[00:00:00] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Hello.

[00:03:52] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Hey. Hey, man. What’s going on?

[00:03:54] Dr. Mike T Nelson: How are you?

[00:03:55] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Good. I was … It’s funny, I was actually just watching your clips on, uh, Dave’s podcast this morning.

[00:03:59] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh. Oh, thank you.

[00:04:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome.

[00:04:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, it was, it was pretty fun. I know you’ve been out there before, and, um, yeah, it was a, a good time. London, Ohio, I would not wanna live there, but it was definitely fun to do the podcast.

[00:04:14] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a flyover town of all flyover towns, I think. Oof.

[00:04:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, man. A funny story, like I got there and realized, “Oh, man, I forgot a razor. I need to shave. Oh.” And then I’m like, “There’s nothing around here.” I’m like, well I found a truck stop which worked, but the other one was like the Walmart, which is like four miles away from the little hotel on the corner, and I was like, “Man, this is like middle of nowhere, small town USA.”

[00:04:42] Dr. Jordan Shallow: You also did need to shave. You have all of your teeth. You are overdressed in London, Ohio. So if you could- Oh,

[00:04:47] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I was way overdressed.

[00:04:48] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. Yeah. Well,

[00:04:53] Dr. Mike T Nelson: thank you for doing this. Um- Mm-hmm … any particular topics that are … I got a bunch of ideas, but I wanted to see what you wanted to chat about most.

[00:05:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I’m super easy, man. I got, uh … I can talk about anything forever, so whatever, whatever you think, I’m, I could pretty much fill in the gaps. So-

[00:05:09] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Is there something you’re super into now or something you find like super fascinating?

[00:05:19] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. Oh, uh, I mean, depending on your audience. I, I mean, I, I’m into a bit of, like, cognitive theory stuff, predictive processing, neuroscience, information, um, or integrated information theory. S- but, uh, movement-wise Yeah, I don’t know. I … You point and shoot. I, I, I have, I tend to tangent off in weird places of the world, so I’m sure we’ll get around to some weird stuff even just with- Yeah, yeah

[00:05:44] Dr. Jordan Shallow: the most basic of questions. But, uh, yeah.

[00:05:46] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Cool. Um, and you’re good for an hour or so?

[00:05:50] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. I, I’m pretty flexible actually, and I appreciate your patience in setting this up. I know it’s been, like, a giant ball ache for your assistant, ’cause I’ve, I’m-

[00:05:57] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, yeah. No worries … a

[00:05:58] Dr. Jordan Shallow: complete degenerate.

[00:06:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: No, that, that’s all right.

[00:06:02] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Uh, Dwayne Jackson says hi, by the way.

[00:06:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Ah, Dwayne-r. Oh, I love him. What a guy.

[00:06:08] Dr. Mike T Nelson: He’s awesome. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, I’ll just do, I’ll record an intro, outro after this, and we’ll just do a short pause and, uh, away we go.

[00:06:16] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Sounds good.

[00:06:18] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Welcome to the podcast. How are you today, sir?

[00:06:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Oh, a pleasure, man. Yeah, doing well, thanks.

[00:06:22] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

[00:06:24] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Thank you for doing this. My first question is, if my goal is a mix of strength and hypertrophy, when I’m lifting in the gym, should I be using internal or external cues?

[00:06:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Oh. Uh, I mean, I think the answer … I- if your true goal is to, to po- sorry, the goal is to build strength and hypertrophy.

[00:06:54] Dr. Jordan Shallow: If you’re- Yeah, so it’s a mix of them … if you’re a relative novice, your goal is actually to build skill. And skill will look a lot more like strength, but strength training h- has a s- has a slightly different way of, of achieving that end goal given the particular skill of the lifter, right? Mm. Uh, strength training programming, and I used to be a competitive powerlifter, like, looks different when you’re squatting 700, 800 pounds, or deadlifting- Sure

[00:07:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: you know, 700, 800 pounds, than it does when you first start in the gym, right? And I, and the reason I like recalibrating the direction of that question towards skill is because the framework of learning skills is already preordained, right? Anyone who’s, like, gone overseas and has downloaded Duolingo 7,000 times and never learned another language can tell you everything you need to know about achieving the goal of strength and hypertrophy from, like, a logistics and framework perspective.

[00:07:52] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But when we turn it into, like, muscle, and plates, and barbells, and weights, it’s just, like, th- something that just, like, makes it this very nebulous project. But when you, when you strip away all of, like, the externalities and you just say, like, “We’re trying to learn the skill of exercise,” you will, you will fall ass backwards into the adaptations of hypertrophy and strength if you get good at lifting weights first.

[00:08:14] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So I think, like, there’s a subjective component that often gets overlooked across the board, especially in, like, novice, uh, l- let’s say, like, novice gym patrons, people who are relatively unskilled. ‘Cause the thing is, when you’re, when you’re pushing weight and you’re, you know, you’re squatting hundreds, two to three times body weight, three to four times body weight, whatever it is, you actually- You have to learn this lesson at some point that the skill and execution and efficiency of the movement is your, is your number one priority, right?

[00:08:44] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So that, that, I think getting that in people’s heads early in training is just gonna give them such a leg up. And it’s actually, I mean, it’s an interesting conversation now in the current zeitgeist of health and fitness insofar as it’s overlapped with, like, boomer culture, right? Like, longevity and they’ve kind of like…

[00:09:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Well, I feel as if the longevity biohacker space started to actually do their homework on what moves the needle, and all of a sudden they’re trying to license some of their credibility from, like, the weird thing that makes their tongue go blue and a bunch of, like, nootropics that you can’t buy in this country.

[00:09:16] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And then they’re trying to license that credibility from being, like, amateur pharmacologists with Pinterest accounts to, like, all of a sudden they’re gonna use that credibility to start talking about resistance training, and they’re gonna cite, like, what they find from Louie Simmons or, yeah, uh, uh, Westside Barbell and like, oh, Google search who’s the most credible strength training, you know, guru of all time.

[00:09:38] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s- guru is probably improper word. You know, rest in peace, Louie. Yeah. I think he’s done more for the state of health and fitness in, in the world than I think most people could ever dream of. Oh, for sure. And obviously, like, a huge, huge fan and supporter of everything he’s done and continues to do posthumously beyond the grave.

[00:09:53] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But the, the misappropriation of that, what he used, you know, with, with, uh, um, Panora and, um, um Oh, geez. Why am I… Vogelpohl and just like- Yeah … the legends of Westside.

[00:10:10] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Who are also insane.

[00:10:12] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. Oh, that. Start with that. But to, to misappropriate that across the aisle. And like I’ve seen prescriptions for elderly females getting into weight training to squat four by four.

[00:10:23] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like what? Oh, Jesus. What do you mean? Right? But it’s like, but it’s… But we look at that and we go, you hold on. If, if you’re lifting a four by four at a relative intensity, that’s gonna move the needle whether regardless of your adaptation, if, if it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, about bone density or muscle mass or whatever, it’s like you gotta like kind of know how to squat first.

[00:10:42] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like sending grandma to the squat rack without a fucking clue is like, it’s not a death sentence, but it’s like you’re just, it’s a non-starter, right? Like you just can’t… It’s a, I mean, it’s a non-starter, it’s a non-sequitur. You just like can’t get there from here.

[00:10:53] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Risk reward. So

[00:10:55] Dr. Jordan Shallow: it’s just not, it’s just not there.

[00:10:56] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s like, it’s a self-governing, uh, behavior ’cause like, you know, there will be a novelty effect undoubtedly, but like to set up for long-term success, it’s like you have to actually learn the principles of movement resistance training and teach it as a skill. And I think that re- that removes a lot of like the anxieties around training that are so often plaguing people who don’t exercise, right?

[00:11:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: They … “I don’t know what I’m doing,” is like the number one thing where people walk into a gym and hire a trainer or coach or whatever it is. Like it’s like, okay, like that’s great. Um, th- then let’s not make you do something you don’t know what you’re doing, but heavier. Let’s make the first mile marker be l- teaching you how to do the thing.

[00:11:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And like lo and behold, if you do that and the skill appreciates, and we, and we appreciate how to appreciate skill, right? Like, you know, if I cram for a test, you know, uh, the night before, it’s like am I gonna get the adaptation I want? Probably not, right? But if I interleave these bouts of deliberate skill practice and training, like from a cognitive standpoint, yeah, I’ll probably have a better retention long-term.

[00:12:05] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll practice of a higher practice or a higher quality practice. And you just see people like just cramming in these, these crazy workouts that, you know, Chuck Vogelpohl would do. And then, but it’s, it’s fucking, it’s fucking Dolores and you’re like, “Oh, man.” So, and I, and so I think like the adaptation of hypertrophy and, and strength are second-order adaptations.

[00:12:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: They’re second-order adaptations to skill. Any physical output is a second-order adaptation to skill.

[00:12:35] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So how would you go about … Let’s take an example. Like, somebody, we’ll use the bench press, for example, and let’s say it’s someone who is an intermediate lifter. They’re 200 pounds and their bench press max is 185.

[00:12:49] Dr. Mike T Nelson: They, you know, obviously not elite. They’re probably can do a lot better. They’ve probably built up some bad habits to get to that particular point. How would you use that as a framework of skill? Like, what would you teach them or tell them, “Here are the things to look for and do”?

[00:13:06] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. There’s an overlying variable that we’ll just, we’ll just have to call it into question, is age.

[00:13:13] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Oh, for sure. Age plays both chronological and, like, quote-unquote, “lifting age.” You kind of lay the parameters for the lifting age as, like, an intermediate. And, like, all right, we have 185, so we’re not at a body weight bench yet. Um, but if we look at this problem through the lens of skill, it’s like, well, what would you do?

[00:13:26] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like, practice. Well, what does practice look like? Practice looks like accruing volume, right? Like, if I wanted to … I mean, I’ve, uh, I have guitar in the other room. I play every day. I have for 20-something years. And it’s like, I’ve gone years at a stretch without playing. I’ve gone, you know, years at a stretch with, when I play multiple times a day or multiple hours a day.

[00:13:46] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s like, lo and behold, the times where I play, like, once a week for 12 hours until my calluses bleed is just like, well, that’s not really a fruitful endeavor. Like, I didn’t get better- Mm-hmm … that week, right? So if we look at this person as, like, unskilled In their, in, in the pursuit of relative strength, it’s like, well, how do we get more skilled at something?

[00:14:05] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like we just need more practice, and more practice comes by the way of doing more repetitions, right? So, like, a- an, an intermediate, like a novice to intermediate, the, the goal, it- it’s almost like this parabolic curve where, like, training frequency can start to increase as you start to get more skilled.

[00:14:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Um, because what you’re looking for, and what I kind of like denote as, like, the indicator that the failure point is no longer skill, is if you can fail in a good position.

[00:14:33] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yes,

[00:14:33] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I agree with that. Right? Like, if I can watch someone bench press, squat, or whatever, like if I see- Yep … like a knee come in or a shoulder hike up or a scap or some squirming going on, it’s like you’re still an intermediate, right?

[00:14:43] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So I need, like, sort of this deliberate submaximal higher volume practice that, like, as you start to do that, well, what’ll happen is, like, likely you’re gonna put on a little bit more muscle in this practice, right? It’s almost equi- it’s almost akin to throwing darts. Now, some of you out there might not know the rules of darts, but, like, you know, if you can, you watch the guys on TV and they just step up triple 20, triple 20, triple 20, out, right?

[00:15:08] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s just like, all right. Now, like, if you’re a skilled lifter and you think about the overlap of strength and hypertrophy, it’s like, you know, some of these guys that are really strong, the muscle mass that they’re getting is accruing from, like, they’re not throwing a lot of reps at the board. Mm-hmm. But their efficiency, their accuracy, their ability to stay in good positions at, under high duress is, like, that, they’re just going up, up, up, up, up, up, done, out.

[00:15:30] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Now, if the threshold is like a number in darts, what we could look at is, like, volume as a way to submaximally reach that threshold. And there’s obviously limits, right? Like, yeah, depending on the research, you’re gonna look at hypertrophy scaling- There’s a couple ranges. You could look at 1 to 30 reps or 4 to 5 to 20 reps, or really anywhere in that window.

[00:15:51] Dr. Jordan Shallow: If you hit within one to three reps of failure two to three times a week, 10 to 20 total sets, you’re probably gonna… And you obviously have to eat the requisite amount of calories and protein intake and da, da, da, da, da, and so on and so forth. You’re going to run into the adaptations of strength and hypertrophy, especially at that level.

[00:16:09] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And I think the, when, when someone in that position, intermediate lifter, 180-something pounds max bench, or sorry, uh, 200 pounds, max bench of 180, it’s like, okay, we’re not at a body weight bench yet. You’re definitely an intermediate, which means you definitely are, are not as encumbered in your ability to put on muscle, right?

[00:16:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So, like, you have our primary work, which is the bench itself, which you could probably, you know, crank up the frequency, maybe add an extra bench day or two, depending on your overall working sets within a week, your ability to sort of recover, which can be easily tethered to your performance on the lift.

[00:16:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And then anything outside of that, it’s like, what are the muscles that are gonna fucking move the thing, right? Well, you got your triceps, your delts. Depending on your torso size, your lats may play a- an appreciable role in narrow torso sizes of extending the shoulder from a hyper, uh, or sorry, flexing the shoulder from a hyper-extended position.

[00:17:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So if you have a narrow sh- uh, rib cage with long arms, you may wanna focus a little bit more lats and upper back. But you know, everyone kinda knows. Like, you train chest, train delt, train triceps, and you put on some muscle there as well, and make that an equal priority into practicing the skill of bench press.

[00:17:15] Dr. Jordan Shallow: You do those things, you eat calories and sleep once in a while, like, you’re gonna, you’re gonna get there. You’re gonna be repping 225. I think the thing, when strength is on the table, it’s just this association with, like, too high intensity without the skill to be able to make that execution so accurate that you can actually still put on muscle.

[00:17:36] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Because, like, I mean, I’ve trained and, and worked with and, a- and, and, and, um, treated and every, in every capacity you can, you know, be in the gym with another human being. Some of them really big and really strong guys. Some of the biggest and some of the strongest, and it’s like, you know, they can continue to get big without a ton of volume.

[00:17:54] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But they’re on the other side of that curve, right? Their failures, when they reach it, which is, you know, maybe once or twice a year in competition, they’re, they are in such a good position, right? It’s almost like- It’s similar to the acceleration of anything, right? I think about, like, flipping over a bike tire, right?

[00:18:10] Dr. Jordan Shallow: If I think of a bike tire and I’m, like, spinning a bike tire upside down, it’s, it’s supported on its handlebar and its seat. It’s like, yeah, the first couple goes are like, there’s a lot of contact there, right? Like, there’s a lot of time on that. But when the bike wheel is spinning, it’s just ta, ta, ta, ta.

[00:18:24] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s just these small touches. When you build strength, like real fucking brutal strength, you kinda just need those small touches, right? Like, um, I mean, you could look at some of the greats. Like, I would say consider Dan Bell, like, something of a living legend in the power lifting- Sure … space. And it’s like, if you look at his training frequency, like, dude’s squats and his deadlifts, like, you can’t really train both of those concurrently in a competition fashion in any close.

[00:18:48] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, maybe a session of each a month, and that could be even a stretch, right? So it’s like… And he’s just, ’cause he’s, you know, in the analogy that wheel’s moving so fast. So just kinda understand where you are, like, in the grand scheme of, of, of adaptation, where you exist on this, this spectrum of skill to output.

[00:19:06] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And so many people are so to the left of that curve, where it’s like, you know, learning the skill of the exercise is, is honestly what gets most people to the goals they had in their head. ‘Cause most people look at Dan Bell and go like, “Hey, dude, respectfully, I don’t wanna do what it takes to do what you do.”

[00:19:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s like- … yeah, that’s fine, and you never will, right? ‘Cause he’s- Yeah … he’s an absolute fucking, he’s a workhorse, he’s a phenom. He’s, you know, he’s also, like, one of the nicest people you’d ever wanna meet in your life. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him a handful of times. He probably doesn’t remember, but, like, you know, his training sticks out to me.

[00:19:36] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Obviously, his outcomes stick out to me. So it’s like, look, just set your sights on getting good at lifting. Understand what it takes to get good at anything, right? Some deliberate practice. You train arms and delts a few times a week as well. Push those to failure, and, like, you’ll probably get to where you wanna be.

[00:19:53] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So in that model, would you then stop most reps before what you would consider a technical failure then because of the said principle to be practicing the thing that you want to get better at with the highest frequency possible?

[00:20:11] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. There’s a part of that, right? Practicing good practice. There’s also like, w- you know, to, uh, the idea of like acceleration being a, a, a, of, uh, a proxy to force production, right?

[00:20:22] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Sure. Like intent to like Ed Coan, also another living legend, is just like, if you wanna lift, and I may be paraphrasing this, but he’s like, “You wanna squat 700 pounds, like you gotta squat the empty bar like it’s 700 pounds.” Mm-hmm. Right? Like you watch Ed warm up and every… And w- any of the greats, like anyone who’s really strong, like es- especially in something as controlled a variable sport as powerlifting, it’s like watch him unrack an empty bar in the warm-up room, and then watch them…

[00:20:48] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Jamal Browner I think is a really good example of this. Jamal’s put up a lot of cool videos of like, you know, he just, h- h- his… I, I don’t know what his internal RPE is, but his external RPE for a guy who routinely deadlifts 900-plus pounds, like just for fun- … is zero. Like I have m- I struggle more putting my shoes on in the morning than Jamal Browner does p- deadlifting fucking 950.

[00:21:11] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, um, you know, it’s, it’s… You, you watch those videos where they, he just quick clips to like empty bar to like, you know, 120 kilos and all the way up. It moves the exact same. Like it moves the exact same, and it, it, the, the first empty bar doesn’t move the same because he lifts the last one. It’s you gotta inverse that dependency.

[00:21:34] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like the last one moves the same because the way he lifts the empty bar, right? And I think when people can see it that way, then they can start to reorient what success looks like in a training session. If you do that, if you change the mile marker, like I said, uh, of what success looks like to quality, to execution, to intent from a strength perspective, that’s, that’s your ticket, right?

[00:21:56] Dr. Jordan Shallow: There’s an over-objectification in goal setting and, you know, it’s, it moves away from subjective interpretation of, of quality. Like does that look good? Is it efficient? People are just too A to B in the way they think of things and just do this like progressive overload, like just add more weight, add more weight.

[00:22:11] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like add more skill, add more speed, right? Those are, those are the meaningful adaptations that are really gonna push you towards that goal.

[00:22:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I think Ed Coan was famous for saying, like, how he would lift everything the same, because in his brain it was literally the same lift. And to the extent that the reason he didn’t load his own weights was he didn’t want any external perception of what he was doing, because he’s like, “It doesn’t matter.

[00:22:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I’m gonna try and do the lift the same way, whether it’s 500 pounds, 200 pounds, 600 pounds.” He’s like, “I’m literally working to do it the exact same way.”

[00:22:47] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Ed Coan also said, “Open your taint.” So, you know, Ed Coan says a lot of things. You know, we, we love, we love Ed to pieces, man. I, uh, so lucky, like, my first three meets Ed was a judge.

[00:22:58] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Um-

[00:22:58] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, that’s wild.

[00:22:59] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah, yeah. I, uh, competed, uh… Actually, no, my, my first one he wasn’t. It was, it was a backyard meet in Santa Cruz, California, and then I competed at Record Breakers, which he was a judge at Rec- Record Breakers twice, and then he was in Australia for my first Arnold Classic. And so I got to know him really well, and he’s just, you know, he’s just

[00:23:18] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Cr- uh, I don’t think people realize, like, you know, imagine fucking, I don’t know, J- Joe DiMaggio. Like, imagine you, like, went to your local baseball diamond and we’re hitting- Yeah. … and J- and Joe DiMaggio was there, like, “Hey, do you want some help with that?” I was like, like it’s just- Yeah … it’s unbelievable to have someone at that caliber of a sport be so close and generous with their time.

[00:23:40] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, Ed’s just, like, he’s, he’s just the best

[00:23:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, my other video, speaking of technical proficiency and making s- hard things look easy was, I don’t remember the exact weight, but it was in the high 900s, I think, on a deadlift, was super old video of, um, Benedik Magnusson, um, just- Oh, easy up the whole time

[00:23:59] Dr. Mike T Nelson: running up to the bar and just picking it up. Like, w- I’m like, I’ve watched that video so many times on repeat of like, “What did I just witness? This is so bonkers,” to make it look like it was, like, child’s play. Yeah.

[00:24:16] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah, and that, there’s such … The crazy part about that, especially the Strongman-style deadlift, Benny just being- Yeah

[00:24:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: so big is, like, there’s a level of dynamics there and timing which is really hard to, to overstate because they, most of them do, like, a more of a rolling start. It’s

[00:24:32] Dr. Mike T Nelson: like- Yeah, like Thor would do the same type thing.

[00:24:33] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah, Eddie the same. Mm-hmm. Uh, Mitchell Hooper the same. Like, any Strongman- Yep … anyone who’s just that proportion, just, like, you almost don’t have a choice.

[00:24:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But it’s like now you have to deal with this, like-

[00:24:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Ugh,

[00:24:44] Dr. Jordan Shallow: another variable … well, yeah, it’s, so you’re on the launchpad, right? In Cape Canaveral. You’re, like, counting down, T-minus, and it’s like, oh no, there is the center of mass coefficient that- … indicates takeoff with a, that … Like, do you know the confidence that takes to be able to hit that thing at a, at, like, fucking Mach 8 when it’s 900 pounds, 1,000- Yeah

[00:25:06] Dr. Jordan Shallow: plus pounds? Like, that’s a set of fucking balls that most people don’t realize. And it’s also an unbelievable skill to execute that timing. It’s such a sensitivity that I think just goes, like, completely overlooked in, like, just the theatrics of being that strong.

[00:25:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Wasn’t it one of the issues with some of Thor’s deadlifts recently that one of the platforms was a little bit different than the one he had set up?

[00:25:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And the rumor I heard, and I don’t know if this is true or not, is that for his attempt at the Enhanced Games, that he actually brought in his own custom platform to make sure that … You know, when you’ve got that much weight on the bar, that even those slight things of how the, it moves and how much the floor gives and stuff like that makes a, a massive difference when you’re at that level.

[00:25:49] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah, and the thing I think that gets you to that level is there’s an innateness to that. There’s certainly sensitivity within your musculoskeletal system, like your vestibular and subcortical systems can be trained to a certain degree. But, like, I, I, I look at athletes like Thor and like Mitchell, like Mitchell’s a really good example.

[00:26:07] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I l- I, uh, or, and, and, uh, let’s go outside of strength sports as well, like, you know, Tiger Woods or Sidney Crosby. Like, these are sensory motor savants. Like, you don’t actually realize- Oh, for sure … that they’re playing with a completely separate, uh, uh, set of tools. Like, the, you know, the, the Tiger Woods story of he got four cl- I’m assuming they were drivers, and from Nike when he was sponsored, you know, kind of back in his heyday And he was like, “I like the heavy ones.”

[00:26:35] Dr. Jordan Shallow: They’re like, “What do you mean? They’re all the same weight.” He goes, “No, they’re not.” And he sends, he sends them back, and they rolled off the same, right, the same lathe, the same mill, the sa- But something was different. A machine didn’t calibrate, and they put it on, like, a high-precision scale, and, like, sure enough, like, within a gram-

[00:26:54] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm

[00:26:54] Dr. Jordan Shallow: they were different, and he was dead on. And, like, I’ve worked with athletes. Uh, I was, I was on tour with Nick Kyrgios a handful of years ago, and I, I, I experienced the same thing with rackets that he had. Like, we’re talking in the grams in which, you know, no mortal human could ever, could ever perceive, but they’re so…

[00:27:13] Dr. Jordan Shallow: He’s, like, sensitive is, like, r- is the technical term.

[00:27:16] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:16] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Right? And he’s so sensitive, and, like, you- Nick Kyrgios is a great example, ’cause, like, here you have probably one of the most skilled, if not the most skilled tennis player of all time with one of the biggest serves of all time. But Nick in the gym, you know, there are way stronger guys.

[00:27:32] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, we would be all over, like, just warming up or even training weeks before tournaments, and we’re around guys that are much bigger, carry much more muscle. But man, there’s not a person in the world that wants to be sitting down the barrel of Kyrgios going fucking 250 to the, to the T, right? And it’s like, how does he do it?

[00:27:50] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like, well, it’s not the, it’s not the components of his motor output. It’s the sensitivity of his sensory input. That’s what makes him so deadly. That’s what makes that serve go that fast, and I think it’s like, it’s just a paradigm that people don’t understand, that sensory input drives motor output.

[00:28:05] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like-

[00:28:06] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm …

[00:28:06] Dr. Jordan Shallow: he’s, like, he’s a s- I, I think, I mean, I’m, I’m biased obviously. Like, I’m a huge fan of his as, like, a person and an athlete, but he’s just such a special… Like, when you look at that, like, you know- I see someone like that or Tiger, I see their ability, I’m like, “You’re, you’re Rain Man with a racket.”

[00:28:23] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Right? Like, you’re coming down over the escalator memorizing equations. You’re the f- you’re the, you’re the sensory motor version of that, right? And it’s just, it’s such a fun thing to watch, and like, y- I 100% believe that that sensitivity would, would be ingrained in someone like Thor. ‘Cause Thor, I mean, there are strength athletes and there are athletes that do strength sports.

[00:28:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: The best ones are athletes that do strength sports. Yeah. Right? Like, you look at a guy like Mitch, who’s incredibly athletic for his si- And that’s why I think Strongman is such a good proxy to

[00:28:57] Dr. Mike T Nelson: strength. Look at Brian Shaw. Like, you ever watch Brian Shaw- Unbelievable … move with heavy loads, you’re like, “How the hell is that possible?”

[00:29:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. It, because he c- Because there’s a sensitivity, there’s an acuity to movement, there’s an understanding of his position in space, and the strength is just a byproduct of that. He can learn fast. He has the tools. They’re all… They… And it’s so incredible to see, and, you know, again, it’s lost, I think, in the less technical because the, the circus act of it all is just so insane.

[00:29:20] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But from a, like a neurophysiological standpoint, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s literally mind-blowing. Like it’s, to me it is like, you asked me earlier, is there anything that I’m excited about? Is there anything that, that I’m really into? It’s like, it’s that. It’s the expression of skill and how it, the sensory system and the subcortical system is, like, really at the r- regardless of, of what the feat is, whether it’s Steph Curry’s, you know, just i- i- insurmountable fucking reign over the NBA, probably solidifying himself as one of the best, if not statistically the best ever.

[00:29:53] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like it’s all the same. We’re all, we’re looking at the same thing. We see the sensory input acuity through the byproduct and lens of the motor output, but it has nothing to do with the motor output. So yeah, uh, un- unbelievable.

[00:30:06] Dr. Mike T Nelson: How trainable do you think if sensory is related to motor output, which I would agree, and I think it’s an untapped area for a lot of athletes, how trainable do you think is the sensory system if I leave it just kinda open-ended and vague like that?

[00:30:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. I, I think it definitely falls into some chronological bottlenecks where these, these, there’s windows of physical and developmental milestones that when open, if g- if nurtured the right

[00:30:31] Dr. Mike T Nelson: way- Like critical periods you’re talking about in development?

[00:30:32] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I think, I think s- I think that’s a big part of it, right?

[00:30:34] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Mm-hmm. Like, just like it’s hard for me to learn Japanese at, at 36 years old, it would be potentially difficult for me to start to engage some of these, these, these motor systems in a way that no different than, like, a polyglot. Like, if you look at a Steph, he’s a polyglot. You look at a Bo Jackson, it’s like, you know, to understand how to speak multiple languages, you have to actually understand how to produce the phonetics, right?

[00:30:59] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, y- the noises you make. Like, I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried to speak, uh, Arabic or Farsi or something like that. It’s just, like, a completely different set of mouth tools you gotta use. Yeah. Right? So, and you gotta kind of ingrain those early, and I think… So that’s, like, a big caveat, but I do think, like, I think that people are circling the wagon when it comes to improving the skill or, or, sorry, improving their ability to improve their sensory system.

[00:31:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I just don’t think they know that that’s what they’re doing.

[00:31:32] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm.

[00:31:32] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I think a lot of times, like, when we’re dealing with, like, let’s kind of put a clinical spin on this, like, if we’re dealing with, like, an injury, for example, there are, you know, percolated to the top are a handful of tools that just don’t seem to die, but they, they also are, like, fairly unsubstantiated from, like, a research and mechanism perspective, and maybe more from a mechanism perspective.

[00:31:54] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And I think if we look at all mechanisms of physical adaptation, at least at some point through the lens of, of neurological adaptation, motor learning, skill acquisition, they start to make a lot more sense, right? So, like, you know, whether it’s the London Olympics and, like, sort of the proliferation of, like, rock tape on the beach volleyball courts- Yeah.

[00:32:12] Dr. Jordan Shallow: or, you know, Michael Phelps covered in pepperoni slaps from cupping, and the, and then, uh, that may have been that Olympics and the following Olympics. And, you know, the, you don’t have to go far within a, with any normal health club to find a foam roller or a one that vibrates or a Theragun. It’s like- People look at these tools and it’s very easy without the, the requisite set of knowledge to look at them a- and place them out of context and throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?

[00:32:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, people will automatically default analog structural mechanisms of correction to these things with, you know, no consideration of the nervous system’s interpretation of the stimulus that they provide. Like, let’s take foam rolling, for example. Like, it’s very easy for someone, you know, in the academic space, both pseudo and otherwise, to denounce the utility of a foam roller.

[00:33:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Except it’s like, yeah, until you’ve flown to central Turkey and been in a gym in a cave somewhere, and someone thought it diligent to put a foam roller in that gym, it’s like, don’t tell me that it doesn’t work. Just tell me you don’t understand how it works. And, but then when you look into, like, kind of circling back to the, the crux of the question, it’s like, how trainable is that?

[00:33:23] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like, well, what does it do? Well, I mean, it does a lot of things. It, it’s, it, it, it, it, uh, it evokes the percep- or it, uh, I’m trying to word this very specifically. It evokes the, the necessary sensory environment for us to perceive the presence of deep pressure. Mm. There’s, like, a l- there’s a lot of depth to the, each one of those words and why I kinda struggled through it, but kinda stay with me.

[00:33:52] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, we- A thing that I always posit, like some of the students that I work with, is like there’s no receptor for wetness, right? Which is like a weird thing to think about. I also thought about this for the first time when I was really high on mushrooms. It’s like, huh. Right. Right.

[00:34:09] Dr. Mike T Nelson: That was your thought.

[00:34:10] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. You know, drugs. But it’s like I remember being in, uh … I was working with an athlete, and he had like a really fancy car and it’s like one of these big Rolls-Royces or something. And we were in Florida and he picked me up, and I got in the seat. And I was driving down the road, I’m like, “Oh, no, like I spilled something on my lap or like I pissed myself or something,” ’cause like I said, this like weird sensation around my legs and I was like, “What?”

[00:34:30] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And I couldn’t figure out, and then I looked down and I was like, “Oh, no, I didn’t spill anything. What the fuck’s going on?” And he had cooled seats. Hmm. And I’m like, oh, that’s a novel sensation. That’s weird.

[00:34:40] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Your interpretation- And it’s a- … is different.

[00:34:42] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Well, yeah, because I … Well, and one, your eyes are your number one trusted source of information.

[00:34:47] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But like when … If we think about like, well, what tools do we actually have? Like I- I’ll use the comparison of like, um, like a hex code. So a hex code is essentially like a numeric, usually six-digit representation, sometimes alphanumeric, of like a spot on the color gradient. Right? So we have like the electromagnetic spectrum, which is like .0035% of the en- the entire

[00:35:11] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So visible light is .0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum, so it represents a very small fraction actually of, of, um, of, of w- wavelengths that we have the tools to perceive. And it’s like from there we go like, all right, there’s primary colors, right? There’s three. I think it was like, what? Red, yellow, and blue or some shit like that.

[00:35:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Is that right? Green, maybe green’s a pri- I feel like green has to be a primary.

[00:35:32] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Red, blue, green.

[00:35:33] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Red, blue, green. So r- so with- … those three primary colors we can create all the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum, or like invisible light. And it’s like you have to think that the human body and our, our perception of our position in space, like

[00:35:50] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s funny ’cause y- I’m not telling anyone to go do drugs, but like drugs will induce a transient state in some cases of synesthesia. Like if anyone’s- Yeah … ever, you know, like really sent it on LSD or if you, if you got a good mescaline connect, make sure to like, you know, find me on Instagram and shoot me a message.

[00:36:09] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But like-

[00:36:10] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Ayahuasca will do that too. Not … I, I may have experienced that and it- Allegedly … feels weird.

[00:36:16] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Allegedly. Right? Allegedly. And it’s … And I mean, these are states of the brain that can be reached without drugs, right? Daniel Tammet- Mm … who’s a British author, he, he cites, uh … So he has g- I think it’s called graphesthesia, which, uh- Hmm

[00:36:28] Dr. Jordan Shallow: essentially like he sees shapes So like, so he, Daniel Tammet is famous for, uh, reciting pi, so 3.14 to the circumference of a circle, reciting pi to 20,000 decimal points.

[00:36:43] Dr. Mike T Nelson: What?

[00:36:44] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So he sat in a room with like four verifiers as they went along and for five hours, honestly like five hours and nine minutes or five hours and 11 minutes- Oh my gosh

[00:36:53] Dr. Jordan Shallow: he rattled it off. But in his brain he wasn’t like… Like imagine like right now I’m sitting in my apartment in Toronto. If I had to in my brain venture to the airport, I could do it no problem. Right? I could kinda like go down and like say, so I go left out of my thing and then- Yeah, you’re thinking

[00:37:09] Dr. Mike T Nelson: visually.

[00:37:11] Dr. Jordan Shallow: He’s thinking visually. So it’s he- Yep … to him it’s like me reciting, you know, the, the stoplights from here to the airport. It’s like, you know, I’ve traveled to the airport like a lot. I fly all the fucking time. So it’s like, so he just did that. So it’s like this synesthesia. But if we think about the way that we, we generate perception and we really think about it and the obscurity in which the tools that we have are primary, are primary components of sense.

[00:37:34] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like there’s a really famous, uh, uh, paper in like the, in the field of consciousness studies. Uh, it’s by a guy named Thomas Nagel and the, the paper is called What’s It Like? It’s something to the effect of like w- is it, what’s it like to be a bat?

[00:37:51] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Hm.

[00:37:51] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And he kinda makes this case about, about like well, we kinda understand a little bit around the sensory tools of smaller bats, right?

[00:37:59] Dr. Jordan Shallow: They don’t have eyes really, like at least ones that are meaningfully contributing to their, uh, their perception of their position in space, right? But like is it something to be a bat? Yeah. But is it the same as is it something to be a person? It’s like no. And it’s like they, they use it, I mean it’s not a one-to-one comparison, but they use it to basically that’s like the consciousness cutoff.

[00:38:18] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like is it like something to be that thing? Like is it like something to be a table? No. Then it’s like probably not conscious. Is it like something to be a bat? Yes. Then it’s, then it’s something– If it’s like something to be that thing, that theme could, that thing could be deemed to be conscious. But in like, in the, in the conversation we’re having here it’s like well, well hold on a second.

[00:38:34] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Well how do bats, uh, or what is the experience like? Like we kinda compare it to like a radar. Why? ‘Cause a radar uses a similar system and it’s like we actually have that, right? Look no further than that scene in Jurassic Park with the water that shakes in the glass- … when the dinosaur comes. But it’s like it, so this surprises a lot of people that one of our like primary sensory inputs, like one of our, you know, red, blue, green is is vibration.

[00:38:59] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:00] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Right? Vibration, so we have these subcutaneous mechanoreceptors that make up part of our subcortical system that actually give us input. Like, an, an easy example of this from, like, a sports perspective would be, like, I, I think of Steph Curry. There’s these videos of him in a warmup, like, finding dead spots on the floor where, like, there’s something wrong with the wood, and it’s like you have to think about, like, what’s happening.

[00:39:20] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, how does he do this? And it’s like, well, the ball kind of imprints a pressure on the skin as he pushes into it. Now, like, there’s more than this going on, but just for the sake of this example, we’ll, we’ll just double-click on, on, on the sensory, uh, s- the sensitivity of the hand, which, you know, the hand is 11 times more sensitive, or sorry, the hand is, has a, a, a density of sensory receptors 11 times more than that of the foot, right?

[00:39:48] Dr. Jordan Shallow: This is, if you, if you ever wanna, like, see just how dominant the sensory component of the hand is, look up something called the sensory homunculus, which essentially, like- Yeah … this little man that diagrams out the density of sensory receptors in your body. And you’ll notice, like, the nose, the face, or around the lips, and the tongue is really big.

[00:40:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: The head is quite large for obvious reasons, the proximity to the brain, you’d imagine. But the hands are the most disproportionately sensory dense things in the entire body. So, here we have Steph, and he’s going to bounce a ball. He’s actually, part of, part of the picture in his, in the conscious theater of his brain that is, is giving him this perception is actually just how much depth I’m penetrating into the layers of the sort of the pads of my fingers as the ball leaves my hand.

[00:40:32] Dr. Jordan Shallow: That’s actually granting us a prediction around what the receiving hand is going to feel after the ball bounces off the floor. And when he doesn’t, when the prediction, when there’s what’s called a prediction error, when that prediction errors and he knows, like he’s so finely tuned and his predictions are usually so accurate, that he knows that the, the variable is the thing in between both of his hands, which is the floor.

[00:40:58] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And that’s where he goes, “Yep, something wrong with that,” ’cause there ain’t nothing wrong with me, right? Like, I’m finely tuned, right? Like I, I know there’s nothing, so it’s like that’s the problem. And so when we think about the trainability Of, of, of the sensory system, it’s you have to understand what the primary movers are, right?

[00:41:14] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So from, like, a mechanoreceptor standpoint, when we look at things like tape, when we look at their, like, kinesio tape, like in the, in the London Olympics, or, or cupping as a mode of therapy, or the pro- proliferation of, of, um, lacrosse balls was a, a big one early days. Shout out Kelly Starrett, right? Yeah.

[00:41:30] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And the Supple Leopard, and the movement in CrossFit for self-myofascial release, and, you know, uh, things like Theragun and what Jason Wersland has done with Therabody. It’s like I think too often people look at the analog misappropriated structural changes, and we start to say, you know, for example, with, with kinesio tape, there was a big push, and I was close to one of the companies in California when I first got out of school, that it was like, “Oh, it’s good for lymphatic drainage.”

[00:41:55] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s, you’re looking at it structurally. Mm-hmm. You’re looking at what this thing does on a diagnostic ultrasound structurally in the layers of some- You’re, you’re not looking at it neurologically, right? Cup it. What does it do? Something, something, you know, toxin something, something inflammation something, something circulation.

[00:42:08] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like I did not see a neurological mechanism superimposed ’cause it could… It’s not… Like, our body’s an integrated system of systems, right? So it’s not just one thing that’s going to happen, right? And it… But if your mechanism of correction doesn’t pay homage to the central nervous system, you either d- haven’t dug deep enough, or you have something that may be existing in the realm of placebo, and that actually doesn’t have a physiological mechanism, right?

[00:42:35] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So, like, let’s take… So cupping, for example. Cupping can so easily, and it’s almost hard to resist the temptation, right? Because the after effects are so, are so apparent and visceral that it’s like, oh, clearly it’s a blood-related thing ’cause blood. It’s like we actually have a receptor in our subcutaneous layer, one of our four mechanoreceptors, one of our four primary sense inputs, that actually perceives the s- the stretch of skin Right?

[00:43:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So now all of a sudden it’s like, well, take your kinesio tape, tape your cupping, and now put these together. And here’s a p- one of the problems I see all the time. I’ll see a therapist do some cupping and then put some tape on them. It’s like, w- hold on. We have a whole, there’s a whole buffet of sensory receptors to which we can call upon, these primary colors that give us this composite palette of our sensory experience.

[00:43:27] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, you know, now we’re just like, just y- just painting the whole thing blue. It’s like, ah, fuck, man. Like, variability is the key to learning, right? The polyglots, they learn multiple languages. My CTO is one of the smartest people I know, and what does he, what does he know? What is his skill? He’s learned the skill of learning.

[00:43:42] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Mm-hmm. It’s a meta skill. So if we can understand that, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll speed over the, the rest of us to not bore the rest of you guys to tears. Yeah. No, go ahead. But, like, m- mechanoreceptors are gonna be light touch, vibration, skin stretch, and, um, and deep pressure. And it’s like, look across the board at the therapeutic modalities that people are reaching for.

[00:44:00] Dr. Jordan Shallow: What did I say? Light, light touch. Oh, massage, great. One of the… You can also classify light touch as, like, compression wear, right? Why do so many- Yep … athletes wear, like, a sleeve over their shooting arm? It’s like, ’cause it’s, it’s, it’s mainlining sensory information and giving them acuity and awareness of the position of the thing that they need to know where it is in space to be accurate at the execution of whatever it is they’re trying to do, whether shooting, throwing- Yeah

[00:44:22] Dr. Jordan Shallow: hitting something, right? So light touch. Vibration Don’t have to look far, right? Like, the, it’s, it will, the, the mall kiosk that I walked by 20 years ago with the vibration plates will be there in another 20 years. And I hope to God someone who sells one of these things takes 10 minutes to listen to what I’m saying, and it’s like, “You’re welcome.

[00:44:43] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s free. If you want to cut me a royalty check for, for sure, by all means, I’m not gonna say no.” But it’s like, sell it on, sell it on, like, the, the truth, right? Like, if you just talk a little bit about the neuromuscular physiology of mechanoreceptors and how that cunoe cerebellar track starts to fit into the rest of our subcortical system, it’s like, look, people can handle it.

[00:45:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, it’s, yeah. Rather than just like, I don’t know, or shake the fat away. It’s like, come on, dude. You were right there. And then so you can look at vibrating plates, you can look at Theraguns and all of the other vibrating tools. It’s like, why? It’s like, because it mainlines into a primary color of our sensory palate experience, and it’s just like, you know, the, so we have a vibration, skin stretch, deep pressure, light touch.

[00:45:23] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So, like, you can take a foam roller light touch. And the thing that you have to kind of be careful with is like, foam roller’s not just light touch, or it’s not just sk- um, um, deep pressure. There’s probably also some skin stretch there, right? Yeah. If I’m displacing the skin around my quad and getting into, like, the w- uh, you know, the fascia, the iliotibial band, or the, the multiple layers of the vastus lateralis, both superficial and deep, it’s like, there’s, I have to be perturbating the subcutaneous mechanoreceptor that’s stretching my skin because th- there’s a displacement here.

[00:45:51] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So now it’s like, now when you start to see this, you go, wow. And this is like a, uh, there’s, there’s about 10 more tangents we can go on here. But even something like that where you go, “Oh, wow, okay. So we have these four things, deep pressure, light, light touch, vibration, and skin stretch. We have these tools.

[00:46:05] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Before I work out, why don’t I just, like, sample a little bit of each one? I’m gonna get a little bit of novel stimulus, sensory awareness, geolocation, you know, this connection between, like, my brain and where my body is in space.” It’s no different than, like, you know, if I, if I leave for a few weeks and my apartment cools down and warms up, I take a guitar off the wall, the first thing I’m gonna do is tune it, right?

[00:46:24] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Because if I put my first finger on the first fret of the E string, the top string, it’s only F if the E is an E, right? If I’d spent 20 hours on the plane flying from Newark to, what is a 20-hour flight? Singapore. I’m gonna, I’m gonna tune the thing, right? So I’m gonna get, I’m gonna, I’m gonna reach for a foam roller and someone’s like, “Oh, you’re breaking up scar tissue?”

[00:46:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like, “No. You fucking- No … you, you fascia.” It’s not like… Well, fascia is actually pretty dense with sensory receptors, some of which that I’m talking about now. Mm. So, like, maybe, right? And vibration actually helps activate muscle spindle reflexes, which is a part of a proprioceptive pathway that, you know, I think is worth discussing.

[00:47:00] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But I may, you know, uh, not take up all the hot air to explain the proprioceptive system. But it’s like, here are things that we do all the time, we see people do all the time, and if we understand the mechanism, we can understand the dosages, right? Like, one of my favorite stories of all time, if you’ve ever read the book called Scale by Geoffrey West with a G, he talks about the- I love

[00:47:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: that book.

[00:47:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: It’s

[00:47:20] Dr. Jordan Shallow: amazing It’s amazing. I, I think it’s just, you know, talk about, like, worldview/principles of everything. Mm-hmm. Like, there’s a universality to, like, the physics of that, which is just so, you know, sublinear, super linear scaling. And it talks about Tusko, right? The elephant to which they- Mm-hmm … injected, I don’t know, 30 grams of LSD, and they didn’t understand- Yeah

[00:47:37] Dr. Jordan Shallow: how drugs scaled. And the poor thing… And, and it’s funny to… I, I’m an au- I’m an audiobook primarily, just ’cause I don’t like- S- stuff. But, uh, y- the audiobook is so funny ’cause whoever’s narrating it has this, like, posh, very, you know, Penguin Random House voice. And you’re just hear- hearing this guy who sounds like the, the Archbishop of Canterbury explain how-

[00:47:57] Dr. Jordan Shallow: this elephant took 300 grams acid or whatever- Ooh … and then proceeded to fall over, shit himself, and die. It’s like, I mean, I, I, I’ve done a, a few things. Acid may or be one of them, and it’s like I’ve had some pretty cool experiences. At no point was defecation and death on the menu. And it’s like, you know, that’s a lot of acid, and it’s just like, what happened, is like they didn’t understand the mechanism.

[00:48:23] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So how could you understand how to dose it, right? So a- and it’s the same thing with these tools. I’ll so often see people, like, just, “I really like foam rolling.” The first thing I do is I put a Theragun in their hand, and I go like, “Okay, try this,” right? There’s a signal that you’re missing, but you’re likely missing multiple signals.

[00:48:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So that, I think, is a really great way to, to reappropriate usage of tools that we so often look at as m- analog and mechanical and structural in their mechanism of correction, and just go like, “Hey, what if it was neurological?” Right? What would it look like if that change was happening in the quickest adapting system in the body?

[00:49:00] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like, well, you’d probably spend, like, a minute here, a minute here, a minute there, and then you’re up and you’re moving around. And you’ll… I’m telling you, you will get way further with that practice. Now, there’s about 20 other things that would come off that, but I feel like a really salient, easy to grasp thing to start immediately improving your, your sensory system and its ability to interpret your body’s position in space is stimulate it.

[00:49:22] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s no different than anything else, right? So you have to understand what are these primary components that you’re stimulating and why, and then the devil’s in the dosages, and there’s obviously some programming considerations. But that’s a great place for people to start. Lean in on these tools before you train.

[00:49:35] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Don’t look at it as, like, inhibitory, right? I think a lot of people look at it as, like, parasympathetic, and I think when, when paired properly with some of the proprioceptive work that I kind of alluded to, such a potent combination to make crazy changes in the perception of your position in space almost fucking immediately.

[00:49:51] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and that’s the beautiful part I think people miss, is that if you’re dealing with the nervous system, because the response is so fast, it allows you to iterate through a whole bunch of stuff really fast because you can test every single thing you’re doing. And you don’t have to be a wizard and be right all the time.

[00:50:11] Dr. Mike T Nelson: You just have to get to the thing that’s like the, like the old log jams, where you see the guy going out in the middle of the river and pulls out the kingpin or the one log and, like, the whole thing starts going again. Like, you just have to get to the main leverage point, and by working on the nervous system, it allows you to just iterate your way through it so much faster.

[00:50:31] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah, and it’s just, I think that’s something that goes broadly unappreciated. I, I wouldn’t go as far as say disrespected, but definitely broadly unappreciated, is, like, the complexity of the system that you get to work on every day is, like, imagine we all worked at, like, the Large Hadron Collider, right?

[00:50:48] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, high energy particle physics. It’s like, those fucking things are expensive to run, right? I- there was a linear accelerator when I was at Stanford that kind of runs this weird outskirt of Palo Alto up by, like, Junipero Serra, just on the outskirts of, of sort of the, the, the, the… I mean, I say the deeded land.

[00:51:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Half of Palo Alto is owned by the fucking school Stanford University, but- Um, it, and it’s like, oh man, this tunnel just has, like, a bunch of nothing that flies through it really fast so people could make predictions about scattering amplitudes or something like that. And it’s like, yeah, that’s really complex.

[00:51:18] Dr. Jordan Shallow: All the shit I just said, someone, someone’s gonna sit there and be like, “What the fuck did he just say?” And don’t worry, I’m not far off from understanding what I just said, uh, either. But it’s like the human nervous system is infinitely more complex and far less understood than any sort of, you know, high energy particle physics apparatus that allows you to, to make predictions or assumptions about q- quantum physics and scattering amplitudes and all that fun stuff.

[00:51:44] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, uh, uh, you can just run another, run another program. You can run another test next rep. You can run another test next set. You can run another test next workout or tomorrow or… And it’s just like, I, I really think there’s, like, when… I, I just don’t, I, because we’re kind of, like, we’re just born into these things, and we’re just, like, the vehicles in these, or we’re, like, passengers in this skin suit experience and, and people don’t really appreciate the complexity of what it is they’re dealing with.

[00:52:14] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, you know, at the end of the day, like, you know, particle physics, Large Hadron Collider, CERN, all these things, it’s like I’m not wearing a white coat when I train my athletes. I’m literally just being like, “Let’s try this. Let’s try this.” Mm. Now, w- on what’s under the hood of that is, you know, a fairly complex thought process, I like to think, and increasingly more so, but I only increase the resolution of my thought process in pursuit of making my application easier, not harder.

[00:52:41] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm. ‘

[00:52:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Cause what did we say? Well, he said a bunch of words about a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with training, but at the end of the day, I was like, “Yeah, if you foam rolled and did some other stuff that everyone else already kind of does, then it’ll probably help.” It’s like there’s nothing profound about my prescription at all, and I, I want that to really resonate, because I feel like it’s very easy to talk about the nervous system with this, this sense of, um, security through obscurity, right?

[00:53:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, we can re- you can really get lost in, in, in, in neurophysiology. Like, you, you- Oh, yeah … it’s a complete, you know, you’re, it’s a complete different map. It’s one thing to know the insertion of the bicep or the pec. It’s another thing to understand the lateral cingulate gyrus or something along those lines.

[00:53:19] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like, what? But so far as training goes- The sophistication of the interface between the mind and the brain is that it takes this– You can– It’s almost like clicking and dragging in a website. Like, I don’t know how to code worth shit. Even with this AI nonsense, I still have no idea what I’m doing. But on my website, I can click and drag stuff.

[00:53:39] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Why? ‘Cause Shopify is an interface. Movement’s an interface. Movement’s an interface between your subconscious brain and your conscious mind, and you can manipulate one to really harness the backend power of another. No different than when I click and drag shit. I just click. No, all I’ve done now is recognize patterns and read a little bit about the source code, and now I just click and drag for a living.

[00:53:59] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And my loops of learning are so quick that, you know, I can get further and further ahead, and it compounds in my ability to train people efficiently ’cause I’ve just had, you know, the, I, I just kind of standardized the landscape, and then you become sensitive to the variables that make the biggest change.

[00:54:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And talking about changes for neuroplasticity, so something I’ve been wondering about for quite a while, I even talked to my own neurologist about this, like, four or five years ago, and he kind of smiled and just laughed at me, but

[00:54:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: As they do.

[00:54:30] Dr. Mike T Nelson: We, we know that certain psychedelics can basically reopen critical periods again.

[00:54:38] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So if we can have an increased period of more neuroplasticity, in theory, we should be able to then learn skills faster, because more neuroplasticity, as you know, is not always necessarily better. You could get- … worse faster also. Yeah. It’s not always a positive. Yeah. No. But in theory, it gives you the potential- Right

[00:55:00] Dr. Mike T Nelson: if used correctly, to make faster inroads. Any thoughts?

[00:55:07] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I think in the next five years, the, the greatest application of quantum physics will be its application in neuroscience.

[00:55:17] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Hmm.

[00:55:17] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I think, I think the brain is a quantum system.

[00:55:21] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Hmm.

[00:55:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And I th- I think what, what… ‘Cause essentially what we’re talking about is su- is superpositions.

[00:55:25] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Sure. Sometimes a su- sometimes the superposition is between paranoid and schizophrenic. And then that’s a- Yeah. And so when, when you leave that door open, you know, you, the next thing you know, you are a Grateful Dead fan. And, uh, but, like, that’s- Yeah, you’re living out of

[00:55:38] Dr. Mike T Nelson: a van and-

[00:55:39] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah …

[00:55:39] Dr. Mike T Nelson: watching every show and…

[00:55:40] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Right. But, you know, it, it’s, it’s, it’s really interesting, ’cause I think there is something to, like, the quantum state and the superposition of, like, neuronal activity. Like, I’ll, I’ll tell you a funny story, and I’ll scrub it for, for names for, for, um, for anonymity’s sake, but a really close friend of mine and we, he’d never done acid before.

[00:56:02] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Fuck. And it, but it speaks… There’s so mu- there’s so much depth to this. And at the end of the day, it’s like, oh, here’s a stoner talking about the depth of an experience. It’s like, no, no, I think it actually lends some, some, yes, but also, hear me out, it lends some insights into how our, our present experience is so governed by the quantum state of a previous experience.

[00:56:28] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Hmm. And so, so we, we finish up a thing. We’re down in Florida, and we’d done mushrooms together. Um, this is not a PSA for drugs, but I think it’s, that’s actually- It, it’s, it’s hard to have a salient conversation about neuroscience without d- like I could either talk about the lateral cingulate gyrus or the posterior columns medial lemniscal pathway, or I could talk about LSD and watching Harry Potter with my friend.

[00:56:51] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like most people would probably rather I talk about Harry Potter on acid. So we, we dropped these, these… They were Altoids dipped in LSD. So some indiscriminate amount. I mean, I, I… Maybe it was thr- Oh, wow. Yeah, maybe it was three. So here we are on the moon with fresh breath. It was great. Um, so we’re, I don’t know, maybe we’re a couple hundred micrograms deep, and, uh, I unfortunately had a, a work call to attend to while I was absolutely just off my fucking face.

[00:57:16] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So I got off a Zoom call. I have no idea where I am. I come around in the living room. I’ve been in on the call for an hour, maybe it was a month. Who knows? I was pretty, pretty fucking blasted by then. And my friend is sitting there, my only friend gone, and he’s got his phone out in front of him. Now, he had found Harry Potter on, uh, you know, Netflix or Amazon, whatever the hell, in the time, and he was pretty much, he was the couch, right?

[00:57:37] Dr. Jordan Shallow: He was furniture. And I was wondering, I’m like, “Oh, he’s just texting someone.” I’m like, “There’s no fucking way this guy’s texting anyone right now.” Like, I’m a, I’m a seasoned cosmonaut in this state, and like I’m not looking at my phone. And when I looked closely, he had his camera up on his phone. So what he was doing was he was filtering the movie through the lens of his camera, and I’m like, “Yo,” insert name.

[00:58:02] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Uh, which is, which is the highest thing ever to do, by the way. I’m like, “Yo, what are you doing?” And he just like slow pans the kind of special LSD slow pan that only acid can provide, and he’s just like, “You’re fucking with me, right?” And I was like, “Dude, what’s going on?” And I looked at the t- and I looked at the TV and I was like, “Whoa.”

[00:58:20] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And which is what you say. That’s exactly the word. Whoa. And, uh, I, I’ve seen the movie Harry Potter probably about 1,000 times, and I looked on the screen and like the p- the characters in some scenes looked like claymation characters.

[00:58:34] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Hmm.

[00:58:34] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, it was the weirdest experience. They just looked like this ver- like almost like Gumby, right?

[00:58:38] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. Like the, like just the back in the day, or if you watch any of the old, like Christmas special cartoons. Mm-hmm. And I was like… And it was, it was a shared experience where I’m like, “What the fuck?” And so what he was doing was like in the, in his high brain, he was looking through… So maybe if he rec- so he was recording it so he could watch it later.

[00:58:56] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And I, like what we did, I was like, “Okay,” like insert name, “I see what you’re seeing. Now like we need to have a signal.” So every c- ’cause it would cut to a scene and you’re like, “No, no, like that’s like Daniel Radcliffe, and that’s like the redhead kid, and that’s like Snape or whatever.” And uh, and we’re like, “No, that’s real.”

[00:59:11] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And so we had like a hand signal that we came up with whenever it was a scene that just looked so fucking strange. Like it, it honestly looked- Mm … like a weird animated director’s cut of like Gumby meets Harry Potter, and we were completely locked in. Every single time… And what we realized was that the scenes that were so obviously- claymation characters in our, in our sort of inebriated state were the scenes that were using heavy amounts of CGI.

[00:59:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Ah. Now, what you realize- … is that we live our day not experiencing CGI. So what we, what our brain does is uses our previous prediction to generate our perception, right? And it, what it does is it fills in the gaps of the Gumby-ness of the CGI’s actual raw sensory data, the photons that hit your eyes, and it creates a very smooth transition where it goes pretty much unnoticed.

[01:00:09] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But so much of the… And this is like, I’m, I’m stepping out on a smaller ledge than people think I am from an actual, like, neuroscience cognitive theory standpoint. So like, you know, it sounds like the musings of, like, a drug addict, but it’s actually, I think, quite neuroscientifically apt in what I’m, what I’m attempting to get across, is You know, people think that we, we perceive the world, uh, from what’s called, like, a bottom-up perception, that there’s, like, something in the– on a recliner behind our eyes that takes in the world as it is, and it’s not, right?

[01:00:38] Dr. Jordan Shallow: One of my favorite quotes is, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” And right now we saw the world as pretty fucking high ’cause we’re, like, really high. But what we, but what it does, and you’ve seen this, and it’s, uh, I think it speaks to, like, your underlying point about these, like, connecting these states, which I think are always connected.

[01:00:54] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I think what drugs do and, like, from a dissociation standpoint, what opens this plot, what’s, b- uh, is it breaks the, that quantum relationship between the past and the present, and it allows that, that to, like, rewire. So here my brain is polluted with the memory of my prediction of what Harry Potter has always looked like.

[01:01:15] Dr. Jordan Shallow: ‘Cause every time I walk Harry– watch Harry Potter, from the first time I probably saw that one at midnight when I was 12 years old on a Wednesday night release or whenever it was, I walked into that theater not experiencing much CGI. My entire life has been this, this, this experience of, of logging my predictions of what faces look like, of what bridges and castles and all of, like, all of this looks like.

[01:01:36] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, and what I’m seeing and what my brain is doing, what your brain is always doing, and what you, what attention really is, you attend to errors. That’s what it is. So it’s like, but in this state where what I think part mechanistically what a lot of psychedelics do and, and, and kind of per our, our short list that we talked about, whether it’s, you know, psilocybin or, uh, I mean, I think to a more serious degree, and I wouldn’t necessarily play with this drug, but, like, a ketamine, I think some, some degree is, like, an MDMA, um, or an LSD.

[01:02:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s like it, it breaks that attachment in your perception engine or your perception machine as, as, uh, you know, A- Anil Seth or, or, um, Andy Clark would call it. Um, uh, he– “Experience Machine,” that was his book. And w- what it does is it breaks that, that interdependency on that, on the prediction of what’s going to happen, and now your sensory tools are just left entering the raw material in a, in a, in a, in a complete raw upload rather than buffering it through this sort of Bayesian equation of your normative value and your, and your, um, and your prior experience to reach your posterior, which is, like, you know, what you see or what you perceive.

[01:02:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s like- That ha– like, like I can, I can attest it. Now mind you, we’re not, you know, uh, un- un- unpacking childhood trauma or PTSD. We were just like two guys trying to have a laugh watching Harry Potter for 12 hours. But it was, it was honestly the most insane ex- like how reproducible it was that, you know, the LSD in his brain and the LSD in my brain experienced…

[01:03:07] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s like I, I, I know, now again, like, was I just high as fuck watching Harry Potter? It’s like, yes. But- … when you kind of look at these mechanisms that are seen in a therapeutic dose, what it’s doing is it’s kind of like, I think it’s, it’s transiently disrupting that Bayesian equation of our perception and it really, it, it, it sheds the input of the prior on the posterior, which the posterior is the present moment, which is like a weird thing to, a, a ver- a verbiage thing.

[01:03:36] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But Thomas Bayes didn’t thought when he, or didn’t think when he came up with the equation of how people change their mind mathematically that some guy would be talking about a movie that was never made and a bunch of drugs he’d never heard of. But I, I honestly think that’s, that’s the case. Now, and we’re so far away from what the fuck we were talking about, but I do think it’s a- And it’s such an interesting piece of like neurophysiology.

[01:03:55] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, and to a certain degree, to maybe land this in a more sane place, a lot of the airwaves around changing perception in the modern zeitgeist, let’s call it the podcast world, is around psychedelics for sure. And like, to a certain degree rightfully so, but also to a certain degree, like potentially irresponsibly propagated, and I’ve probably just added to more of that noise here.

[01:04:17] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So please consult your local physician, shaman, and/or drug dealer before going down this road. But exer- like I think exercise is a worthy compo- uh, is a, is a, is a worthy, um, uh, uh, contemporary in what should be like a triumvirate o- of, of changing your perception. Because I think what it does is it accesses some of these raw materials.

[01:04:39] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like if, if I think about the space of self-help, I think you can make, uh, you can make really interesting pharmacological and neurological, uh, or, or neuroscientific backings for the use of psychedelics in changing perception. You can make the same thing with meditation, right? Mm. So it’s kind of like the hippies have sort of ruled the roost, which is like, “Hey, man.

[01:04:58] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Peace and love, brother.” Fucking rights. I’m the first guy in. Like, I’ve been to Deadhead concerts at the Sphere a couple grams deep. Like, I’m totally cool with it. But I think what brings me to ground consistently every day is the fact that I know I can ch- change my perception with exercise. And this is not kumbaya stuff.

[01:05:13] Dr. Jordan Shallow: This is actually like really, somewhat or at least in my brain, it, it’s really sophisticated application in, of neuroscience.

[01:05:22] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Have you ever read the book, uh, Reality Switch Technology? Reality Switch?

[01:05:26] Dr. Jordan Shallow: No, but I, you’ve- It- I now have something up my… It sounds like it’s right up my alley.

[01:05:31] Dr. Mike T Nelson: It’s… You would love it, because he goes through and takes…

[01:05:35] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So his background, I’m, I’m blanking on his name. He just wrote a book on DMT this past year, which was my favorite book of all this past year. Is

[01:05:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: it Michael Pollan?

[01:05:42] Dr. Mike T Nelson: No. Michael Pollan actually had a really good book about how to change your mind. How to

[01:05:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: change your mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:05:46] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Um, I’ll remember the author’s name.

[01:05:48] Dr. Mike T Nelson: His Twitter is, like, Alien Insect Theory. But, uh, he’s, he’s- Perfect … super fascinating dude because he did a hardcore, like, PhD in neurophysiology, post-doc, like, but then looks at all this stuff with, you know, psychedelics. And so Reality Switch Technology, he goes through the different classifications of each psychedelic and explains from a neuroscience point how they change your perception, how it changes how your body is updating, and things like that.

[01:06:18] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And the s- the most interesting one I thought was there’s a, a classification called, uh, tropanes, which no one really uses because it’s just not a fun experience per se. They, they haven’t really figured out what to, to do with them. But the story he tells is of a, a guy who was, you know, tripping on these tropanes, and he is talking to him and he’s pretending like he’s just smoking a cigarette.

[01:06:42] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And the guy he’s talking to is like, “What’s going on?” He’s like, “Oh man, I’m having this party. All these people are in the room.” He’s telling him about all these interactions and stuff he’s having, and he’s just sitting on a couch by himself, right? So he’s literally thinks all this stuff is going on, and the guy he’s talking to goes, he’s like, “You know, but you realize you’re, you’re not really smoking a cigarette.”

[01:07:02] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And he goes, “Oh shit, I dropped it.” So he could take in outside info, but the tropanes sever your, a body’s ability to update any perceptions of anything. So he’s so in his world, and he can’t update the proprioception of his fingers holding a cigarette, that his logical conclusion then is, “Oh, shit, I must have dropped it.”

[01:07:27] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Well, tell me that’s any

[01:07:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: different than- Like,

[01:07:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: fascinating. Well, that’s, what you just described a dream.

[01:07:32] Dr. Mike T Nelson: W- exactly. Right? Dreams are very much the same way.

[01:07:35] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Well, I think this is where the, like, the physiological state… Now there’s so, I th- I think there’s a lot of inputs into this system that we just, we don’t understand the receivers yet, so we can’t- Oh, for sure

[01:07:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: understand, right? So it’s like I have this idea with dreams, and it first kind of dawned on me. My ex-wife, she was a former Olympic athlete. She incredible, like, uh, she, she was in a, there’s a book called The Sports Gene by David Epstein. Yeah. Love that book. To, to… Yeah. Well, if you read it, again, my ex-wife’s name is listed in there as, you know, just she, she’s such an unbelievable athlete.

[01:08:07] Dr. Jordan Shallow: She’s a world champion in multiple sports, went to the Olympics in, like, a fourth. So-

[01:08:10] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Hmm …

[01:08:10] Dr. Jordan Shallow: but sh- I, and not to, like, I don’t, I don’t want to air this out. Maybe it sh- I don’t think she would mind if I shared this. But through her, I learned of a condition called hypnagogic hallucinations, which really got me thinking.

[01:08:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Hmm. Because there’s, like, a subconscious state of, uh, of, of, of, like, lucid awareness, and it was, it’s, it’s hereditary. It runs in the family. And, y- you know, there was one point which, uh, again, I was just like, uh, I hope she’s okay with me telling this, but, uh, it’s, it’s such an interesting, just on topic, where she woke up one, I woke up one morning abruptly to her in the closet, like, rum- rummaging to get a, a coat on.

[01:08:50] Dr. Jordan Shallow: We were living in, in, uh, Bay Area, California at the time. She’s from Australia originally, and her mom resides in Australia as well. And it’s 2:00 AM, and you’re kind of, like, really obedient when you wake up to something in the middle of the- Yeah … night. You’re like, you’re just like, “Yeah, okay, what are we doing?

[01:09:02] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, let’s go.” And so she’s in the clo- like, I’m thinking the house is on fire. I don’t know what’s going on. The dog’s kind of barking, and I’m just like… So I jump out of bed, and then I’m like, well, I just need, I need to know, like, where’s the fire or the bad guy, right? Like, that’s kind of why, that’s why I’m, I’m up.

[01:09:15] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I’m on shift. What are we doing? And she’s like, you know, she’s kind of, uh, erratic and, and hysterical, and she’s just like, she’s just rummaging and just kind of, like, screaming. Like, “We gotta go, we gotta go.” And it’s like, well, what the fuck is going on? So, you know, I’m just, like, putting enough clothes on to get outside to be decent or to fight someone in my kitchen.

[01:09:30] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I don’t know what’s going on. And she’s like, “We gotta go get my mom.” And I’m like, “What?” Your mom lives in Australia. She’s a fucking z- a 14-hour flight away, plus a five-hour drive down the south coast. Like, what? And it takes a while to register the, like, oh, this, she’s dreaming.

[01:09:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm.

[01:09:44] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Right? Like, she’s dreaming.

[01:09:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Now, here’s the crazy part. These dreams would come in various, um, uh, degrees of, uh, of clarity, right? So that was a very clear one. Like, she was superimposing her dream state over her reality, and that subconscious barrier was broken. And there was other times where it was just sort of inam- the, um, inaudible sort of yammering and just go back to sleep.

[01:10:06] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Something a kid to… You know, just talking in your sleep or whatever. But six months later, same thing. 2:00 A.M., almost on the nose, in the closet rifling around. And again, like you, I, I, you wake up, “Oh, fuck. It’s… Yeah, where we… We gotta go get mom.” And I’m just like, “Your mother lives in Australia.” Like… And before I could even say anything she goes, “I’m not dreaming this time.”

[01:10:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm.

[01:10:28] Dr. Jordan Shallow: She was dreaming. She was dreaming. Right? Which, like, I mean, this, the, the to, to pull on this thread is to pull on the thread of, you know, is there free will or not, which I think objectively and scientifically it’s based, it’s fair to say, unfortunately, that there’s not. Um, or it’s even, to, to quote Sam Harris, probably impossible to think of a universe where free will exists.

[01:10:47] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But I think there’s something about sensory input from r- from, from, um External stimulus on internal receivers that we are actually unaware of that emulate states. Because if you think about cog- cognition, if you think about perception more specifically, it is not a bottom-up, as I mentioned, a set, set of processes.

[01:11:12] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It doesn’t happen by a little lazy boy in our brain, and that lazy guy and the lazy boy goes to sleep, and the guy and the lazy boy wakes up. It’s, it’s top-down inference, right? This is the whole principle behind predictive processing and, you know, the slightly more broader active inference, essentially theories of cognition that explain how it is that we perceive the world.

[01:11:30] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, there’s no sunshine in my skull, right? Mm-hmm. Like, the, the thing that I look at that I find super interesting actually has a lot to do with our conversation around sleep and dreaming and sort of this, like, y- y- this, um, this lucid state that these drugs put this guy in that he was clearly not in to anyone else’s reality, is when you look at, um, when you look at visual saccades, which is something that we do in sports- Yeah

[01:11:53] Dr. Jordan Shallow: a lot, right? Yeah. So a visual saccade is, like, a normal kind of, um, deviation of your eye’s position very quickly. Happens, like, three to five times a second, depending on

[01:12:02] Dr. Mike T Nelson: the person. It’s

[01:12:02] Dr. Jordan Shallow: a reflex of

[01:12:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: the eye muscles, too.

[01:12:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And it’s, and it’s a, and it’s a nor- a completely normal thing, right? So I re- remember first learning about concussions in sport more specifically, like, a decade ago, and I’m like, “Whoa, wait, hold on.

[01:12:14] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Time out.” And my, my, my, my neuro professor was like, “What seems to be the problem?” I was like, “You’re telling me that my eyes are darting around multiple times a second.” He’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like … ‘Cause to me, I was under the impression, as I think most people are, and I think as René Descartes probably set us on the wrong path in his treatise-

[01:12:32] Dr. Jordan Shallow: however many years ago with his dualism between mind and body, that, like, I always just, and I think most people, if you did a, you know, Family Feud survey of how people, and, you know, if you get o- the core of the question across, which is actually quite abstract in itself, most people would assume that it’s bottom-up processing and how we actually perceive the world.

[01:12:51] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But it’s like we perceive our generation of the world through top-down inference, and it’s like that’s su- ‘Cause it’s like if you think about the saccade thing, which for those of you who haven’t heard, a saccade is like you said, is the eye reflex that kind of moves the, the, the eyeball around three to five times a second.

[01:13:09] Dr. Jordan Shallow: If you were streaming y- on your cellphone, like if I took out this thing and I was recording us, and three times a second the camera was moving, the podcast would look like it’s an, it’s a, it’s a cut from the Blair Witch Project. Mm-hmm. Right? It’s like, but here we have this smooth experience, and it’s like well that’s part of that, that top-down generation that our, that our perception of our world both, I think, both waking and sleeping and dreaming is really just, it’s all happening in our head.

[01:13:39] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, this computer i- only exists as so far to me as, as my, m- as my, uh, uh, grab bag of sensory, uh, uh, tools will allow me. ‘Cause, you know, the, like we said, visible light is only .00300035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s like what if there are sensory receptors for these other things? And I’m not getting into 5G or any crazy shit like that.

[01:14:04] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:05] Dr. Jordan Shallow: But, you know, like the thing that I think about when dreaming all the time is, man, if I gotta take a piss in the middle of the night, I end up dreaming about water or waterfalls or sometimes if I really have to take a piss- … I dream about taking a piss, and guess what happens? I wake the fuck up.

[01:14:19] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. Right? But it’s like, well what’s happening? It’s like, well, I don’t know, I think it’s called your, your detrusor muscle. Part of your bladder has a reflex through… Oh, fuck, I’m reaching now into my, into my innervations. But there’s a, there’s a, there’s an entero receptive system that gives me some feedback about what’s happening in the somatovisceral part of my autonomic nervous system.

[01:14:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Pressure system. And that’s imprinting onto this, this, this, this, th- this other méu of sensation that’s causing this subconscious generative reality in my brain, which is fucking bananas, ’cause the same thing happens when we’re awake.

[01:14:59] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Which makes me to think as we’re getting closer to wrapping up.

[01:15:03] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Sorry.

[01:15:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: For a while, I was really big into lucid dreaming because I thought that that would be a way for me to practice my deadlift to get more neurologic reps without the physical consequence. And I kinda got there, but the practice of trying to get to lucid dreaming was a pain in the ass, and I would just get to the point where, oh, I realized I was dreaming, and then I would be out of it.

[01:15:32] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So I got to the point where I could kinda do it a little bit, but it was a lot of this weird practice of, if you’ve ever played with it, like, you- you … There’s different ways of teaching it, but for a lot of people, there’s a cue of, okay, every time I go through a doorway, I knock on the door to see am I dreaming or not.

[01:15:49] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And so you’re always- Wow … kinda running this test to see if you’re dreaming or not, because you can’t ask yourself the question of, “Oh, I think I’m dreaming now,” because then you’re out of the dream. So it was this weird thing you had to practice all the time to make it almost a, a subconscious thing so that you would subconsciously realize you were dreaming without asking yourself the question, “Am I dreaming?”

[01:16:11] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Um, but anyway- Yeah … I thought it’d be a way of, in theory, practicing these, these neural things in a altered reality without the physical consequence of the, the strain and the stress. But I didn’t get too far with it. So there’s something

[01:16:26] Dr. Jordan Shallow: that, I mean, so the, you bring up something interesting, and it’s

[01:16:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: ‘Cause essentially what you’re, what you’re adjacent to right now is a conversation about muscle memory.

[01:16:34] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Correct. Yeah.

[01:16:35] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Which, which, but here’s the interesting thing is, is I don’t think people, one, I don’t think people realize much about muscle, but I think- When talking about visualization, especially to like, let’s call it the extreme of, you know, lucid dreaming in an attempt to pursue a particular skill without the physiological baggage that comes with it- Mm-hmm

[01:16:53] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I think like there’s, there’s something to be said about exposure and people’s, people’s misunderstanding of memory more generally. Like, episodic memory is such a fallible system, right? Totally. Like, like I think of the, the Brian Williams case is like probably a- Yeah … right? Like, he just over the course of like

[01:17:11] Dr. Mike T Nelson: 10 years- Tell us what that is for people who d- don’t know.

[01:17:14] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Sure. So Br- Brian Williams was a war correspondent. It’s wild. It is. And, and it’s, it s- it says a lot about a lot of things. So Brian Williams was a war correspondent, and he was like, if you think about like Will Ferrell’s character in Anchorman- … like, he was, like, he was almost like obviously satirical, but Brian Williams was a type of guy that if you saw him on the street, you’d know he’s a news anchor, right?

[01:17:36] Dr. Jordan Shallow: He was perfect. He had this like, he was like Walter Cronkite reincarnate. Like, he really embodied like… And at, and at a time where, you know, unfortunately, and not to go too political, like this is a time in recent history where people still trusted large news institutions- Oh, for sure … which is like, um, they, they, like this was, and I think that’s why I like the comparison of Anchorman ’cause that movie kind of like, it embodies a time which most people don’t remember, where like you turn the news on and like whether it was Wolf Blitzer, whether it was Brian Williams, like especially post 9/11 Western world- Mm-hmm

[01:18:07] Dr. Jordan Shallow: it’s like you really, there was a dependency and a trust in the institutions at CNN and Fox, and I, I think Brian was with, uh, with NBC. I grew up

[01:18:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: watching Tom Brokaw.

[01:18:16] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. And they were, they were, they were, they had a responsibility. Like, they were serious parts of culture in North America. Anyway, so Brian Williams had a really interesting…

[01:18:27] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s, it’s outlined in, and I first came across it, so I don’t wanna, you know, make it seem like I was some savant at, I was in the sixth grade when 9/11 happened, so I don’t know, what are you, 11 years old? Oh, wow.

[01:18:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: That’s

[01:18:37] Dr. Jordan Shallow: wild. Yeah. And so I was like, I don’t remember this verbatim- That’s so old now. … but you know, I, um, I first come across it on Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History.

[01:18:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: He does a two-part episode- Mm-hmm … on memory, and I started to think about the idea of muscle memory after this, and it kinda led me down sort of this diatribe that I’m gonna attempt to navigate here, and it’s… So essentially what happened was Brian Williams, war correspondent, would go over to parts of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, et cetera, and would report live from the ground.

[01:19:02] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So he would be usually stationed with a battalion as they kind of moved through different parts of the Middle East in the conflict. And he reports a story, I wanna say it was like maybe December 2014, something like that, and he was on the ground miles away from where two of four Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down behind sort of enemy lines, if you will.

[01:19:26] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, uh- They follow the story to his, like, fateful demise, and I forget what year it was. I m- I may even be… You know, it may have been 2004 was the first story, and 2014 was the final story. So, you know, he reports the story, say, in 2004. He’s on the ground miles away from two Black Hawk helicopters that got shot down.

[01:19:46] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And over the course of, and they’ve done this since, well, fast-forward 10 years, 2000- call it 2014, he was on an episode of David Letterman, and he tells the story of how he was in a Black Hawk helicopter that got shot down 10 years ago- Yeah … in Afghanistan. And someone to, and this is dating the story a little bit, someone took to the airways of Facebook Who was on that Black Hawk helicopter that survived.

[01:20:11] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And I was like, “Hey man, you weren’t in my bata-” and, and then sure enough, the other people who were there. And so what you had on the surface, and what was the loudest story that was, and probably still today, was sort of just propagated this story of, of stolen valor. That here you have this guy who thinks enough time has gone past that he can sneak in some heroism to his time in the Middle East.

[01:20:35] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And so he, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s almost like a passing David Letterman kind of interview. The interview continues, it concludes, it airs, and then the next day this story gets picked up of this Facebook comment of, you know, “Sorry Da- or sorry, um, Brian, you were never in my helicopter.” And then it unravels.

[01:20:52] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And where it led academically was a lot of, a lot of researchers in the field of episodic memory going like, “Hey, hey, I know what it looks like, but this is actually a really natural phenomenon.” And one of the things that, that I really loved that Malcolm did in his, in his episode was he, he found someone that…

[01:21:13] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So he, he, he used 9/11 as like a proxy for this- Mm-hmm … ’cause it’s what’s called like a flashbulb memory. And he found the person that he, still a friend. Like, it was a lady that lived in his building while he was in New York City. He’s, you know, he’s a prolific writer and author and columnist and, and, and, you know, social commentator.

[01:21:30] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And so he remembers where he was on 9/11, and he interviews his friend in attempt to acid test these theories about the fallibility of episodic memory. And, uh, what ended up happening was he records the, the separate accounts of his interaction with his friend on 9/11, and her interaction, like what they did, because they were together on that day.

[01:21:56] Dr. Jordan Shallow: And, you know, this is recorded maybe within the last five years, so let’s call it 20 years removed from the event. And, you know, no one really knows what the truth is. They just know it’s n- probably nowhere to be found in either of their very, very distant accounts. Which is like… But so the, the, the takeaway here, and kind of like pulling this back into something resembling, you know, movement science and exercise, is like, you know, here you are trying to lucid dream, essentially spinning a dreidel like you’re in Inception to try to figure out what layer of reality you’re in.

[01:22:27] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Knocking on doors, pissing off your neighbors. And where I think like, I think a conscious waking state solution may also exist. Like we- Mm-hmm … it’s so often just called visualization. ‘Cause if you think about what happened with Brian, it’s like when you remember things episodically, and this is where the experts kind of came to his defense, is you don’t remember…

[01:22:49] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Again, it’s, we don’t have this bottom up, uh, uh, interpretation of the world, right? It’s, it’s a generative process that’s top-down. And so when people think it’s the little La-Z-Boy on, the guy behind the eyes in the La-Z-Boy, they think that your memory is just hitting the rewind button, you know, back 20 years and hitting play, where it’s not that.

[01:23:08] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Essentially what happens is you remember your last memory, and it recalls. And I think there’s something so profound about this when it comes to the idea of motor learning. It’s like, you know, one of the, the things that gets tossed around a lot, it’s like a euphemism, it’s an idiom, it’s an axiom, is, “Oh, it’s like riding a bike.”

[01:23:26] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Why is that? Right? Like, so I, I got hit by a bicycle my first year of grad school, and I haven’t been on a bicycle since. Could I, 20 years removed, 15 years removed, get on a bike? Sure. Why? There’s a lot of things I haven’t done in 20 years. I probably haven’t played ice hockey in the better part of 15 years.

[01:23:42] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Now, I may have a half decent chance because I now work with a, with an ice hockey team. But what you’ll find and where muscle memory and episodic memory start to overlap is that the reason we use and understand and is true, the euphemism about riding a bike is even though we’re not riding bikes all the time, we are exposed to bikes every day.

[01:24:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Every day I’m worried about the little guy zipping by me in the side lane coming up Yonge Street in Toronto, and it’s like, so, so much of our, so much of our learning and our rehearsing is subcortical and non-dependent on the physical, right? So I think like, and, and much like, you know, Brian Williams r- and they showed over the course of time his re- retelling of this story and the slow changes in which his- Mm

[01:24:29] Dr. Jordan Shallow: his generative truth started to change, ’cause it wasn’t a major deviation. It, I mean, it was a major deviation from the first time he’s told the story, but it wasn’t a major deviation from the last time he told the story, right? And memory has this weird finicky property of having a recency and primacy effect.

[01:24:46] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So his most primal or pri- pr- uh, um, uh, the one that was most recent, the, uh, the, the primacy of it, so the, uh, the re- or sorry, the most recent being the, the one that had, he had told the bo- was pretty close. He was in like the second helicopter that didn’t get shot down, or one of the two that didn’t get shot down.

[01:25:04] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So he’s not making these quantum leaps. If you go back and do the tale of the tape, he’s actually incrementally changing the story. But it’s not, it’s like, it’s not like he had in his brain like a big X on the calendar- Mm-hmm … David Letterman 2024 or whatever it was. Like, it was like, no, it was just like when he put the thing back in and he had to generate it again, it’s fallible to error, and a lot of people- It’s altered

[01:25:26] Dr. Jordan Shallow: cooked him for it. But I think like one of the things that keeps bicycle riding so true is that we get exposure to it, right? Because how many, how many exposures did Brian Williams have in his career after that about Black Hawk helicopters getting shot down in hostile territories in the Middle East?

[01:25:41] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Some which he was proximal to, some of which he weren’t, and it’s like no different than the bike riding. It’s, it’s not necessarily about the act, very little, especially in early stages of learning. It’s not so much about the act, but the exposure. Now, the act gives you exposures, but it’s not the only source of exposures, right?

[01:25:56] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like I work a lot in, in, in collegiate and professional football. Film is a massive part of their, their, their skill development. Mm-hmm. And what I think a lot of the skill that gets developed, whether it’s the intent and purpose or not, is it’s not so much the X’s and the O’s, but it’s actually being able to do what you set out to do, which is how can I re-enact this without the collateral damage of, you know, getting sacked or tackled by some big kid or whatever it is.

[01:26:21] Dr. Jordan Shallow: So it’s like there’s s- there’s something so

[01:26:26] Dr. Jordan Shallow: interconnected about the physical and the mental, which I think breaks apart the Cartesian dualism pretty definitively, but also just helps you understand that, like, movement, it, when treated like a cognitive skill, becomes a lot easier to understand

[01:26:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, it’s also why I do a lot of kiteboarding. I don’t try to watch many kiteboard crash videos.

[01:26:51] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I, I don’t want- Smart … that to be the imprint into my… I’m already good enough at knowing all the shit I can do wrong, and I’ve done a lot of it wrong. I don’t need any further help by watching a lot of the other videos. So- Yeah. We’ll tip the scales … if I do watch one of them, I try to, like, watch two or three other ones of something good happening to try to, you know, i- imprint and change the, the default kind of mode of where my brain wants to go.

[01:27:17] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Smart. I like that.

[01:27:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Last thing as we’ll wrap up, but the first time I ever went, uh, tree skiing in Colorado years ago, and I was an okay snowboarder at the time. I was just having a hell of a time, and I’m riding up the lift with this guy who was at, um, Crested Butte, Colorado. This stoner guy, he snowboards.

[01:27:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: He’s like, “Hey, man, beautiful day, isn’t it?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah.” He’s like, “How’s the snowboarding?” I said, “Man, the snow’s great,” but I said, “I, I’m just struggling.” He’s like, “You wanna know the tip?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Don’t look at the trees, man. Look at the space between the trees.” And then he gets off and, like, rips down this run, and I was like, “Holy shit, that guy is right.”

[01:28:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Prophecy. Prophecy. Yeah. I love it. That’s so good. And that’s where the profound is, right? It’s in- Yeah … the simple, man. It’s, and it’s, it’s, it’s… I mean, and I could ex- I, I mean, I’m not necessarily classically trained in neuroscience in, in some respects, but, like, I, I, I would, I m- I’m immediately called to the monkey business illusion, and we think about how we up-weight signals and the way we, we formulate our predictions.

[01:28:28] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Like, the monkey business, um, experiment involves three subjects wearing black shirts, three subjects wearing white shirts, and then somewhere- I love that one … in the middle of them. But it, it’s, it’s the same thing, right? Like, you’re- Yeah … if you’re, if you’re up-weighting your sensory input for the presence of tree rather than snow, then you’re gonna see a tree, right?

[01:28:49] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s, uh, it, it’s, yeah. I mean, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll spare the, the, the, the anecdotal dissection of that and how that applies. But if you guys are ever interested, like, try it, ’cause I don’t wanna… ‘Cause the, the interesting thing about the way this is framed that actually speaks to the underlying, you know, neuro, applied neurophysiological principles of this is if I say too much, it’ll actually change the way you perceive it.

[01:29:09] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yep. You won’t have the novel experience, so we’re gonna stop there at least on that front.

[01:29:14] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Where can people learn more about you? I know you’ve got a bunch of stuff. You got stuff through Prescript. Like, tell us what’s going on.

[01:29:22] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Yeah. Um, I mean, my Instagram is where most stuff lives.

[01:29:25] Dr. Jordan Shallow: It’s, uh, jordanat themuscledoc.com, or sorry, it’s, uh, @the_muscle_

[01:29:32] Dr. Jordan Shallow: The_Muscle_Doc. Website is themuscledoc.com. Our education platform is www.pre-script.com, and on Instagram, it’s @pre_script.com.

[01:29:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Awesome.

[01:29:45] Dr. Jordan Shallow: No, it’s

[01:29:45] Dr. Mike T Nelson: been- Well, thank you so much for all your time and sharing everything. I, I really appreciate it. This was a- Yeah, no … it was a fun discussion.

[01:29:51] Dr. Jordan Shallow: Oh, yeah, no, I appreciate it, man.

[01:29:52] Dr. Jordan Shallow: I don’t get to, to kinda let the brain run around in these topics very often, so it’s, it’s much appreciated. I’ll sleep well tonight.

[01:29:58] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. Really appreciate

[01:30:01] Dr. Jordan Shallow: it. Yeah,

[01:30:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: of course. Cheers, man. Cheers.