspires healthier behavior all around.
Steven Sashen:
Do you find that you need to kind of chunk that down? Because how old are you now?
Jessie Graff:
38.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. So you got quite a while until you’re 70. So in my head, so do you have to start thinking about 40, 45, 50? I mean, how do you keep that in your mind? Or is that 70 year old picture enough that it keeps you going?
Jessie Graff:
I think the 70 year old picture is more dynamic. So that’s the one. But I’d love to get a pull-up related world record at 50.
Steven Sashen:
Nice.
Jessie Graff:
That would be pretty cool. I looked up some pull-up world records, and they’re not outside the realm of possibility, but they’re certainly not something that I could do this year.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Jessie Graff:
I couldn’t just try it and be close. I’m like, “Okay, this is going to take some hard dedicated, specific work.” But if I do that and pace myself and don’t overdo it and get injured, then I think there’s a lot that’s possible that I didn’t realize was possible. So now that I have this, I’ve been doing all this extra research and studying and everything, and I think I found the key to why I have been so injury prone. I don’t like that word. But I’ve gotten a lot of injuries at the end of each season. So like I told you, I’ve been able to build strength extremely quickly and lose it and build it again extremely quickly and lose it.
So I read this book called Training for Climbing by Eric Hurst, and he talks about energy systems, which I think is utilized more often in-
Steven Sashen:
Well, running-
Jessie Graff:
Team sports and running. Yeah, a lot of running stuff. But he talks about it in terms of climbing and percentage of weight on your fingers. So your arms are not as bulky as your legs. You don’t have as much space between the muscle fibers for circulation. So with running, you’re hitting and relaxing, you’re flexing. With hanging from something, your muscles are isometrically contracted and clamping off those capillaries. So if you’re holding more than 50% of your maximum strength, all of your capillaries are so clamped off that you’re getting zero blood flow and you’re immediately anaerobic.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Jessie Graff:
Immediately. So your aerobic system can do nothing to help you in that situation. You’re just accumulating hydrogen ions getting more and more acidic and that acid will just kind of sit in your muscles and weaken things. So strengthening this lactic energy system will get you really strong really fast. You’ll see your gains dramatically in, he says two to six weeks you’ll see huge gains. So training hard, I was able to get dramatic gains for two months. So that’s kind of where you max out that system. So I was scientifically, to the book, doing exactly what he said there. But I was only training that energy system. I wasn’t training … You have to go at a very low intensity to train your aerobic system for your grip. You’ve got to be at 15%-30% of your maximum strength, which for me on a cliffhanger-
Steven Sashen:
Nothing.
Jessie Graff:
Yeah, it’s very low. For pull-ups on a bar, I can do a pull-up with an extra 80 pounds. So what is that? Well, on a cable machine, I’m basically doing 12-15 pounds per arm just pulling down, keeping perfect form. It’s so light, I barely get a burn. But that’s how I know that I’m staying in the aerobic system and not getting … Because as soon as you fill up with acid, that kind of breaks down the progress you can make in building new mitochondria. So it’s hard to train your aerobic system when everything’s super acidic. If I’m doing everything to maximum burnout, I’m also not training that maximum strength. Everything is a percentage of your maximum strength. So if my maximum strength is staying at 80 pounds for a one rep max, my aerobic system can only get up to at best, maybe 35% of that. But if I’m not training aerobic system, well that’s still down at like 20%, maybe 25%.
So I’m building, I have this huge range in the lactic system, but it hits this peak. If my max strength isn’t increasing, I hit a peak. So if you work
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