June 7, 2024 • 38 mins
In Season 8, Episode 5, Marc replays a talk from the FPN Summit #1 in 2022 with the Buffalo Bills assistant strength coach Will Greenberg, MS, CSCS, on wisdom gained over the years in the NFL.
FOLLOW WILL:
Twitter: https://x.com/Coach_WillG
FOLLOW DR BUBBS:
Website: DrBubbs.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbubbs/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-jYKOZ4ZzlAJfVexEp0NtQ
Twitter: twitter.com/DrBubbs
BOOKS:
PEAK: The New Science of Athletic Performance That Is Revolutionizing Sport (#1 BEST SELLER)
PEAK40: The New Science of Midlife Health for a Leaner, Stronger Body and Sharper Mind
SUBSCRIBE:
Members Area - The Locker Room
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
High-level players we have here, I'm talking about the guys seven years plus,
future Hall of Famers that I watch every day and learn from, master the basics.
You could set your watch to when they come in the building. You know what they're eating.
You know what they're doing for recovery. They know which athletic training
they're going to. They know what strength, what exercise you're doing on a particular day.
(00:22):
Welcome to the Performance Nutrition Podcast. Podcast giving you the latest
evidence-based research and cutting-edge insights for elite mental and physical performance.
He's connecting you directly with the world's leading experts and coaches.
Here's your host, Dr. Bubbs. Welcome back or welcome to the Performance Nutrition Podcast.
(00:43):
I'm Dr. Mark Bubbs, Performance Nutritionist, and this is season number eight.
I hope you're well. I'm absolutely buzzing. We are very excited to be hosting
our third Third Annual Athlete Performance Nutrition Online Summit next week, June 11th to 13th.
We've got three exciting days of talks from leaders in performance nutrition
(01:03):
on the ground in pro sport and in research. Let's go down the list.
Kate Calloway, Director of Performance Nutrition at the Carolina Panthers in the NFL.
Music.
Dr. Jamie Pugh, Researcher and Practitioner from Liverpool John Moores University.
Jamie Meeks, RD, New Orleans Saints Lead Dietitian.
(01:24):
Dr. Jose Antonio, CEO of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
James Moran, Lead Nutritionist for UNO X Cycling Team.
Gabriela Alfonso, of the Boston Red Sox in Major League Baseball.
Dr. Darren Kandow, Talking All Things Creatine.
Dr. Emma Tester, Head of Performance Nutrition for the Tottenham Hotspurs in
(01:45):
the English Premier League.
Dr. Andy Sparks, PhD, Sports Science for Morton Nutrition.
Isaac Mourier, Performance Nutrition Lead at the Orlando Magic in the NBA,
Zach DeSimone, Performance Dietitian for the Las Vegas Raiders in the NFL And Carl Bombardier,
from the Arizona Coyotes in the NHL Rounding things out There's going to be
(02:09):
lots of great new science and tremendous insights You can register free for
this event To participate,
just head over to drbubz.com forward slash APN that's drbubbs.com forward slash
APN and you can get all the updates on the summit next week.
On that note, in today's episode, I'll be sharing a talk from our first APN
Summit in 2022 with the Buffalo Bills assistant strength coach, Will Greenberg,
(02:34):
who shares his wisdom and insights from coaching athletes over his career in
his talk, Five Things I've Changed My Mind About. Enjoy.
That's what I'm going to talk about today.
What are five things that I changed my mind about? The setup of this talk is
going to be pretty simple. Not a lot of slides.
(02:56):
There's going to be what I used to think, and then there's going to be what I think now.
Five years ago, me listening to this, I may be thinking, hey,
this guy's crazy because he's wrong.
In five years' time, I'll probably be thinking, what was I talking about back then?
I always reserve the right, I'll put a disclaimer. I always reserve the right
to change my mind on the things that I'm talking about.
(03:18):
So I'm not asking you to walk away with a bunch of Monday morning takeaways.
I'm hoping to have a conversation or provide you with some insight of how I've
grown as a practitioner, as a person over the last five years.
And my transition early in my career from college basketball to college football,
(03:39):
now into professional football, I've been able to see things from a lot of different angles.
And with that open mind that I took at each spot, trying to learn different,
not just different tactics, but different principles or refine my principles
of how I see what I do and what's excessive.
So the first one that I want to hit, really hit hard with is what I used to
(04:02):
think is that people care.
And I left it intentionally vague. I understand that people care.
And I'm talking generally about the athletes or the people that I work with,
but it's not that they, it's not that they don't care.
It's just that my expectations were that they were as passionate as I was about
the things that go into performance.
(04:23):
So I hope you can tell that I am passionate about nutrition.
I'm passionate about exercise.
I'm passionate about the components that make athletes successful or get as
close to peak performance as possible.
But my expectation was misaligned that the athlete would care just as much about
that because there's a lot of things that that athlete has to care about.
(04:44):
Just one of them happens to be nutrition and performance or nutrition and exercise
or anything that goes into improving performance.
But there's also a human being in there.
And everyone on this call has a lot of information in their head.
I hope that I have a lot of of information in my head.
I've got a master's degree in nutrition.
I read quite a bit. I try to attain as much information as possible.
(05:08):
But what I realized was that human beings are not persuaded by information.
You're not going to persuade someone to change their mind, especially in a polarized
world like this that we live in.
You're not going to change people's minds just based off fact and information.
I've tried time and time and time and time again, and I've always hit a brick wall.
(05:30):
The difference is, and the thing that I think now, is that the more I care about people,
the more I authentically have a relationship with them, the more I become part
of their tribe, the more that they rely on the emotion of, I can trust this
person, the more I can get done with them.
So what I used to think was that people cared just as much as I did.
What I think now is that I need to spend the time and invest my time into caring about people.
(05:54):
And it's not the old adage, they don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
It's not that. It's creating authentic relationships with people.
It's becoming part of, not just becoming part of the tribe, but understanding
how they view the world because people make decisions or change behaviors off
emotion, not fact, in the majority of the time.
(06:16):
And the more I recognize that, the less I actually talk to my athletes about nutrition,
about exercise, about the things, the components of performance,
the more I scale that back and the more time I spent authentically learning
about that person's family or their friends or their children or things that
they're interested in the world, the more the gates open and those players came to me.
(06:39):
And trust is such a critical component, especially in professional football,
along with a lot of different places.
But the trust that you can have with that athlete really matters.
So like I said, I used to think people cared like I did. They cared about the
facts. They cared about nutrition. They cared about those things.
It's not that they don't care.
It's just the more you care about them, the more you show an interest in them
(07:01):
and authentically have a relationship with them, the more you're going to get done with them. Yeah.
So let's backtrack five years.
The next thing I used to think, and any of the strength coaches on here,
this might be inflammatory because that's a common saying that how you do one
thing is how you do everything. And I get it.
It's a motivational tactic to say, hey, the little things matter.
(07:24):
I get that. And maybe I'm taking it too literally.
But when you try to maximize everything in your life as a practitioner,
or you try to maximize every piece of my new detail in someone's performance.
Because there's a lot of things that go into it. There's the mental component,
there's the physical, there's the technical, there's the tactical.
(07:45):
There's so many things that go into someone's performance that by the time you
spend all that emotional and physical resources to get all those maximized,
you've maximized none of them.
So what I'm saying is that what I think now is to be intentional with the finite
resources that you have.
Your time and your effort, your emotional effort, your physical effort,
(08:09):
those are all finite resources, ones where you can't maximize everything all the time.
As a practitioner, I have to know where my strengths lie and I have to know what is good enough.
So there's something called maximizing versus satisficing.
And maximization is finding the thing where you're going to get the biggest
(08:31):
return on investment with your time and your effort.
Satisficing, it doesn't mean you don't pay attention to it. You just recognize
that the time spent on that is
not going to get you enough return on investment to continue to improve.
And I think the best example of this that happened recently was we had our off-season
training and then we have five weeks of break until training camp.
(08:53):
And we have a defensive tackle who has a very good body fat percentage.
Let's call it 20%. 20% is very good for a defensive tackle weighing 305 pounds.
But if you look at Aaron Donald, he visibly has abs, which means his body fat
percentage, I can't say objectively, but probably lower than 20%.
Significantly lower. And so that defensive tackle said to me before he left,
(09:14):
hey, I really want to focus on changing my body fat percentage and getting it down.
Now, the strength coach in me, the nutritious in me, thinks to myself, oh, that's great.
This guy's interested in losing body fat percentage. But in the next five weeks,
the emotional and physical and time-intensive effort that it would take to lose
that body fat percentage would take away those resources from him becoming a
(09:38):
better football player,
which is the most important thing going into training camp.
So while I'm excited about his motivation to do that, his body fat percentage is satisfactory.
And not satisfactory in a way of, hey, you don't need to worry about eating
appropriately anymore. more.
We need to be intentional about the things that are going to maximize your time on the field.
So being intentional with time and effort resources is such a critical component
(10:02):
of achieving peak performance.
But if you take the approach of how you do one thing, how you do everything,
you run the risk of burnout as a practitioner or never maximizing yourself as an athlete.
Back five years ago, what I used to think. Other people haven't figured out,
especially on social media.
I guarantee I could go on social media right now and in 10 seconds find you
(10:23):
someone that's either living their best life or someone who has a new exercise
routine or way of eating that you're missing out on unless you pay them $299.
You get $99 off the order now because I see it all the time.
And it's easy to fall in that trap because there's a salesmanship to that.
And I don't discredit them for trying to sell their information that way.
(10:47):
But what I now think and what I have to constantly remind myself is to master
the basics, master the basics.
And that brings me to an idea of something outside of our world in the financial
world of compounding interest.
And some of the wealthiest people
in the world have created their wealth through compounding interest.
(11:08):
They put little by little by little by little, they put put money away that
compounds on itself, compounds on itself.
And exponentially with interest, or as long as the interest rate is going up,
they are gaining money without doing anything.
They're letting their money work for them. In the NFL, in sports, health is your wealth.
(11:28):
And it just happens to rhyme. That's not my tagline, but health is your wealth.
And every good decision that you make, whether it be what you eat and put in
your body, whether it's how how you train, whether it's how you recover,
whether it's how you sleep, every decision that you make that is good compounds
on itself because the next day when you're feeling fresher or you're recovering faster,
(11:50):
you train, you can train harder. You can get more out of what you're doing.
Your, your mental acuity is better. You're learning more.
And then you do that day after day after day, that compounding interest of just
doing the basics really, really well.
Is what creates peak performers. And I say that because I watch the high level players we have here.
(12:13):
I'm talking about the guys seven years plus, future Hall of Famers that I watch
every day and learn from, master the basics.
You could set your watch to when they come in the building. You know what they're
eating. You know what they're doing for recovery.
They know which athletic training they're going to. They know what strength,
what exercise you're doing on a particular day. And time and time again,
(12:33):
I see that with the guys that are seven plus years.
And it's the consistency, not the intensity of it.
Because a lot of people I see think that they get to the next level,
their intensity has to go up.
But it's the opposite. It's the consistency has to improve, has to get better.
Because everyone's intensity is going to be around the same level.
(12:55):
It's how consistent can you be. And as a practitioner working with people that
are trying to modify their behavior, which I think we can all agree is difficult
at times, something long-term like doing the basics,
which are very boring and very monotonous, it's difficult to show someone immediate results.
So the way in which I approach that and the way I think now is find reward in a streak.
(13:21):
And I think Peloton, if anyone uses Peloton, does a great job with this.
Because every time I ride and I get third day in a row, it gives me a badge.
It says, hey, congrats, you got three days in a row.
And I'm like, oh yeah, okay, okay. It's three days in a row.
Maybe I want to get five days in a row. And then five days turns into 10 days,
10 days turns into 50 days.
And then all of a sudden I find myself doing way more cardiovascular work on
(13:41):
the Peloton and getting excited to get that next badge and finding myself on
a day that I might not want want to work out because I care about that streak.
I find reward in that streak.
And so it's just a small strategy of how to keep our players and our athletes
going, but mastering the basics,
consistently over time is what compounds interest to make peak performers sustainable
(14:06):
and their health being their wealth.
All right. Five years ago, what I used to think, that there's always a right or wrong answer.
And I'm not saying there's never a right or there's never a wrong,
but I came from a world in coming through,
those of you who know Charles Poliquin, he did an excellent job of putting out
(14:27):
really valuable information that made you think like, oh man, that's right.
And this other stuff is wrong. Now, sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't.
But as I started to go along my journey in my career, I started to realize,
well, that's not always right.
Or, well, that's not always wrong. There are a time and place for those things.
And what I think now is there may be right or wrong answers,
but context really matters.
(14:49):
Actually, I'll shameless plug a editorial that myself and one of our sports
scientists that used to be with us, Joe Club, wrote about complexity in sport.
That a lot of the problems that we deal with are complex problems.
They don't have simple, predictable, repeatable solutions. Injury is a great example in sports.
(15:10):
If we could predict injury, there'd be no injury. And in fact,
if we knew that we predicted injury and stopped it, we still don't know those
things. injury is an emergent problem.
There's emerging things where as you see what's going on, you gather information,
how they're eating, how they're sleeping, their wellness questionnaire,
all the information that we get, you then make the best decision possible and
(15:33):
then continue moving forward to monitor those things and make the best decision possible again.
It might be the right decision or it might be the wrong decision or the right
decision may turn into the wrong decision in the future so you have to know
that there's not always a right or a wrong answer it's just what is the best
decision for that time what is the emerging solution that you're seeing,
(15:54):
and then you go with it from there and continue to monitor.
And it's hard to think that because a lot of times human beings want a simple solution.
We don't like, as human beings, we don't like things out of our control.
We don't like feeling like things are, it's uncomfortable to feel like it's out of control.
And we are prediction machines. That's how the brain works. We want to predict what's next.
(16:18):
But a lot of times that leads to oversimplification and that leads to binary
thinking, reductionism.
And when we find ourselves in a complex situation and we apply simple solutions,
that creates danger and a fragile environment.
So what we want to be able to do is create a more robust system or robust athlete
(16:38):
that can handle the complexities of life when things go wrong.
And going back to mastering the basics, if you can create someone who can master
the basics at all times, they're much more resilient to the fluctuations of
daily life. And like Mark and I were talking before the call,
our schedule this year has six primetime games.
We're going to be all over the place. We have a Thursday night game,
(16:59):
then a Monday night game, then a Thursday night game, and a Sunday night game, and then a Saturday.
There are so many different days in which we play, which usually in the NFL,
you have Sunday at one o'clock and it's very routinized.
But the more we can be routinized as individuals, as a team,
the more success we can potentially have because we've become more robust in
how we approach our day-to-day. day.
(17:21):
So while I used to think that there's always a right or wrong answer,
I now think, well, context matters and I'm always searching for that context.
All right, last one here. Last one. What I used to think is that information is all you need.
I used to try to accumulate as much information as I could all the time.
I'd dive into the research. I'd read as much as I could. I'd watch as many of
(17:44):
these seminars as I could.
I'd go visit people and think, well, I have the the information and going back,
I used to think that there was always right and wrong. Also information is all you need.
And you, and I hope you're seeing how this is tying in because I used to think
that if I had information, I could tell the athlete exactly what to do, wipe my hands.
I'm good at what I do, but I kept hitting brick walls where even if I had the
(18:06):
information and I told them and I set it up in a meal plan and I set it up exactly
how it needs to be minute by minute that that athlete set up for success.
But time and time again, it just didn't work that way. The world was too complex.
There's too many things. There's too much fluctuation in life for that to happen.
So what I think now is that information is nothing without action.
(18:26):
And that information, while important.
You're not lowering the friction that it takes to create action.
You're just leaving it up to chance. So a lot of times it's an uphill battle
with players because again, they might not care as much as you do,
or life gets in the way for them, or they don't trust you enough to do that,
(18:50):
or they think something different, or their information is coming from a different source.
All of these things are the realities of trying to create positive change within our athletes.
But that information without action is useless. So what I now do in my approach is create action plans.
I find out what the main blocker is for that person.
(19:11):
And I do that through getting to know them, getting to know them as a human
being, getting to understand them, getting them to trust me.
The one thing I try not to do is just, oh, they need to be educated about it.
Because Because education, I can tell you anecdotally, but I can tell you time
and time again, it is not the solution.
And if it was education, information is free out online.
(19:34):
And I could give all of our players, every player that ever comes across my
path, the information, and I would no longer have a job.
It would be easy to do that because information is not what makes change.
Action is what makes change.
And action requires a relationship with that person and you to take one step
further and or two steps further than what you usually would do.
(19:57):
And I hope you're seeing, and this graphic right here, this is not the Greenberg
framework in any way. It's just, this is the way it works in my mind.
As we talked about, what's caring about people, investing in the human being.
Being intentional with them, setting it up so that they know what to maximize
and what is satisfactory, teaching them to master the basics,
(20:18):
show them the compounding interest of the boring.
And this is where you're teaching them to fish. You're teaching them all the
things that are going to keep them.
Keep them going in the fluctuations of life, which is the complexity,
the context that matters, helping them navigate the complexities of life.
And then lastly, is doing more than is required of you, going above and beyond
(20:39):
with that action step, going, reducing the friction, not just pushing the car by it.
So in my head, there's a car that I'm trying to push and that athlete has either
helped me a little bit, helped me a lot, but either way, it's an uphill battle.
Well, reducing the friction, I'm going to take that and I'm going to turn that
car to where it's flat ground, where now we can put, if we push just as hard,
we're going to accelerate super hard.
(21:00):
And as those wheels start turning and the wheels start picking up momentum,
it's a lot easier to push, but we need that momentum first.
So I'm going to change the friction by setting their environment up in order
for them, for it to be easier, and then start with small little wins and go
with them along the way until they can push the call on their own.
And if you complete the cycle here, what you're looking at is when you do that
(21:23):
for someone, you're investing in that person and you care about them,
they're going to trust you more.
And you just continue that cycle, continue that cycle until now all of a sudden
you as a practitioner, your thing that needs to be maximized changes because
those players are satisfactory in what they can do.
And when you don't need to maximize all your time or be intentional all your
(21:46):
time with that person that needed to change the amount of friction and what they needed to do.
And they're self-sufficient because you showed them what they needed.
You helped them master the basics. You helped them learn to fish.
Now you can set your sights on someone else and your time is more intentional.
Hey friends, I hope you're enjoying this episode. If you are,
you can watch the full PowerPoint presentation in the new Athlete Performance.
Music.
(22:09):
Nutrition members area called The Locker Room, which is just launched in 2024.
For just $9 a month, You'll get access to all the latest talks from our monthly
speaker series and past course modules, such as Magnesium and Athletes,
Testing and Supplementation with Dr.
Jonathan Bortz, Curcumin, Inflammation and Recovery with Dr.
(22:31):
Krutika Nanavati, Vitamin D and Athletes, Health Performance and Testing with Dr.
Daniel Owen, The Three Mindsets of Elite Performance with Dr.
Alex Auerbach, The New Science of Sleep Nutrition with Dr.
Kate Pumpe, and much, much more. The locker room members area is just $9 a month.
Head over to drbubz.com forward slash subscribe.
(22:52):
That's drbubz.com forward slash subscribe to register and keep leveling up your
nutrition game. All right, let's get back to the talk.
And to me, this is the way that I see everything constantly.
I've changed my mind that this is, over the last five years,
that this is the way that I approach all the athletes that I work with.
And to be honest with you, it's also the way that I approach my friends and
(23:15):
my family and my daughter and the people that I spend time with.
Because I think all of these principles, I didn't even have to talk about nutrition
while we had this summit here.
All these things are about life, about the human being.
And I think the more I invest in the human being starting there,
the more I get out of people.
So what I did at the end here is, like I said, I like to read.
(23:40):
I like to consume information.
So I put a few books and either a podcast or a TV show or a movie or things
that I thought helped shape my view on the topics that I just discussed.
Us. So caring about people.
There are four books here, Creativity Inc., The Ride of a Lifetime,
two of which are about Disney and Pixar, which I think are just great examples
of leadership and caring about people.
(24:03):
How Full Is Your Bucket is a book that I read when I first started in the business
about filling other people's bucket up that fills up your room,
makes you feel fulfilled.
And The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene is a great author that I think shows
or explains how human beings behave, what patterns they show.
And anyone who's watched Ted Lasso, I might be a nerd for putting this up here,
(24:24):
but it's just a great representation of how to care about other people.
And I like watching the show because I get a sense of that's how I want to approach other human beings.
Being intentional. There are a few books here, Essentialism,
Upstream, Understanding the Difference Between Changing People Upstream and
(24:45):
Downstream, deep work about being intentional about where you put your attention
within a technology and social media.
But really it's a discussion around being intentional with your time.
And The Paradox of Choice, which is a great book.
Decisions around limiting the amount
of choices that you have so that it's easier to get through your day.
(25:07):
And that's something that some people in the building I've heard talk about
is they want to limit the amount of decisions they have to make in a day in
order to be successful in their career.
Because the less decisions they have to make, the less chance they have to mess them up.
And then No Stupid Questions is a Freakonomics podcast episode number 14 that
(25:28):
talks about in-depth maximizing versus satisficing, which I think is a very cool concept.
Mastering the Basics. Mastery, obviously, another Robert Greene book.
The Art of Learning, a very cool book about Josh Waitzkin, who was the world's
greatest chess player as a kid.
He is the topic of searching for Bobby Fischer, who gets bored of chess,
quits, and picks up a martial arts called push hands.
(25:49):
And he uses the principle of how he learned chess to become the world's greatest
push hands practitioner.
The Zen and the Art of Archery is a short, cool book about becoming one with
the activity that you're doing.
And then Unshakeable explains the idea of compounding interest.
And then Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a fun documentary,
(26:11):
about the world's greatest sushi chef who for, I don't even know how many years,
mastered the basics so well and so proficiently that he is now considered,
I mean, they made a documentary about him.
He's now considered the greatest sushi chef of all time. Context matters.
Here's some good books. Team of Teams is a great one.
(26:31):
General Stanley McChrystal about how they change their setup from how they approach Afghanistan.
Learning from the Octopus is one of my favorites. It's such a cool book about
a guy who studied tide pools and was contracted by the Department of Defense
in order to understand the patterns of how the world works so they can understand terrorist networks.
And then again, another shameless plug to mine and Joe Club's article.
(26:53):
And the One Track Mind is a cool podcast, episode number 13 about why complexity matters.
And lastly, and I know I'm going on about books and I get excited about these,
action being more important than information.
I'm sure a lot of you have read some of these books, but the movie,
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is one of my favorites of all time,
is an adaptation from a short story about a guy taking action.
(27:16):
And again, none of this stuff, none of these are nutrition Christian related.
They're a hundred percent nutrition related because they're about human beings.
They're about changing behaviors.
They're about being intentional and understanding what matters and what the
basics are about and how to get someone else to do something.
So like I said, in the beginning, I reserve the right to change my mind about
(27:38):
any of these things, but I'd love to open it up and have a conversation to hear
other people's perspectives or to ask questions about my perspective so I can
elaborate on some of that.
Awesome. Will, appreciate it, man. And that was a great talk and definitely
a few, few things resonating with me as well around that idea of optimization.
I mean, it's great to optimize, but it does come at a cost and we can't optimize everything.
So what are we going to start to focus in on? And that notion around mastering
(28:02):
the fundamentals, mastering the basics, I think it's always interesting,
you know, from a basketball side of things, when people ask who's one of the
best ever at the basics, it's Michael Jordan.
And so, you know, that, that sort of imagery for, for athletes can,
can help propel. So that's, you know, really interesting stuff.
Got some questions coming in for you, Will.
Let's fire away. So regarding mastering the basics, this is from JC.
(28:25):
Do you have any recommendations for how you would determine what the basics are in your field?
Like what's the thought process there of how you might go about that?
In my field, do you mean of nutrition, strength coach? What is the,
what's the context around that?
We'll get JC to jump in. Let's just assume it's as a strength coach is also
(28:45):
providing some nutrition support.
Yeah. I think one of my favorite questions, and this is always like a 101 interview
question is what's your philosophy.
And I think it's, I mean, a philosophy is just a way of thinking.
And it, to me, the basics go back to first principles. What are the things that
you cannot reduce down any further?
(29:07):
And as a strength coach, my first principle is that the body is adaptable.
And then from there, I decide what adaptation I want to make.
And I use my knowledge and information that we can get from research to start
planning of how I want to get to that adaptation.
And to me, that's the way that I look at strength conditioning.
(29:30):
Conditioning, you know, there's people try to segment into methods rather than systems.
Hey, you're an Olympic lifting guy. You're a X guy.
You're a this, this, this, but really the body is an adaptable unit.
How am I adapting the body in order to achieve the peak performance?
Is it that this guy has a previous injury and he's lost muscle mass in,
(29:52):
in, in his left leg and I need to achieve more symmetry there?
Well, I know the techniques in order to get that. Is it that this person is
overweight or their body fat percentage is too high and they're moving too slow
because there's not enough functional weight? Well, I know these strategies in order to get there.
So my guiding principle, my first principle there is always going to be that the body is adaptable.
(30:15):
And then once I've decided what adaptation I want, I use those methods to try to achieve that.
Tremendous. Another one here for you, Will, from Scott Nealon.
Can you share your thoughts when you're in the middle between a coach,
front office staff, and a player regarding playing weight or another concern
about their physical measures, and you have that balance of trust between both
(30:37):
the player and the coach?
Yeah, that's an excellent question. And in no way, again, I said I reserved
the right to change my mind. I don't know if I have a right or wrong answer.
I'll tell you how I see that, though, is that I will never have a conversation
with someone, because trust is really important, with someone else that I wouldn't
(30:57):
tell that person that I'm talking about what I'm saying.
Because that requires me to be open and honest with the person that I'm talking about.
And also aware enough that what I can say may have secondary and tertiary effects.
So that's my, that's my own rule to myself, but I have learned in my time,
especially in the NFL, that the conversation needs in, in, for,
(31:21):
with me needs to happen with every single person who has a hand in that decision.
So the player, I need to have a conversation with that player of, where do you feel best?
What are you feeling right now? What is it that you're struggling with?
What is it that you're maximizing? And if we can have that relationship where
we can talk about that, I feel a lot more comfortable having a conversation
(31:42):
and being the intermediary between those two, because that's a delicate conversation.
You know, it's not that there's tons of battles over that, but I need to know
how the player's feeling at all times, as much as how we see that player and
the adaptations that need to be made or the changes that need to be made.
And everyone needs to be on the same page because again, when you have misaligned
(32:05):
expectations, that's where conflict comes from. And that's where distrust comes from.
And once you lose that trust, it's gained in drops and lost in buckets.
And once you've lost that trust, it's very hard to get back,
especially in the NFL, because it's just such a transient leak.
There's so many transactions all the time. And in order to have a transformational
(32:26):
relationship with someone, it takes a lot of work and effort and a lot of open transparency.
So that's the best way that I can approach that. I can't say that that's the
right answer, that it's always worked out for the best.
But for most of the time, I feel I can sleep at night knowing that I'm having
an authentic conversation with both sides of the party.
Yeah. I've heard the term relationship equity. And like you say,
you build up this equity in the relationship over time and it takes a long time to do that.
(32:49):
And so we do need to be mindful of what we're saying so that we don't,
in one moment, it really starts to damage that trust and that relationship.
If we shift gears here a little bit, Will, and talk lab testing.
So in terms of from a nutrition standpoint or even athlete health recovery,
are there certain tests that you guys might run or things that are on the panels
(33:13):
that you might want to share with listeners?
Yeah, I think the biggest thing to me is, especially to one of my points of being intentional.
Anything that we're going to go above and beyond testing for,
I want to make sure that we have the ability to make actionable change and retest
and see something different.
So I got caught up early in my career testing for everything.
(33:38):
Like the more lab tests we can get, the better. And I found that we spent a
whole bunch of money doing that, but I didn't really make much change.
It was more like, oh man, I have all these lab tests, right?
What are we going to do with them?
So we've actually dialed it back in order to make sure that we are being intentional
with what we can maximize, kind of going back to that point,
what we can maximize, what we can make change on, and the things that we can
(34:01):
objectively say, this is how we're doing it. This is why we did it.
And something that is possible for us to change. you know, if someone's arginine
levels are low, it doesn't inform me enough for how we're going to take action
steps enough than if someone's red blood cell magnesium is low.
Like those two things mean something different to me.
(34:23):
And maybe I'm not, maybe my education is not up to snuff enough to see that.
But I know that if we can increase the amount of magnesium, that's going can
have a huge impact for someone's diet in their performance rather than a whole
bunch of lab tests that we may never,
you know, that might be just a snapshot or that might be something that we don't
(34:45):
really have the ability to change as much.
I also think that a lot of the blood work that we do,
I look at long-term rather than the snapshot, like someone's HbA1c levels comparatively
to their fasting glucose at
that moment when they did their blood test at 11 o'clock in the morning.
(35:07):
That's going to provide me more context of how I want to make interventions,
than anything that's just a snapshot.
Yeah it is interesting the sort of nice to knows rather than the need to knows,
and it's easy to run a lot of those tests and it's interesting to
parallel between nutrition or training when we see a really concise lab
order or a training plan we always think of all the other things that could
(35:29):
be there rather than thinking geez i wonder why this person only chose these
two or three things to include because it is a lot harder isn't it to disc to
take away things and really make it concise of what the person needs to your
point that you can actually act
on, and make a significant change on, right?
Yeah, well, and I think you're playing right into some of my points that I was
(35:50):
talking about is when I first started doing this because everyone else was doing it.
I'm like, oh man, they must have something figured out in their blood work that
I'm not seeing. So I'm going to get all these lab tests because that's what I should be doing.
And then I had this overwhelming amount of information that I didn't know what
to do with, where instead,
when you scale back and you're confident in knowing the basics and and being
(36:11):
very good at making sure that people's vitamin D levels are in a specific spot,
that their red blood cell magnesium levels are, are where you want them to be,
that their lipid levels, like all the basic things that you would test for in the beginning.
And you might only test for three or five things, but you know that you're improving
those and being comfortable with mastering the basics there in time.
(36:33):
The goal is that you can either expand that or that things are going to take
care of themselves because you've, you've been intentional about one thing And
when someone's intentional about one thing, it's a lot easier to be intentional
about two, and that continues to grow and compound on itself.
So that's a great example in nutrition of all the five things that I learned
(36:54):
wrapped up in a single blood test.
Music.
That wraps things up for this episode please share with colleagues and athletes
and if you have any questions feel free to post on instagram at dr bubs and we can get you a reply,
thanks again for listening please take a couple of minutes to leave us a rating
(37:17):
and review on your favorite podcast platform it's a big big help to show lastly
don't forget to register for the
third APN online summit this June 11th to 13th, absolutely free for the 15 tremendous
talks from experts in the field that we have teed up. All right, see you next time.
The Dr. Bubz Performance Podcast
(37:38):
endeavors to provide accurate and helpful information to listeners.
These podcasts cannot take into account individual circumstances and are not
intended to be a substitute for health and medical advice from a qualified health professional.
You should always seek the advice of a qualified health professional before
acting on any of the information.
Music.
High-level players we have here, I'm talking about the guys seven years plus,
future Hall of Famers that I watch every day and learn from, master the basics.
You could set your watch to when they come in the building. You know what they're eating.
You know what they're doing for recovery. They know which athletic training
they're going to. They know what strength, what exercise you're doing on a particular day.
(00:22):
Welcome to the Performance Nutrition Podcast. Podcast giving you the latest
evidence-based research and cutting-edge insights for elite mental and physical performance.
He's connecting you directly with the world's leading experts and coaches.
Here's your host, Dr. Bubbs. Welcome back or welcome to the Performance Nutrition Podcast.
(00:43):
I'm Dr. Mark Bubbs, Performance Nutritionist, and this is season number eight.
I hope you're well. I'm absolutely buzzing. We are very excited to be hosting
our third Third Annual Athlete Performance Nutrition Online Summit next week, June 11th to 13th.
We've got three exciting days of talks from leaders in performance nutrition
(01:03):
on the ground in pro sport and in research. Let's go down the list.
Kate Calloway, Director of Performance Nutrition at the Carolina Panthers in the NFL.
Music.
Dr. Jamie Pugh, Researcher and Practitioner from Liverpool John Moores University.
Jamie Meeks, RD, New Orleans Saints Lead Dietitian.
(01:24):
Dr. Jose Antonio, CEO of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
James Moran, Lead Nutritionist for UNO X Cycling Team.
Gabriela Alfonso, of the Boston Red Sox in Major League Baseball.
Dr. Darren Kandow, Talking All Things Creatine.
Dr. Emma Tester, Head of Performance Nutrition for the Tottenham Hotspurs in
(01:45):
the English Premier League.
Dr. Andy Sparks, PhD, Sports Science for Morton Nutrition.
Isaac Mourier, Performance Nutrition Lead at the Orlando Magic in the NBA,
Zach DeSimone, Performance Dietitian for the Las Vegas Raiders in the NFL And Carl Bombardier,
from the Arizona Coyotes in the NHL Rounding things out There's going to be
(02:09):
lots of great new science and tremendous insights You can register free for
this event To participate,
just head over to drbubz.com forward slash APN that's drbubbs.com forward slash
APN and you can get all the updates on the summit next week.
On that note, in today's episode, I'll be sharing a talk from our first APN
Summit in 2022 with the Buffalo Bills assistant strength coach, Will Greenberg,
(02:34):
who shares his wisdom and insights from coaching athletes over his career in
his talk, Five Things I've Changed My Mind About. Enjoy.
That's what I'm going to talk about today.
What are five things that I changed my mind about? The setup of this talk is
going to be pretty simple. Not a lot of slides.
(02:56):
There's going to be what I used to think, and then there's going to be what I think now.
Five years ago, me listening to this, I may be thinking, hey,
this guy's crazy because he's wrong.
In five years' time, I'll probably be thinking, what was I talking about back then?
I always reserve the right, I'll put a disclaimer. I always reserve the right
to change my mind on the things that I'm talking about.
(03:18):
So I'm not asking you to walk away with a bunch of Monday morning takeaways.
I'm hoping to have a conversation or provide you with some insight of how I've
grown as a practitioner, as a person over the last five years.
And my transition early in my career from college basketball to college football,
(03:39):
now into professional football, I've been able to see things from a lot of different angles.
And with that open mind that I took at each spot, trying to learn different,
not just different tactics, but different principles or refine my principles
of how I see what I do and what's excessive.
So the first one that I want to hit, really hit hard with is what I used to
(04:02):
think is that people care.
And I left it intentionally vague. I understand that people care.
And I'm talking generally about the athletes or the people that I work with,
but it's not that they, it's not that they don't care.
It's just that my expectations were that they were as passionate as I was about
the things that go into performance.
(04:23):
So I hope you can tell that I am passionate about nutrition.
I'm passionate about exercise.
I'm passionate about the components that make athletes successful or get as
close to peak performance as possible.
But my expectation was misaligned that the athlete would care just as much about
that because there's a lot of things that that athlete has to care about.
(04:44):
Just one of them happens to be nutrition and performance or nutrition and exercise
or anything that goes into improving performance.
But there's also a human being in there.
And everyone on this call has a lot of information in their head.
I hope that I have a lot of of information in my head.
I've got a master's degree in nutrition.
I read quite a bit. I try to attain as much information as possible.
(05:08):
But what I realized was that human beings are not persuaded by information.
You're not going to persuade someone to change their mind, especially in a polarized
world like this that we live in.
You're not going to change people's minds just based off fact and information.
I've tried time and time and time and time again, and I've always hit a brick wall.
(05:30):
The difference is, and the thing that I think now, is that the more I care about people,
the more I authentically have a relationship with them, the more I become part
of their tribe, the more that they rely on the emotion of, I can trust this
person, the more I can get done with them.
So what I used to think was that people cared just as much as I did.
What I think now is that I need to spend the time and invest my time into caring about people.
(05:54):
And it's not the old adage, they don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
It's not that. It's creating authentic relationships with people.
It's becoming part of, not just becoming part of the tribe, but understanding
how they view the world because people make decisions or change behaviors off
emotion, not fact, in the majority of the time.
(06:16):
And the more I recognize that, the less I actually talk to my athletes about nutrition,
about exercise, about the things, the components of performance,
the more I scale that back and the more time I spent authentically learning
about that person's family or their friends or their children or things that
they're interested in the world, the more the gates open and those players came to me.
(06:39):
And trust is such a critical component, especially in professional football,
along with a lot of different places.
But the trust that you can have with that athlete really matters.
So like I said, I used to think people cared like I did. They cared about the
facts. They cared about nutrition. They cared about those things.
It's not that they don't care.
It's just the more you care about them, the more you show an interest in them
(07:01):
and authentically have a relationship with them, the more you're going to get done with them. Yeah.
So let's backtrack five years.
The next thing I used to think, and any of the strength coaches on here,
this might be inflammatory because that's a common saying that how you do one
thing is how you do everything. And I get it.
It's a motivational tactic to say, hey, the little things matter.
(07:24):
I get that. And maybe I'm taking it too literally.
But when you try to maximize everything in your life as a practitioner,
or you try to maximize every piece of my new detail in someone's performance.
Because there's a lot of things that go into it. There's the mental component,
there's the physical, there's the technical, there's the tactical.
(07:45):
There's so many things that go into someone's performance that by the time you
spend all that emotional and physical resources to get all those maximized,
you've maximized none of them.
So what I'm saying is that what I think now is to be intentional with the finite
resources that you have.
Your time and your effort, your emotional effort, your physical effort,
(08:09):
those are all finite resources, ones where you can't maximize everything all the time.
As a practitioner, I have to know where my strengths lie and I have to know what is good enough.
So there's something called maximizing versus satisficing.
And maximization is finding the thing where you're going to get the biggest
(08:31):
return on investment with your time and your effort.
Satisficing, it doesn't mean you don't pay attention to it. You just recognize
that the time spent on that is
not going to get you enough return on investment to continue to improve.
And I think the best example of this that happened recently was we had our off-season
training and then we have five weeks of break until training camp.
(08:53):
And we have a defensive tackle who has a very good body fat percentage.
Let's call it 20%. 20% is very good for a defensive tackle weighing 305 pounds.
But if you look at Aaron Donald, he visibly has abs, which means his body fat
percentage, I can't say objectively, but probably lower than 20%.
Significantly lower. And so that defensive tackle said to me before he left,
(09:14):
hey, I really want to focus on changing my body fat percentage and getting it down.
Now, the strength coach in me, the nutritious in me, thinks to myself, oh, that's great.
This guy's interested in losing body fat percentage. But in the next five weeks,
the emotional and physical and time-intensive effort that it would take to lose
that body fat percentage would take away those resources from him becoming a
(09:38):
better football player,
which is the most important thing going into training camp.
So while I'm excited about his motivation to do that, his body fat percentage is satisfactory.
And not satisfactory in a way of, hey, you don't need to worry about eating
appropriately anymore. more.
We need to be intentional about the things that are going to maximize your time on the field.
So being intentional with time and effort resources is such a critical component
(10:02):
of achieving peak performance.
But if you take the approach of how you do one thing, how you do everything,
you run the risk of burnout as a practitioner or never maximizing yourself as an athlete.
Back five years ago, what I used to think. Other people haven't figured out,
especially on social media.
I guarantee I could go on social media right now and in 10 seconds find you
(10:23):
someone that's either living their best life or someone who has a new exercise
routine or way of eating that you're missing out on unless you pay them $299.
You get $99 off the order now because I see it all the time.
And it's easy to fall in that trap because there's a salesmanship to that.
And I don't discredit them for trying to sell their information that way.
(10:47):
But what I now think and what I have to constantly remind myself is to master
the basics, master the basics.
And that brings me to an idea of something outside of our world in the financial
world of compounding interest.
And some of the wealthiest people
in the world have created their wealth through compounding interest.
(11:08):
They put little by little by little by little, they put put money away that
compounds on itself, compounds on itself.
And exponentially with interest, or as long as the interest rate is going up,
they are gaining money without doing anything.
They're letting their money work for them. In the NFL, in sports, health is your wealth.
(11:28):
And it just happens to rhyme. That's not my tagline, but health is your wealth.
And every good decision that you make, whether it be what you eat and put in
your body, whether it's how how you train, whether it's how you recover,
whether it's how you sleep, every decision that you make that is good compounds
on itself because the next day when you're feeling fresher or you're recovering faster,
(11:50):
you train, you can train harder. You can get more out of what you're doing.
Your, your mental acuity is better. You're learning more.
And then you do that day after day after day, that compounding interest of just
doing the basics really, really well.
Is what creates peak performers. And I say that because I watch the high level players we have here.
(12:13):
I'm talking about the guys seven years plus, future Hall of Famers that I watch
every day and learn from, master the basics.
You could set your watch to when they come in the building. You know what they're
eating. You know what they're doing for recovery.
They know which athletic training they're going to. They know what strength,
what exercise you're doing on a particular day. And time and time again,
(12:33):
I see that with the guys that are seven plus years.
And it's the consistency, not the intensity of it.
Because a lot of people I see think that they get to the next level,
their intensity has to go up.
But it's the opposite. It's the consistency has to improve, has to get better.
Because everyone's intensity is going to be around the same level.
(12:55):
It's how consistent can you be. And as a practitioner working with people that
are trying to modify their behavior, which I think we can all agree is difficult
at times, something long-term like doing the basics,
which are very boring and very monotonous, it's difficult to show someone immediate results.
So the way in which I approach that and the way I think now is find reward in a streak.
(13:21):
And I think Peloton, if anyone uses Peloton, does a great job with this.
Because every time I ride and I get third day in a row, it gives me a badge.
It says, hey, congrats, you got three days in a row.
And I'm like, oh yeah, okay, okay. It's three days in a row.
Maybe I want to get five days in a row. And then five days turns into 10 days,
10 days turns into 50 days.
And then all of a sudden I find myself doing way more cardiovascular work on
(13:41):
the Peloton and getting excited to get that next badge and finding myself on
a day that I might not want want to work out because I care about that streak.
I find reward in that streak.
And so it's just a small strategy of how to keep our players and our athletes
going, but mastering the basics,
consistently over time is what compounds interest to make peak performers sustainable
(14:06):
and their health being their wealth.
All right. Five years ago, what I used to think, that there's always a right or wrong answer.
And I'm not saying there's never a right or there's never a wrong,
but I came from a world in coming through,
those of you who know Charles Poliquin, he did an excellent job of putting out
(14:27):
really valuable information that made you think like, oh man, that's right.
And this other stuff is wrong. Now, sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't.
But as I started to go along my journey in my career, I started to realize,
well, that's not always right.
Or, well, that's not always wrong. There are a time and place for those things.
And what I think now is there may be right or wrong answers,
but context really matters.
(14:49):
Actually, I'll shameless plug a editorial that myself and one of our sports
scientists that used to be with us, Joe Club, wrote about complexity in sport.
That a lot of the problems that we deal with are complex problems.
They don't have simple, predictable, repeatable solutions. Injury is a great example in sports.
(15:10):
If we could predict injury, there'd be no injury. And in fact,
if we knew that we predicted injury and stopped it, we still don't know those
things. injury is an emergent problem.
There's emerging things where as you see what's going on, you gather information,
how they're eating, how they're sleeping, their wellness questionnaire,
all the information that we get, you then make the best decision possible and
(15:33):
then continue moving forward to monitor those things and make the best decision possible again.
It might be the right decision or it might be the wrong decision or the right
decision may turn into the wrong decision in the future so you have to know
that there's not always a right or a wrong answer it's just what is the best
decision for that time what is the emerging solution that you're seeing,
(15:54):
and then you go with it from there and continue to monitor.
And it's hard to think that because a lot of times human beings want a simple solution.
We don't like, as human beings, we don't like things out of our control.
We don't like feeling like things are, it's uncomfortable to feel like it's out of control.
And we are prediction machines. That's how the brain works. We want to predict what's next.
(16:18):
But a lot of times that leads to oversimplification and that leads to binary
thinking, reductionism.
And when we find ourselves in a complex situation and we apply simple solutions,
that creates danger and a fragile environment.
So what we want to be able to do is create a more robust system or robust athlete
(16:38):
that can handle the complexities of life when things go wrong.
And going back to mastering the basics, if you can create someone who can master
the basics at all times, they're much more resilient to the fluctuations of
daily life. And like Mark and I were talking before the call,
our schedule this year has six primetime games.
We're going to be all over the place. We have a Thursday night game,
(16:59):
then a Monday night game, then a Thursday night game, and a Sunday night game, and then a Saturday.
There are so many different days in which we play, which usually in the NFL,
you have Sunday at one o'clock and it's very routinized.
But the more we can be routinized as individuals, as a team,
the more success we can potentially have because we've become more robust in
how we approach our day-to-day. day.
(17:21):
So while I used to think that there's always a right or wrong answer,
I now think, well, context matters and I'm always searching for that context.
All right, last one here. Last one. What I used to think is that information is all you need.
I used to try to accumulate as much information as I could all the time.
I'd dive into the research. I'd read as much as I could. I'd watch as many of
(17:44):
these seminars as I could.
I'd go visit people and think, well, I have the the information and going back,
I used to think that there was always right and wrong. Also information is all you need.
And you, and I hope you're seeing how this is tying in because I used to think
that if I had information, I could tell the athlete exactly what to do, wipe my hands.
I'm good at what I do, but I kept hitting brick walls where even if I had the
(18:06):
information and I told them and I set it up in a meal plan and I set it up exactly
how it needs to be minute by minute that that athlete set up for success.
But time and time again, it just didn't work that way. The world was too complex.
There's too many things. There's too much fluctuation in life for that to happen.
So what I think now is that information is nothing without action.
(18:26):
And that information, while important.
You're not lowering the friction that it takes to create action.
You're just leaving it up to chance. So a lot of times it's an uphill battle
with players because again, they might not care as much as you do,
or life gets in the way for them, or they don't trust you enough to do that,
(18:50):
or they think something different, or their information is coming from a different source.
All of these things are the realities of trying to create positive change within our athletes.
But that information without action is useless. So what I now do in my approach is create action plans.
I find out what the main blocker is for that person.
(19:11):
And I do that through getting to know them, getting to know them as a human
being, getting to understand them, getting them to trust me.
The one thing I try not to do is just, oh, they need to be educated about it.
Because Because education, I can tell you anecdotally, but I can tell you time
and time again, it is not the solution.
And if it was education, information is free out online.
(19:34):
And I could give all of our players, every player that ever comes across my
path, the information, and I would no longer have a job.
It would be easy to do that because information is not what makes change.
Action is what makes change.
And action requires a relationship with that person and you to take one step
further and or two steps further than what you usually would do.
(19:57):
And I hope you're seeing, and this graphic right here, this is not the Greenberg
framework in any way. It's just, this is the way it works in my mind.
As we talked about, what's caring about people, investing in the human being.
Being intentional with them, setting it up so that they know what to maximize
and what is satisfactory, teaching them to master the basics,
(20:18):
show them the compounding interest of the boring.
And this is where you're teaching them to fish. You're teaching them all the
things that are going to keep them.
Keep them going in the fluctuations of life, which is the complexity,
the context that matters, helping them navigate the complexities of life.
And then lastly, is doing more than is required of you, going above and beyond
(20:39):
with that action step, going, reducing the friction, not just pushing the car by it.
So in my head, there's a car that I'm trying to push and that athlete has either
helped me a little bit, helped me a lot, but either way, it's an uphill battle.
Well, reducing the friction, I'm going to take that and I'm going to turn that
car to where it's flat ground, where now we can put, if we push just as hard,
we're going to accelerate super hard.
(21:00):
And as those wheels start turning and the wheels start picking up momentum,
it's a lot easier to push, but we need that momentum first.
So I'm going to change the friction by setting their environment up in order
for them, for it to be easier, and then start with small little wins and go
with them along the way until they can push the call on their own.
And if you complete the cycle here, what you're looking at is when you do that
(21:23):
for someone, you're investing in that person and you care about them,
they're going to trust you more.
And you just continue that cycle, continue that cycle until now all of a sudden
you as a practitioner, your thing that needs to be maximized changes because
those players are satisfactory in what they can do.
And when you don't need to maximize all your time or be intentional all your
(21:46):
time with that person that needed to change the amount of friction and what they needed to do.
And they're self-sufficient because you showed them what they needed.
You helped them master the basics. You helped them learn to fish.
Now you can set your sights on someone else and your time is more intentional.
Hey friends, I hope you're enjoying this episode. If you are,
you can watch the full PowerPoint presentation in the new Athlete Performance.
Music.
(22:09):
Nutrition members area called The Locker Room, which is just launched in 2024.
For just $9 a month, You'll get access to all the latest talks from our monthly
speaker series and past course modules, such as Magnesium and Athletes,
Testing and Supplementation with Dr.
Jonathan Bortz, Curcumin, Inflammation and Recovery with Dr.
(22:31):
Krutika Nanavati, Vitamin D and Athletes, Health Performance and Testing with Dr.
Daniel Owen, The Three Mindsets of Elite Performance with Dr.
Alex Auerbach, The New Science of Sleep Nutrition with Dr.
Kate Pumpe, and much, much more. The locker room members area is just $9 a month.
Head over to drbubz.com forward slash subscribe.
(22:52):
That's drbubz.com forward slash subscribe to register and keep leveling up your
nutrition game. All right, let's get back to the talk.
And to me, this is the way that I see everything constantly.
I've changed my mind that this is, over the last five years,
that this is the way that I approach all the athletes that I work with.
And to be honest with you, it's also the way that I approach my friends and
(23:15):
my family and my daughter and the people that I spend time with.
Because I think all of these principles, I didn't even have to talk about nutrition
while we had this summit here.
All these things are about life, about the human being.
And I think the more I invest in the human being starting there,
the more I get out of people.
So what I did at the end here is, like I said, I like to read.
(23:40):
I like to consume information.
So I put a few books and either a podcast or a TV show or a movie or things
that I thought helped shape my view on the topics that I just discussed.
Us. So caring about people.
There are four books here, Creativity Inc., The Ride of a Lifetime,
two of which are about Disney and Pixar, which I think are just great examples
of leadership and caring about people.
(24:03):
How Full Is Your Bucket is a book that I read when I first started in the business
about filling other people's bucket up that fills up your room,
makes you feel fulfilled.
And The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene is a great author that I think shows
or explains how human beings behave, what patterns they show.
And anyone who's watched Ted Lasso, I might be a nerd for putting this up here,
(24:24):
but it's just a great representation of how to care about other people.
And I like watching the show because I get a sense of that's how I want to approach other human beings.
Being intentional. There are a few books here, Essentialism,
Upstream, Understanding the Difference Between Changing People Upstream and
(24:45):
Downstream, deep work about being intentional about where you put your attention
within a technology and social media.
But really it's a discussion around being intentional with your time.
And The Paradox of Choice, which is a great book.
Decisions around limiting the amount
of choices that you have so that it's easier to get through your day.
(25:07):
And that's something that some people in the building I've heard talk about
is they want to limit the amount of decisions they have to make in a day in
order to be successful in their career.
Because the less decisions they have to make, the less chance they have to mess them up.
And then No Stupid Questions is a Freakonomics podcast episode number 14 that
(25:28):
talks about in-depth maximizing versus satisficing, which I think is a very cool concept.
Mastering the Basics. Mastery, obviously, another Robert Greene book.
The Art of Learning, a very cool book about Josh Waitzkin, who was the world's
greatest chess player as a kid.
He is the topic of searching for Bobby Fischer, who gets bored of chess,
quits, and picks up a martial arts called push hands.
(25:49):
And he uses the principle of how he learned chess to become the world's greatest
push hands practitioner.
The Zen and the Art of Archery is a short, cool book about becoming one with
the activity that you're doing.
And then Unshakeable explains the idea of compounding interest.
And then Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a fun documentary,
(26:11):
about the world's greatest sushi chef who for, I don't even know how many years,
mastered the basics so well and so proficiently that he is now considered,
I mean, they made a documentary about him.
He's now considered the greatest sushi chef of all time. Context matters.
Here's some good books. Team of Teams is a great one.
(26:31):
General Stanley McChrystal about how they change their setup from how they approach Afghanistan.
Learning from the Octopus is one of my favorites. It's such a cool book about
a guy who studied tide pools and was contracted by the Department of Defense
in order to understand the patterns of how the world works so they can understand terrorist networks.
And then again, another shameless plug to mine and Joe Club's article.
(26:53):
And the One Track Mind is a cool podcast, episode number 13 about why complexity matters.
And lastly, and I know I'm going on about books and I get excited about these,
action being more important than information.
I'm sure a lot of you have read some of these books, but the movie,
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is one of my favorites of all time,
is an adaptation from a short story about a guy taking action.
(27:16):
And again, none of this stuff, none of these are nutrition Christian related.
They're a hundred percent nutrition related because they're about human beings.
They're about changing behaviors.
They're about being intentional and understanding what matters and what the
basics are about and how to get someone else to do something.
So like I said, in the beginning, I reserve the right to change my mind about
(27:38):
any of these things, but I'd love to open it up and have a conversation to hear
other people's perspectives or to ask questions about my perspective so I can
elaborate on some of that.
Awesome. Will, appreciate it, man. And that was a great talk and definitely
a few, few things resonating with me as well around that idea of optimization.
I mean, it's great to optimize, but it does come at a cost and we can't optimize everything.
So what are we going to start to focus in on? And that notion around mastering
(28:02):
the fundamentals, mastering the basics, I think it's always interesting,
you know, from a basketball side of things, when people ask who's one of the
best ever at the basics, it's Michael Jordan.
And so, you know, that, that sort of imagery for, for athletes can,
can help propel. So that's, you know, really interesting stuff.
Got some questions coming in for you, Will.
Let's fire away. So regarding mastering the basics, this is from JC.
(28:25):
Do you have any recommendations for how you would determine what the basics are in your field?
Like what's the thought process there of how you might go about that?
In my field, do you mean of nutrition, strength coach? What is the,
what's the context around that?
We'll get JC to jump in. Let's just assume it's as a strength coach is also
(28:45):
providing some nutrition support.
Yeah. I think one of my favorite questions, and this is always like a 101 interview
question is what's your philosophy.
And I think it's, I mean, a philosophy is just a way of thinking.
And it, to me, the basics go back to first principles. What are the things that
you cannot reduce down any further?
(29:07):
And as a strength coach, my first principle is that the body is adaptable.
And then from there, I decide what adaptation I want to make.
And I use my knowledge and information that we can get from research to start
planning of how I want to get to that adaptation.
And to me, that's the way that I look at strength conditioning.
(29:30):
Conditioning, you know, there's people try to segment into methods rather than systems.
Hey, you're an Olympic lifting guy. You're a X guy.
You're a this, this, this, but really the body is an adaptable unit.
How am I adapting the body in order to achieve the peak performance?
Is it that this guy has a previous injury and he's lost muscle mass in,
(29:52):
in, in his left leg and I need to achieve more symmetry there?
Well, I know the techniques in order to get that. Is it that this person is
overweight or their body fat percentage is too high and they're moving too slow
because there's not enough functional weight? Well, I know these strategies in order to get there.
So my guiding principle, my first principle there is always going to be that the body is adaptable.
(30:15):
And then once I've decided what adaptation I want, I use those methods to try to achieve that.
Tremendous. Another one here for you, Will, from Scott Nealon.
Can you share your thoughts when you're in the middle between a coach,
front office staff, and a player regarding playing weight or another concern
about their physical measures, and you have that balance of trust between both
(30:37):
the player and the coach?
Yeah, that's an excellent question. And in no way, again, I said I reserved
the right to change my mind. I don't know if I have a right or wrong answer.
I'll tell you how I see that, though, is that I will never have a conversation
with someone, because trust is really important, with someone else that I wouldn't
(30:57):
tell that person that I'm talking about what I'm saying.
Because that requires me to be open and honest with the person that I'm talking about.
And also aware enough that what I can say may have secondary and tertiary effects.
So that's my, that's my own rule to myself, but I have learned in my time,
especially in the NFL, that the conversation needs in, in, for,
(31:21):
with me needs to happen with every single person who has a hand in that decision.
So the player, I need to have a conversation with that player of, where do you feel best?
What are you feeling right now? What is it that you're struggling with?
What is it that you're maximizing? And if we can have that relationship where
we can talk about that, I feel a lot more comfortable having a conversation
(31:42):
and being the intermediary between those two, because that's a delicate conversation.
You know, it's not that there's tons of battles over that, but I need to know
how the player's feeling at all times, as much as how we see that player and
the adaptations that need to be made or the changes that need to be made.
And everyone needs to be on the same page because again, when you have misaligned
(32:05):
expectations, that's where conflict comes from. And that's where distrust comes from.
And once you lose that trust, it's gained in drops and lost in buckets.
And once you've lost that trust, it's very hard to get back,
especially in the NFL, because it's just such a transient leak.
There's so many transactions all the time. And in order to have a transformational
(32:26):
relationship with someone, it takes a lot of work and effort and a lot of open transparency.
So that's the best way that I can approach that. I can't say that that's the
right answer, that it's always worked out for the best.
But for most of the time, I feel I can sleep at night knowing that I'm having
an authentic conversation with both sides of the party.
Yeah. I've heard the term relationship equity. And like you say,
you build up this equity in the relationship over time and it takes a long time to do that.
(32:49):
And so we do need to be mindful of what we're saying so that we don't,
in one moment, it really starts to damage that trust and that relationship.
If we shift gears here a little bit, Will, and talk lab testing.
So in terms of from a nutrition standpoint or even athlete health recovery,
are there certain tests that you guys might run or things that are on the panels
(33:13):
that you might want to share with listeners?
Yeah, I think the biggest thing to me is, especially to one of my points of being intentional.
Anything that we're going to go above and beyond testing for,
I want to make sure that we have the ability to make actionable change and retest
and see something different.
So I got caught up early in my career testing for everything.
(33:38):
Like the more lab tests we can get, the better. And I found that we spent a
whole bunch of money doing that, but I didn't really make much change.
It was more like, oh man, I have all these lab tests, right?
What are we going to do with them?
So we've actually dialed it back in order to make sure that we are being intentional
with what we can maximize, kind of going back to that point,
what we can maximize, what we can make change on, and the things that we can
(34:01):
objectively say, this is how we're doing it. This is why we did it.
And something that is possible for us to change. you know, if someone's arginine
levels are low, it doesn't inform me enough for how we're going to take action
steps enough than if someone's red blood cell magnesium is low.
Like those two things mean something different to me.
(34:23):
And maybe I'm not, maybe my education is not up to snuff enough to see that.
But I know that if we can increase the amount of magnesium, that's going can
have a huge impact for someone's diet in their performance rather than a whole
bunch of lab tests that we may never,
you know, that might be just a snapshot or that might be something that we don't
(34:45):
really have the ability to change as much.
I also think that a lot of the blood work that we do,
I look at long-term rather than the snapshot, like someone's HbA1c levels comparatively
to their fasting glucose at
that moment when they did their blood test at 11 o'clock in the morning.
(35:07):
That's going to provide me more context of how I want to make interventions,
than anything that's just a snapshot.
Yeah it is interesting the sort of nice to knows rather than the need to knows,
and it's easy to run a lot of those tests and it's interesting to
parallel between nutrition or training when we see a really concise lab
order or a training plan we always think of all the other things that could
(35:29):
be there rather than thinking geez i wonder why this person only chose these
two or three things to include because it is a lot harder isn't it to disc to
take away things and really make it concise of what the person needs to your
point that you can actually act
on, and make a significant change on, right?
Yeah, well, and I think you're playing right into some of my points that I was
(35:50):
talking about is when I first started doing this because everyone else was doing it.
I'm like, oh man, they must have something figured out in their blood work that
I'm not seeing. So I'm going to get all these lab tests because that's what I should be doing.
And then I had this overwhelming amount of information that I didn't know what
to do with, where instead,
when you scale back and you're confident in knowing the basics and and being
(36:11):
very good at making sure that people's vitamin D levels are in a specific spot,
that their red blood cell magnesium levels are, are where you want them to be,
that their lipid levels, like all the basic things that you would test for in the beginning.
And you might only test for three or five things, but you know that you're improving
those and being comfortable with mastering the basics there in time.
(36:33):
The goal is that you can either expand that or that things are going to take
care of themselves because you've, you've been intentional about one thing And
when someone's intentional about one thing, it's a lot easier to be intentional
about two, and that continues to grow and compound on itself.
So that's a great example in nutrition of all the five things that I learned
(36:54):
wrapped up in a single blood test.
Music.
That wraps things up for this episode please share with colleagues and athletes
and if you have any questions feel free to post on instagram at dr bubs and we can get you a reply,
thanks again for listening please take a couple of minutes to leave us a rating
(37:17):
and review on your favorite podcast platform it's a big big help to show lastly
don't forget to register for the
third APN online summit this June 11th to 13th, absolutely free for the 15 tremendous
talks from experts in the field that we have teed up. All right, see you next time.
The Dr. Bubz Performance Podcast
(37:38):
endeavors to provide accurate and helpful information to listeners.
These podcasts cannot take into account individual circumstances and are not
intended to be a substitute for health and medical advice from a qualified health professional.
You should always seek the advice of a qualified health professional before
acting on any of the information.
Music.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.