Andy (00:01.9)
All right, so one of the big things that happens that derails people's training and just derails their ability to feel confident in their bodies is, you know, when we get injured and we don't know what to do about that when it comes to trying to return to working out or training or anything, or we get hurt and we hear that we need to be stronger or need more mobility, but we're hurt. So how do we bring these things in?

usually two ways to go about it. One is you stop doing anything and treat your body as fragile and avoid the pain. And the other is to push through and just hope it gets better. And so there really needs to be sort of a middle path and there needs to be one that gives a little more guidance than just do what you feel like. Because what we feel like a lot of times is wishful thinking or a lie or missing some information.

Today, Jarlo is with me. Jarlo is a physical therapist, co-founder of GNB, and also has lately been working back full-time in clinics, dealing with people who are injured and hurt and trying to get back to doing the things that they want to do. So yeah, let's kick it off.

Jarlo Ilano (01:22.968)
Yeah, I think one of the hardest parts, especially, you know, we're talking to our audience now who is, you know, if not middle aged, they're approaching it, right? And here's the thing about middle age. Middle age always seems to be older than you are, right? Middle ages always seem to be another five or 10 years away, but middle age is literally right.

Andy (01:43.086)
Right, now that we're 50, middle-aged feels like it's gotta be at least 65, right?

Jarlo Ilano (01:48.376)
Right. But also middle 50 is way past middle age. Middle age is literally 36, 38 years old. That is middle age, right? The life expectancy in the U S for whatever, right? If you're a male, there's what 74, something like that. And so yes, if you are in your thirties, you are middle aged. Um, and I, I say that as a preface because we all remember when we're, you know, most of the people here,

Andy (02:05.646)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (02:17.292)
have been active since they were kids, whether it's team sports or recreation and all that kind of stuff. And when you're a teenager, you bounce back, right? You get sore, you get hurt. And then two days later, miraculously, you're good to go. I see that all the time with our boys, my boy. Sam had a thing on his ankle like three weeks ago, hurt it in the game, like the ball just kind of hit it wrong, right? And then two days later,

Like he was sore, he was hurting, was limping, whatever. Two days later, back playing full speed. Yes, I worked on it little bit, but also all I had to do was like just, you know, pretty much rub it a little bit and I was like, good to go, right? That's not going to happen at our age. So I precious that because we have this memory of that, right? It's like, why was I able to do that when I was 16 or why was I able to do that even when I was like 25, 26 and then heading into 30s?

You're like, now it takes me forever to back at it. And maybe you did approach it in those two ways that Andy said. Maybe you approached it as like, I'll just lay off for a week and then I'll get back into it. Like, do nothing. And that's probably pretty good. Or I'll just push through it and just screw it. I'll just push through it and then maybe a week, two weeks later, it's fine. So both of those things can work when you are super young, when it's a relatively minor thing, right?

It all depends on injury. I'm not saying you can break your leg and like, just push through it or do nothing. So we got to get rid of those extremes first right away. The main.

Andy (03:55.106)
Right, and the other thing is, like you mentioned, there's the psychology of the way things used to work, and then when you're older, that doesn't work anymore, and so you do need something that's a little bit more of a guidepost at this point.

Jarlo Ilano (04:07.124)
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because you can't trust the past, right? Past performance does not predict future results, especially as we get older. It's very sad. But you can take that experience and work on it where you have a framework. that last podcast I did with my friend, Colonel Solanel, he mentioned his framework thing, which is huge. And that's...

Andy (04:16.654)
Sadly.

Jarlo Ilano (04:35.384)
what we've been presenting with GMB since the beginning. Like what are, what is a framework? What is it like a flow chart? What is the algorithms that can tell you, you know, how to know yourself better and how to keep going. The main problem with going, like say you get injured and the main problem with doing stuff where you go, okay, I'll just wait till completely pain free. That's just, that really doesn't work anymore. Once you hit.

a certain age. Pain is a part of life whether you're 14, 15, or 25, or 35, or 40, or 50, but it actually becomes more so as you get older. It's just the way it is. And it's not wear and tear. It's not like, you get older, you're just going to have to deal with it. It's just reality. Our tissues are not as pliable. Recovery takes a little bit longer. It's just the way it is. It's like the slow.

Andy (05:06.37)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (05:32.896)
you know, this is slow walk into entropy that we always talk about in GMB

Andy (05:35.778)
Right, and also stimulating tissues and joints can help with recovery on some of these things too. If we just wait until everything's completely gone, we're actually shortchanging our ability to build a more robust body and to sort of speed that recovery along.

Jarlo Ilano (05:43.179)
Exactly.

Jarlo Ilano (05:53.738)
Exactly.

I think that's a really important point is because to make it's like we have to get rid of this misinformation really that healing requires, you know, just total, total rest. It's really born out through everything that we in the literature and experience that active rest. So the key, the phrase active rest, quote unquote, means you should be doing things within, you know, you know, not going crazy.

But it's much better to be working, right? Even from the beginning years ago where they did, I think it was a rabbit, rabbit or rat tendons or whatever, right? I think I mentioned this before. It's like, well, this is bad animal research, right? Where they go, they hurt these animals and then they, you know, immobilize them, right? And then, so they can't do anything. And then they compare that to animals where they have them, you know, imagine a little rodent treadmill type of thing.

And it was that little bit of exercise that they got better versus completely immobilized. So, I mean, that's an extreme too, but it just shows you what it is. Another thing too is I remember working even years ago with different PTs and they would tell people that runners, right? You tell runners, okay, he's just gonna have to not run for three months. Even then I was like, that doesn't even work, right? It doesn't even, how?

Andy (07:19.63)
Hahaha

Jarlo Ilano (07:23.426)
So at that end of three months, yes, maybe they've healed and they're feeling better, but then how are you going to get back into running? You've totally lost all that stuff.

Andy (07:30.936)
Well, and it's the same for me, you, for a lot of people that are gonna be listening to this too, is I mean, like, tell me I can't practice martial arts. Dude, I'm at the dojo three times a week. I'm not, you know, granted I can back off and focus on teaching and stuff, I mean, that's my role, but like, I'm still gonna move, I'm gonna do stuff. Somebody who's a climber, who their whole social life goes around the bouldering gym and stuff like that, they're not gonna rep, you know.

Jarlo Ilano (07:39.892)
Exactly. Right, right.

Jarlo Ilano (07:56.344)
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. Right. It's, it's, and I said that to, uh, think it was a patient that just a couple of weeks ago, like he was asking me, well, try to stop or, know, you know, what are these things that I should do? You know, he's, he's jogs, he runs like, well, you don't have to stop running. And he just kind of looked at, yeah. I was like, yeah, imagine, imagine you just stopped running and you feel a little bit better. And then three weeks from now you start running again.

how do you even know where to start, right? So it's much better to have a framework where you can continue your activity. And again, we're not saying you just grid it and go ham on it. What are the, and this is what we wanna talk about today. So this is a big long preamble of what we're talking about. In our programs, we've always used, right, we've always used this

Andy (08:49.718)
Yeah, so let's.

Jarlo Ilano (08:54.968)
this rubric of, you know, uncomfortable discomfort, you know, a little bit of pain, not too much pain. And I think the easiest thing was to tell people, okay, you have a zero out 10 pain scale, zero, nothing, you know, zero pain, 10, the worst pain you ever felt. I think the thing is like, you have to go to the ER, right? And so we always said, you know, three out of four, that makes sense, right? Three out of four, it's sore, it hurts, but it's not like killing you.

Right? So there's the first thing. And people get that. They're like, okay, that makes sense. The other thing, and I've been telling patients, I just repeat myself over and over again, it shouldn't increase as you do it. Right? So say you have, you're doing like, okay, I'm going to do 30 minutes of my elements today. Right? And you start out and it's like, it's a one out, pain in your knee because whatever reason, right?

Then you go a few more minutes and it gets to about a three or four. And it stays there for that half hour. I think that's perfect. I think that's great. If you're doing it and you're like, starts one out of two, three out of four, and then 12 minutes into it, and you look at the timer and you're like, it's getting worse. It's like five. It's creeping up there. That's where you either have to

Change the variation of stuff you're doing may offload your weight a little bit We talked a lot about that offload that joint try and do everything else get that you know get that Baseline back down to a two three and then keep going so that's another thing too It's like monitor how you're doing throughout, know that mindfulness that self-assessment that auto regulation We talked about all the time. This is key. This is your chance to learn how you know how to deal with your discomfort

not overdo it, not make it worse. See what you need to do to change things and we can help you with that. If you're an alpha policy, put it on your log, other people can help you with that. But a lot of it, you're gonna figure out yourself. If you've been with us for a long time, we really emphasize self-awareness. Can you do this for yourself? Be your own coach kind of thing. But it's more than that.

Jarlo Ilano (11:11.958)
Setting yourself up for a lifetime of training if you have more self-awareness.

Andy (11:18.414)
So let's talk about this for a second because I think you mentioned something that's really important is you start doing a movement and you check in and consciously just sort of you know, rate like, okay, I'm having discomfort or I'm having maybe even pain. Okay, where would I put this on a scale of one to 10? And this is key because sometimes we'll get comments on videos or we'll get people that email us like, I tried the bear walk and it hurts so bad. I just couldn't do it.

Okay, how much did it hurt? Was it really bad pain? Was it just a little pain? Was it all over? Was it localized? And then this is also the key is as you continue moving, does that stay the same, get better or get worse? Now, if the pain is something like a seven or eight, we're not saying you should keep going just to see, right? That's.

Jarlo Ilano (12:14.786)
Right.

Andy (12:15.042)
But if it's down in that controllable region, know, one, two, three, four-ish, okay, that's something that you can kind of see, okay, this is not really hurting, it's just uncomfortable and it doesn't feel great, but I'm gonna keep moving with this and see if the continued movement makes it actually feel better as I start to loosen up into it, or.

Jarlo Ilano (12:35.254)
RIP

Andy (12:37.76)
if it is getting worse and if it's getting worse, well, that's when you need to think, okay, this is probably something that's exacerbating an injury or right. It's over a few minutes.

Jarlo Ilano (12:46.904)
And I think that's good too because both of those things are information. I think we need to really, really reframe a lot of this for people because I could also, and we've had people email in or I've had patients that they have a really hard time even reading it. They're like, okay, what does three out of 10 mean? What does five out of 10 mean? And so I get that and it's true. It's especially say,

you know, if there's some people listening where they're just maybe there's not aware yet and that's the thing yet. You are going to get better at this, but maybe you just need more practice. For that, I would say you'd have to work in analogies. It's like, okay, imagine you hit your, you stub your toe, your bare foot on a coffee table in the middle of night and just, you just totally didn't see it. And it just swam. Like you almost broke it. Okay. That's a 10, right?

Versus you're sitting down and you're in your car and you forgot that there was, I don't know, that you left something in the car and it's pressing at your hip and you didn't realize it until about 10 minutes into your drive. But it goes away quickly. So that's another thing too, is how much is it lingering? That's another really important thing. It's like, depending on how the term is,

in therapy and rehab is like irritability. Right? You can have some pain, even high-ish pain, but you remove the stressor, right? You remove that thing that's banging on your toe, and then it goes away after a few seconds. That's actually really good, right? Or you can have something where it hurts and you're walking in the bear and your wrist hurts and you're like, it turned into a five and I'll just stop and shake it out. But you stop and shake it out and it

it doesn't go away. So that's another thing where you're like, okay, that's where maybe you even have to go and get help. Like if it's something that lingers even at a lower level pain, that irritability is pretty high. So I think the next thing I want to talk about then is, is the delayed reaction thing. This is huge, right? I've also had answered lots of questions like, okay, I followed your, your three out of four out of 10 and it felt great. You know, okay.

Jarlo Ilano (15:09.624)
But then a few hours later or the middle of the night or the next morning, it's like it got worse. So that's where, and it happens actually, that's pretty common. That's where you're like, okay, what do I do now? I followed that rule and it's still, you know, got worse as we go out. Unfortunately, that delayed reaction thing is like, it's gotta happen sometime before you know it, you know, it know it can happen. You can try and prevent it. And here's another thing that I've been saying for years. It's like, whenever you get back into something, just,

put everything in half, split in half, split the amount of time you're doing it, split the amount of intensity you think you're gonna go and do it. Like it should basically feel like you're not doing anything for that first workout, right? And we've all had that. Exactly.

Andy (15:54.702)
And compared to what you're used to, compared to what you're used to, it will feel like that, especially if you are an active person that's training. You're like, geez, I use, this isn't even a real, and that's fine. It's fine.

Jarlo Ilano (16:06.442)
Exactly, exactly. It's fine. And this is what I mean about reframing, because anytime you have the presence of pain and all of these types of things and injuries, you just gotta, you gotta have amnesia about what used to be. You got to, because it's not really gonna serve you well and it's actually probably gonna be a net negative because you're just gonna perseverate on what used to be. Well, another thing too that's maybe less dire is we've all had

times where we just couldn't work out for like three weeks, right? And this is a thing, you know, the delayed onset muscle soreness thing. The more you trained, right? If you train for years, whether it's lifting weights or whatever thing, whatever thing, even just running your body, you know, hate to say but it's way it is. Your body remembers what you used to be able to do, right? You're not, you don't have to learn it again. So say, and this happens to me all the time, right?

okay, I haven't done this exercise in like three, four weeks. I go and do it, it feels easy-ish. You're like, oh, I'll move it a little bit, it doesn't hurt. But because your body and your neurologic system remembers what you used to be able to do, even though was very light, you're still contracting those muscles, you're still working at a level that's probably higher than those tissues now can be acclimatized to, right? And then you wake up the next morning like.

why I can't even lift my arms up over my head. Like I did that with pull-ups one time, right? That's like I barely did a couple of sets of like, you know, 12 pull-ups, which is nothing right for me before I woke up next morning like, what the hell? can I move my arm? It's cause your body remembered how to create that force and that force, unfortunately just for now.

Andy (17:36.835)
Right.

Andy (17:50.24)
Right, and there's like a pro and a con to that. Like, you your body remembering this, like, is a great thing if you need to be able to perform, if you are in a situation where you have to do something, right? And that's, you know, I'm not going to go so far as to say that this is evolutionarily why. I mean, I don't think, I don't think that would be like post hoc. But I think the thing is, it's like, it's important. And it's a thing that has probably saved humans asses more times than not too.

Jarlo Ilano (18:00.991)
Exactly.

Andy (18:19.894)
is that when it comes down to it, we can do that. But now in our society of leisure, what happens is we get into a competitive environment in a pickup basketball game when we haven't played for five years and we are like, I can perform way better than I thought I would be able to, but there's a cost, right?

Jarlo Ilano (18:36.984)
All right, there's a cost to it. And that circles back to why you should at least be doing a little bit, right? You shouldn't be completely resting even if you're fully, you know, we're not talking about surgeries or, you know, again, please don't make this even more extreme, know, with super comments and social media, everybody's going to what about, you you hate oranges, right? What does that mean? Right, right, you know.

Andy (18:45.55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (19:04.376)
all this kind of stuff, that's not what we're talking about. Let's go ahead and just have a good faith response to this. Yes, we're not saying just go full ham because you got to do stuff. Let's get away from the extremes. So there's that, where you're probably going to have a little bit of delayed reaction if you haven't done something in a while. You're probably going to have a little bit of delayed reaction if you're pained.

if where you are in your recovery is maybe a little bit more irritable. So that's what I've probably in all of these videos too, I've said it and all throughout alpha-positum, like, you know, do half of what you think. And I've said that all the time because it works, right? It's better to do five minutes than it is to do zero minutes. And it's probably better to do five minutes when you're trying to recover from injury than it is to do, you know, 15, 30, 45 minutes.

It's interesting too that this is brought up with the three to four out of 10. We've been saying this for probably since the beginning of GMB, right? 15, 16 years ago. A little bit later on, I was looking more at the literature and a lot of this is born out. And some of this is directly, you'll see it directly in the post operatives, specifically for knees

Andy (20:14.092)
Long time.

Jarlo Ilano (20:31.714)
you know, there's a protocol with, you whether it's the ACL repair or whatever is, and their number is five out of 10. Their number is five out of 10. It's okay. The next day, if it's sore, more sore, and it's still a five out of 10, the protocol is to drop, rest a day or two, drop back a level of whatever is in your rehab, drop it back. So don't repeat the same thing. Drop it back a bit.

Andy (20:32.099)
Mm.

Andy (20:40.344)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (21:01.09)
see how it feels and then build up from there. And I think I was looking through that, was like, well, if you would have said three out of 10, maybe you wouldn't have had to do that. But that's in the context of rehab, where maybe you gotta push it a little bit more, but not too much.

Andy (21:10.51)
Right.

Andy (21:16.556)
And also in rehab, do have someone monitoring this with you, which is a lot different than self-training and trying to gauge this on your own.

Jarlo Ilano (21:21.26)
That's right.

Exactly. Exactly. So the three to four out of ten gives you a little bit of buffer, right? And you're doing it on your own and you don't have someone going, man, don't do that, right? Which would be great, right? Because sometimes you don't know. And that's specific. Yeah, sometimes, that's right. And that's why I'm always saying, you know, go to a PT or go to another trusted health professional and maybe you only need a couple sessions, you know, no matter how bad it is.

Andy (21:35.596)
Right.

Andy (21:40.302)
Sometimes I need that.

Jarlo Ilano (21:53.44)
And then, you know, they extrapolated that further. think shoulder, they've also seen that also helpful for after shoulder surgeries and all that. So it's nice to see that, you know, we're not, this is just us talking. There's stuff out there that really bears this out.

Andy (22:10.51)
So let's get really specific with a couple of things because you mentioned a few examples, but then let's say, let's look at like during a session first and then we'll talk about after. So we did start off with this being about injuries, but let's also talk about what happens if you're not injured because this comes up sometimes too. Let's say you haven't been injured, you are doing your workout and

Let's just say for convenience, you're doing pushups and suddenly you're having an ache or a pain in your shoulder while you're doing pushups. You did not think you were injured. And let's say it gets to like, suddenly you're at like at a four or something, right? Now, so is this something where you pause for a second? Is this something where you just keep going? Or is this something where let's say it start, you feel like it's climbing up, like we talked about, you keep going a little bit and it feels like it's climbing up. So

Okay, you take a rest and you talked about that sort of, you know, decay rate. How long are you looking for it to then get better? Within how long would it need to get better for you to continue or then back off or what? What are you looking at like time horizons?

Jarlo Ilano (23:23.756)
That's a really good one. Yeah, that's a really good one. And I think, you know, this is also from personal experience. It actually depends on the body area. If it's in your back, and this happens all, I mean, anyone who's ever done any exercise where your back starts to feel a little twingy or your neck start to feel a little twingy and you're like, it's fine actually. And then you keep going and then boom, something happens, right? It's just.

Andy (23:34.562)
Sure. Yeah.

Jarlo Ilano (23:52.748)
then all of sudden you throw your back out, right? Or you whatever. And I've had that happen all the time. Back when I was squatting super heavy, it's just like, wow, okay, that's fine. I'll keep going. And then the next set just, just absolutely kills you, right? So there's that. Like I would be very cautious when those types of things happen on the spine, spining, meaning low back, up to your neck. So with that, I would be like,

Andy (24:07.586)
Yep.

Andy (24:20.104)
And spine is just high stakes, man. Spine is high stakes.

Jarlo Ilano (24:22.454)
Right, and that's what it is. It's like, it's very low reward for very high risk to keep going with that, right, keep going with that exercise. Now, once you get into the extremities, you could argue that it's kind of the same thing, but in my experience, it's a lot less of a risk to just keep going. I like probably the rubric of what we discussed earlier is like, how long is it lingering? Right, so let's say you do your set.

Andy (24:27.982)
Right.

Jarlo Ilano (24:52.12)
And you do your five minutes of crawling around, right? And you're like, OK, I'm just going to shake it out and get a drink of water and come back. And if that's gone within a minute, then I say, go ahead and try it again and see how that next minute of work goes. A lot of times, and it's true, it'll be fine. It's just some weird thing. Remember, pain is a protective response for the body. Pain is an output.

So for whatever reason, your body's decided to tell you, know, maybe quit this a little bit. And the reason might just be an overreaction, right? It just might be. We've all had random pains where you're walking along and you're like, right? You're like in your side or your back, you're like, what the hell is that? Then you shake it off and you're fine, right? What was that versus, you know, knowing that you actually hurt yourself. Know that.

Andy (25:37.358)
Yep.

Jarlo Ilano (25:48.414)
Again, I keep saying that that doesn't mean the pain isn't real. It just means that reaction by your body at that point was a relative false alarm. If you go back at it and it starts hurting again and maybe even hurts a little bit worse, then that's the sign of you. Okay, let's just stop that, move on to the next thing, see how you feel a few hours later. A lot of times maybe it is you just need to warm up a little bit more or

your body is just like, you're not recovered enough for that for some reason. And there's all

Andy (26:23.999)
And so when you say a few hours later, you're expecting that something like that, if it's not serious, if it's just pain that's like warning you off, that a few hours later, you should basically be, yeah, right?

Jarlo Ilano (26:32.76)
It'll go away. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's had that type of too, even with running, like running like, oh crap, right? I'm not even home yet, right? I'm halfway home. So what do I do? I actually, you know, I did stop and then walk and you're in a little pain. I get home, you know, just kind of chill out and then it's gone. So that's the thing with, know, do you keep going?

Andy (26:45.549)
Right.

Jarlo Ilano (27:02.424)
It's, all of this, again, goes back to how experienced you are with yourself, right? And I've said this before, it's like experience with yourself doing things and physical activities and how you react. But it's also, what is your overall personality like? Are you a person that was just gonna keep.

you know in your heart you're just going to keep going no matter what. Right? You're that type A, I'm just going keep going. Well that's going to give you a clue as to like maybe you shut up. Maybe whatever that thing is happening don't go on even if it is okay because you know in your personality that you're going to keep moving. And that's doing yourself a disservice.

Andy (27:49.794)
Right, and you probably, if you're a person that's been doing something for a long time and you have that personality, you can probably think back to one or two times where that personality trait has gotten you in trouble by actually making something worse in the past.

Jarlo Ilano (28:02.282)
Right. Right. This is a time where history you should remember. This is a time where you go, please remember what happened before. And again, speak from experience where I just totally ignored that. what? Who? Him? I don't even remember that guy. I don't even remember him at all. But luckily, you get bit older, it's a little bit better. So yeah, this is all information. I keep.

Andy (28:08.908)
Right.

Andy (28:12.416)
Learn from your mistakes.

Jarlo Ilano (28:29.56)
I'm going to say it again and again, reframe this all as information. Pain is information. How are you moving is information. We want you to keep going as much as you can. That's the whole thing about what we're talking about. We want you to be able to keep going as much as you can. The cliche is this is lifelong training. This is how you do it. This is how you do it. Absolutely how you do it.

Andy (28:40.972)
Mm-hmm.

Andy (28:57.006)
So we talked a little bit just now about like, okay, if you're not injured and you notice a pain, so what if, let's say that you are injured, let's say that you have a shoulder injury and without getting too much into specific things, like you've got a shoulder injury that, let's say you did rest a little bit, it's on the way to recovery, but still sort of fresh and you're like, okay, well, I need to now get back into training.

because I can't just do bed rest for months until this is all better. So how would you approach this as you go into a training session? You've got some warmup or prep, you've got some exercises happening, and you're trying to monitor the pain versus how hard you should push yourself. Say it's your first session back or third session back or something, and you're still not confident. How can you use this sort of protocol of rating the pain and

trying to monitor if it's going higher or lower, and then what do you do with that information?

Jarlo Ilano (30:02.466)
think this is my kind of scientific way about doing it, about doing it is you have to really decrease as much variables as possible. Right? So you have to have, you would pick some exercises that you're pretty familiar with. That's probably the first thing, right? You don't want to probably try anything new that first time back. So it's got to be stuff that you feel comfortable doing, right? And then

Andy (30:13.08)
Mm.

Andy (30:23.843)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (30:29.27)
The reason for that is because you want to be able to offload as much as you need to, meaning whether it's your arm or your leg, there's always gonna be some type of loading on it throughout all these locomotion exercises. Or even if you're doing say integral strength and you're doing some different things, it doesn't mean you should avoid doing a movement just because there's load.

onto your joint or your body area that's sore, you actually do want to it. This is what we're talking about. You want to load it appropriately. Right? So you pick something that you're very familiar with so that you can do some variance. Right? This is also at the heart of like all you need and the shoulders unlocked programs that we've had where I talk about variable loading with your time is consistent.

So you're gonna pick 30 seconds, right? Just because it's just 30 seconds. You can do 30 seconds of, yeah, it's easy to remember, it's a good amount of time, right? It's enough to get warmed up into it, it's enough to have benefit. 30 seconds, could be a minute, whatever. So you pick a movement you're familiar with, you pick the amount of time that you wanna do it. Let's just say 30 seconds. So within that time, that's your goal. So I'm gonna do it for 30 seconds.

Andy (31:33.89)
Easy.

Jarlo Ilano (31:56.696)
And then you have what we just talked about. I don't want to go above a three, four out of 10 pain. So you got your time is the same, 30 seconds. You got this three out of four, 10 pain. That's also your cap. So those variables are Those are the independent variables. The dependent one then is how much force you're putting through that area.

or another way of saying is loading. How much you're loading through that area. So does that make sense? So say you're the bear and your elbow hurts, how much weight are you pushing through my right elbow during your bear crawl for 30 seconds? Let's start less than you think you should, We're kind of summarized everything. Let's start less than you think you should, maybe about half. Okay, you keep going about 15 seconds through, you're like, oh, that's okay, that's not bad.

Then in about 25 seconds through, you're like, oh wow, they're starting to ramp up there. Then you just back off a little bit. You put a little bit less weight through there, you put weight through your other limbs. Same thing with the inverted press, the same thing with a pull-up. A pull-up doesn't mean all your weight into a pull-up. We have so many variations on how to do a pull-up. Everything we have, there's variations. We got...

You don't want to think about progressions. Just because something is harder doesn't mean you need to do it. Just because something is easier doesn't...

Andy (33:26.336)
Right. I think this is something that's difficult. Yeah. People want a discrete thing. We get so many questions about, I have this, I need a modification. Okay, maybe, maybe, but if you, so there's, there's definitely situations where maybe this exercise just is not appropriate for you. That's a thing. But okay. Do you need a modification of the actual? Right. Yeah.

Jarlo Ilano (33:47.809)
Exactly.

Jarlo Ilano (33:52.194)
but you have to go through the process.

Andy (33:55.438)
And you need to go through the process to find out if that's true. But okay, do you need a modification of the actual exercise or can you vary one of the aspects of it? And so you mentioned load is a big one, duration you've talked about. Range of motion is another one. You can do a less range of motion. You can do, you know, there's a lot of ways and it's not even a modification to just say, hey, I'm going to shift a little bit more of my weight onto my legs so that I'm not

Jarlo Ilano (33:58.776)
Exactly.

Jarlo Ilano (34:23.35)
Right, so this is a thing. Everything is a modification. Do we walk 100 % of the time the same exact way? No, we don't. We don't. There's this big thing too right now in various athletic circles and sports of this ecological training. Every rep is different. That means you shouldn't practice.

Andy (34:24.726)
stressing this joint.

Andy (34:29.55)
Or everything is a modification.

Andy (34:38.018)
Yeah, right.

Jarlo Ilano (34:53.336)
a certain way because every rep is gonna be different. You just gotta figure it out. Yeah, okay, that's not even wrong, right? But it's also not helpful at all, right? Let's get, oh man, this is the theme. Let's get away from these strictures, right? Let's get away from A leads to B leads to C, right? Because this doesn't work.

Andy (35:00.654)
Right.

Andy (35:13.368)
Right. Anytime somebody comes to you with a new paradigm that's saying everything is wrong, therefore you should never do anything and everything is whatever you want it to be. you should probably, I mean, you don't need to completely call bullshit on it, but you need to understand that while that may be epistemologically correct, it's also not useful or helpful.

Jarlo Ilano (35:24.449)
Right.

Jarlo Ilano (35:37.174)
Right, it's a big red flag. Yeah, yeah. And this is all of what we've always wanted to do since the beginning of our company is how can we provide useful, usable information for people? And luckily we have done that. have, you know, at this point, tens of, know, into the hundreds of thousands of people saying, yes, this is useful, actionable information, right?

So yeah, that's basically how I do it. I would just kind of limit as much variables as you can and choose the one that you're gonna change. For me, I think the easiest thing, still not easy, but the easiest thing is the load. The amount of force you're putting through that. And yes, range of motion is another thing too, but also, I mean, it's biomechanics. Range of motion also changes load, right? So that's why I do agree with a lot of these.

trainers, physical therapists now, it's like, oh, just add load. You just got to load through, which of course is another extreme, but it's also true, right? You just have to find a...

Andy (36:41.408)
It's true until the point where someone's like, well, you know, if one kilogram is going to be helpful, what if I try five?

Jarlo Ilano (36:49.11)
Yeah, exactly. I think the overall message is good that we want to try to do appropriate load through there as soon as you can. Again, for most relatively minor injuries, and even major ones if you have guidance.

Andy (37:00.142)
Mm-hmm.

Andy (37:04.92)
Right, and again, appropriate is a thing that you can find through this process of rating and noting and just being aware of this stuff. And I think that one of the things that you, yeah, you absolutely can. You absolutely can.

Jarlo Ilano (37:12.319)
Absolutely.

Jarlo Ilano (37:20.46)
And you can do it yourself. You can do it yourself. You absolutely can. You can. Some people would maybe need a little bit of help and they should. If you feel like you need a little bit of help, you should seek the help, but also don't be afraid to just try it out. mean, you've yes, and you can flare it up and I've done it myself. You can flare yourself up, but hopefully it's not too bad. And in a couple of days try again, like don't, don't let it dissuade you.

Andy (37:42.318)
think that's one of the great things, like Kelly Sturrett always says this too, is that for most injuries and most training things, like you should be able to self-treat a lot of stuff. You shouldn't need to see a professional every time you have pain or every time something's not working the way you want it to be. Yeah, and you have to learn how to do it, but it's totally practical. It's like, you know, well nowadays with a car, you can't fix anything. Everything's computer controlled, everything's software locked.

Jarlo Ilano (37:57.644)
Yeah, and I think it's just practical to think that way too.

Jarlo Ilano (38:09.292)
Right. Right.

Andy (38:11.822)
You know, you've got to pay $19 a month to get Tesla to like let you unlock your doors automatically or something. But in the back in a day, like I bought my first car for $600. And the first thing my father made me do was change the tires. Then he taught me to change the brake pads, then the spark plugs. By the time I had had my first month with that car, like I knew how to do most like, you know, ongoing maintenance with it myself. And our body should be like that.

Jarlo Ilano (38:18.424)
That's crazy.

Jarlo Ilano (38:39.202)
Yeah, I rebuilt the engine of our... Yeah, rebuilt the engine of a VW Bug with my uncle. He showed me how to do everything. But yeah, you can't do that anymore. You need the thing. can't do it.

Andy (38:47.086)
Right? You can't do that anymore. And I think that like, you know, there's obviously you're a professional, you know, I'm not saying don't, you don't need professionals. You do a lot of times, but you also need to be able to learn.

Jarlo Ilano (39:00.02)
Well, it depends on what you and that actually I was going to say that like if you want to get you should get help. But also a lot of the time, you know, that me as professional or anybody who goes to see will give you more education, too. That's the main thing that I think where if they are good, right, if they are good, they are good professional. They will also be giving you good education and how to deal with this, too. Right.

Andy (39:08.355)
Yes.

Andy (39:17.336)
Mmm.

Jarlo Ilano (39:29.538)
So yeah, you should definitely see someone if you're like, I really can't do it on my own. Or just not comfortable doing it on your own. But I do believe you can.

Andy (39:37.154)
Right, and like you said, yeah, and a lot of things that might just take one or two trips, and if you're looking at it, look, I get it that that's not cheap, but maybe $153 or something is a lot cheaper in the long run than being in pain every day for months or years or something, or maybe getting injured more or something. So, you you really have to make a trade-off with this stuff. But at the end of the day, like you said, it's education, and I think the end product is that you...

you know yourself better and then you get better over time at learning how to sort of like find where your actual edge is and know what to, know, how, where it's safe to do more work and where you need to back off and all of these things so that you can keep making progress.

Jarlo Ilano (40:21.73)
Absolutely.

Absolutely, absolutely. And also too, right? As a company, we provide education and provide help, right? You you can't go to the extreme and say, you can make your own program now. You can do whatever you want, right? Otherwise you wouldn't need us to.

Andy (40:42.242)
I mean, yeah, anyone can and your results may vary.

Jarlo Ilano (40:46.936)
Exactly. And that's what it is. Like what is your comfort level and you know what exactly are you trying to get out of it? I think all we're trying to say here is that don't be afraid to kind of learn more about yourself, especially when it comes to pain and injury, especially if it's real again, minor, we're not saying you can help yourself out of a broken arm or you know, a torn ligament, right? That's not what we're saying here.

Andy (41:11.758)
Cool. All right. So I hope that this is helpful for people. I think it will be because this is something where I think a lot of people have just been in this. It's either A or B and I don't know. And so now we've got a process that you can use. And so the main thing is that you just have to learn practice being aware of this, right? And if you do that, I think that this is something that anyone can get better at with time, but it does take practice.

Jarlo Ilano (41:42.228)
Absolutely.

Andy (41:45.07)
All right, thank you and yay, that's done.

Andy (00:01.9)
All right, so one of the big things that happens that derails people's training and just derails their ability to feel confident in their bodies is, you know, when we get injured and we don't know what to do about that when it comes to trying to return to working out or training or anything, or we get hurt and we hear that we need to be stronger or need more mobility, but we're hurt. So how do we bring these things in?

usually two ways to go about it. One is you stop doing anything and treat your body as fragile and avoid the pain. And the other is to push through and just hope it gets better. And so there really needs to be sort of a middle path and there needs to be one that gives a little more guidance than just do what you feel like. Because what we feel like a lot of times is wishful thinking or a lie or missing some information.

Today, Jarlo is with me. Jarlo is a physical therapist, co-founder of GNB, and also has lately been working back full-time in clinics, dealing with people who are injured and hurt and trying to get back to doing the things that they want to do. So yeah, let's kick it off.

Jarlo Ilano (01:22.968)
Yeah, I think one of the hardest parts, especially, you know, we're talking to our audience now who is, you know, if not middle aged, they're approaching it, right? And here's the thing about middle age. Middle age always seems to be older than you are, right? Middle ages always seem to be another five or 10 years away, but middle age is literally right.

Andy (01:43.086)
Right, now that we're 50, middle-aged feels like it's gotta be at least 65, right?

Jarlo Ilano (01:48.376)
Right. But also middle 50 is way past middle age. Middle age is literally 36, 38 years old. That is middle age, right? The life expectancy in the U S for whatever, right? If you're a male, there's what 74, something like that. And so yes, if you are in your thirties, you are middle aged. Um, and I, I say that as a preface because we all remember when we're, you know, most of the people here,

Andy (02:05.646)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (02:17.292)
have been active since they were kids, whether it's team sports or recreation and all that kind of stuff. And when you're a teenager, you bounce back, right? You get sore, you get hurt. And then two days later, miraculously, you're good to go. I see that all the time with our boys, my boy. Sam had a thing on his ankle like three weeks ago, hurt it in the game, like the ball just kind of hit it wrong, right? And then two days later,

Like he was sore, he was hurting, was limping, whatever. Two days later, back playing full speed. Yes, I worked on it little bit, but also all I had to do was like just, you know, pretty much rub it a little bit and I was like, good to go, right? That's not going to happen at our age. So I precious that because we have this memory of that, right? It's like, why was I able to do that when I was 16 or why was I able to do that even when I was like 25, 26 and then heading into 30s?

You're like, now it takes me forever to back at it. And maybe you did approach it in those two ways that Andy said. Maybe you approached it as like, I'll just lay off for a week and then I'll get back into it. Like, do nothing. And that's probably pretty good. Or I'll just push through it and just screw it. I'll just push through it and then maybe a week, two weeks later, it's fine. So both of those things can work when you are super young, when it's a relatively minor thing, right?

It all depends on injury. I'm not saying you can break your leg and like, just push through it or do nothing. So we got to get rid of those extremes first right away. The main.

Andy (03:55.106)
Right, and the other thing is, like you mentioned, there's the psychology of the way things used to work, and then when you're older, that doesn't work anymore, and so you do need something that's a little bit more of a guidepost at this point.

Jarlo Ilano (04:07.124)
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because you can't trust the past, right? Past performance does not predict future results, especially as we get older. It's very sad. But you can take that experience and work on it where you have a framework. that last podcast I did with my friend, Colonel Solanel, he mentioned his framework thing, which is huge. And that's...

Andy (04:16.654)
Sadly.

Jarlo Ilano (04:35.384)
what we've been presenting with GMB since the beginning. Like what are, what is a framework? What is it like a flow chart? What is the algorithms that can tell you, you know, how to know yourself better and how to keep going. The main problem with going, like say you get injured and the main problem with doing stuff where you go, okay, I'll just wait till completely pain free. That's just, that really doesn't work anymore. Once you hit.

a certain age. Pain is a part of life whether you're 14, 15, or 25, or 35, or 40, or 50, but it actually becomes more so as you get older. It's just the way it is. And it's not wear and tear. It's not like, you get older, you're just going to have to deal with it. It's just reality. Our tissues are not as pliable. Recovery takes a little bit longer. It's just the way it is. It's like the slow.

Andy (05:06.37)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (05:32.896)
you know, this is slow walk into entropy that we always talk about in GMB

Andy (05:35.778)
Right, and also stimulating tissues and joints can help with recovery on some of these things too. If we just wait until everything's completely gone, we're actually shortchanging our ability to build a more robust body and to sort of speed that recovery along.

Jarlo Ilano (05:43.179)
Exactly.

Jarlo Ilano (05:53.738)
Exactly.

I think that's a really important point is because to make it's like we have to get rid of this misinformation really that healing requires, you know, just total, total rest. It's really born out through everything that we in the literature and experience that active rest. So the key, the phrase active rest, quote unquote, means you should be doing things within, you know, you know, not going crazy.

But it's much better to be working, right? Even from the beginning years ago where they did, I think it was a rabbit, rabbit or rat tendons or whatever, right? I think I mentioned this before. It's like, well, this is bad animal research, right? Where they go, they hurt these animals and then they, you know, immobilize them, right? And then, so they can't do anything. And then they compare that to animals where they have them, you know, imagine a little rodent treadmill type of thing.

And it was that little bit of exercise that they got better versus completely immobilized. So, I mean, that's an extreme too, but it just shows you what it is. Another thing too is I remember working even years ago with different PTs and they would tell people that runners, right? You tell runners, okay, he's just gonna have to not run for three months. Even then I was like, that doesn't even work, right? It doesn't even, how?

Andy (07:19.63)
Hahaha

Jarlo Ilano (07:23.426)
So at that end of three months, yes, maybe they've healed and they're feeling better, but then how are you going to get back into running? You've totally lost all that stuff.

Andy (07:30.936)
Well, and it's the same for me, you, for a lot of people that are gonna be listening to this too, is I mean, like, tell me I can't practice martial arts. Dude, I'm at the dojo three times a week. I'm not, you know, granted I can back off and focus on teaching and stuff, I mean, that's my role, but like, I'm still gonna move, I'm gonna do stuff. Somebody who's a climber, who their whole social life goes around the bouldering gym and stuff like that, they're not gonna rep, you know.

Jarlo Ilano (07:39.892)
Exactly. Right, right.

Jarlo Ilano (07:56.344)
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. Right. It's, it's, and I said that to, uh, think it was a patient that just a couple of weeks ago, like he was asking me, well, try to stop or, know, you know, what are these things that I should do? You know, he's, he's jogs, he runs like, well, you don't have to stop running. And he just kind of looked at, yeah. I was like, yeah, imagine, imagine you just stopped running and you feel a little bit better. And then three weeks from now you start running again.

how do you even know where to start, right? So it's much better to have a framework where you can continue your activity. And again, we're not saying you just grid it and go ham on it. What are the, and this is what we wanna talk about today. So this is a big long preamble of what we're talking about. In our programs, we've always used, right, we've always used this

Andy (08:49.718)
Yeah, so let's.

Jarlo Ilano (08:54.968)
this rubric of, you know, uncomfortable discomfort, you know, a little bit of pain, not too much pain. And I think the easiest thing was to tell people, okay, you have a zero out 10 pain scale, zero, nothing, you know, zero pain, 10, the worst pain you ever felt. I think the thing is like, you have to go to the ER, right? And so we always said, you know, three out of four, that makes sense, right? Three out of four, it's sore, it hurts, but it's not like killing you.

Right? So there's the first thing. And people get that. They're like, okay, that makes sense. The other thing, and I've been telling patients, I just repeat myself over and over again, it shouldn't increase as you do it. Right? So say you have, you're doing like, okay, I'm going to do 30 minutes of my elements today. Right? And you start out and it's like, it's a one out, pain in your knee because whatever reason, right?

Then you go a few more minutes and it gets to about a three or four. And it stays there for that half hour. I think that's perfect. I think that's great. If you're doing it and you're like, starts one out of two, three out of four, and then 12 minutes into it, and you look at the timer and you're like, it's getting worse. It's like five. It's creeping up there. That's where you either have to

Change the variation of stuff you're doing may offload your weight a little bit We talked a lot about that offload that joint try and do everything else get that you know get that Baseline back down to a two three and then keep going so that's another thing too It's like monitor how you're doing throughout, know that mindfulness that self-assessment that auto regulation We talked about all the time. This is key. This is your chance to learn how you know how to deal with your discomfort

not overdo it, not make it worse. See what you need to do to change things and we can help you with that. If you're an alpha policy, put it on your log, other people can help you with that. But a lot of it, you're gonna figure out yourself. If you've been with us for a long time, we really emphasize self-awareness. Can you do this for yourself? Be your own coach kind of thing. But it's more than that.

Jarlo Ilano (11:11.958)
Setting yourself up for a lifetime of training if you have more self-awareness.

Andy (11:18.414)
So let's talk about this for a second because I think you mentioned something that's really important is you start doing a movement and you check in and consciously just sort of you know, rate like, okay, I'm having discomfort or I'm having maybe even pain. Okay, where would I put this on a scale of one to 10? And this is key because sometimes we'll get comments on videos or we'll get people that email us like, I tried the bear walk and it hurts so bad. I just couldn't do it.

Okay, how much did it hurt? Was it really bad pain? Was it just a little pain? Was it all over? Was it localized? And then this is also the key is as you continue moving, does that stay the same, get better or get worse? Now, if the pain is something like a seven or eight, we're not saying you should keep going just to see, right? That's.

Jarlo Ilano (12:14.786)
Right.

Andy (12:15.042)
But if it's down in that controllable region, know, one, two, three, four-ish, okay, that's something that you can kind of see, okay, this is not really hurting, it's just uncomfortable and it doesn't feel great, but I'm gonna keep moving with this and see if the continued movement makes it actually feel better as I start to loosen up into it, or.

Jarlo Ilano (12:35.254)
RIP

Andy (12:37.76)
if it is getting worse and if it's getting worse, well, that's when you need to think, okay, this is probably something that's exacerbating an injury or right. It's over a few minutes.

Jarlo Ilano (12:46.904)
And I think that's good too because both of those things are information. I think we need to really, really reframe a lot of this for people because I could also, and we've had people email in or I've had patients that they have a really hard time even reading it. They're like, okay, what does three out of 10 mean? What does five out of 10 mean? And so I get that and it's true. It's especially say,

you know, if there's some people listening where they're just maybe there's not aware yet and that's the thing yet. You are going to get better at this, but maybe you just need more practice. For that, I would say you'd have to work in analogies. It's like, okay, imagine you hit your, you stub your toe, your bare foot on a coffee table in the middle of night and just, you just totally didn't see it. And it just swam. Like you almost broke it. Okay. That's a 10, right?

Versus you're sitting down and you're in your car and you forgot that there was, I don't know, that you left something in the car and it's pressing at your hip and you didn't realize it until about 10 minutes into your drive. But it goes away quickly. So that's another thing too, is how much is it lingering? That's another really important thing. It's like, depending on how the term is,

in therapy and rehab is like irritability. Right? You can have some pain, even high-ish pain, but you remove the stressor, right? You remove that thing that's banging on your toe, and then it goes away after a few seconds. That's actually really good, right? Or you can have something where it hurts and you're walking in the bear and your wrist hurts and you're like, it turned into a five and I'll just stop and shake it out. But you stop and shake it out and it

it doesn't go away. So that's another thing where you're like, okay, that's where maybe you even have to go and get help. Like if it's something that lingers even at a lower level pain, that irritability is pretty high. So I think the next thing I want to talk about then is, is the delayed reaction thing. This is huge, right? I've also had answered lots of questions like, okay, I followed your, your three out of four out of 10 and it felt great. You know, okay.

Jarlo Ilano (15:09.624)
But then a few hours later or the middle of the night or the next morning, it's like it got worse. So that's where, and it happens actually, that's pretty common. That's where you're like, okay, what do I do now? I followed that rule and it's still, you know, got worse as we go out. Unfortunately, that delayed reaction thing is like, it's gotta happen sometime before you know it, you know, it know it can happen. You can try and prevent it. And here's another thing that I've been saying for years. It's like, whenever you get back into something, just,

put everything in half, split in half, split the amount of time you're doing it, split the amount of intensity you think you're gonna go and do it. Like it should basically feel like you're not doing anything for that first workout, right? And we've all had that. Exactly.

Andy (15:54.702)
And compared to what you're used to, compared to what you're used to, it will feel like that, especially if you are an active person that's training. You're like, geez, I use, this isn't even a real, and that's fine. It's fine.

Jarlo Ilano (16:06.442)
Exactly, exactly. It's fine. And this is what I mean about reframing, because anytime you have the presence of pain and all of these types of things and injuries, you just gotta, you gotta have amnesia about what used to be. You got to, because it's not really gonna serve you well and it's actually probably gonna be a net negative because you're just gonna perseverate on what used to be. Well, another thing too that's maybe less dire is we've all had

times where we just couldn't work out for like three weeks, right? And this is a thing, you know, the delayed onset muscle soreness thing. The more you trained, right? If you train for years, whether it's lifting weights or whatever thing, whatever thing, even just running your body, you know, hate to say but it's way it is. Your body remembers what you used to be able to do, right? You're not, you don't have to learn it again. So say, and this happens to me all the time, right?

okay, I haven't done this exercise in like three, four weeks. I go and do it, it feels easy-ish. You're like, oh, I'll move it a little bit, it doesn't hurt. But because your body and your neurologic system remembers what you used to be able to do, even though was very light, you're still contracting those muscles, you're still working at a level that's probably higher than those tissues now can be acclimatized to, right? And then you wake up the next morning like.

why I can't even lift my arms up over my head. Like I did that with pull-ups one time, right? That's like I barely did a couple of sets of like, you know, 12 pull-ups, which is nothing right for me before I woke up next morning like, what the hell? can I move my arm? It's cause your body remembered how to create that force and that force, unfortunately just for now.

Andy (17:36.835)
Right.

Andy (17:50.24)
Right, and there's like a pro and a con to that. Like, you your body remembering this, like, is a great thing if you need to be able to perform, if you are in a situation where you have to do something, right? And that's, you know, I'm not going to go so far as to say that this is evolutionarily why. I mean, I don't think, I don't think that would be like post hoc. But I think the thing is, it's like, it's important. And it's a thing that has probably saved humans asses more times than not too.

Jarlo Ilano (18:00.991)
Exactly.

Andy (18:19.894)
is that when it comes down to it, we can do that. But now in our society of leisure, what happens is we get into a competitive environment in a pickup basketball game when we haven't played for five years and we are like, I can perform way better than I thought I would be able to, but there's a cost, right?

Jarlo Ilano (18:36.984)
All right, there's a cost to it. And that circles back to why you should at least be doing a little bit, right? You shouldn't be completely resting even if you're fully, you know, we're not talking about surgeries or, you know, again, please don't make this even more extreme, know, with super comments and social media, everybody's going to what about, you you hate oranges, right? What does that mean? Right, right, you know.

Andy (18:45.55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (19:04.376)
all this kind of stuff, that's not what we're talking about. Let's go ahead and just have a good faith response to this. Yes, we're not saying just go full ham because you got to do stuff. Let's get away from the extremes. So there's that, where you're probably going to have a little bit of delayed reaction if you haven't done something in a while. You're probably going to have a little bit of delayed reaction if you're pained.

if where you are in your recovery is maybe a little bit more irritable. So that's what I've probably in all of these videos too, I've said it and all throughout alpha-positum, like, you know, do half of what you think. And I've said that all the time because it works, right? It's better to do five minutes than it is to do zero minutes. And it's probably better to do five minutes when you're trying to recover from injury than it is to do, you know, 15, 30, 45 minutes.

It's interesting too that this is brought up with the three to four out of 10. We've been saying this for probably since the beginning of GMB, right? 15, 16 years ago. A little bit later on, I was looking more at the literature and a lot of this is born out. And some of this is directly, you'll see it directly in the post operatives, specifically for knees

Andy (20:14.092)
Long time.

Jarlo Ilano (20:31.714)
you know, there's a protocol with, you whether it's the ACL repair or whatever is, and their number is five out of 10. Their number is five out of 10. It's okay. The next day, if it's sore, more sore, and it's still a five out of 10, the protocol is to drop, rest a day or two, drop back a level of whatever is in your rehab, drop it back. So don't repeat the same thing. Drop it back a bit.

Andy (20:32.099)
Mm.

Andy (20:40.344)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (21:01.09)
see how it feels and then build up from there. And I think I was looking through that, was like, well, if you would have said three out of 10, maybe you wouldn't have had to do that. But that's in the context of rehab, where maybe you gotta push it a little bit more, but not too much.

Andy (21:10.51)
Right.

Andy (21:16.556)
And also in rehab, do have someone monitoring this with you, which is a lot different than self-training and trying to gauge this on your own.

Jarlo Ilano (21:21.26)
That's right.

Exactly. Exactly. So the three to four out of ten gives you a little bit of buffer, right? And you're doing it on your own and you don't have someone going, man, don't do that, right? Which would be great, right? Because sometimes you don't know. And that's specific. Yeah, sometimes, that's right. And that's why I'm always saying, you know, go to a PT or go to another trusted health professional and maybe you only need a couple sessions, you know, no matter how bad it is.

Andy (21:35.596)
Right.

Andy (21:40.302)
Sometimes I need that.

Jarlo Ilano (21:53.44)
And then, you know, they extrapolated that further. think shoulder, they've also seen that also helpful for after shoulder surgeries and all that. So it's nice to see that, you know, we're not, this is just us talking. There's stuff out there that really bears this out.

Andy (22:10.51)
So let's get really specific with a couple of things because you mentioned a few examples, but then let's say, let's look at like during a session first and then we'll talk about after. So we did start off with this being about injuries, but let's also talk about what happens if you're not injured because this comes up sometimes too. Let's say you haven't been injured, you are doing your workout and

Let's just say for convenience, you're doing pushups and suddenly you're having an ache or a pain in your shoulder while you're doing pushups. You did not think you were injured. And let's say it gets to like, suddenly you're at like at a four or something, right? Now, so is this something where you pause for a second? Is this something where you just keep going? Or is this something where let's say it start, you feel like it's climbing up, like we talked about, you keep going a little bit and it feels like it's climbing up. So

Okay, you take a rest and you talked about that sort of, you know, decay rate. How long are you looking for it to then get better? Within how long would it need to get better for you to continue or then back off or what? What are you looking at like time horizons?

Jarlo Ilano (23:23.756)
That's a really good one. Yeah, that's a really good one. And I think, you know, this is also from personal experience. It actually depends on the body area. If it's in your back, and this happens all, I mean, anyone who's ever done any exercise where your back starts to feel a little twingy or your neck start to feel a little twingy and you're like, it's fine actually. And then you keep going and then boom, something happens, right? It's just.

Andy (23:34.562)
Sure. Yeah.

Jarlo Ilano (23:52.748)
then all of sudden you throw your back out, right? Or you whatever. And I've had that happen all the time. Back when I was squatting super heavy, it's just like, wow, okay, that's fine. I'll keep going. And then the next set just, just absolutely kills you, right? So there's that. Like I would be very cautious when those types of things happen on the spine, spining, meaning low back, up to your neck. So with that, I would be like,

Andy (24:07.586)
Yep.

Andy (24:20.104)
And spine is just high stakes, man. Spine is high stakes.

Jarlo Ilano (24:22.454)
Right, and that's what it is. It's like, it's very low reward for very high risk to keep going with that, right, keep going with that exercise. Now, once you get into the extremities, you could argue that it's kind of the same thing, but in my experience, it's a lot less of a risk to just keep going. I like probably the rubric of what we discussed earlier is like, how long is it lingering? Right, so let's say you do your set.

Andy (24:27.982)
Right.

Jarlo Ilano (24:52.12)
And you do your five minutes of crawling around, right? And you're like, OK, I'm just going to shake it out and get a drink of water and come back. And if that's gone within a minute, then I say, go ahead and try it again and see how that next minute of work goes. A lot of times, and it's true, it'll be fine. It's just some weird thing. Remember, pain is a protective response for the body. Pain is an output.

So for whatever reason, your body's decided to tell you, know, maybe quit this a little bit. And the reason might just be an overreaction, right? It just might be. We've all had random pains where you're walking along and you're like, right? You're like in your side or your back, you're like, what the hell is that? Then you shake it off and you're fine, right? What was that versus, you know, knowing that you actually hurt yourself. Know that.

Andy (25:37.358)
Yep.

Jarlo Ilano (25:48.414)
Again, I keep saying that that doesn't mean the pain isn't real. It just means that reaction by your body at that point was a relative false alarm. If you go back at it and it starts hurting again and maybe even hurts a little bit worse, then that's the sign of you. Okay, let's just stop that, move on to the next thing, see how you feel a few hours later. A lot of times maybe it is you just need to warm up a little bit more or

your body is just like, you're not recovered enough for that for some reason. And there's all

Andy (26:23.999)
And so when you say a few hours later, you're expecting that something like that, if it's not serious, if it's just pain that's like warning you off, that a few hours later, you should basically be, yeah, right?

Jarlo Ilano (26:32.76)
It'll go away. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's had that type of too, even with running, like running like, oh crap, right? I'm not even home yet, right? I'm halfway home. So what do I do? I actually, you know, I did stop and then walk and you're in a little pain. I get home, you know, just kind of chill out and then it's gone. So that's the thing with, know, do you keep going?

Andy (26:45.549)
Right.

Jarlo Ilano (27:02.424)
It's, all of this, again, goes back to how experienced you are with yourself, right? And I've said this before, it's like experience with yourself doing things and physical activities and how you react. But it's also, what is your overall personality like? Are you a person that was just gonna keep.

you know in your heart you're just going to keep going no matter what. Right? You're that type A, I'm just going keep going. Well that's going to give you a clue as to like maybe you shut up. Maybe whatever that thing is happening don't go on even if it is okay because you know in your personality that you're going to keep moving. And that's doing yourself a disservice.

Andy (27:49.794)
Right, and you probably, if you're a person that's been doing something for a long time and you have that personality, you can probably think back to one or two times where that personality trait has gotten you in trouble by actually making something worse in the past.

Jarlo Ilano (28:02.282)
Right. Right. This is a time where history you should remember. This is a time where you go, please remember what happened before. And again, speak from experience where I just totally ignored that. what? Who? Him? I don't even remember that guy. I don't even remember him at all. But luckily, you get bit older, it's a little bit better. So yeah, this is all information. I keep.

Andy (28:08.908)
Right.

Andy (28:12.416)
Learn from your mistakes.

Jarlo Ilano (28:29.56)
I'm going to say it again and again, reframe this all as information. Pain is information. How are you moving is information. We want you to keep going as much as you can. That's the whole thing about what we're talking about. We want you to be able to keep going as much as you can. The cliche is this is lifelong training. This is how you do it. This is how you do it. Absolutely how you do it.

Andy (28:40.972)
Mm-hmm.

Andy (28:57.006)
So we talked a little bit just now about like, okay, if you're not injured and you notice a pain, so what if, let's say that you are injured, let's say that you have a shoulder injury and without getting too much into specific things, like you've got a shoulder injury that, let's say you did rest a little bit, it's on the way to recovery, but still sort of fresh and you're like, okay, well, I need to now get back into training.

because I can't just do bed rest for months until this is all better. So how would you approach this as you go into a training session? You've got some warmup or prep, you've got some exercises happening, and you're trying to monitor the pain versus how hard you should push yourself. Say it's your first session back or third session back or something, and you're still not confident. How can you use this sort of protocol of rating the pain and

trying to monitor if it's going higher or lower, and then what do you do with that information?

Jarlo Ilano (30:02.466)
think this is my kind of scientific way about doing it, about doing it is you have to really decrease as much variables as possible. Right? So you have to have, you would pick some exercises that you're pretty familiar with. That's probably the first thing, right? You don't want to probably try anything new that first time back. So it's got to be stuff that you feel comfortable doing, right? And then

Andy (30:13.08)
Mm.

Andy (30:23.843)
Mm-hmm.

Jarlo Ilano (30:29.27)
The reason for that is because you want to be able to offload as much as you need to, meaning whether it's your arm or your leg, there's always gonna be some type of loading on it throughout all these locomotion exercises. Or even if you're doing say integral strength and you're doing some different things, it doesn't mean you should avoid doing a movement just because there's load.

onto your joint or your body area that's sore, you actually do want to it. This is what we're talking about. You want to load it appropriately. Right? So you pick something that you're very familiar with so that you can do some variance. Right? This is also at the heart of like all you need and the shoulders unlocked programs that we've had where I talk about variable loading with your time is consistent.

So you're gonna pick 30 seconds, right? Just because it's just 30 seconds. You can do 30 seconds of, yeah, it's easy to remember, it's a good amount of time, right? It's enough to get warmed up into it, it's enough to have benefit. 30 seconds, could be a minute, whatever. So you pick a movement you're familiar with, you pick the amount of time that you wanna do it. Let's just say 30 seconds. So within that time, that's your goal. So I'm gonna do it for 30 seconds.

Andy (31:33.89)
Easy.

Jarlo Ilano (31:56.696)
And then you have what we just talked about. I don't want to go above a three, four out of 10 pain. So you got your time is the same, 30 seconds. You got this three out of four, 10 pain. That's also your cap. So those variables are Those are the independent variables. The dependent one then is how much force you're putting through that area.

or another way of saying is loading. How much you're loading through that area. So does that make sense? So say you're the bear and your elbow hurts, how much weight are you pushing through my right elbow during your bear crawl for 30 seconds? Let's start less than you think you should, We're kind of summarized everything. Let's start less than you think you should, maybe about half. Okay, you keep going about 15 seconds through, you're like, oh, that's okay, that's not bad.

Then in about 25 seconds through, you're like, oh wow, they're starting to ramp up there. Then you just back off a little bit. You put a little bit less weight through there, you put weight through your other limbs. Same thing with the inverted press, the same thing with a pull-up. A pull-up doesn't mean all your weight into a pull-up. We have so many variations on how to do a pull-up. Everything we have, there's variations. We got...

You don't want to think about progressions. Just because something is harder doesn't mean you need to do it. Just because something is easier doesn't...

Andy (33:26.336)
Right. I think this is something that's difficult. Yeah. People want a discrete thing. We get so many questions about, I have this, I need a modification. Okay, maybe, maybe, but if you, so there's, there's definitely situations where maybe this exercise just is not appropriate for you. That's a thing. But okay. Do you need a modification of the actual? Right. Yeah.

Jarlo Ilano (33:47.809)
Exactly.

Jarlo Ilano (33:52.194)
but you have to go through the process.

Andy (33:55.438)
And you need to go through the process to find out if that's true. But okay, do you need a modification of the actual exercise or can you vary one of the aspects of it? And so you mentioned load is a big one, duration you've talked about. Range of motion is another one. You can do a less range of motion. You can do, you know, there's a lot of ways and it's not even a modification to just say, hey, I'm going to shift a little bit more of my weight onto my legs so that I'm not

Jarlo Ilano (33:58.776)
Exactly.

Jarlo Ilano (34:23.35)
Right, so this is a thing. Everything is a modification. Do we walk 100 % of the time the same exact way? No, we don't. We don't. There's this big thing too right now in various athletic circles and sports of this ecological training. Every rep is different. That means you shouldn't practice.

Andy (34:24.726)
stressing this joint.

Andy (34:29.55)
Or everything is a modification.

Andy (34:38.018)
Yeah, right.

Jarlo Ilano (34:53.336)
a certain way because every rep is gonna be different. You just gotta figure it out. Yeah, okay, that's not even wrong, right? But it's also not helpful at all, right? Let's get, oh man, this is the theme. Let's get away from these strictures, right? Let's get away from A leads to B leads to C, right? Because this doesn't work.

Andy (35:00.654)
Right.

Andy (35:13.368)
Right. Anytime somebody comes to you with a new paradigm that's saying everything is wrong, therefore you should never do anything and everything is whatever you want it to be. you should probably, I mean, you don't need to completely call bullshit on it, but you need to understand that while that may be epistemologically correct, it's also not useful or helpful.

Jarlo Ilano (35:24.449)
Right.

Jarlo Ilano (35:37.174)
Right, it's a big red flag. Yeah, yeah. And this is all of what we've always wanted to do since the beginning of our company is how can we provide useful, usable information for people? And luckily we have done that. have, you know, at this point, tens of, know, into the hundreds of thousands of people saying, yes, this is useful, actionable information, right?

So yeah, that's basically how I do it. I would just kind of limit as much variables as you can and choose the one that you're gonna change. For me, I think the easiest thing, still not easy, but the easiest thing is the load. The amount of force you're putting through that. And yes, range of motion is another thing too, but also, I mean, it's biomechanics. Range of motion also changes load, right? So that's why I do agree with a lot of these.

trainers, physical therapists now, it's like, oh, just add load. You just got to load through, which of course is another extreme, but it's also true, right? You just have to find a...

Andy (36:41.408)
It's true until the point where someone's like, well, you know, if one kilogram is going to be helpful, what if I try five?

Jarlo Ilano (36:49.11)
Yeah, exactly. I think the overall message is good that we want to try to do appropriate load through there as soon as you can. Again, for most relatively minor injuries, and even major ones if you have guidance.

Andy (37:00.142)
Mm-hmm.

Andy (37:04.92)
Right, and again, appropriate is a thing that you can find through this process of rating and noting and just being aware of this stuff. And I think that one of the things that you, yeah, you absolutely can. You absolutely can.

Jarlo Ilano (37:12.319)
Absolutely.

Jarlo Ilano (37:20.46)
And you can do it yourself. You can do it yourself. You absolutely can. You can. Some people would maybe need a little bit of help and they should. If you feel like you need a little bit of help, you should seek the help, but also don't be afraid to just try it out. mean, you've yes, and you can flare it up and I've done it myself. You can flare yourself up, but hopefully it's not too bad. And in a couple of days try again, like don't, don't let it dissuade you.

Andy (37:42.318)
think that's one of the great things, like Kelly Sturrett always says this too, is that for most injuries and most training things, like you should be able to self-treat a lot of stuff. You shouldn't need to see a professional every time you have pain or every time something's not working the way you want it to be. Yeah, and you have to learn how to do it, but it's totally practical. It's like, you know, well nowadays with a car, you can't fix anything. Everything's computer controlled, everything's software locked.

Jarlo Ilano (37:57.644)
Yeah, and I think it's just practical to think that way too.

Jarlo Ilano (38:09.292)
Right. Right.

Andy (38:11.822)
You know, you've got to pay $19 a month to get Tesla to like let you unlock your doors automatically or something. But in the back in a day, like I bought my first car for $600. And the first thing my father made me do was change the tires. Then he taught me to change the brake pads, then the spark plugs. By the time I had had my first month with that car, like I knew how to do most like, you know, ongoing maintenance with it myself. And our body should be like that.

Jarlo Ilano (38:18.424)
That's crazy.

Jarlo Ilano (38:39.202)
Yeah, I rebuilt the engine of our... Yeah, rebuilt the engine of a VW Bug with my uncle. He showed me how to do everything. But yeah, you can't do that anymore. You need the thing. can't do it.

Andy (38:47.086)
Right? You can't do that anymore. And I think that like, you know, there's obviously you're a professional, you know, I'm not saying don't, you don't need professionals. You do a lot of times, but you also need to be able to learn.

Jarlo Ilano (39:00.02)
Well, it depends on what you and that actually I was going to say that like if you want to get you should get help. But also a lot of the time, you know, that me as professional or anybody who goes to see will give you more education, too. That's the main thing that I think where if they are good, right, if they are good, they are good professional. They will also be giving you good education and how to deal with this, too. Right.

Andy (39:08.355)
Yes.

Andy (39:17.336)
Mmm.

Jarlo Ilano (39:29.538)
So yeah, you should definitely see someone if you're like, I really can't do it on my own. Or just not comfortable doing it on your own. But I do believe you can.

Andy (39:37.154)
Right, and like you said, yeah, and a lot of things that might just take one or two trips, and if you're looking at it, look, I get it that that's not cheap, but maybe $153 or something is a lot cheaper in the long run than being in pain every day for months or years or something, or maybe getting injured more or something. So, you you really have to make a trade-off with this stuff. But at the end of the day, like you said, it's education, and I think the end product is that you...

you know yourself better and then you get better over time at learning how to sort of like find where your actual edge is and know what to, know, how, where it's safe to do more work and where you need to back off and all of these things so that you can keep making progress.

Jarlo Ilano (40:21.73)
Absolutely.

Absolutely, absolutely. And also too, right? As a company, we provide education and provide help, right? You you can't go to the extreme and say, you can make your own program now. You can do whatever you want, right? Otherwise you wouldn't need us to.

Andy (40:42.242)
I mean, yeah, anyone can and your results may vary.

Jarlo Ilano (40:46.936)
Exactly. And that's what it is. Like what is your comfort level and you know what exactly are you trying to get out of it? I think all we're trying to say here is that don't be afraid to kind of learn more about yourself, especially when it comes to pain and injury, especially if it's real again, minor, we're not saying you can help yourself out of a broken arm or you know, a torn ligament, right? That's not what we're saying here.

Andy (41:11.758)
Cool. All right. So I hope that this is helpful for people. I think it will be because this is something where I think a lot of people have just been in this. It's either A or B and I don't know. And so now we've got a process that you can use. And so the main thing is that you just have to learn practice being aware of this, right? And if you do that, I think that this is something that anyone can get better at with time, but it does take practice.

Jarlo Ilano (41:42.228)
Absolutely.

Andy (41:45.07)
All right, thank you and yay, that's done.