Automatically transcribed, so expect the odd wrong name or word.
Great man. Fizz. What's up? Greg Day. How the hell are you? Yeah, I'm good. Is that the worst answer possible? Yeah, no it's it's it's pretty shit. I'm well, having a subtle variation. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks. It's been a few years, it's been a little while, it's good to have you back, it's good to be here. You know the last time out here we had a little Batman icon. We do, did you bring one? No. I apologise. Absolutely no segue from that. Nothing's happened since we did the last podcast episode. The world's going well.
People in government appear to be handling things reasonably well. I think there's not much violence and the climate's in good shape. If you could summarise the last four years in a nutshell, would it be this? Emotional, damn it! Yeah. It's one of Fizz's favourite Instagram reels, little bits of content, so you know, it might come out. Emotion! Sorry, I can't help myself. But how you been? What's been happening? Fill me in, tell me everything. Don't tell me everything, but tell me all the good stuff. Narrow it down. There's a lot of categories of the world. There are.
Alright, so here's how I want to start. We haven't done this for a while. The Virtus family, you know, just because of the world's, the world spins, people move on, people come in. Virtus family looks a lot different now to what it might have 2017 when we first did this. Yeah, I still haven't met a large number of the new people and lots of reasons behind that. I'm not always down on the floor and they haven't met me and so. So what should they know about the Fizz? Because we'll get into a little bit of a cliff notes of your history and what you've done and where you've been and things like that.
Today I want it to be a little bit more of a chat than that but I think that's an important way for us to get started for you to get to know or for everyone to get to know you. First of all, what should they know? What are cliff notes? Why is it called a cliff note? I actually don't know. Do you know? You would know. Is it possible that you have used the wrong phrase? No, cliff notes are a thing. Now cliff notes is like the breakdown. It's, I don't know, I actually don't know the technical definition but I'll sort that out.
If you could give us a summary of who the Fizz is and what the Fizz has done while I search cliff notes. I am a purveyor of possibility. Go on. Does that make sense to you? It does. So the word purveyor is not something that I knew about until I watched Kath and Kim. Kath and Kim, an Australian iconic comedy. It's iconic and it's obviously very intellectual because you learn words such as purveyor. Well Glenn Robbins' character used to talk about, someone asked him are you a butcher and he said no I'm a purveyor of
fine meats and I looked it up and purveyor is somebody who supplies, delivers, sells and so being a purveyor of possibility means that you sell, deliver, produce, manufacture, whatever, craft, possibility for other people and in my professional training that's in clinical care and in my post professional training it's in clinical coaching, training, exercise, advanced performance, development of clinicians in, anyway so I teach clinicians and I treat people and I coach people to move better and the transition from all of those things is so they go back to doing what they want to do. So what
you're really selling people on is you know it's possible that you could be different to what you are currently right now and usually that's better or faster or stronger. That's what we're here for in a nutshell. Or leaner or fatter if you want to be or and sometimes happier and sometimes just even more calm and sometimes just breathing better because the breathing better makes a world of difference and sometimes it's not feeling sore or feeling more supple and so there is always a possibility that things could be different and so we sell the idea of
possibility and we sell the idea that a person could be possibly better than what they currently are and better is whatever they want to tell us about you know what's better to them is different to every single person and then you've got to figure out where you play a part in delivering that to them and often it's what we directly do to them often it's how we create a space for them to step into and then be in that space and how they be is usually different to how they were before they stepped into that
space so I'm a purveyor of possibility that's a phenomenal answer oh it's okay little sidebar for a second sidebar cliff notes a little cliff note about a sidebar or a series of pamphlets with summaries and basic analysis of works of literature intended to study aids study aids so it's like a summary yeah so you're putting together a list of series of pamphlets about cliff notes I might make a Greg cliff note yeah comment below if you want Greg cliff notes just send it to my link yeah I can do that purveyor of possibility so and
I love that I love that summary because it's really easy for us to put ourselves and each other in a little box and say I coach or I treat people or I you know account numbers or I do XY and Z but purveyor of possibility gives you that infinite range of possibility possibility to both a juice drive that yeah a juice to bring out and worth clarifying to people that the word a juice comes from Latin educate which means to bring out and it's the root word for education and in a lot of education circumstances
what you end up doing is having a teacher or instructor who's putting information or technical skills into we would call that instruction and there are times where that's absolutely necessary other times where you have to create a circumstance where something comes out of the person and that's inducing and if we could summarize your teaching philosophies bastardize even in a sentence it would be to a juice change yeah and you got to instruct sometimes because there is technical things that people just not going to know until you instruct them in how to do it you know
some for sure they were not going to know how to deadlift until you instruct them in how to do it and then you create a circumstance where what comes out of them is an entirely stronger person and so you instruct and you reduce and it's the balance between those two and sometimes you have to step away and let's see what comes out and then you can use performance bandwidth to guide that person and sometimes you've got to say hey you know what that space I'm creating it's just not coming out of you let me instruct
it and we call that walking the dog let me I need to walk the dog so that the dog feels what it looks like to walk yeah so and okay go ahead oh no I was gonna uh I was gonna break left a little and and get a little bit of history as to how you became the purveyor of possibility that you are today it's got a little bit of alliteration there a couple peas couple of days good at little iterations thanks eat well that's this the pups in the background shout out how it ties
directly into the fact that when an individual has come seeking assistance they didn't know that there was other they thought about things that were possible and it's usually it's just can I not have this pain okay and when I was not able to do that for them I would consider myself to be not as good a purveyor of possibility before I even use that phrase mmm as I should be or as I want to be and that becomes a source of high stress for a professional person who spent a lot of money and a lot
of time putting yourself into the category of someone whose job it is to do that and when you can't do it you think I'm missing something either I'm shit or and I could be and I probably am but I want to be less shit so I can actually exchange value because someone's gonna pay me to do this service so what came from that is that I had I knew that there was mistakes happening and I had to reveal those mistakes in me because here's the thing if you reveal the stakes if I revealed the mistakes
in me I had an opportunity and a possibility I became a purveyor of possibility for myself to change those things to make less mistakes so that when somebody came to see me I would be able to reveal in them the gatekeeper that's holding them back from achieving their possibility and that led to me to move on so many times from where I was because I was not in a circumstance where I was being able to reveal those mistakes about myself and I had to move on to somewhere where that would be revealed and then I
had to go and study systematic ways where I could reveal those mistakes in others and then I had to tie back all the shit that I learned that wasn't systematically organized and say oh I think at some point in time I learned a technique or a strategy where if I was to tighten that up now and apply it to the mistake I just revealed in this person I now actually get to unlock that possibility and so that was a long process of knowing how messed up I was in terms of a professional or personal whatever
recognizing that is the first thing that's the awareness and then secondly thinking I need to break free of the current circumstances so I can go and address that and that's going to be the balance of sometimes it's personal sometimes it's professional but you've got a well I had to I didn't have to I just chose to because I was it was just this internal drive of this ain't good enough and that took me all over the world and it learned I learned systems that allowed me to reveal another piece and of course all of those
things have to fit together in a continuum so that I know when someone comes to see me they fit at this point in the continuum and I know all of the steps afterwards and I know if I have to go backwards I can take these steps backwards so in a roundabout way to get to a point of being a purveyor of possibility and others I had to be a purveyor of possibility myself and to know how to do that I had to observe mistakes in myself that weren't at the heart of things or the soul
of things good and I had to change those which meant I had to go to places that were a space for me to then figure that out I had to be a purveyor of possibility for myself so I could do that for others is that something you were always inherently aware of that need to know because I become aware maybe if I'm saying these things in an articulate manner I probably had internal grumblings of knowing that something wasn't quite right and not not knowing how to change it or what even was not right and it
took a long time to get to a point where I could articulate what it is and now I can say it so it's not easy because you don't know what you don't know and you know you don't know the words that represent the deep feeling of discontent or the deep feeling of incompetence if you don't know the words you can't clarify it and then not being able to clarify it clearly means that you go around in circles and you go searching for the next maybe it's the next big thing or it's the next experience or
that's the next whatever and unfortunately well I reckon you know it took me a long time and part of my journey now is to say when people are thinking how do I be better or how do I find this possibility it's like you know I can cut a lot of shortcuts shortcuts for you but you might also disregard those shortcuts make your own mistakes and then come back and go what were those shortcuts again it is a fascinating part of the human experience that everyone we think like what are unique in our own in our
own special snowflake II little way but at the end of the day everyone every problem we've been through someone else has been through it in some way shape or form but there's almost part of that experience has to be experiential it has we have to go through it ourselves so what what steps did you take was it purely just and you know something we'll probably talk about that one step one two step in front of where you are now that you need to uncover before you hit the third and the fourth and fifth step what
were the actions or experiences or things that you did either consciously or subconsciously that allowed you to not simply just go around in circles but spiral around and then uncover deeper layers of understanding I think it's primordial and it's primitive it's basically feeling you you feel something and you move towards it or you feel something else and you move away from it that's primordial that's bacterial that's sensory input I feel shit therefore I need to do something to feel less shit this feels amazing let's do more of that and you can get that's how addiction
eventually spirals more that's how compulsion spirals or that's how avoidance spirals and and it clearly could no one can tell you how much is too much for you and how much is not enough for you so everything starts with feeling how do you feel I feel fucking shit house okay well we need to look at what's going on that's part of that and figure out what we could cut out that makes you feel less of that so that's so while we could tell people shortcuts people have got a feel because the language this is a
great quote from Greg Cook who said that the body doesn't learn through the language of words it learns from the language of feeling and so as a purveyor of possibility you don't help somebody simply by your words you help them by creating a circumstance where they feel and dr. Maya Angela said it brilliantly people don't remember what you say or do for them but how do you make them feel and so the personal journeys that people go through was really about experiencing feeling and then the great part about a community like vertices sharing those feelings
with others so that you get to hear your own words because that comes back at you and other people may if you let them and if you ask them if you want them be able to assist you to get more of that feeling or to you know support you when you're trying to figure out the stuff you want to get rid of that doesn't feel less of the bad stuff so in terms of asking me how did I initiate that it was all started with a feeling hooked on a feeling if we had a soundbite
for that that would have worked well just good chugga if you gave me a little bit of a little bit of time I would have would have nailed it for you I'm in a space time in different dimensions so let's fold a bit of space oh how many dimensions we gonna lay this I've actually worked out I think I understand six dimensions and they reckon there's nine or more and I'm not quite I think I understand seven eight nine but I definitely understand the first six but that's for another podcast yes and let's talk let's
quickly talk about the first three go on in height width depth mm-hmm okay so three dimensions on an axis and the fourth one is time mm-hmm we won't go any further than that because if because it's a fourth one this time I think I understand five and six and I think I was just for the people playing at home what are five and six yeah no next time next time all right so today's purely a 60-minute podcast so we don't want to uh I guess delve into other dimensions because we may lose track of space
and time oh so he did it yeah you slotted that in it hasn't heard that before he just saw that it was written down so very good from you um have some water by the way this is your weekly reminder to drink some water it's clean it's cold and that's what I call a cloudy a cool it's making the world better one mouthful of water at a time right yeah one sound biters time we're here for the sound bites okay so one thing that I love about the way you treat and a lot of other
people kind of see it happening without maybe understanding the the depths behind it is the systemic systematic approach that you take to to your to your treatment and to your practice and to your effectively your life so I guess the question is around one what allowed enabled you to develop that and one was there a point of time in your life when you said okay I have accumulated all of these experiences and I've understood how things work individually now I need to build it into a system and or find a system that is already built
around the things that I know we've already mentioned how feeling was the first thing and the next thing was connecting feeling to words because words allows you to reproduce the feeling for sure so I had to explore great use of um I had to explore people that were great orators hmm who capable of articulating the good stuff yeah this smell like potential like potential yeah okay if you if you stumble across a great orator they connect with you and they make you think they create iceberg statements where they will make a statement that's quite brief
like the volume of the tip of an iceberg relative to the 90% that sits beneath the waterline and they lead you to look beneath the waterline and explore the depth of something so part one was feeling part two was coming across words that connected to deep to go deep and then once you go deep which takes time and effort and energy you eventually come back to above the waterline need and then you look at that iceberg and you go I know what that means now at a deeper level so part two was who was connecting
that with words and the only way you can do that is to is to explore whether that's through books or videos and and I didn't have we didn't have a lot of the systems I didn't have them in video form or book form and I had to you know luckily the internet opened up that world and I explored when searching for you know started off with can I see a 400 meter program because I was in an location where I'd previously run at state level once at national level and I wanted to then look at
some templates of what looked like a good 400 program if I was going to apply that to myself now that I was in a different part of the world and I stumbled across a couple of coaches who said hey you know what before we do any of these programmings we do a particular movement screen it's called this and I've gone oh that's interesting because I also had been doing some assessments with track athletes and I'm interested to see what somebody else does and what I saw was so much better than what I was doing and
that was connected to me by words and some visuals and I thought well I think I need to learn what that is and that took me in a direction of saying oh I see now more mistakes in myself and in other people that I didn't see before and that's got to be a good thing because if I can see those mistakes then maybe I could learn to do it less often so that process was connecting with other people who had ideas and saying well that is better than one I've got let's move in that direction
it's still primordial it's still bacterial of an amoeba having a sensation going I'll go towards that direction or I'll go away from and I guess that takes a lot of effort and time and even money because every time you move and you go and go somewhere else it's like you know you uproot yourself and that's costly but the benefit comes back in how you feel hmm so the systematic approach was finding those elements and systems that were done by people at a in really tough circumstances and a lot of my life was spent visiting and
moving to and working in circumstances that were really tough athletically where to get a successful outcome in the environment that they were in was damn near just not impossible because people were doing it so I was like well what are these people doing this outstanding and I started writing down you know they do these things and they talk about this vision they talk about their mission statement and they talk about their principles and then they expand on them and I thought well that's really cool and you know if I could dive all day there's another
huge iceberg so I wrote those things down and then I would stumble across an experience in my life in another really challenging athletic environment and if I could just give specific examples one is Australian military in the tropics and the other one is British military in the snow of Germany and a third one is elite professional sport in China and a fourth one is then let's look at the peak sporting bodies in the United States of NBA and NFL and NHL and do I know people that are having success there as coaches and influencing physical
therapists and athletic trainers and chiropractors and osteopaths and the answer was yes and I think what are they doing to be able to get outstanding outcomes in a signal in probably the toughest competitive environment in the world from a sport point of view and I think China and Russian sport would be even tougher and then I wrote theirs down and that there was a train ride and from the east of China to the west of China and I ended up sitting there for hours in a super fast chain and I had looked at all the
notes I'd written on a mind map and I shuffled them around and I put all the mission statements alongside each other and then beneath that was the visions or different phrases and they use different phrases for almost the same stuff and then their principles and I thought that's interesting they're really similar now none of these people have met each other and they're in different parts of the world in different organizations but they are all talking about the same thing and then I looked at some of the founding principles that said you've got to be healthy
first and then you have to move pretty well and when you move pretty well on a healthy body you're a pretty good chance to actually express high performance and so those are three fundamental pillars and a lot of people were outstanding in one but maybe not three and I found out that one of those sections which is about moving well there's probably two breakdown components and some people were outstanding at one of those but not both of them and I thought that's interesting because if you do the barriers to doing successful things in the toughest
that league environments have come down to only four things and you and all these people across the world are all doing the same thing to a greater or lesser degree very few people doing all four and if you could do all four or know about them then when somebody comes to you and says hey I need some help when you do a good evaluation you figure out that they actually need boosting in one of those four and if you boost one do not be surprised to see all the others lift and I thought this is
this is magic that has been expressed in a moment but it's highly built on the articulation of words that were given by people all around the world and that was based on them going through their own life where they felt a particular way to change and then they spoke about it and that reached me and then I took that and I observed what happened all these different athletic circumstances and saw my own insights and then when I came back I thought huh so when someone comes to see me it's only going to be in one
of three categories that they got an issue and I got to figure out which one of these and once I've done that I had to use the tools that I've got to figure out exactly within that category where the breakthrough is and then I've got to be skilled enough to do it so there's a lot of responsibility there and now and the best thing is to say there are other people that do this better than me so let's handball now from here to there or I don't have that capability so let's refer that out to
this person who does and at the end of the day what you're really doing is helping people sure that's the true essence of pervasive possibilities you're helping people be better and it may not always be you that does it and to be perfectly honest a lot of the time I get the shits and I go I'm tired yeah someone else can do it at this point in my life not I'm not saying that right now but yeah at some points in your life you think I right now need to go back to purveying possibility of
myself and that might mean I need to sacrifice the efforts and energies and times that I was allocating to purveying possibilities I think that awareness has been a well maybe a lifesaver yeah it's been a feeling saver because it does it again it comes back to that feeling doesn't it how important and I guess I for some context of how did you know that what did you say that word for context you know not that you were always a yes man but for you know the first couple years I know you I knew you there
were very few times when you would say no because I guess the capacity you had the capacity to be that purveyor of possibility for people over the last couple of years you've become aware of your need to create boundaries and to fill your cut when you need to and to purvey possibilities in yourself how important has that shift been obviously it's been conscious in some way shape or form but what has allowed you to kind of put the needs of other people aside so that you can fill your own cup first the answer is in
the question you don't fill your own cup there's no cup to help others but for a lot of for a lot of people and you know it's that hustle culture or that you know I need to work or I need to earn money or I need to do all these things get to the end get to the my cups empty what the fuck am I gonna do before that it seems like you've done a fairly well fairly decent job of identifying what you need and when you need it yeah I think there's three parts to
it one is if you're introverted or extroverted and maybe that's not the only two dichotomies on a continuous scale but grace dichotomy thank you if you're extroverted then one way that I recently heard it was that you recharge by being around others so those that are emptying their cup can actually fill it up in the process of serving others if you're on the introverted scale you recharge by spending time alone for sure and so when you go through a troublesome period where your recharging is required more than it was at another time of your life
there's only one way to do that if you're introverted which I am and you can be a socially advanced capable competent with capacity introvert who can express themselves extrovertedly but that's at the heart of it you need recharging by being alone so when you're recharging is required a bit more and you think okay well the only way for me to do that is to step away from being around others as much as I was before and so that's that's probably where you do it the second part is again you have to experience for yourself how
much you can empty your cup before you gotta fill it up you can't be told that and so who who knows how many hours and weeks and years you can go emptying your cup before you actually crash and burn no one knows that because that's an individual process and the third one is that there are times in your life where you just got to suck it up and be out it's time to hustle yeah because there's lots of reasons I could explain but this is the time to do it I do have a choice I
choose to do the hardest way the hustle yeah and you know that at some point you're gonna be able to take stock and and refuel and refill your cup and yeah and effectively go again and there'll be no shortage of people who give you advice free advice oh yeah oh yeah and here's a great stop giving and unsolicited unsolicited that's what I was looking for and if I've learned anything it's that advice is like assholes everyone's got everyone's got one of my stink there's some good advice out there and I think we're gonna I said
they can't see they can see yeah we're gonna we're gonna get some today just for those listening at home or watching at home it's just started pissing down and I'm not sure how this is gonna go should be okay now with the mics here but if you the the noise of the outside rain is not really coming through the noise I don't think so so I think we should be okay but if you know just close your eyes and just think you're in or underwater for something I've lost my train of thought what we're talking
about you're talking about how do you know when you're emptying your cup and and yes and you are in barriers around saying practices when you feel as though your cup is getting empty what are your actions practices one is quiet time you have you have to schedule it maybe you don't have to schedule it because but but I schedule it improve sleep quality and that sleep quality is not automatic there are some things that you've got to do and now they just have habitual for me so you can get the quiet time in the sleep
but you're getting a quiet time when you're awake is this is important and then what you do with that quiet time is the personal choice and on occasions it's meditation other occasions it's a meditative practice of movement which you for me currently it's riding a bike prior to that it would have been walking with the dog and clearly all of these things have got different benefits just rather just quiet time so there's quiet time in this sleep and then you've got to feel good so really a lot of the times it's like what what can
I do that makes me feel better feel good so as a result my cup is charged and sometimes you think okay I've done my recharging and I've done some meditation and I've done some quiet reading and I've had a cup of tea and I've turned all music off and I've just listened to the rain and now I have to go back to the thing that drove me into that quiet hole and I think no no no this is not just going to be a better time in my life because of the things that I do
to recharge it's also going to be a better time in my life if I actively stop doing the thing that forced me to need to have the extra quiet time and that's the whole concept of if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life and so you've got to find ways when you're hustling because that's needed to also look for those moments of greatness and usually when it's tough you go if you start with a smile and the question of how can I help you you're not in work anymore you're
in a moment with a person where they will smile back usually because it's contagious and the how can I help you is you opening the door for somebody to step into a space and then you think I'm actually pretty good at this so let me listen to what you're saying and as I'm listening I know you're gonna fit into one of these three categories and then we'll dive a little deeper and hopefully you'll pay me at the end and I'll give you a little pat on the bum and then and then everyone wins and then
I've got to stop and say do you know what that doesn't feel like work but am I drained from it and a lot of people are up and about because of that and sometimes I can think I could do with not seeing anybody for the rest of today yeah because if I don't do that remember that tomorrow I've got a bunch of stuff to do I always look at that balance or that attempted balance is almost like a pendulum you kind of you're the pendulums forever swinging and you shift between the blast and caress or
the the work and the rest and the cuddle yeah and and ideally yeah I guess when when we're feeling fulfilled and life's humming and everything's going well that pendulum doesn't swing too much it kind of feels like they're both symbiotic or synonymous synonymous in in themselves but when things get hard and it might be a global pandemic or a you know something's happened external to your locus of control where you have to shift you have to allow that pendulum to you know to have a big swing just on the on the sleep habits and the
the things that you've done to improve your sleep we spoke about it with Tyler a few weeks ago the the big rocks of hydration and good nutrition and stress management and then sleep being the effectively the cornerstones of any worthwhile endeavor what are the actionable things that you've done and that you would suggest this is some good quality advice yeah you would advise other people to do if your body is too hot you won't stay asleep your body what this is part of the circadian rhythm is when you as the hormones of the overnight shift
start to change into the day shift that changes your body temperature and you start to get warmer and when you get warmer you start to wake up so if you get warmer during the night you'll wake up during the night and when you wake up during the night you you actually interrupt your slow wave sleep where your brainwave frequency is actually much slower and when you interrupt that you lose one particular thing which is the the lymphatic drainage of your brain which is known as glymphatics and so the glymphatics are really active when you're in
slow wave sleep when you jump out of slow wave sleep the glymphatic activity reduces by about 90% so how that matters then if I just quickly dive into the science is that you end up with certain symptoms as a result of glymphatic dysfunction which include neuro inflammation now what neuro inflammation leads to is sensitivity to anything anything anything part of your body that's got a nerve in it can be hypersensitive which means you can be pain you can feel cold more you can feel heat more often you can be stressed by noise you can hate
the things that you look at and they can agitate you so neuro inflammation is highly tied to how efficient your lymphatic system is and that's highly tied to how much slow wave sleep you get and that's highly related to the foods that you've eaten before you went to bed the hydration status that you were in the previous is 12 to 15 hours the the blue light that you've been exposed to before you shut your eyes and because that can affect the hormone of melatonin and that can reduce your slow wave sleep again and so it's
about saying I've got to figure out how I can not be exposed to blue light as much and sometimes that's blue light shielding glasses and sometimes it's switching your devices off and for me it's about wanting to watch something before I go to bed but not get the blue light from it so I plug my iPad into a projector which sits beside my bed and beams across to the wall opposite the foot of my bed and the projector builds out to a hundred inches of HD which is cheap so for a thousand dollar projector versus
a six thousand or seven thousand on television yeah I can same size no blue light no blue lights big rain time it's in and I get to sleep and so those are active things and I want to make sure that the rooms not particularly hot optimal sleeping temperature well yeah it's Shona Helson dr. Shona Helson from the AIS who's a professor and scientist of recovery and sleep nutrition sleep like to sleep hygiene I recall her talking about how they set the air conditioning at the AIS for their athletes at 19 to 21 degrees now in
the winter time you don't have to bother about that yeah but um also if you have a lot of water before you go to bed that's got to be processed through your liver which means your liver becomes metabolic and then that wakes you up between the hours of 1 and 3 a.m. because that's when your liver is gonna peak so you're waking at 1 or 3 a.m. you got to go back and think am I drinking a lot of water after dinner doesn't mean you can't sip on it mmm am I having sugar or alcohol
around dinner time because my liver's got to break that down and then I get metabolic and I get warm and I wake up so the active things for me is don't be drinking and that hasn't always been great because I love the taste of beer I love a good scotch and also love a different wine but then I think it's no longer serving me to do that yeah and I what I find now is if I do have one I actually appreciate the taste better yeah I mean everything we do or don't do is a
trade-off so it's being able to be an adult take your own decisions to go hey this is gonna impact my sleep but I want to have my beer or and there were two other things that came about one was that the recommendations for slow way sleep or deep sleep is about an hour and a half to an hour 50 or an hour 45 and you think like what and then I was using my Apple watch which was connected to my to an app called auto sleep which was saying to me Greg you're getting 45 minutes
of deep sleep or an hour 15 or 25 minutes yeah and that was correlating with not feeling very well and I thought well I need to change that and get it up to it's an hour 30 an hour 45 so I've got to implement these things but the last thing I'm gonna drop off is a beer after dinner hmm and until I drop those things off so that was it didn't it didn't get to an hour 30 and this is the wonderful thing about living in 2022 and having access to Apple watches or rings with
bands and and all of these technology that allows us to measure you know the X's and O's of sleep training sure nutrition etc so if you've got the tools utilize them yeah and learn to understand what these things are telling you there was another thing as well which comes back to the heart rate variability there's over 20 apparently over 20,000 studies in the PubMed library that relate heart rate variability to health and what a heart rate variability for those that don't know is let's say you and I are both sitting here because we're chatting and
we're up and about and the dogs are barking get around let's say we're on about 70 beats per minute let's call it 60 because it means one beat per second if I'm beating at a very very regular state such as beat beat beat beat beat that would say we would say that there's low variation there's almost no variation between the beats if you're 60 beats per minute and you're beating all along at beat beat beat beat beat beat then you've got a high variation now both of us are still getting 60 beats per minute well
the research is pretty clear that says if you have high variation like yours your heart is in a particularly healthy state and your sympathetic nervous system is currently suppressed and your parasympathetic system which is related to being recovered and and regeneration is the dominant state so for as long as I've had this Apple watch patch the past year my heart rate variability has been well below the lowest minimum standard and I look at it and I think that's interesting and I put in place practices that were about flipping me out of a stressed state things
like my own meditation regular walking which can be meditative hydration better nutrition better and gradually figuring out that I wasn't doing enough cardiovascular exercise low steady state walking was not enough yep and the beer or wine or whiskey that I was drinking I'm not you know sometimes it was like I feel relaxed if I've got that and surely that would be parasympathetic and I thought well maybe I'm wrong about that so why don't we figure this out and then it's it's taken a significant training block of cycling at various intensities and durations as I prepare
for a five hour mountainous ride to get to the point where my heart rate variability is starting to elevate now into above the dangerous state and I've had ECG's and my resting heart rate overnight gets down to 50 and below and that's an indication that I've got a pretty good cardiovascular system my ECG's are fine and yet the heart rate variability has been low and so that's another piece of tech in addition to the sleep wave the slow wave deep sleep that said how I perceive of how well I am is not quite matching up
to what the data is saying so I tracked it using a different form of data which uses the camera from the iPhone and it records the pulse via the light that penetrates the skin and it gave me the same data and I said it's pretty clear there's something still sympathetic in my heart and I should ignore that at my own risk or and I don't necessarily think it's related to occlusion of blood vessels you know that would indicate that you're at risk of getting heart damage but you know a significant life event could mean that
you know you have a broken heart and you go quite literally I still may be suffering the sympathetic effects of that sure so then you think all right well just chip away at it what the things are they're supposed to change that and that means well planned out exercise progressive hydration good sleep quality moderation on all sorts of things that go into your body and be aware of the things that detract from your mental health and physical health and keep those at bay when necessary and embrace them because at times because they help you with
coping skills so it has been it's been a process of ignoring and then being aware of and then making subtle adjustments and not paying any attention to the changes and then figuring out that maybe those changes are still there to be had and dialing in and just in the last couple of days the last couple of weeks that high rate very rarely has just jumped up to above those minimum unsafe levels and I guess that's a deliberate outcome of doing things somewhat scientifically you know with a case study of n equals one yeah which is
you know brilliant for own self-awareness but then you have that experience that you can then pass on that experiential learning to all the good people at home listen the podcast so and when we think about the things that form staples in the training programs we do here is breathe well and drink lots of water and move in three dimensions and challenge yourself and get around good people and I see a lot of the clients that come in and they are missing all of those elements and it usually starts with hey we need to improve your
lymphatic system which means we have to talk about how your sleep is going to be better and because the lymphatic system is causing you to be in pain in ways that you shouldn't be so we're going to reteach you how to breathe better by the way your hydration is really low and for those people that thinking how much hydration is normal the answer to that is if you went into hospital today because you were in a coma and someone took you in a hospital because you can't and you can't sleep coma walk coma active coma
but if I was in hospital today and I was in unconscious the nurses would put a needle in my arm they would connect that to a tube which would go to a bag and we call that a drip and that bag would be a thousand milliliters of saline solution and at about 12 hours they would set it so that it would drip away into my body and about 12 hours later they later have gone into my body they changed the bag so in a full 24-hour period two liters have gone into me and I'm laying
physically still with no physical activities so if you're a person who's drinking two liters of water and you're not in a coma laying perfectly still there's no way that you've got anywhere near enough hydration in your body two liters without any physical activity just keeping you barely alive yeah so a lot of people say I drink heaps of water how much would you actually say at least a later you know 600 mils to a later or water a day yeah and so their possibility is being inhibited by a very very pure element they're just not
healthy at the most fundamental level what's the first thing you do we do when we're born and if you don't do it actually what's the last thing you do before you die you stop breathing yeah so breathing is that core fundamental and so the next thing after that that we need as a human being is some kind of fluid nutrition hmm and after that it becomes a solid nutrition so at the fundamental level you've got a breathe have some hydration sleep food could come after that you know you can get hydration nutrition and so when
a lot of people are in pain or not performing and if you stop and say talk to me about your sleep your hydration has your nutrition and your performance as a person who wants to physically move might actually be secondary and tertiary and quaternary yeah to those and it's fascinating like probably not all not that surprising how many people do struggle with those three four basic basic things yeah you know because how goods coffee coffee is the best and coffee becomes a substitute for simple water mmm how goods getting up early at four four thirty
training session because I've got to get the train I live gonna do seven hours commuting because they want me at seven thirty because the office hours now is extended mmm by 12-hour shifts and I've got to go and do sport because everyone says that's pretty good and you think well I lost my sleep I'm not drinking water cuz I'm tired yeah I'm drinking coffee caffeine which is great but I'm dehydrated which makes me more tired and it spirals and one of the easiest ways to clean all that stuff up isn't necessarily to have to add
water I have to add sleep it's to remove the things that are remove the negative impacting your capacity to you know stay hydrated rather than adding more to your life sometimes it's about removing the things that are not making you happy and healthy simplicity but is a beautiful thing but saying this to anyone is not me or you giving advice to the world it's saying in our experience and this is this and you might find that if you explored the world that a lot of people are saying the same things because that's their journey mmm
and you'll ignore all those things and still have your vices and we're not going to judge you for it because at times you will then get to your own experience based on feeling and you'll go I think I heard that once on it yeah for me it's just cultivating an awareness to how we're feeling and what that feeling is enabling us to do and who it's enabling us to be yeah like the first thing or so we sit like first thing we do in our processes we sit down for a chat and we go through
lifestyle we go through goals and go through where they're at and and but usually the first thing we do down the gym floor is just some breath work learning yeah lay on your belly and breathe and you make the joke of you're gonna be great at this because you've been breathing your whole life but the fact of the matter is that most people have disrupted breathing in one way shape or form and if we can improve breath work improve your capacity to breathe which is obviously going to affect things like resting heart rate and our
variability then you kind of take away one of the barriers to moving well and you spoke about before about health function performance health come first which enables function which then enables performance and if you were to summarize the majority of people athletes or regular humans that you see what would be the main two or three roadblocks that they've got in front of their capacity to perform it doesn't actually have to be on the sporting field but it's cobwebs to their bookshelf oh great and I'm going to refer back to dr. Greg Rose colleague of mine
from San Diego you do shout outs in a beautiful way by the way thank you he won't be listening we'll send yes send it across to him he tells a story about you know everything you're trying to learn is really is well told if you can tell a story so you and I and every other human being were born and God or the universe gave us a empty bookshelf in our brain and the what's going to go on the bookshelf is a book that tells us how to do stuff and the very first book that
goes on that bookshelf is the book that tells you how to breathe and if it doesn't appear instantly on the bookshelf the doctor smacks you on the bum and all of a sudden there's a book on the bookshelf that says hey little baby this is how you breathe so that's pretty cool because what happens then is then you learn to make noise and that's the second book and then you learn to flail your arms you know uncontrolled fashion and that's the third book what are the three things you do when you get drunk you breathe
flail your arms and you make uncontrollable crazy noises you end up doing primitive shit yeah and then you know it's like baby stuff in that order ideally anyway the general gist is that it in sequences as you develop as a human being you then learn how to do different things like reach for food suckle swallow poo roll over crawl pull yourself up to a table you know sort of cruise along the furniture until you wide stance walk and then you refine it and then you waddle and jump and run and fall out and climb back
up again and you you start filling this bookshelf with books about how to do certain stuff and then you occasionally will combine them and that forms a new book now when somebody scares the shit out of you or you become nervous or you see yourself in the mirror and you remember that social media tells you that you have to have a flat stomach or you hear this you watch a movie where somebody says pull your stomach in and puff your chest out because it's a military movie and you're standing on parade hmm and you see
that as something that is socially normal so you change the way that you breathe and instead of breathing the way the nature taught you to do so you breathe by pulling your guts in and puffing your chest out now you just wrote a new program and you just put that on the bookshelf so a lot of people then go through their life going to the bookshelf to do different things and they never go back to the original program about how to breathe and it gets covered with cobwebs yeah and so what we do here at
Virtus is we'd say let me clear some cobwebs away dusting because you've dust the bookshelf we're going to go back to that very first program because everything is built upon that and you're going to need to access that for your best recovery and when you recover well you get to turn up here more often and see our beautiful faces which is pretty much the endgame right yeah so the barriers to performance is that you've got dust on your cobwebs or you've got cobwebs sorry dust on your shelves or you've got cobwebs that are stopping you
from being able to physically find the specific volume that you want so when you and I step back we see other people's bookshelves and we go you've got access to the stress breathing hmm but you can't find the other one so I'm gonna dust that away because if we do that we're a chance to see you run faster because you'll recover better and you can do more of the good training we want so the barriers to physical performance are bad energy blocked energy leaked energy and deficient energy and bad energy is being in pain or
toxins or inflamed or scared or mentally unwell or unable to access the breathing patterns and the blocked energy is that you're too stiff and the leaked energy is that you're really really supple but you've got no control we call that stability and the deficient energy is you're just not fit enough and different people around the world will become experts in one of those I can make you really really really really really really fit but I think if you put that program upon somebody and they don't get really really really really really fit there's something miss
it's not their fault it's not your program it's just that that was the wrong starting point yeah and if you unlock one of the other three you'll find it that same program has a better income because the nervous system says oh thank you I can actually now hear the things that you're telling me yeah I mean the best summary or the best example for that is just take the handbrake off before you drive the car around the racetrack hey and here's the thing is you can drive a car around a racetrack with the handbrake on
and you'll still get around but then you say can you help me get around there faster and can you build me a bigger engine I go I could but you could just take the handbrake off it's real simple you'll get around quicker anyway and it's somewhat almost instantaneous relative to you know six weeks of performance training absolutely and you don't get your hands dirty but releasing the handbrake yeah it's easy let's go see the fizz and take a deep breath and have some water once in a while let's get your handbrake off all right we
have about six minutes left okay so I have some questions posed by the Virtus family so you can add and the answer these in whatever depth you'd like or and tell them to get stuffed tell me it's soft Bailey Schmidt has been really pushing chicken Schmitty it's been really pushing for a shout out on each podcast so a couple days of his um and I realized that half of them are written on my phone which is currently recording so uh they will be not the questions I ask all right did you write them in notes
I put a couple in but there's a bunch on my uh in text but anyway what have you learned working at the dolphins can't you access your text from the no I don't have it connected okay what have I learned by learning at the dolphins by working at the dolphins what is it what is it given you that you maybe haven't had in the past or have had in different ways here's one specific thing I learned I don't know whether this is a male Mornington Peninsula characteristic or whether it's an Australian male and or female
characteristic is that people that come to ask me for advice will say I'm really tight here now every single person in the world that they've ever been to see and said I'm really tight here will then get addressed with somebody doing something to reach it to change tightness but I stopped and I said wait a minute do you mean title do you mean saw and they pause and they don't quite understand I say tight means limited in flexibility or motion saw means it's really sensitive or it's tending towards being hurt nine times out of ten
now 95 times out of 100 they'll say oh no I mean saw yeah and because they've that difference you now address it differently than if it was just tight or restricted because tighter restrictors let me rub it manipulate it you're gonna stretch it you change the tissue but the sensitivity of the system opens up the possibility of did you sleep last night what's your hydration horrible okay that foam rolling will not work neither will the treatment that I give you hmm so one of the things I have learned is that maybe in Australia we have
a phrase called oh that's really really tight and it's causing people to not really get improvements because tightness and soreness require different pathways so I guess I've learned I become more aware that in because of the volume of people that I'm seeing in football down here in the peninsula yeah whereas my previous batch of athletes prior to that were Chinese and they had a specific word that was very different between tight and sore yeah and they would use the right word so they were capable of articulating the difference yeah whereas here tight and saying it
with a grimace it's all that's really tight yeah was it was a way it was a colloquial way of saying I'm really sore yeah whereas the tight word triggers let's do some massage all that's interesting yeah that's interesting because like as a as an athlete and a coach you kind of you learn the different terms and the different ways to articulate feelings but I guess it's probably lacking general awareness around what the difference is and it's important to call a spade a spade but if you only know if you don't know the shovels exist you're
probably just gonna call it tight yeah we have a lot of tradies out there and they know what a difference of the show what shovel and spade is but they smaller and flatter spades and square but tighter and sore is not a word that people have known and one thing to note is that when you're triaging a whole bunch of footballers in an hour before they go to the team meeting and then go into training and they've had three days of wallowing in their saunas since the past game before they get to see you yeah
is that you feel the tendency to just prescribe quickly and when they say I'm really tight here if you stop pause take some extra time to deduce or e juice or induce what specifically talking about that little bit of extra time will direct you in the right direction that saves you a hell bunch more than if you just go right everybody who's got tightness go and hit the foam rollers because that's not the answer that people need and it's not what they're asking for because they just but they may be saying in a word that's
not quite correct but it's being mistranslated so that's one thing that I've learned the other one is that you know the Dolphins have got a arresting motto which is that good people make good dolphins and good dolphins do good things true love we do love that and it's similar to the vertice motto and then it fits in with this other characteristic which is that the standard you walk past are the standards you accept and it is a challenging circumstance when you're in professional sport or semi professional sport is that we want to set standards for
behavior and what if it stands for performance success but on occasions we have to relinquish those standards just because the simple resources that we're dealing with mean we're gonna find a shortcut we're gonna have to accept something lower than what we ideally would like to accept because at this point in time we just don't have that choice you know we can't we don't like some of the behaviors that these athletes are undergoing for lots of different reasons sometimes it's not voluntary and if we draw a line in the sand and say that stand is not
acceptable from my military background where I was not a military serving person but for seven years I worked in England Germany Australia in different states of Australia if you were beneath the standard on occasions that would be disciplinary action and you would be left at home and that could be you're dropped from a football game and that happens across all sports but on occasions there are reasons where people will still drop standards and you go on this occasion we're gonna choose to ignore that and I guess that's a metaphor for life is that we we
have our own rules about what's acceptable and then we break them because for some reason it's no longer as important as we thought it was once before and and you know this as well as anybody is that sport is a great lesson in how to live because of the experiences that you have the people that you meet and the challenges that you come up against them whether they be individual pursuits or team pursuits you're effectively learning how to navigate the world that where the world tries to knock you over and so I guess I've had
a lot of reinforcing lessons in the Dolphins and some newer ones thanks chicken Smitty good that wasn't his question this is questions this one what has been the most challenging and almost interesting injury you've rehabbed helped to rehab who'd you fix challenging and almost interesting yeah can be multiple injuries challenging one that comes to mind was a female athlete from China who was involved in the sport of Wushu Wushu means kungfu it's like kungfu but you in China they have a combat version was to want one on one or they have a dance version where
it's one person doing kungfu style Wushu moves in an artistic expression and in the artistic version or the dance version of combat of Wushu these individuals would jump and leap in the air spin around and then land and they always only landed on one leg and so they got a significantly stronger one leg and they would land in a pistol squad and bounce out of again it's the strongest the most athletic things I've ever seen so I had a girl there who ripped cartilage did an ACL in the league that she was supposed to be
landing on for her future career and there was no way that this cartilage was ever going to be repaired because it was degenerated all the way to the bone and all I'm being told was you have to make this person stronger and her job is to leap from great heights and land on this leg in a full knee flexion on one leg and bounce out of it as do and I don't want to be the purveyor of improbability but it was impossible in my eyes that this person was ever going to return to that sport
that was challenging because that's somebody's life hmm and she didn't choose to be that so somebody else chose her to be that athlete and as a result of not being able to do it they were just going to discard her that's really hard hard to see so that's the most challenging from an interesting point of view there was a girl that popped her knee in a World Cup volleyball tournament and the reasons that she popped her knee was related to a single leg landing I say popped it she did her ACL and I think there's
probably four or five other reasons that her local people had not seen to which is a shoulder pain a thorax restriction a lower back pain a hip restriction an ankle restriction an ankle pain and if you don't do anything to those other areas there's one thing that will collapse and that's the knee and that's what happened and so she would have been rehabbed afterwards in a hospital system where they would have just done quad strengthening to get her knee yeah and that's challenging it's interesting because of the things that you can address to avoid that
happening and that's what you do in physical preparation and movement prep is try to hit the big buckets that are stuck hmm try to develop control on the ones that are likely to be sloppy and put them all together and integrate them the whole body patterns and that's interesting and it's challenging love that in 20 seconds summarize access bars for us the ground before you'd say that before you dive in we will talk dimensions on further podcast so so I got 17 seconds now 12 probably 12 it's the greatest it's the best head massage you've
ever had or it'll change your life can confirm good love that get around access bars by the way it's phenomenal we'll get into the quick fire 30 in a moment for a separate episode but fizz quiz can you bring it back yeah people want the fizz quiz there's been a couple of people have asked for the fizz quiz course they do so can I ask awesome so yeah you sure you can I'll license it out to people I'll throw a bunch of fizz it's not the same that now it's never the same maybe I'll just
do appearances during VGT yes that would be wonderful do you have a quick did you have a quiz question for us while we're here yeah how does NASA organize parties they plan it and on that note great to naturally fuck pleasure to everyone else have a good day this is from Lucy have a good day
