StrongFit | Training Yourself To Feel Less Pain And Handle Extreme Discomfort w/ Julien Pineau

Julien is a movement specialist who will teach you a thing or two about extreme discomfort, pain, and intensity. We move past technique and programming today to focus on the end game — creating and applying torque. I also had a blast nerding out with him on the concept of pushing your brain as hard as you push your body.

In this episode, some things we talk about:

  • Why torque changes everything, even if it visually LOOKS like you’re performing a movement correctly
  • Difference between mobility and flexibility: Why passive stretching hasn’t fixed your hips yet
  • Building a mental palace to push, organize, and strengthen your mind

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Show Notes:

  • “I found myself when I started MMA, that’s when things really clicked for me.” (2:20)
  • “I could more or less wonder my intellect in easy life. It’s that moment when you have to look in the mirror. And I realized and decided that I needed to build something.” (3:21)
  • “In the end, them saying no was the best thing that could have happened to me. I struggled really hard for a few years. Sold my car, lost 20lb because I had to ride up and down to my gym on a bicycle.”
  • “Steroids and CrossFit, honestly is the wrong conversation. What we want to look at are pain killers and anti-inflammatories. That’s the dirty secret of CrossFit.” (4:45)
  • “The body moves well. We just messed it up along the way. We learn wrong patterns along the way that creates imbalances and deficiencies that ends up causing trauma. The key is if I can just remove what you’re doing wrong, chances are the body will do right on its own.” (9:40)
  • “Skill, Eccentric, Weight-bearing. The lower the SEW, the higher I’m going to push the intensity. The skill is very limited on a sled push. I know that there’s not much that’s going to stop you from taking two more steps. You won’t pay the price for it in the sense of, your knees won’t ache the next day. Your back won’t be destroyed.” (11:30)
  • “What is the difference between mobility and flexibility really? Mobility is the range of motion that you have while maintaining torque. If it is without tension or torque, then it is flexible. Passive stretching will increase flexibility, but will not increase mobility. With flexibility, the second I put weight or load, I have to increase torque. If you’re increasing the range of motion with just flexibility by itself, I don’t want to say that it’s useless, but it’s not interesting.” (14:00)
  • “Creating torque is everything. That’s how you create strong joints, strong mobility, and strong movement.” (16:10)
  • “If you don’t understand how to create torque, you can LOOK like you’re doing the movement correctly, and yet you’re doing it completely incorrectly. If you create the wrong torque overhead, you will get hurt and mess yourself up. You are looking the part but not being the part.”
  • “For people’s hips to be healthy, first they need to understand what a hinge is.” (25:45)
  • How do you really know if you know how to hinge?
  • “How come you can feel the pain is getting worse over weeks and weeks and months and months? It’s never trauma that happens just one time. It’s things that are happening over weeks, you just don’t know how to stop it. Eh, whatever I’m gonna wait until it breaks. Problems relating to imbalances come from you applying torque incorrectly. If we fix that, we fix them.” (36:00)
  • “Pain is an interpretation of the brain. Nothing else. If you associate intensity with pain you are training yourself to feel more pain. After that, the better you get at it. The lower the level of intensity is where the pain is going to start. They have that moment where they are in pain all the time. Because the brain signals pain at an intensity at any level. That can work the other way as well.” (41:12)
  • Memory Palace: “It’s something used for memory. It allows you to develop a certain mental strength. It allows me to stick with problems longer. I’m not smarter than anybody. I can stick with problems longer that way. That’s the thing with the mental palace. That you are in control of. I don’t need the phone to do that. I’ve built that room in my head.”  (47:15)
  • “It’s the greatest thing you can do for someone. Is give the ability to someone to create that room.” (55:33)
  • “This has been mankind’s greatest invention. Books. There is no question. The number of things that are in those few cubic inches. The stronger you can make your mind the better you will be as a human being.” (56:33)
  • “Those guys went so far in their own field, that they’re bound to come up with stuff that you can use in yours. They have opened their mind to concepts that are very hard to conceptualize. Those are very difficult and probably painful to conceptualize. Out of that pain out of that struggle that they had to go through to become better, they can teach you so much.”  (1:04:00)
  • “I had to sell my car just to pay the rent. Do you know when you pay the rent on the 10th of every month? That was my life for 3 years. At the same time, it was the greatest thing. It taught me how to take the hits. At no point in those 5 years where I struggled so much did I ever think about quitting. It never even entered my mind. I was like I don’t care if I have to work security at night. But I will not close the gym. I will do whatever I have to do to build something. (1:11:15)
  • “I don’t want to live in a world where I see so many athletes one step away from breaking. And their only options are to stop doing what you’re doing or wait until it breaks. I want to train coaches so they can train coaches. So we can fix a million people instead of 200.”

Podcast Transcript:

Julien  00:00

Hey guys, this is Julian Pineau and you’re listening to the airborne mind show.

 

Misbah Haque  00:29

Hey guys Misbah Haque here. Today, we are going to be talking with Julien Pineau from a strong fit. The reason I am beyond excited to have him on the show is because he is doing a world tour right now, where he shares a lot of his principles and philosophies on training. And he’s going to drop some of that knowledge for you today. He is a movement specialist who knows a thing or two about extreme discomfort, pain and intensity, and he’s going to teach us how to increase that tolerance or that threshold, we move past technique and programming today to focus on the end game, creating and applying torque, I also had a blast nerding out with him on the concept of pushing your brain as hard as you push your body. In this episode, we talked about why torque changes everything, even if it visually looks like you are performing a movement correctly. We talked about the difference between mobility and flexibility and why passive stretching hasn’t fixed your hips yet. And we talked about building a mental palace to push, organize and strengthen your mind. Before we get started, head over to the airborne mind calm and sign up for the newsletter, you’ll get my weekly athlete digest along with this free book I’m working on, which is pretty much my notes on all these fascinating guests we’ve had so far. So it’s all the distilled nuggets that you wish you might have written down, but you’re probably driving or doing something else. So it’s gonna be like having these fascinating minds in the back of your pocket. And you can refer back to it at any point. So head over there, sign up, you’ll get all that good stuff. You can also check out some of the show notes there as well. So with that being said, Please enjoy. Julien, welcome to the show, man!

Julien  02:06

Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you.

Misbah Haque  02:08

Good, man. I’m super excited to have you here. You’ve been on tons of podcasts. And I resonate with a lot of your philosophy. So I’m very excited to kind of share that with the listeners today. Let’s talk a little bit about your background in fitness before even a strong fit kind of got started.

Julien  02:28

That’s the long run. I started. I guess the first sport I was really good at would be soccer. But we talked when I was like eight, nine years old. And I was part of a very good French team in Paris. I remember ACM 13. That was a 13 on the small soccer team and everything. We actually had a very high level. We wanted to differentiate between the championship, European Championship, and 910 year old so it was kind of cute. But yeah, so it started a while ago. And I went into swimming, wrestling, martial arts, bow and arrows actually, believe it or not. I’ve been in sports all my life, basically. And how I started lifting weights when I was like, I don’t know, like 18, I think. But I found myself when I found MMA. A team. That’s really when things clicked for me. 

Misbah Haque  03:19

That’s awesome. And how did this kind of strong fit come about?

Julien  03:23

The real thing is I was so I traveled a lot right? To Africa, when I was 14 came back to France, moved to Europe. Left for LA, I was 24. So it was 1998. And then, because of MMA, I moved to Brazil, in what was like two or three, right to do two more and everything. And so here I am, it’s like 2007, I’m in Brazil, I have a daughter now she’s a few months old. And I had two choices, I could basically keep going, running my life the way I was doing at the time, which was not exactly full of responsibilities. Let’s put it this way outside of my daughter. And I could Molly squander my intellect in an easy life. Or I could, there’s that moment where you have to look in the mirror. And I realized I needed to build something. And so I was like, okay, at the time, Brazil was not a good place to do that. So I decided to come back to LA and build the gym. And that’s how strong fingers really started. So I came back to LA, I was supposed to come back because I had a few people I wanted to finance me. So I came back to LA. I have my wife at the time, my daughter, and I get there and then they tell me no, we’re not going to finance you. And so that was fun. And so we wish you at the end it was good actually. The best thing that happened to me is the fact that they said no because I struggled really hard for a few years. So my car lost 20 pounds because I had to go up and down to my gym on a bicycle which was like 10 miles or 15 Miles uphill. So it forced me to build a gym my own way to make my own mistakes, to have absolutely no net. And so I made every single mistake you could make as a business owner. I don’t know how I made it, but I managed to make it. But it was in a weird way, the best thing that could happen to me was to struggle that much because I was given the time to make mistakes as well, maybe if I had partners, things would have gone differently. Because I was on my own making my own mistakes. I had the time to add the time to make those mistakes, time to find my own system. Time to develop what I wanted to do. So you ended up working really well. Very cool. And you work with, you know, tons of elite athletes and you know, to the common I feel like they look unbreakable, they look unstoppable. Right? But how do you kind of uncover some of these weaknesses that are hiding inside these top athletes? Because they’re not hiding man, like everybody has that idea that cross videos don’t break any couldn’t be further from the truth. Like, there is that talk all the time about steroids in CrossFit. And I think honestly, it’s the wrong conversation. There are not that many steroids. In CrossFit. What we want to look at is painkillers and anti inflammatories. That’s the dirty secret of CrossFit energies, the top ones, I mean, at the mid level, I know so many CrossFitters that cannot walk out without taking 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, almost on a daily basis. That’s the dirty secret, not steroids. And so a lot of the athletes that you see that go to the CrossFit Games are hurt almost all year long. There is almost this, they are always in pain somewhere, the thing you don’t see is because who’s gonna post that on Instagram, right? It’s not glamorous, it’s not fun. I mean, like, who wants to see an athlete going, Man, I woke up this morning, I can’t raise my shoulder or I can’t raise my arm over my head. Because my shoulder hurts so bad. And I’m 22. And that scares me and I almost cried last night, because I’m in so much pain. Who wants to see that? Right? So you’re never gonna see it. But that’s the reality of all those athletes is they pay the price, like all pro athletes, because that’s what dobcross videos are. They’re in pain all the time. A lot of them are broken. Like how many surgeries did Sam Briggs get so far? She has, she has been like, what, whatever year for like, four years now. And everything, like asking her how she feels in the morning, trust me. So that idea that they don’t break is honestly couldn’t be further from the truth. So when I get there, they rush to me and they go a my lower back hurts on the left or my right shoulder is messed up. Why do I do? So it’s actually fairly simple. It’s I don’t have much to uncover, trust me. It’s very obvious where they’re broken, where they start to hurt and everything. So from there, there’s a certain pattern that seems to be fairly obvious in CrossFit that I go after. But any goes past that. It’s like people have to stop thinking about those top CrossFitters like athletes that don’t break that train every day, six times a day, that don’t need to take days off that recover. They don’t. Like everybody else, I can tell you Lauren Fisher didn’t train for four weeks after the CrossFit Games. Now they are the Christian hottie Christian hotel, I’ve got to do anything. She was actually Oh my God, I don’t feel good. So she went back into training. But he was easy training. Now we’re starting to talk about programming this year. We in late September, it took them two months to recover from the CrossFit Games. Like all the other ones, like if you look at all Instagram, understand that they were holding the mud run the Spartan Race, you know why? Because he couldn’t train. That’s why. And they need to do something. Because they’re broken from the CrossFit Games like some denser high fields, because he completed the entire CrossFit Games on a broken leg. Like having a one on one conversation, we stopped CrossFit athletes, they are not unbreakable. Trust me. And that’s a disservice to them. Look like they are human beings, like everybody, and people need to understand those guys break more often and everybody else they just that is their choice, that they want to make it so they’re willing to do the sacrifice to put in the work and the sacrifices necessary physically and emotionally to go into the games. But it’s a tremendous disservice to them to think like they have those machines that don’t break and don’t rest.

Misbah Haque  09:30

So what’s your philosophy behind fixing these broken athletes?

Julien  09:36

I always look at it as if you look at them. It’s almost like a Christian bias in a way but it’s that idea that they have that the body is something that is inherently flawed that needs to be fixed. Well I look at it the other way. I think the body’s perfect the way it is like evolution get us where we are in a not a perfect state, but you know, the body moves way. We just mess it up along the way, we do just certain wrong patterns along the way that creates imbalances and deficiencies that end up causing trauma. But the key is if I can just remove what you do wrong, chances are the body will do right on its own, which is a bit the other. Sometimes doctors look at it the other way, it’s like the body’s that thing that is not to be trusted, that they need to fix. Every time you see a doctor, as he always has stuff to fix me, it’s like now you’re doing certain things wrong, that you shouldn’t be doing that way. And if I can just fix that, the rest will take care of itself. So my job is not really to, I mean, it’s to fix things, but just by allowing your body to move the way he would want to move if you were not getting in the way, basically, and so I look at it differently. Like me, I try to coach as little as possible, I try, I just tried to remove the key logs that are here and there. Understanding that once I do that, the body will work perfectly on its own. I see so many athletes that in a weird way, if they had not been taught incorrectly, they’d be fine. But because they were forced into a movement pattern, they started to break. But basically we did it for them, the coach or whatever we did it the body on its own would have been fine. We just got in the way.

Misbah Haque  11:16

Now you have a method for pushing intensity without increasing stress on the body. Can you dive into how that works for someone who might have no idea about this?

Julien  11:26

I call that the SEW, right. And so S stands for steel. E stands for eccentric, and W stands for weight bearing. So the idea is that the lower the SEW the higher I’m going to push the intensity. Why? Because it’s simple. Let’s say I use something that is very low SEW like a sled push. So the scale is very limited on a sled push, obviously. So I know that’s not going to stop you from taking two more steps. So you can always push a bit harder on the sled. And then Louie centric means I don’t go against muscle fibers. So there is no muscle breakdown. So the chances of tearing or Rhabdo on anything is very small. And no way everything’s I don’t go against the joints. So that means there is no energy spent on each century, there is no grinding of the joints, and there is no skill to stop you. So that means I can push the intensity as high as I want, you’re going to be able to push as hard as you want, and I’m not going to damage the body doing so. So that means the next time we go into that workout, the body has no reason to go a little bit further into intensity. So the key is not so much. I don’t look at the SEW for one session. I think like over time, with the lowest SEW of your time, you’ll be able to increase the rate of intensity of your workout a little bit at every workout, because you will never I mean, you won’t pay the price for it in the sense of your knees will not eat the next day your back will not be ruined because of the low centric low weight bearing. And the fact that it’s a low skill allows you to keep pushing harder and harder and harder.

Misbah Haque 13:03

So what are some of your favorite movements? You mentioned the sled push. But what are some favorite movements that are kind of examples of these? 

Julien 13:11

Well, like for example, something like the crossfader like the Aerodyne, right? The two are like the airline because again, there’s absolutely no skill, no eccentric load, no weight bearing, so you can push yourself as hard as you want. Without with no consequence, no bad consequences. Anyway, my favorite tool is to do it because I can do so much more with a sled I can drag it, I can push it as a sprint, I can put a harness put a lot of Shitload shitload of weight on it and bear crawl it, I can pull it with a rope, I can do a lot of movements that allow me to hit different planes of movement, and hit the weaknesses that I need to hit, basically using a sled, which every time is a low scale movement, Low centric, low weight bearing, so it’s the lowest SEW so that allows me to do so much with a simple sled. So it’s by far my favorite one. 

Misbah Haque  14:00

Now, I love your way of thinking when it comes to mobility. And I did an experiment on myself last year where for three months, I did about an hour of mobility on my hips every single night just to see what would happen. And it felt great. But every day after training every night when I was back to it, you know, it was like starting at square one. And it was kind of short term, it was addressing the tightness that I felt. But the most important question was like why? And I have shit to do, right? So I didn’t want to be doing an hour of mobility every single night. So tell me a little bit about your approach to handling this.

Julien  14:40

So what is mobility really the difference between mobility and flexibility? Mobility is the range of motion that you have while maintaining torque right defeats without tension without torque, then it flexibility. Mobility is the range of motion that you have while maintaining torque. So that’s really that’s really the key is passive stretching will increase flexibility, but it will not increase mobility. Like, if you look at the greatest example of mobility that would be gymnastics like the Iron Cross, you wet your edge of your range of motion for your arms and you create the maximum torque in that position. So really, that’s the greatest example of extreme mobility would be gymnastics, like passive stretching will increase the range of motion, but the second I put on weight, I put load, I have to increase talk, I’m going to go back to where I was before. So that’s why the hour of passive stretching, or the mobility when you’re not being active, is useless for you. Because the second you go back to normal life, you need to create tension, you need to create talk, you go back to the random, the Go back to your earlier mobility, because by doing the passive stretching, you never increase mobility, you increase flexibility. So that’s, that’s the problem. Also, with the tail mobility that I think people misunderstand is the idea that we all have to fight tension. That’s gravity anyway. So we need to be able to increase the torque created at the end of range of motion, increasing the range of motion, just the flexibility by itself. I don’t want to say it’s useless, but it’s not interesting. Right? Now, do you feel like teaching just the concept of creating torque, creating tension is kind of undervalued? Oh, no, everything is tremendously undervalued. It’s everything. What else is there? If you can create tension? First of all, imagine, like, how do you get to know and cross is creating tension at the end of the range of motion? Creating torque is everything like otherwise? A movement, if you want, is a screw going through a plane of mood, it’s on a nail, a screw is stronger than a nail? How do you create a rope, you have to create a tool. You know, like a rope, a rope is a spiral, right? Every moment in life is a spiral. It’s a school going through a plane, not a nail. So if you don’t teach to talk, you don’t teach. To push a nail to a plank, you have to push to teach, you have to teach the action of a school. So everything is about looking at boxers. Look at all that stuff, the way to create power is to talk through no internal or external rotation. So learning to create torque is the way to create correct movement. Pawel has talked about it, all the greats I’ve talked about it with without creating torque, you cannot create efficient movement. That’s how you create strong movements. John, strong mobility is through creating.

Misbah Haque  17:31

And sometimes I feel like it’s very easy to show somebody like, this is how you should hold an overhead position. And somebody can be doing that, but have no idea really how to create that tension. And the second you kind of explained that even briefly, it’s a game changer. 

Julien  17:47

So let me give you an example. Do you play chess?

Misbah Haque  17:53

I don’t have much. 

Julien 17:55
You know of chess, but you know, artists. Do you know how you learn what chess chess is ? You do it by learning the end game. So there’s three phases. In chess, you have the openings, which is memorization, you have the middle game, where the strategy comes in, while you try to, to play the pieces together to start to create a powerful endgame in the endgame is when you’re going to learn the true nature of chess, because that’s when you learn the strength and weaknesses of each piece. You learn to move like a pawn, and the king against the king, you need to move a rook and an A king against a king. So you truly learn the nature of chess in the end game where you learn the power and weakness of every single piece that says you need to learn chess this way, if you learn the openings, that’s only memorization. You just know that yeah, people do that, because they want to, they want to learn how to make their friends really fast, because they allow us to show them how dazzling they are. But that’s not really the true nature of chess, the true nature of chess is in the end game. So for movement, it’s the same thing. The opening would be programming, people love to learn programs, it’s very dazzling. It allows you to say I’m doing smaller from doing that it makes for a great conversation, completely useless. The middle game basically is when you learn how to squat, you don’t have to Okay, that’s great. But that’s like in chess. If you learn the middle game, without understanding the power of the end game, you’re always going to get stuck in the end game. So if the key of the middle game is to create a position where you will have a strong end game, otherwise you always get defeated by your stronger opponents. Movement is the same. The middle game is the technical aspect, how to squat, how to hold the head, but that’s not the nature of movement, the nature of movement is torque. So the question becomes, how to apply torque. That is the end game . The nature of movement is how to apply it so I can teach about holding overhead all day long. That’s the middle game, that’s strategy. That’s the technical aspect. If you don’t understand how to create torque, you can look like you’re doing the movement correctly, and you’re doing completely incorrectly. So understanding how to be overhead, that’s the problem is that no, this is your whole overhead. If you create a wrong torque, while overhead, you’re actually doing it completely wrong. You might look like you’re doing it right. But you’re doing it completely wrong, and you will get hurt and you’ll mess yourself up. And then people are so confused, but I’m doing what you’re telling me? No, you’re not, you are looking the part that you are not being the part. And so the key to movement, which is torquing, is something I call the movement matrix, for example, you have four movement patterns, you have a pull up, push, and squatter hinge. That’s it. I mean, those are the movements, the loading patterns, you have those four, remember, Dan, John, that’s what he was saying, right? So how do you create torque in a pool, but the idea is to create an external rotation of the humerus. So I’m not talking about displacement, I’m not talking about actually moving the movement, I’m just talking about creating a talk to engage the lag properly. People understand that, but so what is the opposite of a positive push. So that would mean in that case, an internal rotation, you think like a boxer, right? A boxer when he punches, you can see that 10 rotating toward the inside. Why? Because he’s engaging his chest, which forces the hand, the torque on the inside, so it’s not so much at the elbow goes up more as you can talk to the inside, which moves the hand that way. But so you’re you don’t not talking about displacement talking more like a screw. A squat is an external rotation, therefore, a hinge is an internal rotation. So the problem when we talk about overhead positioning, for example, is like what is overhead positioning when you do overhead squat? You: It’s a press right, you’re pushing the bar up. So technically, it should be an internal rotation. So I’m not talking about moving the arm to the inside, I’m just talking about creating enough torque to engage the chest and the short head of the bicep to stabilize overhead, like you’re in a pressing motion. Most of the time, people are taught to externally rotate when they press overhead. Yeah, so technically, that’s a poor movement. Right? Right. So you might look like you’re doing it great. But in reality, you’re doing the movement completely wrong. Even though visually it looks like you’re stabilizing overhead and everything is aligned properly. Everything is actually misapplied because praying the wrong torque. And so you can mess up your shoulders, by holding the weight overhead incorrectly, even though visually look like everything is lined up properly. But internally, the torque will be wrong, and rake your shoulders completely. And that’s what I see. Most basically, it seems like that web talk is applied incorrectly, therefore wrecking the joints, even though visually can look like they’re doing it right. The concept is wrong. And so you will never be able to do it correctly that way. 

Misbah Haque 22:58
So you know, when I first started getting into Olympic weightlifting, I remember hearing the show your armpits cue a lot. And it was something that didn’t click for me. And once I started coaching it didn’t click for a lot of the athletes I worked with, and it made me feel pretty unstable. So what is your cue? And what’s your method for kind of teaching that concept of creating torque overhead?

Julien  23:22

I don’t like queues because people misinterpret queues all the time. And they end up breaking themselves because then they end up doing something wrong every time. So I teach the why and the how every single time, which means first of all, I need for people to understand what internal rotation means. People don’t mind showing your armpits to the point that they engage your lats. Right. So that’s why I really show your armpits. That’s what it means. I mean, engage your lats. So do people understand what can people engage your legs first of all you’re telling them to engage are less of a major problem with focus on female CrossFitters right now is when I think they engage your lads. That means that you know the douchebag Paul’s, like that guy at the gym was saying he has lots and his arms are flaring out like most, most female CrossFitters cannot do this. The second I’m asking them to engage your lats, they can gauge your traps. So, if you cannot find your lats this way, I’m looking at the latissimus dorsi versus the upper back and the traps right? Every time I say engage your latissimus dorsi they engage their traps. So if I say shot, show your pitch, it’s useless as a cue any way they can find their lads if you can find your lads, you certainly cannot engage them properly. So people have to stop going after the accused and starting to understand what that means. In that case, showing you on PT means engaging your lats and showing your lads properly. So, before we go into queues, I’m going to make sure you can engage your lats and show them so we might spend two weeks on that alone on top of you know, like how to develop the lats correctly and stuff like that. And once you have the lats engaged now I can teach you internal rotation which means you’re going to have your laps engaged. And now I want you to engage your chest as well. So you can create your pyramid of tension. I need the lats, I need the chest to be engaged, I need the short end of the bicep to hold it away correctly overhead. So rotation is it’s not so much about rotating the shoulder, it’s about just having the lat, the chest and the shoulder of the bicep engage. So I don’t really coach cues, I coach athletes to control their own body. So it’s a lot slower than going into a class and saying show show. You’re on pace, that’s for sure. But to me, cues are very dangerous. excuse our word. If you want. I don’t. I never teach what I teach you why and how always. So I don’t go fast. Sometimes it takes time. 

Misbah Haque  25:44

So we’ve talked a lot about the upper body and how about the lower half? How do we kind of keep strong and healthy hips? What kind of work? What are you doing to work with your athletes for the lower body?

Julien  25:58

So I was talking about rotation for the upper body, it’s the same thing for a lower body, like a squat is external rotation that’s accepted. Therefore, what is the hinge? hinge has to be if a squat is external rotation, and a hinge is internal rotation, right? So at first, to keep people’s hips healthy are two things, I have to see if they understand the concept of internal rotation, how to engage like the inside of the HMI. And can they hinge correctly. And I can tell you, most people cannot, most people because they’ve been taught to externally rotate on a hinge lock, the SI Jones into place ended up doing a flexion extension of the spine. So most people that I see, are using their spine to go to go into flexion extension instead of hinging at the hip. And that’s a tremendous problem. For people’s hips to be healthy. First they have to understand what a hinge is. To understand what a hinge is, you’re going to have to free the swivel of the hip, right? To do that you have to go into internal rotation. For example, everybody talks about external rotation, even in a setup for the deadlift, the deadlift, the deadlift is a hinge. Right, right. If it’s a hinge, why would you set up in your external rotation, if you do that your SI John is going to stop on moving. So what happens is you’re gonna have to initiate as a back extension, and then finish with the squat. You’ve never hinged, you never use the swivel to lift so you use your erectors and not the more powerful posterior chain. So the greatest example I have for this is, have you ever seen a sprinter externally rotated? I haven’t. You’ve seen Usain Bolt, does he look like he rotates when he runs? Now? Have you noticed that top Smith is almost pigeon-toed when they run? Why? Because they go to our internal rotation. What is a sprint, a sprint is a pure is a pure hinge. Now I mean, so every hinge is internal rotation. So we go back to the end game. In order to fix people, we have to stop thinking of middle game like technical aspects, how to teach you deadlift, and everything, you have to go to the end game, teach people how to create torque correctly, depending on the movement. A pole is external, pushes internal squat is external or hinges internal. That’s a matrix of movements to teach people how to create in the right loading pattern. If you do that, teaching, the squat is easy and correct every time no matter how they squat. If you understand the matrix of movement, you can teach an Olympic lifting squat or power lifting squat, low bar high bar wide stance rotate, it doesn’t matter. The matrix, the movement of the matrix movement is the same. The problem starts when people start to think, like the only lifting squat versus the powerlifting squat, it’s the squat the same Do you supply it a little bit differently, but the movement matrix is exactly the same is I need to know the posterior chain or homies I need to freeze the swivel as internal, I need to log the side job to be able to activate the quads fully. That’s external rotation that works no matter what form of squatting you do. So people have to stop fighting about how to teach only lifting and everything. Teach people how to talk to imply a proper on and a proper movement loading pattern. And the technique will follow from there. So instead of feeling everybody into one box, you have to let them squat their way. As long as you apply torque correctly. You don’t have to worry about how they do it. They’re going to do it correctly their own way. Like we all do things the right way differently, but we will do things the wrong way the same. So the key to fix a squat is not to make them fit into one box. The keys apply torque correctly according to the shutter loading parallel and they will squat correctly no matter what that way, stop over coaching people and stop thinking that there is one way to do anything. Only the Sith deals in absolutes. 

Misbah Haque  29:56

So how does somebody because the hinges are definitely something that’s commonly overlooked. I feel like it’s something people shrug off and they’re kind of like, okay, I know how to, you know, stick to my aspect. I know how to do a kettlebell swing. But how do you really know if you’re okay in this department?

Julien  30:13

People think they know how to do a kettlebell swing. What is a kettlebell swing? It hinges, right? Okay, look at people doing kettlebell swings, how many of them are squatting the weight?

Misbah Haque  30:23

A lot.

Julien  30:24

Most of them? So if your knees come out and everything, guess what? You’re not, you’re not hinging. So what the hinge basically means is to swivel at the hip. If your knees come out, every single time when you squat the weight, you’ve created external rotation, you’ve logged a psi Jones. If you log the psi John, you can swivel anymore. That’s the point. If you can swivel you’re using your back. So the key is to go back to teaching internal rotation correctly, which means how to engage the inside head of the HMI if you want, and freeing the swivel. So they are, that’s what I spend the most time on doing, for example, with my coaches is okay, we’re going to lean forward and I’m going to show you what it’s like to internally rotate, versus externally rotate until you can feel the difference in your hammies in your obliques in your entire core. So you can tell what it’s like to be in a hinge position versus a squatting position. And from there, you have to be able to apply that to every single movement. But until you understand the difference between internal and external rotation, you cannot do a movement correctly. If you externally rotate on a kettlebell swing, you’re squatting it, you’re not hinging it anymore. So like the way they I mean, it’s not a cube, but the way visually is, I can always tell if when their knee starts to rotate to the outside, on a kettlebell swing, right, that means they go to an external rotation, that usually tells me the squatting the weight, if they can keep their knees locked in. It’s not about focusing on the knees, it’s about focusing on rotation, but from a visual aspect, if their knees are facing forward the entire time, and they have control of their knees. That means they control their homies that mean the hinging. So look at yourself, when you do a kettlebell swing next time, Are your knees flaring to the outside. If they do, that means internally rotated, or at least when you start the movements, and when you end, then the kettlebell is at the bottom. Are your knees filled out? If they are filled? Or are they turning more toward the outside? I’m not talking abduction, I’m talking more to showing towards the outside, you externally rotated. If you externally rotate, that becomes a squat. Right? So if my knees are facing in the direction of my feet the entire time and see the same direction, I’m internally rotated, I’m hinging the weight, which is a correct way of doing your kettlebell swing. And just to clarify, you know, you’re not telling people like, Okay, your, your knees aren’t coming in, right? You’re, you’re, you’re teaching people how to create that feeling, right? And get that. Because if your knees are coming, you’re adopting, right, right. Abduction is not rotation. That’s a problem. Like, for example, if I say externally rotate, that doesn’t mean push my knees out. There’s a difference between pushing your knees out and externally rotated. Okay, it’s exactly the same thing. When I see some rotation, I don’t mean push my knees in, that’s adduction. adduction is not rotation. Remember, I’m talking about a screw coming into, into a plank, not a nail, if I let my knee come in, I’d lost tension. I’ve lost my talk, because now I’m adopting adduction is not rotation. So I don’t want the knees to come in, I want to stay out, the knee position has nothing to do with the rotation, I can have my knees completely out and be internally rotated. Because my knees are not rotated my female is not internally rotated. I’m creating talk, to walk internal rotation, I guess maybe I’m using the wrong term. When I’m saying internal rotation. What I mean by that is creating talk to the world internal rotation or rotation, internal rotation, creating talk, it’s all about creating tension, right? So my knees, my knees will never come in. And I can keep my knees out if I want to. I’m just talking about creating tension on the inside which will engage my homies fully, but in no way shape or form, am I saying that my knees should come in? I am not changing the technique of Olympic weightlifting, I can have my knees out completely. But creating tension to the inside will engage my homies properly. That’s all I’m saying. Right? It’s the same thing as saying like external rotation. I cannot mine it completely straight and externally rotated. External rotation is not knees out. There is a difference between the two. The second leg, my knees come out and end up on the edge of my seat. I’ve lost talk, actually. So knees out to the point where I lean on the outside of my feet, you lost external rotation. You cannot have abduction and external rotation just like you cannot have internal rotation and adduction. It’s impossible to have both. So the second units come in, you lose tension, you lose tension, you lose the torque I’m talking about. So it’s not about knee position. It’s about how to create tension. It’s an idea if you want, right? Like, how to gain tension to what internal Autobot externally second screw is going to the inside of us going to the outside. But in no way shape or form, I think the knees should come in. That’s been the biggest misconception people have. When I talk about internal or external rotation, And that’s why I just wanted to clarify that. Because I think it’s huge. I think that that feeling and that body awareness is very overlooked when somebody walks into the gym, especially when you may not have been active since high school or college, right? And you don’t understand how to create that tension, that feeling. So very cool. Now something that really resonated with me was your discussion on creating a field for movement specialists. And that’s something that you mentioned was in between personal trainers and practitioners like physical therapists, chiropractors, etc. So how do you kind of differentiate from something being a structural problem versus an imbalance problem? Like how do you know when they should come to you versus go to a practitioner? Well, whenever there’s damage to the structure, like the first thing I tell when there’s actual trauma, like, you know, there’s a difference between you waking up every morning, and like you got a hit by a car and your shoulder is messed up. We know there’s actual physical trauma, we do an MRI, we do an x ray, there is trauma that that that you have to go. That’s why Western medicine is for that you need to go see your doctor or PT and everything. But you always have that in between stages where you’re not broken yet. But imbalances have started to show like different humans, they were the valleys of the bodies, so in balance, pain has started. So you’re not at that level, where really, there’s been structural damage yet. But you’re on the way there. There is nobody to help you really at that stage. Like, basically right now. It’s either you wait until you break. Or you stop doing what you’re doing. How many times you go see a doctor and you say, my elbows hurt when I push weight overhead? And the answer is stop pressing overhead. Or your other option is keep doing it until you pop something and then I can help you. That’s that in between where I want people to help. And I think the biggest polemics are because people don’t understand, again, they are busy teaching the squat, or they’re busy waiting until you break. But nobody is looking at what the end game of movement is, which is how to apply correct rotation and how to apply torque correctly. And this is how we fix imbalances. If you’ve been externally rotating, pushing weights overhead, you have stretched your shoulder into an incorrect pattern tremendously, that has created some problems. Now you load your lats too much, you have an entire pattern of imbalances and undeveloped musculature, to anybody, right? There is no PT that can fix that, like he’s going to wait until you break. But then when you go back to pressing overhead, you are still doing the wrong pattern? What is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting different results? So you have an entirely wrong pressing pattern? You break your PT, you go back to that? What do you think is gonna happen? Exactly the same thing, you’re gonna break again. And that’s what you see over and over and over again. So what I mean, what I want is coaches that are capable of going, you doing it wrong, you’re applying talking correctly. And that’s what is holding you? How come? How come you can feel the pain getting worse over weeks and weeks and months and months. It’s never trauma that happens just one time, it seems that you know it is happening over weeks, you just don’t know how to stop it. So what is it like just something like, Whatever, I’m gonna wait until it breaks. That’s where we are right now. And that’s what drives me insane. I’m like, No, you’re just doing something incorrectly, the body should not be breaking. Right? If you were to do things correctly, you would not have that problem. That’s where I think the Christian bias comes in. It’s like, yeah, the body is messed up. It’s just gonna break anyway. I’m like, No, that is not true. That is not true. You just apply talk incorrectly, and that’s hurting you. Let’s find what the pattern is that you’re doing incorrectly. Let’s fix that. And then the body will do things correctly, and you’ll go on without pain. And that’s what I’ve been doing with athletes really interesting like this during right there your prime talking correctly. Let me explain to you why. And how do we fix it, let me explain to you how to apply to it correctly. So you can go back to your movement, but this time with the right pattern. And now pain goes away because you are just doing it correctly now, but that doesn’t come through teaching how to squat correctly, it comes to teaching how to apply torque correctly. So there’s another step there that is missing. Most cultures are busy in the middle game, we need to develop the end game, we need to teach the end game to coaches to explain to them what was wrong with the movement in the first place. And that’s what I want to develop the feel of movement specialist is people understand how to look at pareo based on creating rotation, cleaning talk, because that’s what mobility is that’s where strength is How to create to correctly a problem relating to imbalances always come from that they come from you applying talking correctly. So again, you can look at the movement, and it seems it’s perfect. And in fact, it’s completely wrong, because you can talk the wrong way. And that’s the biggest problem I have with that talk of external rotation all the time, is you, you’re playing the wrong talk. And I grinds people, hips, lower back shoulder, most of the problems that I see are just people creating talking correctly, if we fix that, we fix them.

Misbah Haque  40:33

Now let’s talk about pain versus intensity, right? Like, what do you do? What’s the difference? And how do you kind of train that tolerance or that capacity?

Julien  40:42

So the idea of pain, people think we have pain receptors, right? People misunderstand what pain is. People think we have pain receptors. The reason for that was a holiday card, the French philosopher, then French people. And about, like, what is that, like, for 350 years ago, came up with the idea of pain receptors, which was an improvement for Western medicine, don’t get me wrong, but he was still, he was still wrong, he had that idea. So he had that drawing. Well, let me go inside real quick, just because the iPad is running out of juice. So he had the idea of that. We have pain receptors, he had a drawing, where the guy’s next to a fire and his foot is next to the fire. And there’s a signal going from the guy’s foot to the guy’s brain saying, hey, there is pain. That’s nice. But that’s also completely wrong. That’s not what’s happening. I don’t know what we have, we have intensity receptors, there’s actually a name for it. It’s called Neo, something I can never remember the name of. Like, that’s where the medical world always catches up with me. He’s I don’t know any of that stuff. Because I absolutely have no degrees whatsoever. So we have an intensity receptor. This is why if you want, heat and cold feel the same. At a certain level, like you’ve noticed, like when it gets really hot or really cold, he actually feels the same and feels. So the idea is the second you reach a certain level of intensity, the intensity receptors will trigger to signal to the brain that they might be a problem to look in that direction. And that there can be structural damage from whatever is happening over there. And so now the brain looks on that side and goes, Okay, if there’s the possibility of structural damage, it will signal pain. So literally pain is an interpretation of the brain, nothing else, right? It’s the brain deciding whether or not a situation is dangerous for us or not, thank God, we have that. Otherwise, we’d be doing really, really stupid stuff all the time. Even more stupid than usual. Anyway, So but so that’s why you have ghost pain, you know, like people lose their hands and a newsletter still has the feeling of pain in the fingers, right? Well, they shouldn’t, there is no so I mean, that’s why there is no pain receptors, it’s just, it’s an interpretation from the brain. So the problem with that is, the more you do something, the better you get at it, that means like, if you start to associate intensity with pain, you train yourself to feel more pain. And so now after that, the better the better you get at it, that means the lower the level of intensity is where the pain is going to start. And then you get better off, that means now even at a lower intensity, you’re going to feel more pain, lower. So before you know it, at any intensity, you feel pain all the time. This is what you have when you take too much painkillers, you have that with veterans that are on painkillers all the time, they get to that weird moment where they’re in pain all the time. Because now the brain is triggering pain signals at any intensity whatsoever. And so when muscles tell you, Oh my god, I hurt my finger, they’re not lying. They’re really feeling pain. This is training themselves to feel pain all the time, right. So that can work the other way as well. If you can train at a level where there is no structural damage done to you, then what is your excuse not to train harder the next time, because then you just intensity is not paying anymore, right? So that’s the idea of the SEW, if I can make you do a training where there is no eccentric non weight bearing, so you’re not so have you not turned down the muscle, and you don’t apply pressure too much against your joints. So you wake up the next day. And you’re not so you’re not aching and you are anywhere. The first thing that goes through your mind is I could have gone harder. Okay, so now we’re winning, because then the next time you do that training, you’re gonna go a little bit harder, then you’re gonna wake up the next day, you’re going to go, I’m not sure. I’m not achy. I’ve gone harder. And so the next session and so now you’re training yourself to feel less pain, because there is no reason for your brain to create the signal of pain because there is no physical structural damage happening. Right? And so that’s the whole idea of the lowest SEW is like with a low skill, low eccentric, low weight bearing. I can trick or not trick you but I can basically make you understand that you should go harder In every single training session, and so over time, I can build you up to ridiculous intensity because every single time, your brain will look at the training session and go, Okay, fine. That’s intensity, not pain. And so suddenly you look at a horrible workout like I put people through as discomfort, not pain. No matter how bad it is. That’s all it was. It was uncomfortable. Is it? extreme discomfort? Yeah. People that train with me can tell you that. But it’s not pain anymore, because there’s no damage being done. It’s only extreme discomfort. Can you take extreme discomfort?  Can you take pain, eventually, you’ll build up fear. So that’s the thing is, if I do work out, and the next day your knee is swelling and blown up, then the next time you do that workout, you’re going to be fearful of it. So now I’m starting to lose, because now your body’s like, Oh, you’re not doing this, because that created damage. So the next time you do that same workout, you won’t go as hard, because you’re going to be afraid of the damage. So the key for me is to remove fear and to remove fear, I need to remove that physical damage. And so now, there is a difference between intensity and pain. So now you can go through discomfort, understanding that discomfort is not pain. And so we can go higher and higher and higher in the intensity of the workout. And that was the entire idea behind the SEW was to create a system that allows me to to increase intensity with without, not without triggering pain. Technically.

Misbah Haque  46:35

Now, you mentioned something about your mental palace, on Mind Muscle projects, podcasts. And I love how real and descriptive that was. It’s a great example for those of us who want to get inside your head. So can you walk us through what that is and what it exactly looks like?

Julien  46:54

The Greeks talked about that, about the mental palace and everything. It’s something used for memory. It’s Marcel Proust, he was a very famous French writer. And he had a photographic memory. And so he built what he called a memory palace, he writes about that, where, where it keeps all information because imagine you have a memory palace, and the guy could read books out of memory, entire books. Now, that’s a shitload of information in your brain, right? You can do that right? You have to organize it a certain way. Otherwise, how the hell are you gonna, so what he did was to organize that is he created what he called a memory palace, and then the Greeks talked about it which means he built an entire palace in his head. So for this to work is you have to have a tremendous you have to visualize exactly every single room of the palace, I’m going to explain exactly, but in this case, build a palace with rooms in it in every room, there was so there was corridors at the end of corridors, there’s a door then he takes that door inside that door, there’s a let’s say a dresser and he opens the dresser, this library inside the library so there’s rows inside of Rose’s books and then he would choose the book and be able to read it like this so he organized his entire memory like this in a palace that has room inside the room, there’s a library inside the library there are rows and rows of books and in the books are the information is looking for. And so that’s how we did everything. And so it’s called a memory palace, which is how you talk about memory. People organize their memories and always do it visually. Right. So add so much stuff speaking inside my head all the time. Me it has to be organized, it’s whatever they do is memory means everything is always spinning really fast up there. So it’s the same idea. So me I built a memory palace for example, for myself for coaching, so it’s a palace in my case it’s white it’s for this to work you have to visualize every single thing is you because you’re going to go in there every single day, every single day you’re going to build another room you’re going to build a bigger Palace, everything has to be visually even to the point where you can see the walls you can you know the smell of the room you know the touch you know everything of that room. So in that case if I go inside my palace right so the door in front what is the door is it made of wood is made of metal has a doorknob is Donald men of wood metal was the shape of the doorknob, I open and exactly what it looked like for me, I always take the stairs on the left. For whatever reason, it’s always on the left. So I take the stairs on the left, I go the first woman in my mental palace on the left, I walk into that room and this room there’s nothing in it. There’s only a bass tool in the middle of it so I sit on my bass tool and across the wall for me is a whiteboard on that whiteboard is written my entire system of the movement matrix. Everything that I use in my system is written on that whiteboard. So whenever I need to think about my system, I walk into my mental palace. So I go to the door, open the door. I take the stairs on the left, I go up the stairs, I open that door. Although I walk in, I sit on the barstool and I look at the whiteboard. And that allows me to do that every day, whenever I need to, I can see my entire system on the whiteboard, it’s like, you could basically look exactly the same as I do it mentally. So obviously it requires practice every day. And you have very allowed you to develop a certain mental strength, I guess, to work correct visualization of things. And so from there, like Marcel Proust did it because with his photographic memory, he could store any information somewhere, so we had so many rooms, you build rooms, after rooms after rooms, and he could store any information in any of the rooms. So I did the same thing. In my own cases, up the stairs on the left, there is that first room or there’s my whiteboard, the second room, there’s basically whiteboard, where there’s more pyramids that are used for my system. The third room is where I keep all the stuff. I’ve been working on mobility, like range of motion, while maintaining torque. Right, I’m trying to come up with a graph that explains it correctly. And so but it’s a bit fuzzy, I almost have it, but not quite, I’ve been at it for a few months now. But whenever I look at the whiteboard, it’s almost there, it’s a little bit fuzzy, because I’m not exactly there. But every single time I walk in that third room, and I walk, walk on it a little bit, I set this bar stool there, too. And I have a chart if I need to grab the chalk, and I start to make that drawing a little bit clearer, because I’m almost there in the graph that I want to do. But that’s what got it. So I don’t have to do it physically, when I’m at the gym, I can just walk into my mental palace and work on the problems I need to work on in there. But what it means is that the problem is always on that whiteboard, always in that filled room. So it’s always spinning in my head. So even when I’m not thinking about it, it’s there. And the problem is always fixing itself. So it allows me to stick with problems longer. Like have you ever had a problem where when you really look at it with one clear mind, the solution is pretty obvious when you just sit down and go, Okay, let me think about this correctly. And I can fix this, right? So that’s what I do all the time, I have a problem. And I sit. So I go to my mental palace, I take the stairs on the left, I go one, first, second or third room. In that case, I fit on my barstool. I’m like, Okay, let me think about this clearly. And for five minutes, I’m going to clear my head and think about the problem. And so now that it’s on that whiteboard, it spins in my head 24/7. And that’s how I fix problems because I can apply my head clearly to every problem in that room all the time. And so I’m not smarter than anybody, it’s just like, I can stick with problems longer that way. But you can develop as many rooms as you want, there’s a room that I have. So this tells on the left, but the room is on the right, where I have all the pictures of my daughter, I have all our videos when she’s small and everything and when I need when I need to break them when I need to do that I can just go in that room sit and watch had my daughter when she three years or four years older videos that I have a few that I really like and have that that picture that I have in my phone that were these excessively clear. And it’s a huge poster of that that is on the first wall in that room. And whenever I’m stressed out or whatever, I can always go in that room, sit and watch that picture of her. And it suits me so you can be in rooms for anything, you can have a panic room, you can have a room when you’re depressed , you can do whatever you want. That’s the thing, the mental palace is the keys that you’re in control of, the visualization technique where you can go inside as many rooms as you can, and the room can be whatever you want. I use it to fix the problem that I need to fix. But I have the rooms with my daughter’s pictures in which I can just relax and everything. So I don’t need the phone to do that. I can build that room. In my head, we’re all pictures out. And I can just look at it. And I see the pictures. And so a lot of times people think I’m staring. I’m not, I’m just in one of the rooms in my mind. And every time there’s a problem that I can’t figure out, I go in the room, I create a new room or a room just for problems. And I will take whatever problem you gave me, open the door and write it on the whiteboard. And I’m going to come back to that room on a regular basis trying to fix the problem that you gave me, basically. And so that’s what I do all the time.

 

Misbah Haque  54:24

That’s amazing, man. That’s one of the best and most vivid descriptions of using visualization that I’ve ever heard. 

Julien  54:33

The Greeks talked about it. There’s plenty of people I talked to. And this is within the reach of everybody. Everybody, you can build two rooms in your head. You can be like please to one for problems, one for relaxation. Anybody can do that. I mean, you’re applying it every day. But the key is like every visualization is you’re going to have to visualize every single thing in that room. What are the walls? What does the wall look like? You have to be able to walk in that room and you have to know what the smell is. If it’s wood, if it’s metal or whatever, like you have, but it’s it’s, it’s the greatest thing you can do for someone is to give them that the power to create their own room because once you’re in that room and it’s nobody can get into you can actually Stephen King wrote about that in I don’t know if you remember like they made a movie about it like the four kids that were awarded like powers by by alien is to Stephen King book I can’t remember the name of it, they made a movie about it, okay. And the guy, like an alien, is trying to take over his mind. And he said he has his own memory palace and he locks himself in that room to not let the aliens so even Stephen King wrote about

Misbah Haque  55:44

Now, so who are some of your biggest influences, like you mentioned that you don’t have any degrees or anything like that? What did you kind of do to learn and kind of get to where you are now?

Julien  55:55

I like to read a lot, obviously, but Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Leona skin are physicists or while more toward quantum physics. And so I guess I read a lot, just not that much about strength and conditioning, I probably read most of the books or them at least once, but I’m at a stage where most of my education is done through getting a clearer mind. So I’m more interested in reading about philosophy and quantum mechanics. And I’m a humanist. So I don’t believe in people, I believe in human intelligence. And so I’m always fascinated to read about people like Isaac Newton, people like Einstein, the power of the intellect, and what he meant for the world. Those are the things I read about, but those people were their mindset and everything. So I don’t read that much about strength and conditioning. I read enough to understand the metal came about, but that’s about as far as I go. I’m much more interested in human intelligence as a whole, instead of only taking it to strengthen conditioning. So I try to better myself as a person as much as I can by reading about as many diverse subjects as I can. And that has a tendency to fuming much better. For example, you know, the movie, I mean, the book Shogun? Yeah. Okay. It was about it. Actually, just, it was about a guy that actually existed. His name was somewhere I William, he was an Englishman that was a drift on the show of Japan, in 1602. And so that’s the story of someone who actually existed. History’s even crazier than then the book show goon. He actually married. He was, he was made to summarize, so he was the only person allowed inside of Japan. Only the non Japanese allowed inside of Japan, he married a local summariser, lady, he had kids and everything he had he own CF, he was an automotosocial, counselor to the Shogun and everything. You’re talking about an Englishman, not exactly the best people on earth when it comes to mixing cultures, right? Who ended up running a show on the coast of Japan, which at the time, the only connection they had was with the Portuguese, which were enemies of the English at the time, because they were fighting, you know, protesting against Catholics and a BC. And he ended up being a counselor to the Shogun and made the samurai and lived in Japan. That is the craziest story possible. If it didn’t happen, you will never believe it, yet someone did it. So reading the biography of that guy, every time. Like, how many problems do I have in my life? Compared to that guy? Right? That guy makes something that is not possible. It’s ridiculous. And so I love reading stuff like that. Because every time I read that, I’m like, imagine talking about pain versus intensity. Imagine the discomfort he went to language, culture, religious war in the Middle, I mean, everything you can think of under being a counselor to basically the Shogun at the time, that guy’s life is I, I can’t even fathom what it must have been like. So trying to visualize that always fuels me, because then my problems are very, very small. When I look at that guy, and so are we alone reading his biography? Because it’s the craziest thing ever.

Misbah Haque  59:22

I totally agree with you. I mean, it’s and I’ve mentioned this many times before, but it’s like in a book, somebody puts their life’s worth of experiences, right and what they’ve learned into a few 100 pages and you can tap into that for just a couple dollars. And a lot of people have said like, there’s no problem that has not already been solved by somebody before so why waste time? Why not tap into those experiences and figure out a way to use it for yourself?

Julien  59:50

This has been mankind greatest invention has been books. I agree. There is no question the amount of things that are in those few cubic inches of information is insane, like the like. I mean, obviously, but for me that for example, reading this pack, to strive for niche was the greatest thing that happened to me at 18. I was in a dark place mentally any a few my entire life from there because I read the book, feeling like he was reading it for me. And at that time in my life is just, he lifted me and everything, the power of information, the power that is in the book, to me is still the greatest things. So never limit myself just out of strength and conditioning, because that’s my field. And I tell coaches all the time, you want to be a better coach, be a better human being, you’ll always be a better coach. So don’t stop yourself just as reading, you know, Westside and Louis Simmons and everything that’s that’s the word man that’s that’s that’s memorizing openings and chairs that that’s not how this works. But you’re way past that. And so the stronger you can make your mind the better you can be as a human being the better was a coach you will be so it goes so far beyond just that. And so, like we actually were going to start a book club because people asked me continuously which books to read. So but across a seminar this weekend, we’re gonna announce we’re gonna announce the book club and so the first book I can tell you because your podcast will come after that one will be the black hole wall by Lernout Siskin It’s okay. That’s the craziest story ever. So Stephen Hawkins go where i goes, and I do small conference is only like five people. This name, loner Siskin was organized in San Francisco. It’s like a very rich guy who loves to have in his attic. Like the five graders, physics mind, just shooting the shit basically. And the guy just love quantum physics. And then he will talk about stuff and everything. And he’ll come Hawkins, who comes and says, information is lost in a black hole. information goes in a black hole, black hole evaporates over billions of years, obviously, information is lost. And alone of skin lost his mind because he’s like, Wait, if information is truly lost in a black hole, that means entropy decreases. That’s what entropy is, is the amount of information in space. entropy decreases. That means the second law of thermodynamics is wrong. Because that’s what the second law of thermodynamics says. Entropy always increases. That’s why you cannot cook an egg. That’s why time only moves forward. Because of entropy, the amount of information always increases. And so here comes all things saying information is lost in a black hole at a time people don’t understand. That means all Newton’s laws are wrong. Foundation of Physics Today, second law of thermodynamics, there’s only very few right? And here comes the saying well, then that’s wrong. And so Siskin lost his main thing, but that can’t be. But he couldn’t prove why Hawkins was wrong. That lasted 20 years. It took him 20 years to explain that Hawking’s that finally agreed that he was wrong. But why was wrong, but in the meantime, in order to do that, he had to revolutionize the world of quantum mechanics, explaining that the amount of information of a surface is contained on the outside and not on the inside, basically. So the world is a hologram. You’re gonna have to google that because it’s a long conversation. But so the book is called a black hole war by loaner Siskin. Everybody should read this, because you don’t need to understand quantum mechanics to see that book. But it’s a true piercing every, the way they look at the universe, not being able to prove it. So it’s all done through advanced math. And everything is mind blowing to me every single time. And so those were the two greatest minds of quantum mechanics. Please bring out each other. And it’s the greatest thing ever, because it shows you how far you can take the power of the mind. Right. And so that was a fascinating book to read.

Misbah Haque  1:03:58

I’m super excited that you said you’re starting a book club. That’s something that I had been talking about with a few people. And it’s cool to see you’re doing that. So definitely keep me posted on that. 

Julien  1:04:09

I know that I know that feels like five books. 

Misbah Haque  1:04:13

The other thing that you said was really important, I think, is that a lot of time we spend so much time in our own industry on our own, get that we don’t poke our head out of the sand and kind of look around. But I think some of the best insights come from doing that, like looking outside of what you are not used to. And the other misconception that I think I’ve heard a lot of people talk about these days is like, you know, people are reading a lot and not doing a lot with the information. But at the same time, it’s like you don’t have to do every single thing that you read, especially right away, right? Like this is something that you can tuck away in that memory palace, and it might benefit you somewhere down the road when you’re thinking about something else. You know what I mean? So it’s really just kind of like adding more tools to the toolbox.

Julien  1:04:59

I look at it though. Just making myself a better person. That’s all. Like, if I had a Master Gardener that came to me saying, let me show you how to plant correctly, and jump on it. And it’s not about learning how to do gardening, burial, or even gathering at all. What is his mindset when he does this? What are the life skills that you learn doing at that level? How would he teach me we don’t know anything? How we that’s what you looking? You look for the message behind the message, you look like? How was he teaching that? What? What did he learn from such an advanced degree of performance at anything, they are lessons from that, that you can take for anything in life? Exam, right? That’s what and that’s what you read over and over your subjects and everything those guys went so far, in their own field, they’re bound to come up with stuff that you can use in yours. Now, I mean, and they have opened their minds to two concepts that are very hard to conceptualize, that are very difficult to conceptualize, and probably very painful to conceptualize, right. I know that pain out of that struggle that they had to go through to become better. They can teach you so much. One of the best things I’ve ever read was a business lecture from Charles Mungo. Like Charles Munger is Warren Buffett’s right hand man. And he had that, that he was in 1994. I think at USC, he had a lecture about economics.  He’s talking about the elementary lesson of worldly wisdom, right? And he’s explaining what he looking at, in order to invest in a company, and he has 20 points of elementary lessons or worldly wisdom? None of those points are related to finding it, right? None of it. It’s the psychology of Miss judgment. It’s critical mass. It’s basically the principle of heart science and psychology. Right? And I was like, each of those points you could use for training? You could use it for anything in life. It has nothing to do with finance. This basically was how to move forward in life. Any field you look at greed through those 20 points of elementary with a lesson of worldly wisdom, and you can progress at what you do. And so I was like, This is the greatest thing too. So you taking someone who basically is the right hand man of the richest man in the world, he’s learned one, one or two things about life, right? That you can apply to your level, trust me. And here he is giving away for free because you can find it anywhere on online, the greatest lesson that is learned over an entire life of being at the top of his field for the richest men in the world, right? This is gold. This is Pascal, this is diamond stuff that is giving you his life lesson that is he has been with the sharpest mind in the finance world, with the sharpest mind around the world for years. And this is what he’s basically gained from that. And he’s giving it to you for free. And I put it like on PBS, I put it on Facebook, and everything, people will read it. I’m like, You guys are insane. Dude, this is the greatest gift people can give you. His information given out on the internet is not just for porn, there’s actually stuff you can get from it. That’s one of them. I mean, read, become a better person, get interested in people outside of your field. They are tremendously smart people out there that want to help them, want to share all that tweeze you and most people are so blinded by their you Okay, but how is that going to help me with my little field that they forget that in order to get better, you need to become a better person first. And that will translate into getting better or what you do.

Misbah Haque  1:08:50

Now that video that you’re talking about? I think I read a PDF version of that it was like it’s I think it’s the psychology of human misjudgment.

Julien  1:08:58

One there’s two PDFs out No, it’s a PDF. It’s not a video, it’s a lecture at USC that it made into a PDF. There’s two of them. There’s the one about the psychology of Miss judgment. And the other one that is called immature lessons of worldly wisdom. There’s two of them and those are two of the greatest things ever to read.

Misbah Haque  1:09:17

It’s like a compiler. I think it goes very into detail of I think like 25 cognitive biases that kind of shape humans that’s it’s very, very interesting.

Julien  1:09:26

Exactly that one that was so smart. To be part of the book club are those two any can be found. It’s an internet like you can find a PDF for free. It’s everywhere.It’s such an important valuable lesson that is given. And it’s one of the sharpest minds. I’ve read a lot of what he put out there. He’s one of the sharpest minds ever. I mean, he chose finance but he would have been successful anywhere. I just happen to choose finance because that’s what he likes. But this is someone you want to learn from for every show on him. Training money. I’m not, I couldn’t care less. But no matter what he does, I want to send how he does it. Because I understand how he does that. I can be a lot better coach.

Misbah Haque  1:10:12

So alright, now this is one of my last questions. So if you had to start over, and let’s say you only had one year to live, but you wanted to become the best coach that you could possibly be? What would you do to get back to where you are?

Julien  1:10:29

I can’t do it in one year, man.

Misbah Haque  1:10:31

So yeah, and I totally, I don’t mean to say that. 

Julien  1:10:35

I would. Honestly, like I wouldn’t. I’ve learned more from my mistakes than I did for my successes. So I don’t know that. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go through them again. But like, for example, you know, what got me off Mars wanting to build something is having my daughter. So I don’t think I would have done any of it without her because she forced me to look at myself and dude, like, at some point, you have to stop talking, you have to stop thinking you’re so smart. You have to do something with it, because you have to prove it. Right. And that deciding to build something kind of came out of that because her daughter and I was like, what are you gonna teach her? What are you going to be for her? Are you going to be the guy that talks that’s so smart, that does nothing? Was it and just go go through life on talent alone, and really never accomplish anything? Are you going to stop talking, put your head down and actually build something and take the hits. Because the second you stop talking, and you have to actually do something, you have to take the hits. And it’s not fun and everything. And what I’ve learned the most is been out of taking the hits, because I’ve always been fairly arrogant, because I’m somewhat smart. So that made me fairly arrogant when it comes to things like that. And I had to be willing to take the hits. I had to be willing, the hardest thing for me has been to put myself out there. Is that the system I talked about? That’s me, because nobody talks about it before. I mean, I don’t know anybody that I’m sure somebody has. But I am not aware of anybody who’s broken down movement to the building blocks like I did, right? So when I put stuff out there, it’s mine. When I talk about internal rotation, I’m one of the few to explain it like this. So any criticism. It’s not criticizing just like I could hide behind like you have PT is a hand behind Kelly Starrett. They said, Well, he said, I don’t have I don’t I can’t quote anybody. I didn’t learn from him. Everybody. I’m self taught. I taught myself everything. So if I make a mistake, it’s mine. I don’t get too hung behind anybody. So when people criticize what I say they criticize me directly. So I had to be willing to take those hits like, This is what I think this is basically me, putting myself into the system and everything. So you gotta be willing to take the hits. Me willing to take the hits is a direct digression with the fact that because of my daughter without her, I would have never been probably never been willing to take those hits. Because I would have stayed in my corner being our again thinking I’m so smart, but never actually willing to challenge myself about it. And so if I had one year, I would have her. Cuz she’s the reason I had to push forward and everything. And after that would be that to read everything that I read, and at the end actually trust myself more when I was 1819 20 growing up if I listened to the naysayer way too much. I should have just gone forward. And so if I could, if I had one year, and I could talk to myself in the person saying, Okay, you have one year to go,  one year to go to where I’m at now, I would be like, put your head down. Don’t listen to naysayers. And prove it. Not to the world just to yourself. But to just get your intellect to what direction, apply it to something and move forward. And don’t listen to any of the naysayers and just just plow forward and do something with it. You have a brain that works fairly well. Do something with it. That’s all good. And then I did it because of her because I would have, for example, the thing I don’t understand these days, I still don’t have haters. That is so weird to me. The two reasons I know I’m not famous is one, it’s only guys that want to take it. I want you to talk to me, or only take pictures with me. I’m single, I don’t have a single girl that wants to take the picture with me. It’s always above guys. I’m like I love y’all. But where’s the pretty girls? Okay, because I don’t like the whole big sweaty dudes that every single but I did jujitsu enough. I would like the girls now. And the second thing is I don’t have I don’t have haters. I mostly have guys saying all this is so awesome. And I’m like, this is the internet sooner or later I’m bound to have a guy saying I’m like, Who is it? I saw a French guy right who keeps telling everybody is wrong. that still hasn’t happened. So it’s kind of weird to me. But being without a blanket,  without a security blanket without a net to fall back on, because I can’t blame anybody. For the matrix of movement, the movement may trick that’s mine. So if you criticize it, that’s me. It’s on me one way or another. And so there’s a courage there that I had to develop over time. And that is something that would not have happened, I think was on my daughter. That’s awesome. That’s probably the when she was. So that’s why I came back from Brazil to build something. That’s why the first five years struggle with money so hard, because I had nobody to finance me anymore. I had to work for Equinox for like eight months, just to put food on the table, right? So by the way, that was a learning experience. You hear those morons, telling me how to do stuff, and I’m like Jesus Christ. And so I had to go through that, but put food on the table, and I had to sell my car, just so I could open my gym. So the fifth wheels, you don’t like when you pay the rent on the 10th? Yeah, that was my life for about three years. And things like that. But at the same thing, it was the greatest thing. So he taught me how to take the hits. And at no point in those five years where I struggled so much, did I ever think about quitting? Anyone even into my mind? I was like, I don’t care if I have to work security at night, but I will not close the gym. Yeah, I will do whatever I have to do to build something. And but that that still resumed, I think comes out of having my daughter because otherwise, maybe I would have been tempted to quit? I don’t know. I don’t know, honestly, maybe I will. Because I’m very stubborn. So maybe I would have kept on going. But the fact is, she’s the one who at the time I decided to build something it was because I was like, What are you going to do? At some point, you have to look in the mirror and then decide, okay, which way am I going? Am I going left or going right? But there are no excuses. At some point. It’s like you’re going left or you’re going right? But it’s on you one way or another. So the success will be on you. And so we’ll have failures, are you willing to take the hits? Are you willing to be you can only be as great as you willing to be bad? So are you willing to take that kind of a hit to be that good? And if the answer is no, then you will never be that good?

Misbah Haque  1:17:21

That’s awesome, man. Well, it seems to be really paying off for you. You’re really impacting tons of people out there. Tell me Tell me, where can we support you? How can we support your journey? What resources would you like to point people to?

Julien  1:17:37

The seminars are going very well. So we have and right now we’re going to do a world tour so they can get on my strong feet page on Facebook, and they can see the seminars and everything. But all that is going really well what I what I really want people to do is become better humans, man, just just read and understand what I want to fix people, I don’t want to live in a world where I see so many athletes that are a step away from breaking. And the only options are, stop doing what you’re doing, or wait until it breaks. We need more coaches out there that care, that care about fixing people, not just selling a six week program, not just getting into the fitness industry that is all about selling, we need people out there to care and wanting to fix other human beings. That’s what we need. So we need to create a field of movement specialists. And so we’ll start by having people to, to study movements, and just following all that stuff. And so what matters to me is that it’s just people, I want to see a willingness to learn, right? So we can, we can learn that end game of movements, we can fix people that that’s really what the influence I want to have is to create that feel of movement specialist. And so hopefully, I’ll be able to do that through the seminar, the coaches week that I have, and then creating a structure to the website. So we can all come into one place and move the ball forward, basically, but there has to be a joining of at least minds and people that we can stop being stuck between the medicine which is surgery and pills. And just well either you train or you go see a doctor, which is the doctor prescribes us to enjoy your pills. Basically, we have to do better as a human race. We need to do better. And I can’t do it on my own. So I’m trying to train as many coaches as I can. Because on my own I can fix what 20 100 people that’s not enough man, they matter to the one I fix. So that’s awesome. But it’s not enough, right? And I want to train coaches so they can train coaches so then we can fix a million people instead of fixing 200.

Misbah Haque  1:19:50

I’m looking forward to that. So where is the best place to reach you and follow you? Is it Instagram

Julien  1:19:57

On Instagram? I got strong fit one Instagram. And then on Facebook. I’m Julien Pineau. And then the page is strong fit. And so on the pages and like all the seminars, all the stuff that I do people can always email me [email protected]. Just I’ll just try to answer as much as I can. I don’t apologize, guys, sometimes I do forget to answer but hopefully, alright, email at [email protected] Actually, you have a much better shot at getting to me because we’ll go to Wendy and Wendy always knows how to reach me. So [email protected] You’re the better shot. And then the strongfit page on Facebook, strongfitone on Instagram, and then we keep the ball moving.

Misbah Haque  1:20:39

Well, I want to acknowledge you man for all the hard work and the good work that you’re doing out there. And I’m very excited to you know, continue to follow your journey. So I really appreciate you taking the time and tons of knowledge for the listeners. 

Julien  1:20:53

It was my pleasure. It was very nice to meet you, man.

Misbah Haque  1:20:57

Thank you so much for listening. Guys. If you enjoyed this episode, the best compliment you can give is by sharing it with somebody who might enjoy it or sharing it somewhere on the web. And if you’re feeling phenomenal, head over to iTunes and leave a five star review. Don’t forget to head over to the airborne mine comm to sign up for the newsletter so you can get my weekly athlete digest along with a few free gifts. If you ever have any questions or you would like to see certain questions asked, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can email me at info at airbornemind.com with a Q & A in the subject line. So once again, thank you so much for listening guys. Until next time!

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