Strengthen This/Not That: Fitness Secrets from SUPER Strongman, Chris Duffin
Chris Duffin went from body building to building a business empire. After becoming a superstar in the world of fitness, and one of the most respected strength coaches in the world, he became a best-selling author and has created and turned around companies in multiple industries ranging from shoes and supplements to Aerospace and High-Tech. Now retired from competing, he uses his MBA, his engineering background, and hands-on knowledge to provide industry-changing innovations and education, entrepreneurial coaching, and leadership.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Chris Duffin about the parts of the body that should be strengthened.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
Connect with Chris:
Guest Contact Info
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Links Mentioned:
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Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
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@XeroShoes
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
I’m waiting for it to say it’s officially recording. It says starting. There we go. We often talk about the importance of foot strength here on the … Wait. Let me try that again. We often talk about foot strength on the Movement podcast, but there’s other joints in your body that you care about, right? And maybe not. Maybe there’s only one or two, and you can ignore the rest. We’re going to find out which joints you don’t care about, you shouldn’t care about, you don’t need to pay attention to, and which ones you really do need to pay attention to if you’re looking to have a healthy, happy, strong body.
And that’s what we’re going to do on today’s episode of the Movement Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, usually starting feet first. But once you take care of the feet, there’s other things as well. And we breakdown the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to walk or run or play or lift or do yoga or crossfit or whatever it is you like to do and to do that enjoyable and efficiently. And did I mention enjoyably? I know I did. Because if you’re not having fun, just do something different til you are. Life’s way too short.
And most importantly, if you get a kick out of what we’re doing here and want to learn more, go to JoinTheMovementMovement.com. You’ll find all the previous episodes, all the different places you can interact with us on Facebook and YouTube and Instagram, et cetera. And of course we call it the Movement Movement because we’re creating a movement that involves you about natural movement, using your body the way it’s made to be used. And the part about you just means share this with friends, like and thumbs up and hit the bell on YouTube, et cetera. You know what to do. Basically if you want to be a part of the tribe, please subscribe.
So let us jump in. Chris Duffin, welcome. It is a pleasure. This is the first time we’re meeting, and I’m really looking forward to our chat. So, do me a favor and tell people who the hell you are and what the hell you’re doing here.
Chris Duffin:
Oh, the who I am, that’s a tough one. My name’s Chris Duffin. I’m known for a lot of things. In the strength world, I’m known for my feats of strength. I’m the only person that’s ever both squatted and deadlifted 1,000 pounds, and I also did it for reps, just because. But I specialize in kind of biomechanics as it relates to being under load, so I work with … When I say 90% of percent of professional sports teams in North America, I’m not exaggerating, 29 of 30 major league baseball teams, 600 plus … every collegiate teams, any big name that you can think of. So I build specialty products, barbells and other things, that get joints in the right position to be able to accommodate for variability in levers, lever lengths, mobility restrictions. We can individualize training and actually get the joints in the right positions.
So I do that. So I’ve got a couple companies. The primary one is Kabuki Strength. That is the equipment and education company. And Barefoot Athletics is because, talk about priorities, it’s a different take on Xero Shoes. Actually I think we’re actually probably not competitive, even though we’re both in the minimalist footwear environment.
Steven Sashen:
It’s close. We’re close. We’ll talk about that.
Chris Duffin:
But that’s fine. I don’t care.
Steven Sashen:
Oh dude, competition’s a good thing. The more awareness that we can build, the better.
Chris Duffin:
Exactly. I went barefoot for five years before going … I had so many questions. Yeah. People going, “What should I wear because I can’t go shoeless?” Well, I own my own gym, and I’m like, “Well, okay. I need to be able to answer a solution for this.” And I also co-founded Build Fast Formula, which is supplementation I do, but I’ve got a really interesting background. We have, as far as a manufacturer, I’ve got the leading scientific and research advisory based board in the industry. No one else has what we have, basically leading physical therapists, chiropractors, by the way they all believe [inaudible 00:03:55] the things we do around foot mechanics by the way, orthopedic surgeons, the list goes on and on of like top movers and shakers. But my background is I’ve got a best selling book about my life. It’s an autobiography, and I’ve got a really crazy story that covers a lot of ground, and so it’s an inspirational motivational piece. And so I do a lot.
Basically [inaudible 00:04:16] short. Here is me in a nutshell. I want people to develop resilience through stress and adaptation in life. I want them to take it on. I want them to go for it and not look at those things as negative things, be it body mind and soul, all aspects. Human physiology is really simple, we do not adapt and progress without imposed demand.
Steven Sashen:
Stress.
Chris Duffin:
Stress. We understand it in the gym, but then we try to find the … We want to retire in the Caribbean and never do anything. That’s the goal, right? Well, that’s the beginning of death, physiology. It is.
Steven Sashen:
Look, the stress of managing a tan can really tax somebody. So I want to back up. So, first of all, to something that I teased in the intro about what joints matter and what joints don’t, the fact that you’re paying attention to joints when it comes to strength right away sets you apart from almost anybody, where they’re just looking at the numbers. They just want to see what you’re lifting. They don’t care as much about form. They don’t care about your longevity. They’re not paying attention to what actually creates strength. I don’t know if you ever heard this line. I love it. Someone asked Joe Rogan about martial arts. He goes, “Martial arts is the art of using your muscles to throw your bones at people,” which I thought was just a brilliant line.
Chris Duffin:
That’s a good one. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it was really good. But with strength, it’s a similar thing, and most people just don’t think about anything other than the number of plates on the end of the bar. So can you talk to me more about your perspective on joints when it applies to strength?
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. And here’s the interesting thing. I switched my careers a number of years ago. I used to run aerospace and automotive manufacturing and heavy equipment. I’m engineering all this sort of stuff, background.
Steven Sashen:
Oh dude, come on. Look, if I hear of one more guy with that background who becomes one of the best power lifters of all time … but I’ve heard of so many times. Please.
Chris Duffin:
So anyway, I switched because I saw all this broken stuff. And when I started speaking on these things, nobody was speaking on it. When I was talking breathing and bracing and producing content over a decade ago in strength sports, no one … Everybody was like, “You’re crazy. It doesn’t matter.” And then six, seven years ago, I’m talking foot mechanics. Nobody’s talking foot mechanics, right? And now these things are like so ubiquitous in the industry, although people still don’t get it and apply it correctly. They can say and repeat, parrot the stuff that’s being said out there. But it’s crazy. Like the things that I started you cannot find. Go do a search, and you’ll find my videos. No one in strength sports was talking about the stuff that I was talking about first. Okay, I’m tooting my own horn. I’ll stop.
Steven Sashen:
No, that’s totally cool. So the question is … Because I’ve got to tell you honestly, I have people who email me on a regular basis about being on this podcast who are just regurgitation something that other people said that they learned, so I have no problem with someone pulling out a horn and tooting like crazy if they’ve come to something meaningful and real and useful and that gets underneath sort of the common wisdom or most likely the common mythology that gets passed down generation to generation.
Chris Duffin:
This is why I have the network and the advisory board in stuff that I do. And I’m going to answer you’re question. I’m getting there. But it’s relative to all the things that I’ve mentioned, which is I’ve got this engineering approach, this business admin, all this other stuff. But I started self-educating on the clinical side. I started doing continuing education courses in developmental kinesiology through the Prague school of Medicine and doing all these other things because I wanted to be the best athlete I could.
I wanted to lift more weight than anybody’s ever done before. So I’m like, “It’s not just about going and pounding my head against a plate in the gym. I need to be smarter. I need to know more,” and so I started this stuff together, and that’s where I found these gaps. Because it’s not just reading the material or sitting in the lecture or doing that with some of the leading people, but it’s the also doing it. You don’t know until you’ve done really, so it’s this combination of having this intellectual mind but also being and pushing and finding where the breaking points are. What isn’t working? Why are you failing? So it’s pushing those extremes. Pushing those extremes helps you find perfection in form and technique, and people miss this.
I just was answering somebody on the Strong First, on a podcast I just did. And they’re like, “But isn’t that the antithesis of what Strong First says? You should never push it hard because then you’ll breakdown in form.” I’m like, “Well, how do you get perfect technique unless you find where you breakdown, so you can go back and fix it?” So, I use this thing all the time where I say, “I want you to have the absolute perfect squat in the world, and that doesn’t mean a body weight or a barbell, but I also want you to push it to the absolute max of everything you’ve got.” And people think, “Oh, well that means the form’s to the wind, everything’s to the wind.” I’m like, “No, I want both.” And when you seek both, you find you reduce the energy leaks. You [inaudible 00:09:21] those opportunities, and you end up lifting more, and you also perfect your technique because … And you find this beautiful thing in the middle. So, let’s go to your question now, now that we’ve framed it appropriately.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. All right. Wait. Hold on. I’ve got to make notes because you said two things that I wanted to jump on. All right. Go ahead. Answer the question, and then we’re going to make a loop back to something you just said.
Chris Duffin:
I like to simplify things, really, really simple. So when I look at an assessment of what’s going on when somebody’s moving or a clinical based approach or any of this stuff, we look at the largest global impact first. You’ve got somebody that’s like, “Oh look, I can’t squat because I lack dorsiflexion,” and like, “We need to do this mobilization strategy. That mobilization … Do all this stuff.” It’s like, “No, we’re not going to start there.” Fundamentally, what has the largest global impact? And that is going to be the ability to control and manage spinal mechanics. So if I’m … don’t have my diaphragm in relation to my pelvic floor, I cannot create what’s called intra-abdominal pressure, so it’s eccentrically loading this cavity and then working that against the concentric co-contraction of both the pelvic floor as well as all the thoracal lumbar musculature, rectus abdominis, obliques, all this stuff. It works to create this stuff, and it has actually a neuromuscular effect. It affects our nervous system. And I want to go off on that in a little bit.
Steven Sashen:
Hold that thought. You just raised a point that most people don’t understand. They think when they watch someone lifting, and they’re wearing a belt, they think the belt is to hold things in, which is the exact opposite. Talk about that.
Chris Duffin:
No. So then everybody wears the belt wrong because they crank it super tight. But then when it’s super tight, you can’t expand into it. You need to be able to stick at least two fingers between your belly and the belt before you lift, so you can expand into it. Most of my training, I actually use an expandable belt that a friend of mine developed, and we sell, called the Breath Belt. It cues. And it’s got little pockets, so you can put balls and things in there to like cue different areas that are not functioning as well for you, so you cue that movement.
So it’s actually not supportive at all, but you’ll lift more, and your pain will go down and all this stuff because I can’t tactically be there for everybody to like stick my fingers and go, “Hey, are you feeling this? Are you feeling that?” Right? So it helps that. But you can’t address shoulder mobility if we’re not managing our spinal mechanics. You could be kyphotic. You could be flexion. You could be … or extension. It’s going to completely change that. And then that changes everything upstream and downstream.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Chris Duffin:
So, managing spinal mechanics … And I say managing. It doesn’t mean it needs to be particularly something, but our ability to manage and control it in really great, and also fundamentally that covers breathing and bracing. Because if you have disfunction in breathing and bracing and breathing, you’re also going to have disfunction in bracing. So the diaphragm, which we’re using for stabilization, has three functions. The diaphragm also covers respiration, stabilization, and the sphincter. So anyway, don’t take a shit while you’re squatting.
Steven Sashen:
And we’ve seen people do that. This raises an interesting point when you think about runners. Because runners as a group, they have no control of their lumbar and lower thoracic spine, and they’re just like bad springs. Usain Bolt’s coach, Glen Mills, said that what got him to be a 100 meter runner was they spent a year working on his, quote, core strength, basically being able to engage his abdomen. So, like you said, getting rid of that leak.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah, these same concepts I’m talking about. This isn’t to squat 1,000 pounds. This is to run. This is to walk. This is for your 75 year old great grandmother to pickup the baby off the floor. This is for life as a whole, and people don’t understand this. And a lot of the things in our environment today break this down. Because when we start breaking breathing functions, then the other things, and the awareness of position gets broken down because we’re not out chopping wood and doing things that we as human beings are meant to move and do. We live in this world.
People think of the phone posture as being bad. It’s not just the phone. The technology interface actually starts changing your respiration patterns which turns it into more of a chest breathing type stuff, and then that starts … This whole mechanism starts breaking down. You know what the number one healthcare cost in America is? I’ll give you a hint. Pop Quiz. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer. I don’t know. Throw something else in there.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, I thought you were going to make this a multiple choice, and I was going to pick one.
Chris Duffin:
I was.
Steven Sashen:
Auto accidents, but that’s not really health, but it kind of is. Balance issues for the elderly, where they fall down, break their hip and die, like my dad did. Cancer .. Well you already did that. Basically things related to smoking. Things related to diet. You already said diabetes, or the sugar as my friend said growing up.
Chris Duffin:
You still haven’t it hit yet.
Steven Sashen:
No. Wait. Hold on. I don’t know.
Chris Duffin:
Back pain.
Steven Sashen:
Man, how did … Come on. That would have been extra simple to do that one.
Chris Duffin:
Number one healthcare cost in America. And you know what the driver of that is? Something that we all control and manage every day. And guess what? The shoes behind you also have a huge impact on because-
Steven Sashen:
Hold on.
Chris Duffin:
Number two-
Steven Sashen:
It’s the other way around. Someone asked me why I have this on my desk. I go, “Because this is the cause of most of the problems that we know.”
Chris Duffin:
Exactly. And what does that elevated heel do?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It messes with your posture.
Chris Duffin:
It opens that … It creates an open scissor. So it tilts the pelvis forward, which cocks the diaphragm forward, right? Opens our stroke with our walk. So, again, this isn’t like lifting heavy … It is lifting heavy too, but we reach further as we’re walking because of the raised heel … or the raised toe and the elevated heel, which again puts us into this open scissor relationship and starts breaking these patterns down. We’re not stabilizing effectively. And people went, “Oh, argue this, science that, blah, blah, blah.” Yes, it is science because your muscles operate best in where they’re supposed to be in their natural length/tension relationship.
And so when you take the ones and shorten them in the back, because you’re in an open scissor, and open them in the front, we’re … And then it’s just simple straight physics. It’s a cylinder. The diaphragm works in a pump fashion, just like a diaphragm pump in engineering, like my background. It drives down and creates pressure equally, 360 degrees all the way around and out. As soon as we cock that forward, that relationship between it and the pelvis, we have spikes in certain areas. Man, it’s all related.
So that gets to point number two, global impact. The largest global impact is the ability to manage and control spinal mechanics. Number two is the foot, the foot mechanics and the ability to be able to control, not the foot, foot and ankle complex.
Steven Sashen:
Yep. No, you’re absolutely right. And of course you can’t control the foot and ankle complex if you’re in something that’s stiff, if you’re in something that doesn’t let you get feedback from the ground because it’s too thick, if it’s got arch support, so you can’t articulate those joints. Someone asked me … I got interviewed by a reporter, and he said … I told him all the reasons why I don’t like the, quote, modern athletic shoe. And he said, “Well, I can’t quote you on those because it just sounds like you’re a disgruntled business owner.” I said, “You have it upside down. I got into this business because I discovered these things about footwear and how they’re complete nonsense.”
Chris Duffin:
Complete nonsense. They’re all band-aids built upon band-aids because we used to have a raised heel to fit in a stirrup, right? And then it became a fashion thing. And because of the raised heel, now we’ve got to have the raised toe. And then for some reason, I don’t know where the pointy came from other than fashion, but now we pull that toe in, and now we completely lose the stabilization of the foot and ankle complex. Just go ahead and stand in a squat position. Lift and pull … Reach down into a squat. Lift and pull that-
Steven Sashen:
Your big toe up.
Chris Duffin:
Pull it up just a little bit, and then move your foot around. And now grab it, and pull it out and down. And don’t even hold it, just set it there. And now it’s like, “There’s the test.”
Steven Sashen:
I do this one. I go, “Do me a favor. Drop and do pushups with your fingers squeezed together like this. Just try that. Just give it a shot.” It’s like … It doesn’t work. Here’s something that you may not know. So the reason for the elevated heel in athletic shoes isn’t from the sort of history of fashion and all the rest.
Chris Duffin:
Actually I know. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know what happened?
Chris Duffin:
This was Nike, right? Where they started having issues, and they went, “Well, okay. If people have been wearing the elevated heel, and everything’s too short, we actually are going to put that bandaid and fix in here because as soon as people start running … ” And this is also the same problem, and it’s unfortunate. Vibram hurt our industry because they didn’t do the education.
Steven Sashen:
Wait. Hold that thought. We’ll come back to that in a sec. We’ll come to that. Here’s the thing about the Nike thing. I’ve got to give you the epilogue to that story. So a friend of mine who was at Nike for 30 years working directly with Bowerman, a guy who I actually designed one of these shoes behind me with. He was at a track meet with one of those podiatrists who suggested doing the elevated heel for Nike shoes. And he said, “Your design idea has become the ubiquitous design for all athletic footwear. What do you think about that?” And the doctor said, “Biggest mistake we ever made.” I mean, which it is because it led to all those other things you just described.
Now, to the point about FiveFingers, just FYI, a couple episodes ago I interviewed my friend Tony Post, who was the CEO of FiveFingers when that really blew up. And I said to him on the podcast, and I’ve said to him privately as well. I said, “One of the things that I appreciated about you when we first met … ” I tend to say things to people when I first meet them that they may find horribly obnoxious or rude, but it’s a true statement, and I want to see how they react to it because if they can’t handle the truth, I can’t handle being with them very much. So like literally one of the first sentences I said to him after he expressed his support for what we were doing, I said, “You guys are really dropping the ball on education, and it’s going to hurt everybody.” And his response was, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s growing faster than we can help people.”
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. And they didn’t have the strength training background, which tells us we have to have progression.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Chris Duffin:
You don’t just walk into the gym and go, “Squats are good. Let’s put 225 on the bar and do max reps.” Guess what? You’re going to be hurt. You’re either going to injure yourself, or you’re going to be so sore you can’t move. And so runners, and then you take the runner mentality which is always more is better, right? Which is … I’m sorry, that’s a … Everybody’s got their kind of cultural norms in the environment. And runners are like, “I’m getting slower. I better run more. Stress is building up. I better run more.” The answer’s always run more. So like, “This approach is better. Let me get those shoes and go run 20 miles or 10 miles every day.” And it’s like, “You can’t do that.”
Steven Sashen:
And you know as well as anyone, perhaps better than most, that strength training has a direct and positive impact on how well you run, and the research could not be more clear. And you tell that to runners. You go, “Why don’t you take two or three days and don’t run and do some strength training that’s relevant for your running.” And you just watch them look like you said, “Why don’t you eat your babies.” It’s really amazing. And I understand people get anxious about trying something that they don’t understand yet, that’s new to them, that threatens the things they’ve been told, but nonetheless … I want to back up to a couple of things you said, just for the fun of it-
Chris Duffin:
But it’s not the strength training necessarily. It’s the progression. You have to adapt to and expose demand, but you can’t just go 100% in. If you’ve been running a certain way, within a certain range of motion and all this sort of stuff, you go, “Hey, maybe 10% of my day,” or for the week, “10% of this week, I’m going to wear a minimalist shoe. I’ve never done it before. And then I’m going to start adding some running, a little bit,” right? That’s why I used the analogy of you don’t just … Squats are good. I’m going to go max out in the gym. Everybody knows that when you go into the gym. Like you can’t do that, but people don’t think about that in this transition. And I really try to beat that home because that’s the part … It really did hurt this industry because it was great content, a great education, a great message, but it set it back when people got hurt. And then it became you’re like anti-vaxxers. There’s nothing to it. The science of shoes, which we can get into, made an analysis of orthotics, but-
Steven Sashen:
Well, that’s easy. We can just say they’re bullshit, but that’s a whole other story. The reason that they got hurt was twofold. One is that for the last 50 plus years but really accelerating over time marketers, especially marketers in the footwear industry, have sold the story that the product is the instant solution to whatever your problem is. And so people believed that, and so that was the message that came out about, say, the FiveFinger shoes, another minimalist footwear in 2009, 2009. And so people just thought, “Oh, all I need to do is … Because that’s what shoe company has been saying. This new shoe is magic. All I need to do is wear it.” And they just treated the FiveFinger like it was just another one of those new shoes that, “Hey, it’s magic,” and away they go.
Combine that with people hearing things like, “Oh, you’re supposed to land on your toes or your forefoot,” which I’m not saying is not true, but what they were doing is over-striding, reaching out with their foot way in front of their body and then pointing their toes, so they’re getting stress fractures because they’re running with improper form.
I was on a panel, and one of the guys who was against me said, “You’re going to tell me that everyone who gets injured running barefoot is injured because they ran with the wrong form?” I said, “Yeah.” End of story. Look, you might stub your toe. There’s no way of preventing all injuries. But fundamentally, yeah, it’s not about the footwear. It’s about the form. It’s just that most footwear, you can’t use the right form. It gets in the way.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. Footwear is … we miss the point. Footwear isn’t some innovative science that’s going to fix stuff for us. Our foot is so incredibly complex with the amount of muscles and bones and ligaments and structure in this to manage and the impact it has on the body. It is to prevent cuts and burns and things from the environment.
Steven Sashen:
That’s it.
Chris Duffin:
It has a purpose. I’m not a like, “Oh my god. Everybody’s got to go barefoot all the time,” type of stuff. Guess what? You’re not going to go do that on hot pavement. It’s going to destroy your feet. You’re not going to go into a bathroom with disease, go to the gas station and-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I’ve done all those things.
Chris Duffin:
Shoes have a purpose, but they should allow the foot to do what the foot does and just be protecting the environment.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s it.
Chris Duffin:
Anyway.
Steven Sashen:
So I want to back up a giant step into something you said before about putting your … Well, there’s two points to this. One is stressing yourself with proper form. Someone gave me a great analogy. I don’t know what it was, an observation. Anyway, he was talking about running speed. And he drew an interesting little graph that was basically just a triangle. And he says, “As you get faster, the … ” Sorry, let me back up. He said, “There are common factors for successful running, as there are for lifting, as there are for most activities we would do. And the better someone gets, the less deviation you see from those common factors.”
So if you look at … If you look up Usain Bolt’s slow motion sprinting, you’ll see Bolt in slo-mo, and it’s amazing. But if you then look at all the other runners in that same race, they all have the exact same form that he does. They’ve all come to that point where you’ve found the common factor that allows you to perform at that maximum level. And so that’s an interesting thing that you’re focusing on that, not just getting to … or basically not relying on luck or survival of the fittest for people to get to the point where they can be in the right position to maximize their strength output, which I think is brilliant.
Now, here’s the second point. You brought this one up too, which is that the only … My line is, “You can’t know you did too much till you do too much,” and that little bit of progression. And that’s a sad thing, but it’s true.
Chris Duffin:
It is.
Steven Sashen:
That bit of progression is super interesting to me because, like we were talking in the 10 seconds before we started this about the problem … People talk about moderation, and they don’t get that the way you find the middle is when the pendulum has swung both ways, and you can identify what the middle is.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Sorry. There’s a business thought about this. Then I’m going to go back to you. Someone wrote a bunch of books in the late ’90s about finding balance between work and life. They sold millions of copies. In the early 2000s, he wrote a book that may as well have been called, “Sorry, I had my head up my butt.” And he said what it really is is you have times where work takes precedents and times where your life can take precedents, and you go back and forth between these two extremes if you’re trying to really accomplish something because there’s no way otherwise. That book did not sell at all.
Chris Duffin:
Well, I want to take that a step further here.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Chris Duffin:
This is that balance by extremes, and I gave the squat analogy, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
It is relevant to business, life, all these sorts of things in much another way as well because so many people don’t … They do try to find like this balance. And I say, “You find these crazy things that appear to be the dichotomy, work life balance, squatting crazy weights and having perfect technique.” We could take the list wherever. And you chase those, right? And that helps you find the middle on those things, but it also as a whole in business and in life makes you understand what really is truly important because the other stuff on the peripheral has to drop away. It forces you to take the introspection, whether you realize that you’re doing it or not, and understanding what your values are, again business and life, to define what is important in life.
So, like for me right now, I had the crazy career before. I was doing turnarounds for companies and getting companies sold and coming in. I was sought after for doing this sort of stuff. And I was training to try to be the best athlete that I could be, and I owned a gym on the side, and I had my hobbies. And then my kids were starting to get older, and I’m like, “There’s no time for this.” And I’m like, “What are my priorities?” And I’m like, “Well, family. Yeah. So let’s see … Training. Yeah, all right. Well, the hobbies that I like, actually those are priority above my job. And there’s my job. That’s got to go,” right? “There’s just no fucking room for this.”
So I walked away from this career that I made a lot of money in and was really secure and founded my own business and had been doing this stuff. But now I chase those things that are … It’s all one. Like my hobby is basically designing and engineering, and sometimes it’s automotives, but it’s equipment. It’s other stuff. It’s also the time for your friends and things like that, and you start … I created this environment that has drawn people from all over the place to come that have this shared set of values, and it’s done … Right now, I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, and I spend at least four hours a day or more with my family.
Steven Sashen:
Oh that’s awesome.
Chris Duffin:
Because my training is part of … Like the running to meet up with friends … So many people, when they try to seek balance, it’s like, “I’ve got to balance out work and life,” they end up not engaged. They’re not engaged with their work. They’re not moving forward with their career. So they go home, and they turn on the TV and have a beer. And Sunday, going to watch the game. And the kids are trying to talk to him, and they’re just like … They’re not engaged with their family at that point. Things fall away in life, so chasing your extremes is going to, one, allow you to live an action book life, which I think is … This isn’t for everybody, but, those that want to seek to challenge and improve themselves, it’s a great way to do that, but it drives you to actually help find the priorities.
There’s a lot of other ways that I use around this process. So anybody that wants to check out my book, The Eagle and the Drag, I did mention, best seller in philosophy and self-improvement and stuff like that. It’s a crazy story too. But I cover a lot of this stuff. Don’t tell you how to live or any of this sort of stuff but kind of guide you on a process to find that yourself. But anyway, it’s one of those things. If you think about it, it ends up doing so much for you, instead of chasing this moderation type approach.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I’m going to ask you a weird question. So when you were on the consulting side and doing turnarounds, et cetera, where you this big?
Chris Duffin:
Yes. Yes, I was.
Steven Sashen:
And how did people respond to you?
Chris Duffin:
Well, I’ve always been judged my entire life. I grew up like homeless in the wilderness, so you walk into a store and you’ve got-
Steven Sashen:
Houseless.
Chris Duffin:
Houseless, living in a tree fort to avoid the rattlesnakes, or in a trailer down by the river, in a condemned home, whatever. So, a different environment, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
And you’re judged for that, even by people that shouldn’t, your teachers, people that should be supportive. Like you’re the poor trash, right? And then going in my corporate career, growing up, or going into the gym, people see me. I’m a giant, tattooed-up guy. And it’s like, “Where do you bounce at?” I’m like, “Well, here’s my background, by the way. I graduated top of my class, all this sort of stuff.” They’re like, “Oh.” And then you go in the work environment, and same thing. It’s just interesting but I’m used to being judged, just like today. People don’t realize. They’ll see me. They’ll see my videos online, and they reach these assumptions that I’m just some dumb blockhead, until they dive into the content, and they’re like, “They call you a mad scientist for a reason.” I’m like, “I actually have awards for scientific innovation, by the way, and patents and things like that, whatever.”
Steven Sashen:
I want to know how much it played-
Chris Duffin:
It’s good. It’s a dichotomy. It’s the balance of extremes, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, here’s the thing. I want to know how … I’m sure you have a story. How do I want to put this? So I have a number of friends who were blonde who have told stories of how they exploited the fact they were blonde, and that people thought they were dumb blondes, and they took advantage of that. In fact, I actually … God, I just had a crazy flashback. I met this woman when I was performing for a living. I was in Florida, a very attractive blonde woman. And she did something where she sort of batted her eyelashes at me. And I went, “Oh my god. You do this thing where you just bat your eyelashes at people, and they just do whatever you say because they just fall into that, don’t you?” And she goes, “Yeah. Oh … Oh.” So when I saw through her clever ploy, it had no impact. And then she dumped me immediately, which I thought was a smart move because it wasn’t going to work. But do you ever play the muscle-head thing to kind of let people go down that road and then kind of smack them with reality at the end of it?
Chris Duffin:
Not really. I’m pretty much my authentic self wherever I am. I’ve been taking a lot of shit for that lately with my hair and stuff like that online. Actually, I just got out of the shower, so it’s not sticking all over the place today.
Steven Sashen:
Dude look, I’ve got-
Chris Duffin:
I’ve got ADHD-
Steven Sashen:
Stand in line.
Chris Duffin:
I’m bipolar. Like I just I am the way I am in the world, and that’s the way I present myself. And so it definitely … Yeah. When people connect, you always see the eyes open up a little bit like, “Oh wait. I just made some judgments that were the wrong direction.
Steven Sashen:
You’ve just got to use one good SAT word in a sentence, and it makes them go, “What?” But the hair thing is funny. I was talking with a venture capitalist, and he had his head completely up his butt about the reality of footwear and orthotics. He’d been wearing orthotics for 20 years, couldn’t walk barefoot at all.
Chris Duffin:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a long story. But at one point, he was talking to me about what his doctors had said, and his doctors clearly were just trying to get him into surgery. I mean, that’s all they did. That’s all they saw. And I just looked at him. I said, “Dude, just because I have hair like this doesn’t mean I’m not smarter than your doctor.” That was it. I’m not wearing white … Look, I was a premed. I know all those guys. My friends who were the ones who went into medicine were not the smartest ones of my friends. So, FYI.
Chris Duffin:
It’s funny because I’ll speak at colleges and at events where it’s like leading PhDs. It’s like all this, and then there’s me. And it’s just like-
Steven Sashen:
So I’ve got to tell you a story, and just I’m curious what your thoughts are, or I imagine you have similar things. I have never lifted anything close to 1,000 pounds, but I’ll never forget the day I deadlifted 405.
Chris Duffin:
Nice.
Steven Sashen:
And my first thought was, “Holy crap, that’s a lot of weight.” And my second thought was, “Crap, now I’ve got to go for 500.”
Chris Duffin:
495.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Back to your point about progression, progression’s so interesting because … I mean, I never decided to do that. There was no value in me getting to be a 500 pound deadlifter at 150 pounds. But the thing that was interesting to me was just how that, when there is this idea of progression that you can see, and you’re not like looking at way down a tunnel, how motivating that is. And how to use that effectively is something that I’m really interested in, and obviously you’ve had a lot of experience with that.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. It is definitely good in those … We’ve got the intrinsic motivators, and then we’ve got those things that are right in front of us, and a lot of professionals like to pooh-pooh those other metrics, and they can be … If you align those properly with the other things, they can really help move you forward. And so it’s also a great way to see it. On that topic, I do a lot of work with the Special Olympics. We sponsor events. We have coaches that work with their teams. And we do this all just for free.
And there is nothing I’ve ever seen more empowering for that group of people than strength training because they have so many people that are trying to motivate them and tell them stuff, but they still know a lot of times it’s words. But you actually get them in, and they see, and they know over a couple months period of time the impact that it has on their emotional wellbeing, their confidence. It transforms a whole lot about their life, actually getting them under the bar and them knowing. No one has to tell them a thing. I put effort in. I made progress. I’m strong. That is just so powerful to watch.
Steven Sashen:
The only kind of real confidence comes from accomplishment. I mean, that’s it.
Chris Duffin:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
And ironically, when you have the accomplishment, you don’t think of it as confidence. You just have … I mean, you’re just doing what you do. And the idea of building … I hear this in business all the time. It’s like, “You have to build up your confidence.” It’s like, “No, you just have to do the thing that’s next.”
Chris Duffin:
You have to win. You have to go … put something out there and accomplish it.
Steven Sashen:
What I say to people, I say, “Look, I’ve been an internet marketing person since 1992. I have what people would call confidence about what I know how to do. But my confidence means that I know that my ideas could be completely wrong. I’m not attached to any idea that I have because what I’m confident about is the process of getting to the end result. But how we get there, none of my business.” People don’t get that. They get very confused. They go, “What do you think about this ad?” I go, “I think I have no idea. Let’s run it and see how it works.”
Chris Duffin:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
And they’re like, “But don’t think you think … ” It’s like, “I don’t care what I think. It’s meaningless. My opinion is not relevant,” and they’re very confused by that. So, I want to dive in because we don’t have a ton of time, unfortunately. But boy, it seems like you and I could do this all day long, so we’ll have to do that at some point. But if we want to talk to people about, let’s say, building that confidence by building some strength and using their body correctly, whether they’re running or not. We’ve got a bunch of runners, but let’s not cater to runners, or lets separate runners out.
If someone’s going to start on a strength training program, based on what you know, based on what you think is important, what would you recommend to them? other than the obvious, which we’ll get to, which is track you down. But on their own, if they’re sitting around right now just thinking, “What am I going to do?” We’ve given them some inspiration. If they want to go try something as soon as we’re done chatting, what would they do? How would they get started?
Chris Duffin:
So, a couple of fundamental things to understand around adaptation is the research showing acute versus chronic loading. And this is reference for runners too. So, chronic sounds bad, but that’s your average loading over the last several months. Your acute is your short term. And there’s a reason I’m going to just cover this fundamental, and then we’ll jump into actually actionable stuff. Acute is your short term, so let’s say your week. How we actually move up our average level of strength, our average level of cardiovascular, whatever it is, is we have to have spikes in our acute loading, and then that starts bringing up this average, right?
But if we have spikes of acute loading of over 10% of what our chronic loading is, that’s … 80% of injuries actually happen from that. So it’s actually not the poor movement. It’s not the over-stride. It’s not all the content I produce around correctives and all this stuff. That’s 20% of injuries. 80% is poor programming that actually causes you that big stuff. So it’s really important to understand this when you start out or if you’ve taken a break and get back to training because your training is … your chronic loading is zero or close to zero, so we need to ease into this. You don’t want to go crush it. You don’t want to hire that personal trainer that is going to want to show you how good they are and make you not walk. Okay?
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Chris Duffin:
So, how we train, what program, you could pick a whole lot of stuff, but roughly if you can hit each muscle group twice a week is going to elicit, for the most part, the best gains. So at that point, we’ve stimulated stress. We’re having an accumulation of what we call fatigue. And then that starts tapering off, but if it tapers too far we don’t make any progress, so before it disappears you need to load again.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Chris Duffin:
And this goes, again, running, anything. So, twice a week for strength training is usually pretty good. All right? The more we can pack into shorter times as we progress, the more gains you can make, but that works pretty well. Now you need to look at what’s going to fit in your lifestyle. Don’t over-commit. Don’t go, “I’m going to train six days a week because I said such and such program. I saw Duffin’s training, and he trains five days a week,” just pick. I was performing at world class level when I was doing my, not at the 1,000 pounds squat/deadlift level, but I was ranked number one in the world when I had that crazy career, and I was training three days a week because that’s all I could it in my life. It was Monday night, Wednesday night and Saturday morning. That was it. So, three days a week is not a bad place to start.
So, now break up your training and split it over whatever fits for your timeframe. If you’ve got 40 minutes three days a week, go ahead and do that. Now, over time, we want to start adding more volume, more frequency, however you go about that. So, over three days, it takes you to work through the whole body. Figure out a way to work through that, right? Or sorry, twice. If you can only start once, go ahead and start there.
So let’s say we’re starting hitting the body once a week, but Duffin said, “Hey, we want to try to do twice a week.” We don’t go to … Again, think about that 80/20 rule as far as injuries as far as the 10% spike. So if we’re going to jump to twice a week training, let’s say I’m going to do a four day split now, and I’m going to do everything in two different programs, so day one, day two, and then repeat later in the week, I can’t just take my workouts before and double them. I need to take that volume, split it in half, and now add let’s say 10%, less than 10% because we can’t add that two that split apart. We want to add this stuff over time.
And here’s another reason we don’t want to jump. People do this with dieting, per se, all the time. “I’m going to hit the cardio every day. I’m going to cut all my calories out. I’m going to do all of this stuff.” And then you stop making progress. Where do you go? You’ve consumed all your available … You can’t move any further, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
So I’ve been training for 32 years. And to be able to advance that, it’s small things. Like in the last decade, as I was working towards those big squats and deadlifts, one cycle to the next might be another rep or two. Like that’s the type of change we’re talking about, right?
Steven Sashen:
Right. That’s a big deal. Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
So it’s understanding that. It’s going to be fast. It’s going to come way faster than that early on, but don’t jump, push to it. Early on, you probably may end up having more breaks before you develop the discipline. That’s why, again, understand your lifestyle and what you can commit to first. There is no optimal, the perfect diet that’s going to give you the best results. There’s no the best training plan. There’s the best that fits within the scope of your life and how you want to live, your lifestyle, your work, your family, all those sorts of things.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to add a variation on that. So, for me personally … That’s redundant. For me personally, I, I found that I need to have a program that’s a five to six day a week program because the consistency is important for me. If I know I’m off Monday, Wednesday, Friday kind of thing, if Wednesday becomes a crazy ass day, then that screws up the whole thing. And if I know … And I’ve broken it down so that my workouts are often like 20 to 30 minutes tops.
Chris Duffin:
That’s what I was just going to say. Yeah. So my workouts these days are usually five days a week, are 30 to 40 minutes. That’s it now.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
Because I don’t lift heavy. I’m just … But now let me give some more actionable. I would shoot for about three to four exercises per workout. And then within that, each exercise, shoot for three to four sets total. Start with your big basic primary movers first, so some really basic like whole body stuff, pressing and squatting and whatever it is. It could be over-head. It could be pushups, whatever that is, and before you would do more of singular joint type work, if you’re doing that sort of stuff. So that gives you kind of a good platform. You could go beyond that, depending on … but scope-creep is a huge problem. I see this mostly a lot in mobility as well. People read this exercise, read that mobilization, read this, and it’s like, “Well, I need to add that. I need to add that.” Next thing you know, you’ve got 12, 16 things, and one’s, “Ah, It’s half-ass. Don’t worry about it. It’s not working today. I’ll just move … I know I’ve got more next,” and you end up not putting the effort in.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
So, keep it restricted so that you make sure … Think about it. It’s the same concepts I keep talking about. Make sure you pick things that are really a priority. You can’t address everything at once, so pick your top two or three priorities and work on those. Same thing with like trying to fix movement or other issues in your body. If you’ve got 20 freaking major issues … Well, one, rethink your training and your life. Two, you’re not going to fix all those at once, so don’t pick the 20 mobilization stuff. You should not be doing movement prep more than nine minutes per session. If you’re doing more than that, it’s too long. Okay? The adaptation actually comes in the training. It comes in the running. It comes in all those sorts of things. So pick the two, maybe three things, that you need to have as a priority, and then nail them. Nail it. And then a few months later, once you’ve nailed then, now pick the next thing. Okay?
Steven Sashen:
Was it Herschel Walker who said all he ever did was push-ups, pull-ups and wind sprints?
Chris Duffin:
Man, that’s a good combo. Those are killers.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
Back when I had an open gym that people could come to and do stuff, and they’d come, and they’d go, “It’s bench day.” I’m like, “Well, let’s see a push-up.” And they’re like, “I’m not a newbie.” And I’m like, “Yeah. Well, you’ve got to be able to push-up.” Push-ups and pull-ups are still part of my weekly routine right now. They’re some of my key stuff that I do. And wind sprints, man, that’s freaking … I don’t do them because … they’re too hard.
Steven Sashen:
Not your thing.
Chris Duffin:
Actually, I do them with BFR up my driveway, hill sprints. So I do the blood flow restriction, so I don’t have to do as much, and I wear my barefoot shoes.
Steven Sashen:
My joke is that, since I’m a competitive sprinter, I do a bunch of stuff that’s all designed for helping that, and then I do basically some pushing, like bench press or push-ups and some pull-ups because I’m vain. I don’t need that, but I like to look good when I take off my shirt and have my wife go, “Oo.”
Chris Duffin:
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I have no problem with it. I just enjoy admitting it.
Chris Duffin:
But so many people don’t, and they want to justify it. “Oh, I just want to get … ” Like, “No, it’s okay.” Like, “It’s fine.”
Steven Sashen:
No, I’m vain. Yeah. For whatever reason though, that’s a thing. That’s all awesome advice. I’m just thinking if someone did just pick any sort of like squat or lunge, body weight or not, with some small amount of weight, some sort of pushing thing, some sort of pulling thing. They split that up over however many days makes the most sense for them with a nominal amount of volume, so the first few weeks you feel like you’re definitely not doing nearly enough.
Chris Duffin:
Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
And then just build up very slowly until at some point you’re going to go, “Oh shit, that was too much,” and then you back off and repeat. That’s it.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. Find the edge. I ref
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