Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast! I'm Dr. Mike T Nelson, and in this episode, I’m joined by Ben Mayfield Smith, a coach, researcher, and all-around grit expert from Australia, for a deep dive into what it really means to build resilience in both training and life. We unpack the science and psychology behind grit, perseverance, and stress adaptation and how you can strategically apply these principles to become more robust as an athlete, coach, or everyday human. Ben and I get into the weeds on why mental toughness isn’t about grinding yourself into the ground, and how balancing physiological stress with psychological readiness is key to long-term progress. You’ll also hear some practical takeaways you can implement today, whether it’s developing a growth mindset in your coaching or using tools like cold water immersion to toughen both body and mind. Plus, I give a quick update on the next Flex Diet Certification cohort, perfect for anyone looking to level up their coaching toolbox. Sponsors: Tecton Life Ketone drink! https://tectonlife.com/ DRMIKE to save 20% LMNT electrolyte drink mix: miketnelsonlmnt.com
Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast! I'm Dr. Mike T Nelson, and in this episode, I’m joined by Ben Mayfield Smith, a coach, researcher, and all-around grit expert from Australia, for a deep dive into what it really means to build resilience in both training and life.
We unpack the science and psychology behind grit, perseverance, and stress adaptation and how you can strategically apply these principles to become more robust as an athlete, coach, or everyday human. Ben and I get into the weeds on why mental toughness isn’t about grinding yourself into the ground, and how balancing physiological stress with psychological readiness is key to long-term progress.
You’ll also hear some practical takeaways you can implement today, whether it’s developing a growth mindset in your coaching or using tools like cold water immersion to toughen both body and mind.
Plus, I give a quick update on the next Flex Diet Certification cohort, perfect for anyone looking to level up their coaching toolbox.
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase hypertrophy performance, improve body composition, do all of it within a flexible framework without destroying your health. Today on the podcast, we've got my buddy from the land down under of Kangaroos and wombats Mr.
Ben Mayfield Smith. And we're talking all about the concept of grit. So there's a little bit more on the psychological side of training. We talk about what are the fundamentals of grit and a perseverance, what is the real role of mental toughness and a growth mindset? Also about strategic struggling stress adaptation, long-term development ego versus mastery of the goal.
Physiologic and psychological toughness, [00:01:00] different ways you can build this AKA. I'm a big fan of cold water immersion for this and a whole bunch of other really useful stuff. So always enjoy talking to my buddy Ben, and I think you'll get a lot out of this podcast. So I think if you're like me, I do find the physiology side to be utterly fascinating.
But when you work with clients, you also realize a huge portion of it is on the psychological, on the mental side. And even if you don't train anyone this applies to your own training yourself also. So I think you'll enjoy this podcast if you wanna learn more. We've got the Flex Diet certification.
It is opening again for one week only, starting June 16th on Monday. So that's coming up very soon. Hop onto the newsletter for all of the information that is gonna be the best place. We've got some fast [00:02:00] action bonus items going out there, so if you're looking for complete information on primarily nutrition and recovery this is the one for you.
Using the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting, so I have it broken down into eight different interventions. Everything from your macronutrients, protein, fats, carbohydrates. But we also include things on micronutrition neat, which is non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, walking around, movement, exercise, sleep, fasting, and much more.
We also have a ton of expert interviews, everything from protein with Dr. Stu Phillips, Dr. Jose Antonio, Dr. Mike Ormsby, flexible dieting with Dr. Peter Fitch. Sleep with Dr. Dan party, metabolic Flexibility with Hunter Waldman and many other ones there also. So all the [00:03:00] information you can find on the newsletter, we'll put a link down there below to hop on that.
And if you're interested in being in a state of ketosis, but you don't want to do a ketogenic diet, which I would say I don't blame you unless you have some pathology you're working with your physician on. Check out my friends over at Teton Ketone Esters. They have a beverage that'll put you into a state of ketosis within about 20 minutes.
So each can contains 10 grams of a ketone ester. They use an exclusive ester that is the BHB molecule, bonded to glycerol. I've been able to use it for quite a while. I am biased, so I'm a scientific advisor to them and an ambassador. They've got some really cool stuff coming out. I was supposed to be out this spring, but it'll probably be out early this fall.
Again, I can't say what it is, but I think you'll be really excited about that. But in the meantime, they have their current ketone nester available. Use the code, Dr. [00:04:00] Mike to save 20% at the code down below at the link. And then we also have our sponsor element. I'm drinking some raspberry element right now.
Especially coming up. It's gonna be summer, well, it is summer-ish here in Minnesota. And surprisingly, it can get pretty hot and humid. So I find just having more sodium and electrolytes makes a huge difference, especially training in the Garage gym. So check them out below and stay tuned for the Flex Diet Certification opening June 16th.
Hop onto the newsletter. Enjoy the podcast here with my good buddy down under Ben Mayfield Smith. All about grit and beyond.
Ben: [00:05:00] [00:06:00] [00:07:00] [00:08:00] Hello? Hello, sir. How are you? Good, how you doing?
Dr Mike T Nelson: Good. Good. I was gonna say good morning, captain.
Ben: Wait, how did the how did the client go? She absolutely looked like she crushed it.
Dr Mike T Nelson: She did great. It was funny, she sent me an email. She is and all these girls around me are freaking out about, oh my God, I, I haven't drank water in two days.
And she is oh, and I am, feel like I'm drinking too much water. And I felt pretty good. And
Ben: it's always funny when you have the old school sciences and they're like, oh, I cuddle my carbs out for this. And I pulled down sodium to nothing. And I [00:09:00] did the, like why are you still doing that?
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, I remember talking to shit, I remember talking to John Ardi about this back in 2006. No, not even before that. I think it was 2003. And asking him, I'm like, so I don't do any bodybuilding prep, but why did they do these weird, stupid things? Because from a physiology standpoint, I'm like, this makes no sense.
He is you're right. It makes no sense.
Ben: The more you try and make sense of it, the more frustrated it becomes.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Because at the time I'm thinking, oh my God, what are these like secret things I'm missing? Or there's, some way to, to hack or trick the system, or there's some other rein, aldosterone, angiotensin system I'm just not aware of or something, and he is no you're not.
Ben: Honestly I've had these and you are 20 years before me, but I had these same like landings where I'm like, hang on. This doesn't make sense from a physiological perspective, psychological perspective, nutritional perspective, biochemistry, [00:10:00] neurotransmitter.
Yeah. What am I missing here? Am I missing something drastic that doesn't make sense that I just don't know about yet, so therefore I don't think to ask it. And then the more I've got through it, I'm like, no, that just doesn't make sense. That just, it just fails to make logical conclusion and you still see them do it and you're like, what the fuck is happening?
I had a client mad at me because there was people backstage that were eating blocks of chocolate and chocolate muffins, and I had him having very strict pre-prepared nutritional meals that he like, cream of rices, rice cakes, like nut butter spread stuff that he is already processed, digested in the past.
I'm like, why would you want to throw in a random block of chocolate when we've tested this and you didn't like your look was what we wanted. Now, because you're backstage, you like, oh, but this guy's doing this. I'm like, oh, just put your blinders on and shut up.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Well that's like with all. All athletes, like for, when I first started I'm like, oh my God.
If you're coaching, high level athletes, like the week before the big competition, like there's all this stuff that goes into it and there [00:11:00] must be all these little secret things or not. And then you realize 95% of it is all the stuff you did up to that point. Just don't screw it up.
And then you're gonna spend 95% of your time just trying to talk them out of the stupidest shit known to man like the week before. And I get it, like having done, some lower level competitions, it's psychologically, it's the weirdest thing to think all of a sudden these ideas, you would not have tried eight weeks ago.
They sound like, well maybe this will get me the extra 0.5%. Like your brain is almost like not thinking of the risk at all to any of it. And like most of what I do is just tell 'em we're not doing anything different. If we haven't tested it, we're probably not gonna do it unless. We think something's really off track, and then we have to take some risks.
Okay, let's try to not be in that position. But if we are okay, then we will we'll look at it, but most of the time it's no, just don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that.
Ben: Yeah. Stop. Stop trying to introduce things. If you haven't done [00:12:00] it yet by now, you probably don't need to do it, and it's not gonna be this magical hail Mary that you think it is.
And usually the risk profile is so much higher. Physiologically than it is, but they think 'cause they saw someone else do it on Instagram once, that they need to do it and they're missing out. Even though you've structured and strategized everything to make sense. It's oh, this week. Where I think it's 'cause so many people have glorified the peak week that it's oh yeah, redefining structural change that's gonna bring out all this muscularity and vascularity that you don't have if you just get this peak week, right?
It's well if you just get prep right, the peak week is just emphasizing what you've already done. So I don't need to do anything different in the peak week really, other than what we've already tested and tried. And if it worked, just do it. But you think throw in this Hail Mary, 70 yard throw is gonna somehow pay off.
And you have no experience doing that. So why the, why would we do it? Why would we risk this look that we know works for a look that we have no idea? And it might make a 2% variance, but the risk is that it ruins 50%. But you're [00:13:00] like, oh, it has a 2% potential positive. And somehow that's the logical conclusion they make during the backend where all the work is done.
You're like, just switch your brain off. Let me do the job. You just do what you're told, stick the schedule and shut up.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I do think a lot of it still comes from, like we talked about, like enhanced bodybuilders using all sorts of different drugs. And yes, some of those drugs are gonna have, side effects of water retention and all that kind of stuff.
But even then at a professional level with all of that, and supposedly being coached by professionals, like how many top level enhanced bodybuilders, physique athletes still don't do it. Right. You know what I mean? For. This show or that show, and I get it. You have a lot of moving variables and, all that kind of stuff.
It's not as easy. But even, I think that's where a lot of it trickles down from because not so much in now, but especially in the past, like a lot of the top gurus made their name as oh, this is the guy or gal that's gonna get you in shape and you're gonna look like this [00:14:00] on stage.
And they have one thing that goes well and there's, that's the poster child. They hold up to everyone else. Yeah. And you don't see the road littered with all the bodies that they just destroyed or didn't turn out well,
Ben: literally. Yeah. It just becomes this guy gets glorified on YouTube or Instagram and Yeah.
They only show the wins and never the losses. And the funny part is I ask new coaches is like, where have you failed? Where have you gotten wrong? Yeah. Where have you stuffed up? Because that'll tell me a lot more. And usually it's like, where have you like dropped the ball and corrected yourself?
Because like you said, the amount of times they'll use one or two genetic outliers that just nail everything, or no matter what you throw at them, they were gonna nail it anyway. The body was gonna be responsive. It's hypersensitive, highly adaptable to androgen receptors. It's highly adaptable to drug loads.
It's highly adaptable to training volume, stimulus, and it just simply responds. They're not the ones you base your peak strategies on or your prep strategies on, because they're the ones that were gonna do it no matter what. Yeah. It's like that's not your success story. That's a, it was an inevitable story.
You just happen to be the coach that got [00:15:00] that client. Let's be very honest. If you're in a, if you're in a prep and you have Chris Bumstead. Chances are, no matter what you do, he's gonna rock up there and look good. Yeah. Now you can get, those 0.1 percenters outta him because he's a high performer and that adds up.
But for the most part, like if I had Phil Heath ready Coleman, Chris Bumstead, genetically, no matter what I throw at the kitchen sink, it's gonna stick and something will pay off. And all of a sudden it's Hey, I'm the greatest coach in the world because I got these guys ready. To be honest, they were probably going to be ready, regardless of what I did.
That's not where it's what we call the survivorship bias. Right? Like back in World War ii Yeah. They used to look at the bombers that were returning and adding additional armor to the planes, going, oh, this is where the gunshots are. We need to reinforce it. And this engineer goes, well, actually, let's look at the planes that aren't returning.
Let's reinforce the lapses in the armor from where they're not, surviving. And they would repu recall the, they would drag out the ship, the planes from the English channel and the planes were crashing because they've been shut down. And they'll go, well, we're looking [00:16:00] at the wrong thing.
We're looking at the planes that are returning, yes, they're being shot at, but they're still surviving. How about we look at the planes that aren't coming back and start to find where those problems are? Those are the clients in peaks that perhaps that you need to look at and go, well, let's not just look at these genetic, anomalies that are gonna nail it no matter what.
Just because whatever is thrown at the body's cool, thanks. I'm gonna use this. Let's look at the ones that are actually, dropping like flies and not getting on, not making it to stage or completely missing the prep, or completely missing their volume landmarks. And they're training like they can't even recover because if you've thrown 200 sets a week at them, plus super sets and drop sets and cluster sets and everything else, like they're the ones we have to assess and study and go, okay, how do we not make that mistake?
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. Side note, unless they're recording the podcast I find all the intensity techniques I think are also vastly overused. There's a time and a place for 'em, and I use some of 'em, but. I don't know. It just seems like there's that, oh, I wanna know the secret, length and partial [00:17:00] end range of motion.
It's bro, you're curling 15 pound dumbbells. Like, how about you curl 20 pound dumbbells? And we start there. It's yeah, if you're super advanced, then you need a different stimulus and you wanna add a few of those things in. Hey, great. That's fun. But I don't know, it's just funny how often I just go back to just basic boring training, different rep ranges.
'cause all, even like the natural competitors I know who do physique stuff, like all of them are really strong. I can't think of an exception. Both males and females now, they're not, power lifters strong, but, compared to the average person in the gym, they're way stronger. So let's just go in that direction.
Ben: Yeah I hold a very similar philosophy. Like I would rather, usually when I see a drop set. It's no greater generation of stimulus than if you simply rested longer and had a complete set. The next set that comes right, rather than adding the drop set, the cluster set, the giant set if you were to take that three minute rest instead, not [00:18:00] only would you not need to do length and half reps or half partials, or you wouldn't need to do a superset, you would probably get a greater low generation.
'cause you've recovered between the two sets. Yeah. It's hard quality work and got better quality work and then it becomes quality over quantity. You don't need to do 50 reps, you just need to do 12 good ones, which long term I look at they talk about like fatigue, accumulation and that sort of thing.
But long term, yes, six to 30 reps all produce the same level of hypertrophy. But I can almost guarantee doing 30 reps of something every session you're in the gym for the next 10 years is gonna have greater recruitment of load on your joints than if I did 12 or six. Or eight 10. That's where it starts to get to me like.
50 set drop sets when I can just have a good set of 12 to 15, rest, repeat, rest, repeat, and be done. Makes more sense. And I have better control of that stimulus.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Agree. Awesome. So today we're gonna talk about grit. Is that right?
Ben: Yeah. I was like, I was really excited when I saw you guys. I've got some, I've got [00:19:00] some I'd say hot takes on grip, but yeah.
When I saw that you guys were at the Ducksworth presentation, what was that summit for? What was that? That was a
Dr Mike T Nelson: yeah, so it was through, so it was through Parker University. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but I hadn't really heard much about them ironically until, was it last year?
Yeah, last year we were down at the rapid had a meeting down in Dallas and Andy Yelp had just taken a job working at Parker remotely. And they have this beautiful facility. They're building a whole new research area. Like equipment, like they have a gyro, I don't think of the specific name, but basically I've used it for my own neuro rehab.
But you sit in the seat and it can spin you and basically x, y, z any orientation you want. So for vestibular rehab I don't know the price of the machine. I think it's like a quarter million dollars or something like that. Super expensive. They're like gyro Stim. Yeah, let's get two of 'em.
So just crazy amount of stuff [00:20:00] there. And so Park University had a conference there in Vegas, and so that actually turned out to be a couple days before the Cav Mastermind. So it literally was directly before it. So I'm like, that's crazy. So we didn't go to a ROMs event. The real coaches' summits were all gonna be down here in South Padre.
Yeah, so we went to the Park University one which is great. Gotta see Andy and Dan again, and some of the guys from Rapid were there. Andy and Dan were doing their little seminar there also. And like Dan John got to talk to Kelly Stare again, which for a while, which was awesome. And yeah, it was really good.
It was actually a really good event. And yeah, Angela Duckworth was one of the keynotes there. Gary v Andrew Huberman blanking on her name. What's her name? Who does Gabrielle Lyon. And then there was Jay Shetty, one other guy I'm missing. So yeah, like a lot of really You popular?
That's a big event. Keynote speakers. Big.
Ben: Yeah. Wow, that's a big event. That's big names. [00:21:00]
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what they spent on it, but it was a lot. Yeah, my buddy Tommy Wood was presenting there too. Yeah, it was great. It was super fun. That's awesome.
Ben: Yeah, let's crack and talk. Great. 'cause I know Cool.
I think she was talking grit about stress and stress adaptation, which I think would be a great well, for what you guys do with metabolic stress adaptation. I think it's a great chat.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Perfect. And what are you on time, just so I know?
Ben: Oh, whatever. I think it had a calendar till 1230, but yeah, it's like just before quarter to midnight here.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, quarter to midnight. Yeah. All right, cool. So if we go for 45 minutes, about an hour, you're good?
Ben: Yeah, that's fine.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Okay, cool. All right. I'll do short pause and off we go. And welcome back to the podcast, Ben. How are you doing? Mate,
Ben: I'm good. It's nice and late here. I had a nap before, actually, Brooklyn made sure that I sat down and have a nap to make sure that I was recharged and ready to go because it's quarter to midnight here.
But,
Dr Mike T Nelson: oh man, [00:22:00]
Ben: these are the time conversions. We have to deal with you Yanks.
Dr Mike T Nelson: I know. Well, thank you so much for doing today. I really appreciate it. All is all his well in kangaroo land,
Ben: all his all is great. All his very good in kangaroo land.
Dr Mike T Nelson: I had a client years ago who was in Australia, and he sends me an email and he disappeared for a couple days.
And I said, Hey man. I said, what, what was going on? He is oh dude, I was so excited. I got my ru shooter license, so I was out ru hunting. I'm like, what are you talking about? Ru like Kanga, like kangaroo. He's yeah man, it was so cool. I was like, oh. And then once I've been to Australia, I'm like.
They are like deer in Minnesota. Like you just see them everywhere.
Ben: I'm fairly certain we're the only country in the world where a national emblem is also a national pest and you're allowed to kill and eat it. Yeah. Ru kangaroo, if you ever get a chance to try it, because I know it's an important, some countries you can do it as a game meat.
It's a 98 2 when it [00:23:00] comes to protein to fat. Yeah. So there's a reason they're jacked and it's because those boys are lean. So it's a good gaming meat and a strong taste, but it is solid in your macro profile.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. When we were there, we ate a fair amount of it because it was also way cheaper and I guess it used to be even cheaper a couple years before that.
And yeah, same thing we found it was, I liked it, but you had to cook it correctly. And it was definitely uber lean and more on the kind of gamey side, which actually I like. But if you were used to standard corn fed American processed beef, it's quite different.
Ben: It's a little different. Yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So today we wanted to talk about, you have a interesting take on grit and how this came up is I was at the Parker University talks in Vegas, oh man.
Probably about a month ago now, which was great. Super awesome event. If you get the chance to go to one of their events. It was way bigger than I thought. Like the Ville [00:24:00] Hall was amazing. I gotta see a lot of people. My buddies, Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner from Rapid Health, which I worked with him part-time.
They were there doing the talk. My good buddy Kelly Stare was there, Dan, John, Dr. Tommy Wood a bunch of other people I know. And one of the keynote presenters was Dr. Angela Duckworth talking about grit. And he said, you had some interesting comments and takes on it. So I said, Hey, let's, great, let's get you back on the podcast so we can discuss it.
Ben: I think one of the things that excites me is when, being around more of the masterminds and people like yourself that you can actually have these interesting conversations. 'cause if I say we're gonna, I, I wanna what was your take on grid? Or how, what did you find that she has to say?
I know that it's gonna be met back with a legitimate intellectual conversation. Like sometimes you get into, in the industry and you talk with people and it's such service level things about macros or carbs or, body composition and something like that. Yeah. They're things to talk about.
But when it, you get into the [00:25:00] performance realm and you get into, these rooms of like our mastermind group, it's like there are such high level coaches in there where I know that if I to send them something philosophical, if I send them something intellectual, if I send them something about, even concepts like this.
It's gonna be worth having a conversation. And then usually if we're having a conversation about it, chances are that conversation's worth being heard and shared to someone else, or rerecorded. So I was just keen to see what you thought at first, and you're like, do you wanna record it? And I was like, absolutely.
Let's record it. I was like, why not? But no, I think one of the things that really excited me I got into Angela Duckworth's work about, oh, I reckon 8, 7, 8 years ago. Right around, right before and during my early start to my degree in clinical psych and behavioral science.
And interesting at first, like she, she caught me. Very enthusiastically. Like she's very grabby. It's like her concept is great, right? It was like, we're talking about this idea of perseverance and consistency of interest. We're talking [00:26:00] about how do we get people to be more direct and consistent their efforts and focus on the future and passionately work towards something.
But one of the things that I find we get not confused with, but is worth being conscious of is, are we just simply renaming things that already exist? So with duckworth's grit, and it's not a tack on grit, I actually like it for what it's at the fundamental level of what she shares. When you really start diversifying the exposure of different psychological concepts and constructs.
She's popularized. Already existing frameworks and constructs that exist to explain the things she teaches. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it starts to ask bigger questions in psychology, which is, are we studying things that don't need to be studied? Are we looking at things that don't need to be looked at?
Or are we simply find a way to popularize stuff that may expose people to [00:27:00] new frameworks? So in my context, like looking at what Ducksworth was actually teaching, there is a multitude of stacked up level of things that can, that, that contribute to her construct, if you will, of grit. But it's exciting because it makes people more aware of psychological concepts.
That's what gets me excited about, it's like when I looked at, when I was looking at grit and I looked at how popular Angela Ducksworth stuff is, it's not groundbreaking in the sense of she's come up with a new theory of gravity. But it was, the way she structured and explained it and popularized her Ted talks and her books and YouTube is, it's brought to mainstream, almost like a pop psychology of stuff that is already very conceptually deep and preexisting.
And it's like nicely wrapped it into a package that you can sell to. Someone's like you are gritty, like you have grit. Like you are someone who's delayed your gratification. You've persevered towards an outcome, you're consistent in your efforts and you're passionate about a topic. [00:28:00] Like those things indicate that you have grit and you are like, grit has become a lot more, grit has become a lot more popular term than say conscientiousness.
But if we look at the research and even recent research, I believe as far as 2010, 2016, when controlled for conscientiousness, grit doesn't show much greater improvement, or it doesn't show a greater score, if you will, in what they're trying to prove than when it's compared to against conscientiousness in the same studies or the same examinations.
So it starts to become a question to me where is it necessary, but is it necessary? 'cause it already exists in another form, or is it necessary because it's teaching the general population high performance concepts that they can use in everyday life? Like to me it's looking at say a James Smith.
James Smith doesn't say anything revolutionary, doesn't say anything that impressive, but he says it in a very marketable and catchy way where it's oh, we're teaching stuff to the general population. That [00:29:00] is a higher order of thinking through a very simplified term. And it's in which James Smith,
Dr Mike T Nelson: because I could name like four in fitness right now.
Ben: That's true. How would you describe him? The Bri with a very tasteful language profile. Okay. Basically said
Dr Mike T Nelson: f Was he the guy who did some stuff with Chris Williamson? Is that the same guy?
Ben: Yeah. Yes.
Dr Mike T Nelson: All right, so now I got the right guy. Okay.
Ben: Yeah, so, so, you look at him and you kinda he's really just taken stuff that we know and repackaged it and thrown it out there as very catchy, very marketable versions of that sort of talk, right?
He just makes it very popularized and that's great because it means that at the general level, people are picking up these concepts. So, for me it was like, I get really excited when people wanna talk about this stuff because a, it means, you guys being there to see Angela Ducksworth talk about grit and adaptations in stress and stressful environments is fantastic.
'cause it means you can unpack that and go, okay, well it's deeper than that. Because when you really unwrap grit. Realistically at a deeper level, there's a [00:30:00] lot of individual constructs that go into this or different frameworks and different theories that go into this that already exist and actually lead to greater performances or have greater impacts of like fundamental levels.
So for me it was like it's exciting when I see you guys or people like yourself go there because I know it becomes a more open-ended conversation about like, how did you find grit? How did considering you guys study stress, how do you find grit in the way she explained it with stress, adaptation or stress in the sense of like it building resilience.
Because to me it starts to become like a deeper conversation that you can expand on a sort of start to, to enhance the knowledge or awareness of other constructs in psychology that otherwise get bubble wrapped or bow tied into grit.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, I think my view at a high level, and I'd be curious what you think of this is I liked her talk.
I like most of her research. This is definitely not my. Area of expertise. I like what you said about people talking about it and it being more [00:31:00] awareness surrounding it. The one area as an outsider in the field that I, it seems like this could just be an illusion from social media, is that my fear is that grit then gets thrown into the area of almost distress training back to the, if you just air quotes, try harder, then it'll solve all your issues.
And I'm not saying that's what she's saying per se, with the research I'm saying that's what I, it appears like the interpretation is that if you were, if you just watch four more David Goggins videos on repeat and try harder, like everything in your life will work better. What are your thoughts, do you think that's an adequate perception of kind of a misconstrued version?
Or what are your thoughts.
Ben: No I think you are on the money with a key critique of grit [00:32:00] is if it's not carefully applied and strategically taught, it does basically just become unintentional or un deliberate, un deliberate, unstrategic suffering and simple, grit your teeth, hard work, push through it, endorsement. And we know that at some points there, there are concepts that, knowing when to pull back or readjust or redirect actually has a greater improvement on overall development. Your skills, whether you are, if you are heading down the wrong path. Just gritting your teeth through it or just grinding your way through it might not actually be the best reinforcement policy.
It might not be the best developmental policy. You might be reinforcing a sense of failure because you just simply can't get through it or you can't win or you can't get better. You just made a certain point suck at this thing. At what, like you, you need to know that at a certain point there is strategic fallback [00:33:00] and it can be mis not misconstrued, but it can be perceived if not carefully educated in the market.
Especially when it reaches that gen pop audience because they don't have that critical thinking lens. They just see white coat fallacy. Dr. Ducksworth is absolutely smashing his TED talk and I'm really hyped up about it. If I grip my teeth, suck it up and just continue the course, something's bound to happen.
We can, lead people down a very dangerous path and at a certain, not everyone has the same. Tolerance, levels of stress, of deliberate suffering, of exposure, of resilience. And so you can run that risk of heading down this, these dangerous roads that if not prepared for, if not developed can eventually, break a person or they can, teach rather than correct learn hopelessness or rather than correct failure, they can almost reinforce them because that's all the person starts to feel.
So it is definitely a, in my opinion, a fair critique, but it's a fair critique when not [00:34:00] intelligently applied. So, if grit isn't strategically and intelligently taught and this is where it starts to come back to, well, what are the fundamental principles of grit and these constructs?
Because really if we're then talking about, teaching grit. Where we're now going to the fundamentals of what grid is we're teaching perseverance. Well, let's just delay gratification with effort. We're teaching task orientation, commitment to a process. Well, that's conscientiousness.
We're teaching our industriousness and goal orientation, well, let's, that's conscientious as a personality trait. So personality traits, which we know are partly fixed, partly malleable. So we can develop these things over time. And in terms of like stress tolerance, load we're now talking about expo micro exposure therapies.
We're talking about scaffolding. We're talking about the zone of proximal development. Making sure that a skill is not so difficult to master, that you don't bother and not so easy that you aren't stimulated. It's gotta be in that right middle ground where with the right [00:35:00] environment, but the right stimulus, but the right pressure and stress, you will actually want to do better and putting more effort to get better.
So to me, it's. It's a construct of very good psychological concepts especially in the presence of athletes, highly driven people, high performers, executives. If it starts to reach gen, pop without the right implementation, it does become risky.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. How would you teach grit, like the one principles you just outlined?
Would you break it down into sub principles, or do you have a better model that you use instead?
Ben: So
it's, yeah, we teach it in almost like deliberate specific and strategic suffering with what I call cognitive progressive overload. So. In the same way that we [00:36:00] look at, stretching muscle, train your muscle, progressively adding load to the body to try and force adaptation to occur. We can't simply grit our teeth through the heaviest thing possible straight away, right?
You're not gonna be able to simply, or very few people can go straight to here is a ultra marathon, right? The amount of people who aren't David Goggins is 99.999999% population. Yeah. Like the chances are you aren't David Goggins. So let's remove that ego cap and be logical. We need to systemize and deliberately expose the stress environment to create adaptation over time to get better to load.
The same way we do that with the body, we have to do that with the brain. Mental toughness can be taught, mental toughness is shown in military, in emergency services studies in high performance work environments and high performance training environments mental toughness can be taught over time.
So resilience thing. So these things can be taught and exposed. Although we do know the trait of mental [00:37:00] toughness, again, like most traits is malleable, but also fixed. You have a percentage of the of that trait that is like inherent, but that doesn't mean that it's not teachable, it's not learnable.
You can't get mentally tougher over time. So the important thing to understand with trying to develop a quote unquote grit mindset or a grit life is that you can't go zero to a hundred. Because what happens then is if you try too hard too soon, you're going to basically teach yourself that you're going to fail.
And if you don't have a strong growth mindset, which again is another thing that can be taught, which makes up grit. That's referring now to Carol Dweck's worst, Dr. Carol Dweck. And she has a lot of positive psychology around growth mindset versus fixed mindset. We need to look at, okay, well how do we expose this deliberately, but with a structured level of progression?
And it goes back to, even looking at CBT and we start looking at therapeutic practices, looking at exposure therapy. If we're going to structure the idea that we can learn grit, if we just umbrella the term grit and use that as [00:38:00] the system the average person needs to not look at David Goggins and go, I'm gonna go run an ultramarathon with a broken ankle and, piss blood and basically shit my pants.
Pardon my language. What you need to do is go, what's the next hardest thing that I can do That's with my proximity of ability, but just outside my capabilities and it forces me to get better. So we want that skill range to be just outside our competence, but but within reach enough that it's the carrot and the stick.
It's it's just enough in front of me that I can reach for it and I'm going to progressively improve to try and get there and be able to get a hold of it. But it can't be, so far in my reach, there's not even motivating. If I see $5 down the road, I'm not gonna run for $5, a k down the road.
If I see $5 two meters in front of me, oh, it's a free $5 note. I'm gonna pick that up. Very different context based on distance and p, same sort of concept, right? If we expose, develop, grid. We have to be able to expose it [00:39:00] gradually over time with degrees of incremental difficulty. And that's for the physiological side, as it is the psychological side.
You need to show yourself over time that you can get better and better at harder and harder things. And that you need to be able to then remind yourself that, and this is where the growth mindset comes in, it's where the structure comes in as a like a dynamic adaptive model is we're looking at I just lost my absolute train of thought there.
We're looking at exposing ourselves to greater complexities, but remind ourselves that it's, we are malleable in our ability to adapt and get better and improve means we can, develop the over time we can systemize it. And then when things do seem difficult, which is what we want them to see a little bit more out of reach.
It becomes a matter of language and identity. So it's a very. Psychosomatic Biop psychological model that we have to look at when developing a grit concept. Where we're not there yet. I'm gonna be [00:40:00] there soon. It's not, rather than using like defeat language, we're using driven and open-ended language.
We're using reaffirming language. It's gonna remind us like I, I haven't got my first million yet. I'm not there yet. I haven't won Mr. Olympia yet. The, yet. As Dweck would teach in growth mindset orientation development reinforces that though you don't have it, it's possible. And it's coming. That ties into Angela Duckworth's perseverance.
And so, when you're doing these really hard things, exposing the degrees of difficulty to yourself cognitively, you are trying to then reinforce, remind yourself specifically selected self-talk and language, and then defining your identity. As someone who over time gets better as things, I'm someone with a growth mindset, someone that gets things done.
I'm someone I'm someone who doesn't quit when it's hard. This leads to a more structured approach to learning learning grit and trying to develop it as a concept to really make you a better person and enhance your ability to suffer and [00:41:00] struggle under stress.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Got it. I'll come back to if there's ways you can teach those concepts more on the physical versus the mental side, but I know that they're all overlapped.
So, one of the phrases I really like is the brain is in the body and the body is in the brain. Or the mind is in the body. The body is in the mind, like they're so interconnected, it's hard to separate 'em, but for the sake of. Doing things and prescribing, tasks and things, that's sometimes easier to have things be more physical versus mental.
And related to that, my, my really out there question is, have you seen the the goat drill from Cal Dietz? If you haven't, it's okay. It, the first time he showed me this drill, God, probably five years ago, six years ago I watched the video and I'm like, okay, you [00:42:00] have lost your freaking mind.
Now what the hell are you doing? And so for people who haven't seen it, the simple version is you have an athlete, you've got two cones set up, they're gonna run a figure eight around the cones. Cool. That's pretty easy. But as they're doing this, they're gonna keep their head focused only on one specific target.
So their head's gonna stay the same way. But as you're running the figure eight, then you're gonna have to switch. You're gonna have to rapidly rotate your head to, to stay and keep the same target acquired. You may be pulling on the person in one direction. So now as they're running the figure eight, as they're watching one area, they have an external force that's changing a little bit, depending upon their position of where they're at.
While they're doing all that, they have a tennis ball. They're passing literally around their waist the whole time.
Ben: Oh, I have seen this. Yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: So they have a task they're doing with their hands, and then on top of that they have something called dual tasking. So they're cognitively doing a task at the same time they're doing all [00:43:00] this.
So they are counting backwards by sevens, they're counting backwards by three, and they're saying that out loud. And that's a simple version. There's an advanced version with three hula hoops. Somebody chasing you, like shit on the ground stuff you have to hop over someone blocking your vision and.
It looks insane. And so the first time I saw it I was like, okay, you've completely lost your mind. Now this is the craziest circus trick I've ever seen in my life. And I'm like, so how is it working for you? He's oh my God, this is like the greatest drill I've ever done. This is like so amazing. And I'm like, okay.
So, and the more I thought about it, I was like, oh, so not only do you have to coordinate prop perceptively, not only do you have to coordinate visual information, vestibular information, now you have a cognitive load on top of that in a sort of semi controlled environment. So the reason for explaining all that is what I've noticed, and I think Kyle [00:44:00] would probably agree with this, is doing drills like that seem to not only physically allow you to coordinate better.
It seems like cognitively you function better also. And I was wondering if that is a form of, like you were talking about cognitive overload because of that dual tasking aspect. So are there drills, do you think, something like that, which is more a combination of both to increase the sort of the ceiling so you have more like physiologic headroom.
And the sub-question to that is are there things that are more on the physical side and things that are more on the mental side that you would use strategically with athletes?
Ben: Yeah, I think that's definitely a form of that degree. Cognitive progressive overload if we're looking at, especially because there's progressions of the model or progression of the exercise as well.
Yep. When you look at it, you can whether, [00:45:00] whether he throws someone in the deep end, straight away, and that's just the baseline. But I imagine to get going, athletes generally have a good degree of these sorts of skills, right? They've spent time over years of life and so enhancing someone who's already a 90 percenter and it's like, how do I get that extra eight 5% outta you?
That is exactly that, right? We're looking at a degree of cognitive progressive overload. We're taking a psychological skill of the ability of psychosomatic relationship. And enhancing the complexity to a degree that's gonna push that athlete. They're now have to do so many things that it's going to force 'em to either adapt, it's a degree of stress in the brain to not only think about, 'cause like realistically, there's neural signals going into the body.
There's neural signals trying to understand time and place. There's neural signals playing attention to, resistance being pulled by force. Then there's also the cognitive load of them thinking over time, counting backwards, and then all of that wrapped up in also just gotta pay attention to what's going on and, like it's all gotta flow at the same time.
So if they don't [00:46:00] develop this skill, if they don't develop the ability to organize chaos like this, at a certain point they're gonna break in the game or they're gonna break in their sport. Right. That, the logic of that to me psychologically is that you are teaching them to handle chaos and function and order that in execution.
And it's yes, like appropriate exception and awareness and space time and things like that. If all of that is happening all at once, at first it's gonna feel like chaos and it's gonna feel like stress and panic. It's gonna feel crazy. But at a certain point in time they continue to do it. They understand the reasoning behind it.
They are passionate about their sport. They're excited by the exposure and the interest in the development. Eventually that starts to become easier and you've now increased what you might call their cognitive threshold or their cognitive ceiling, and they can now operate more tasks like I, I call that cognitive sta task stacking.
They can now operate, in my opinion, based on that very exercise they can now operate. [00:47:00] More strategically with more capability psychologically before you might say they, cognitively break or snap. And, you put that into a game environment, especially something like an NFL or a grid on American football NHL things where there's so many different plays of direction, multiple angles, multiple speeds.
Yes, the ball's gone in one direction, but you're paying attention to what plays are here. Reading the play, reading the flow of the field, all these things happening at one time. Coaches yelling at a play from the sideline or in your w in your head, whatever's going on, refs making a decision.
All of these things then, you are able to handle to a degree better before your psychological bandwidth snaps. So, absolutely in my eyes, like that is a degree of, it's cognitively structuring chaos so that you can handle that chaos in the real life scenario. So that to me would be like, it's a huge application of that process to enhance the athlete's performance.
Not in a sense of the [00:48:00] drill itself is insane, but cognitively it's gonna enhance their performance. They'll then be able to function more effectively before so many things get in the way. Or it might be six actions or six psychological processes used to cause a, over performance.
Now they be to handle. If we just call them units of cognitive load, they can now potentially handle eight or nine, which allows 'em to do that next step ahead or that next level of an athlete. And yeah, psychologically versus physiologically, there are definitely exercise. I think that I try and expose them to for me it's especially in lifestyle factors in training factors, environment factors getting them to do things that are just a little degree harder than what they're currently doing.
So obviously training progressive overload is easy. But having people do things like
difficult con, difficult like confrontations, things that might challenge them as a [00:49:00] person. Push themselves in a, fear-based environment. What is something that scares them? Well, let's gradually expose you to that fear, to that worry, that concern. For my prep athletes, it's trying to get their life structure and organized by a calendar.
Getting them to, meet deadlines, having them get greater and greater proficiency at their life over periods of time. What that eventually does is reinforce let's say skill skill stacking, right? For the average physique athlete. It's not about so much the training acumen, the training skill, but it's more so can you get your meal prep done?
Can you wake up at a certain time? Is your alarm clock off? Did you get your steps in and your bike in? How do I teach you to handle the load of a prep before we get there? Because if you go from never training dieting or being lean before to starting a contest prep. The very likelihood is that your life implodes and it's going to collapse.
So how do we get you from zero to plus one then plus one to plus two, then zero to three, then three to four. And not in the sense of more [00:50:00] exercise or more training, but the ability to tolerate and juggle the chaos of a prep life. And also, 'cause on top of that, you have to realize how many people are also up paid to compete.
They're just simply prep athletes that do it as a hobby and they've got a full-time job. So you need to be able to develop and expose yourself to these things, structure these things. And I a strategy I'll do is I have them write two lists. And this goes back to my stoic beliefs and how I employ stoicism in my coaching.
And what I'll do is have them create two lists. One, immediately they have direct control over every, anything in their entire day that they have to get done. That. Is something that they're in control of. They react, they're responsible for not, everyday occurrence stuff that has to get done no matter what.
It's gonna happen or you, your job requires it. That's not, that's your job. But stuff that is in your control. Training, posing cardio steps, time with your relationship with your partner, your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever time with your dog, your kids, whatever you got.
Social interactions maintaining your finances, those sort of things. That's in your control. You, [00:51:00] that's you. They have a list of things that we can't control, that a list immediately to reduce cognitive bandwidth and waste of energy. Let's just get rid of that. List, the list that you can't control.
But yeah, there are things that impact your life, but if you can't control 'em, what's the point? So let's get rid of that. Now, what I want you to do is how many things in your day can you get done? And with an order of priority, like most important things first, how many things can you get done based on your current ability, your current skillset.
Before you go, shit, this is a big day. I can't handle it. It's too stressful. So what we find is when we don't develop this cognitive progressive overload this cognitive ceiling, people will see if they see a list and it's too big, they are more demotivated than they are. If you just remove the list and let 'em go at it by themselves, figure it out.
So we go, okay, let's cut this list down. Pick, find the number for you where it's operable. It might take you a couple weeks, but you find what's operable. I can do five things in my day before life just seems chaotic. Fantastic. [00:52:00] Let's figure out how we can stack your calendar and load your day and load your time, make it more effective and productive.
It might be learning to habit stack, it might be understanding operationalizing routine systems and behavioral conditioning. Any psychological skillset there around like just structuring time more effectively, time blocking, whatever that might be. Can you handle two more if we do that?
Yes. Okay. What about a yes? Fantastic. What about nine ninth? Pushing it. Okay. What I like to do there then is hold the line of that ninth item, and then one of the mistakes, talking about before with grit is like we just push people through, right? If we don't prepare this properly, we just drive them forward down this path.
There's landmines, there's, barricades, there's things in the way, there's explosion, stuff blows up. Life just gets chaotic. What I like to do in that scenario is if someone has that night thing and it's that's where we're juggling, we'll reinforce the foundations and re and structure that, [00:53:00] solidify that position, reinforce that position as much as we can, and then allow that to become a new baseline and then operate again further from there.
And now find 10th at the 11th. But what I find is when we do this is over time, those initial. First 3, 4, 5 things that used to be really difficult with this grit. Practice with purpose, implementation excitement and interest to the goal. These things become non-negotiables that aren't even concerned anymore.
So what used to be nine or 10 things in my day that would break me, I've now created the emotional bandwidth or the psychological bandwidth that we can add new things because this stuff now is just, it's gotta get done no matter what. It's not even on the list anymore, it's just non-negotiable.
So, that concept over time starts to teach them to handle greater degrees of difficulty through deliberate exposure of stress by stacking to the struggles, right? It's, I would call a strategic struggling. I'm like deliberately trying to get you to struggle on purpose, under load to force stress [00:54:00] adaptation and force stress management.
And then that way we start to get more difficult tasks. And one of the things that I do with my check-ins my clients is I ask them, what's the win this week? What's something that you overcame? Versus what's an action you wanna work on for next week? But I go back to say, I've got a client I've worked with 12 months.
Whether it's physique performance or might be, what you tend to find is the things that they said were struggles they faced at the start are just everyday occurrences that they execute. Not even mention it's not even a struggle 12 months down the track. That's just stuff they get done because it's a Tuesday and that's what they call waking up.
But back then when we started, getting 'em up on time to do some steps, have a coffee and make their meals for the day, was this overwhelming level of stress exposure that, there's, that paired with their work life, paired with their relationship pair with trying to go to the gym. It's not grinning through that they were collapsing.
So this deliberate structure and exposure. And, stoic principles and cognitive development and deliberate strategic suffering [00:55:00] leads to the ability to develop a higher ability to tolerate load. And we can add more intense things on top of that. So, it is like increasing the complexity of a movement pattern to a client and increasing the weight of that movement.
That's where it starts to kinda stack up. And eventually you look back 12 months, two years, five years, you're like, not only did I get those things done, they're basically non-issues anymore for me. And on top of that, I'm now adding greater degrees of di difficulty that I didn't even think I even wanted to work on.
Five years down the track, what else can I do? And so now we're reinforcing this growth mindset with that sort of application as well.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. And related within that that's probably a side topic, but I do think it's related. My bias, which I got this from my buddy Frankie, is that I. I don't think we have to force adaptation.
I think adaptation will happen given the correct circumstances. I do think [00:56:00] other things can change the degree of which we get from that adaptation. So I always think back to the, a classic lifting mice studies. So they had the the overweight model, which was a lot of times a tail limb suspension.
So they put the little mouse, they have its tail up in the thing, so it's walking around all day on it. Its fronts paws. They had a squatting mouse study where they had a little harness for the guy and they would shock him and he would, squat up and down on this little lever machine, which is crazy to see.
IO probably wouldn't approve that study now. But what they found with these studies is that if they had enough overload and granted this is a high amount of overload and a controlled environment, then. They could do all sorts of mean cruel things to 'em. They could castrate 'em, they could put 'em on low protein diets and the front paws because they had so much overload would still get bigger and stronger.
Now again, would they get bigger and stronger to the same degree if they had more protein or other things? No, but even in the worst possible [00:57:00] scenario, they couldn't drive the adaptation to absolute zero. So I always think with clients that were, like you said, stacking all these things in a nice progressive manner so that they can get the most adaptation from it versus, back to the distress model of forcing adaptation on someone like, oh, you may not want to lift this week, but we're gonna increase your volume by 30% or something like that.
And the hard part with this is that there's a time and a place for distress training. I'm not saying never do it, but it. It always feels to me like when people say overload or adaptation, that they, their brain tends to go more to this forcing load and forcing things and trying harder on it. What are your thoughts on that and how does that, because I think that relates more to the model you're talking about of just slowly, progressively adding these things.
We're not gonna go [00:58:00] from like volume loading. We're not gonna go from a nice, progression one week to the next to be like, Ooh, this is an intense week, so we're gonna up your volume by a hundred percent. Right?
Ben: Yeah. And let's look at what happens if we grab a random person that's barely trained before and we put 150, 200% load on their back squat and they've never trained.
Yeah. Yeah. One good
Dr Mike T Nelson: eccentric rep,
Ben: literally you get, you're gonna get one good rep and it's not even gonna be concentric because they probably won't come back up. But even with that, if they did manage to come back up, right, like to me, the reward of that exposure does not outweigh the risk profile of what comes from that attempt.
Yep. And if we classify that as a stress, a unit of stress, then the risk of that stress exposure is, to me, it's not strategic. It's almost irrational. And if we're trying to look at strategically forcing adaptation, or sorry we're trying to strategically employ, apply adaptation to [00:59:00] occur, create an environment in which adaptation is positive and beneficial and productive towards growth, then creating a.
A threat based environment like that where it's urological gonna overload the client. They're nervous, they're scared, they've already, to me, that starts to inverse the u hypothesis, the arousal level becomes defeating not productive. We're going to see a lot more risk to that outcome then if we simply gradually expose the client over time, or the person over time.
And this this concept isn't just limited to a gen pop person who's just starting out. It'll apply to the highest level of person that operates. And it's just about managing that load and expose them over time. Because even a leak tier operators, at least even, advanced SAS operatives, seal operatives, they still need degrees of stimulus to progressively overload and get better.
They still need, their training environments have to be a certain way. They progress their training when they go through from buds to real life training profiles or real life environments. [01:00:00] The threat stress exposure increases because they go from a structured, controlled environment to chaos in a real world scenario that then creates a new level of stress for them to adapt to.
But they didn't just go straight there, they didn't just go from zero to a hundred. The same way when we take our clients, and I'm a big believer in a big philosophy of mine is trying to teach high performance level principles to the average person. I don't need them to be Michael Jordan, but I genuinely believe most people can improve their life by taking some things from high performance athletes or high performance individuals.
More people need structure. More people need executive decision making. More people need conscientiousness goals and they need to be able to, yes, to a degree, to umbrella it. They need grit, they need to be able to get through life, stress. Life is chaos. Life is chaotic. So, yeah, I definitely think in regards to that distress model, if I just take a new client's work and said, Hey, the next two years I wanna get in on stage and, be a high.
And I just go, cool, here's a gram trend. [01:01:00] Here's, a gram of tests. We're gonna do 150 sets a week train six days a week. You're not allowed to see your friends on the weekend. You're not allowed to do these things. They will maybe last a week before their bloods are shot, their body's shot, they're beaten up.
They're overstimulated, they're injury risk profiles through the roof. But then what happens is psychologically, and this is where it combines, like you said, the body doesn't exceed the brain. The brain doesn't exceed the body. The psychosomatic relationship is almost inseparable.
We're going to reinforce them. They can't do something.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And
Ben: if we look at the motivational theory
Dr Mike T Nelson: we got successful at failure.
Ben: Exactly. Literally. Right. And if we look at the motivational theories, if we can't in reinforce competence, we don't help them to develop a sense of relation to us, and they don't have autonomy and decision making.
They're going to be almost completely unmotivated by the goal they're trying to achieve. And then on top of that, we pay the idea they can't do it because we've set up this environment for [01:02:00] pure failure. They simply cannot do it. The average person is not yet adapted to that level of stress and volume and output and intensity.
Doesn't mean they can't get there, but right. The likelihood is that right now they can't. So by doing that, all you've done is reinforce the negative self beliefs that they already have for themselves. The negative language that they use, the negative identity. They've come to you to try and build this profile out, and you just go, Hey, screw you.
I'm gonna throw you in the deepest end possible. And you've barely touched a football in your life, or you've barely thrown a ball around, or you've barely done structured sport. I'm gonna throw you the deepest level of intensity I could find under the greatest load possible, and expose you to none of it beforehand, and then blame you when it goes wrong.
And so you didn't want it bad enough like that. Isn't coaching that's defeating your client before they start. That distress model in that regard breaks them before it build them. And yes, we look at people talk about you break down the tissue first, then [01:03:00] rebuild it, repair it over time, blah, blah, blah.
But in this context, you are psychologically breaking the client alongside the physiology and the likelihood is that client doesn't come back from it. That athlete doesn't come back from that. So yeah, is there a time and place to throw 'em in the deep end? For sure. It might be like, I just simply wanna see if you have grit or mental toughness.
I wanna see if you have resilience. There are certain environments where it's more constructed to see if the person would break and throw in the towel, or if they'll just simply gimme the best effort and go until they literally can't go anymore. That's a test. Sure. But I'm not gonna do that for every training session and go, why didn't you want a bad enough?
So to me, yeah, absolutely agree that distress in that regard is that model of training or exposure becomes detrimental and negative to the long-term goal. And if we're planning to work with these people long time or long-term or, these people are trying to change their lives for the better over a 5, 10, 20 year period, going about it this way [01:04:00] in the first month is completely irrational and defies the logic of periodization and progressive overload of cognitive and physiological hypertrophy.
So yeah, I think it's a, if we look at the long term, right, like a lot of people overestimate what they can do in a year, underestimate what they can do in a decade. If we extend the time horizon for most of these people and have 'em understand like this is a long-term gain, whether it be high performance, you wanna be an elite operator, an elite businessman, an executive, CEO you wanna be a bodybuilder, a track athlete, a sport field sport athlete at a certain point these are long-term gains that will take time to build up to, it's more productive and it'll be a greater degree of development for them.
If you build those skills up, like those athletes before they get to the goat exercise, I guarantee that most of them have some high degree of athletic development over time, whether it be going from high [01:05:00] school to collegiate or they're at a D one school or they've come from a very successful high school program.
So they have the fundamental pillars to handle that much cognitive operation. Right. If you just took a 7-year-old was like, Hey, figure this out. They're probably gonna overload and overwhelm themselves and go, shit, what am I doing? All these things that happen all at once because they haven't developed that mental proclivity to doing these things yet.
That doesn't mean it won't ever happen, but if we look at that 7-year-old and go, Hey, you haven't done it yet. Year failure, that's, we're really not setting up an environment for them to become a high tier operator in the future.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So a couple of my thoughts on that is I think as we learn more and more about the science of even adaptation, I don't think we even have to on a physiologic level, air quotes, break as many things, right?
I feel like I have a Limp Bizkit song running through my head now. We look at muscle, right? You used to think, oh my God, like you have [01:06:00] to tear down all the muscle tissue and build it back up. And yes, of course that does happen to some degree, but I. Most of the data now says muscle itself can sense the amount of stress that's being applied to it.
You don't have to tear all the fibers per se. If you look back at the, Hans, gas law, it was mostly based off of toxicology that, oh yeah, if these cells are exposed to this toxic thing, then you know, this is your add adaptation from it. The newer data would say more along the lines of Kelvin Davies stuff, which is adaptive homeostasis, which just simply says you don't need to break anything, or you don't need to cause damage before the body will respond.
It can sense these different changes in, pH and stress, and you don't have to necessarily cause damage and you can still get, high levels of adaptation like cardiac preconditioning, low levels of oxygen to cardiac tissue via aerobic training. [01:07:00] Positive adaptations later. You don't need to.
Absolutely cut off oxygen to certain parts of the tissue that ends up in a lot of damage, which is really bad. Which brings you all the way back to the, again, the eustress versus the distress model. I think with eustress, eustress stress that's applied to the system you can generally adapt to in a shorter fashion.
You can, I think, get a long ways on that model. And I agree. There are definitely times where you're gonna need to do some distress training or and honestly, I may do that with certain athletes just to see, like you said, how do they respond and that gives me an idea of, what I should work on.
Ben: Yeah, I agree. I think, yeah, it is, especially on the psychological side, the risk of breaking is. It's a lot more concerning that I think people give gravity to. Or give weight to when we look at these athletes, individuals, general [01:08:00] populations the psychological exposure that comes from doing something like, that, that style of stress exposure that is quite intense, abrupt, and instant, but very, especially for first timers, it's, it risks very long-term damage and it creates some risk profiles that just aren't simply worth the squeeze.
When you can structure a better approach, that helps build over time. Now, if we're, like, if I'm talking about building high operators for the rest of their life, why does it matter if I have them do this utmost extremity now in the first month of us working together, what does that. I've just thrown them in the deep end, but also in the deep end is a toaster and it's connected to a power outlet, and I turn the power on and it's gonna fry the brain like it, it's a no win situation that I've somehow constructed to look as mental toughness or resilience or grit, whatever umbrella turn or psychological [01:09:00] construct you wanna throw under it to to define it, when to me I would much rather just have a slower, gradual rate of progression that is productive, strategic, and achieving a specific outcome that I know that.
And the other part is that it's reinforcing positivity. It's reinforcing that growth mindset. So the risk we play is if we reinforce a fixed mindset to someone who hasn't quite developed a growth mindset yet, that locks in more of that lone hopelessness and failure perspective than they give up. We have what's called ego versus mastery goal orientation.
Someone who's mastery driven. Has the ability or the traits and awareness to understand that developing goals over time, develop skills over time, sorry, or achieving something over time is a matter of when, not if, but it's because they put in the work, they develop, they work on it. People that have a, an ego driven goal will tend to drop off if the goal isn't aligned with what they're good at.
They won't push themselves beyond that. And we see that a lot in high school athletes, [01:10:00] right? They go to a certain caliber and because they've been reinforced and their ego's been fluffed up, and there's their high crew around them is you're the best. You're the best, you're best. They go to that, say, next level.
They go from, high quality, a high school program to D one, and they can't quite cut it. And then it's all of a sudden, it's the coach's fault. Let's throw 'em out. The, they basically just throw out the, they're throwing the town for a lack of better term. A lot of that is less to do with their physiology and a lot more to do with their cycle, their psychology, because they haven't, quote unquote, developed this grit.
But really the reality is like their ego goals have prevented them. They developed a fixed mindset around what they're good at. They don't wanna try a different position. They don't wanna try a different play on the field. They don't wanna try this different route to run because this is what's worked for them.
This is what got them hyped up. This is what got them reinforced. And if you aren't working on this, developing this over time, that fixed mindset, especially as [01:11:00] soon as things start to go wrong or get chaotic or get a little bit more stressful, which, there is a big jump in quality and speed and skill going from high school to.
You are very quickly going to reinforce a fixed mindset and they quit. And it might've only took, rather than it looking at it as a skill or per performance issue or lapse, the reality is we should have been working on them developing these mental resilience, these mental skills, this cognitive overload, as well as developing this growth mindset towards what they're trying to achieve.
But again, going back to kinda like that, that that EU stress model, we need to be looking at this over time, progressing this, getting it better. If you just simply take a kid and go, Hey, you are, a freshman in high school, you're gonna go play NFL, chances are that kid gets absolutely pumped and never plays football again.
Right? That's the equivalent of what we're talking about when you look at it in a performance field sport. The progression model is, peewee football or little league, whatever you guys call over there high [01:12:00] school, you make high school you get your offer and you get drafted to, or picked to whoever you declare to.
You get to the whatever division, university program or college program you get into, generally from there, if you go to the next level, you win a decent state title or national title, you're in a very high tier program. You make it to the NFL. You've developed over time and exposure to not only the physical skill or the physical demands, but also the psychological pressures and needs and skills that come with that.
It's a lot different going from playing in front of your local friends and family to a high school. Friday night lights, 5,000 fans, middle of the night, and it's, everyone's going crazy. The whole town shut down. Then it's, you're playing at Ohio State and there's a hundred thousand people and then you're at the NFL and you're playing, trying to play for a Super Bowl.
The adaptation over time with degrees of exposure with hardship and deliberate strategic development. Is going to reinforce that stress adaptation, the ability to tolerate that load before you crumble. And so now it's just like another day in the park. [01:13:00] But reality is, if you look back to where you started in the park, now you are playing, in the NFL at a Superdome and the a million people are watching you play every week.
That is the real life progression of how that works if you structure it properly. But if you don't and you just take that peewee kid and go, Hey, go play D one, he absolutely gets pummeled and breaks basically every bone in his body and we'll probably never play the sport again. And we've just completely disenfranchised this individual from developing not only as an athlete, but as a person because of the skills and abilities we know that comes with that cognitive development.
They transfer from their sport. It's not just in sport, we apply them, it's business, life, friendships, relationships, education, study. So, to me it's such a. It's critical that it's taught properly, but in the strategic and correct manner, it can be very fruitful. But if it's rushed and the process is ignored and you do end up on [01:14:00] that sort of misunderstood grit route, it can be very detrimental, if not ruining, of what potential development that person might have had.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I always think of people, I think underestimate the psychological, mental side. I remember years ago when Pablo was still doing the RKCI, I signed up, did the RKC, this is I, God was this probably 2007, maybe something like that, long time ago. And at the time it was a three day thing. You had to pass the on the kettle ball snatch test on the first day.
And, it was pretty grueling. Like you didn't really know what was gonna happen. They'd have you do, three to four hard workouts a day and do some skill instruction and stuff. And, from the physical side, it was pretty demanding. But the craziest part was, I think it was like day two.
It was taught at this high school gym. So we'd have access to the gym and outside. And Pablo comes in, he is like, all right, so I think if we're gonna have you do the hardest workout you've ever done next I'll come get you when we're ready. And just walks out of the gym. So there's [01:15:00] no instructors in there.
There's no one in there, doesn't give us a timeframe. This is all done on purpose, of course. And so the kid next to me is just freaking out. He is just losing his shit. He's oh my God, we're looking, gonna have us do, this is gonna be horrible. This is gonna be so bad. I'm like, we don't know what it is.
He's oh, when's he coming back? He's just leaving us Sit here. I'm like, yeah, I'm sure he is doing this on purpose. Know he is probably out back talking with his buddies and going, ah, leave him cooking there long enough. And he is well, aren't you nervous? I'm like. Yeah, but I don't know, I don't control what's gonna happen next.
Yeah. It's probably gonna suck. Like all of it's sucks so far. What do you expect? Like you signed up for this thing, like you voluntarily pay this guy a lot of money to do this, yeah. But it was interesting just to see how many people who, in theory this is a rest time, this is a time you're not doing anything.
Which was, pretty rare over those three days. And just to see how many people could not really deal very well with the [01:16:00] uncertainty of something they signed up for, knowing that they willingly put themselves in this position, and physically they might have been relatively prepared, but psychologically they were just like out of it entirely.
Ben: Yeah. It's, it is, to me it's always interesting to see. I think how little value people put in psychological development. And mental skills training. And just as simple as as, like you said, emotional regulation. Yeah. What you're talking about there is going, again, going back to even very simple, stoic, philosophical principles.
Is this inside my control? Can I control this? Am I in charge of what's about to happen? No. No, not at all. What do I have control over my effort and my emotional regulation? Do I put energy into what he's about to give us that I can't? Like right now, it's shrouding, his workout, the workout's, nothing. The workout doesn't exist, and the workout's gonna be the worst thing in the world all at the same time until he [01:17:00] tells you.
You can't do anything about that until he tells you. And then you can regulate yourself accordingly and, stimulate yourself as you need to. And it's gonna be hard, obviously, whatever train it is, it's like the idea is the train's probably gonna be hard. So yeah, that's the case. But like you said, you've come into this deliberately exposing yourself to this environment and the intention of hard training and development and exposure, and you are then freaking out about the said thing that you've signed up for.
So some, something along the line, along the way, people aren't deliberately exposed themselves to enough of these things where when you do sign up for it or you do expose yourself, it's overwhelming. And that's why we do if you look at, grit as a concept, what we talked about before, how to structure the correct application.
Micro exposures aren't just oh, go do hard things for hard things sake. What you find is when you do a hard thing. It reinforces self-confidence. It reinforces the ability to psychologically adapt to that stress, not just physiologically, for [01:18:00] next time I'm not gonna be as stressed because I've done it before.
It might not be the same thing, but one of the things I teach my athletes is preps get substantially easier the more you do them. It doesn't mean go do them all the time and do a prep every six months, but the next time you prep, you'll get a little bit leaner. You'll mentally handle a little bit more workload.
You'll probably have a bit more size, you'll be able to eat a little bit more food and you'll probably be able to handle me digging you a little bit deeper. So every time you do the hard thing, it's not just that you've got grittiness to get through it, it's that when you've proven that you've been able to do something that is difficult, that is hard, that is exhausting, it then reinforces in your brain in the future that you're able to handle this.
It's threat development. Your threat development's the wrong word. It's
Dr Mike T Nelson: almost like threat inoculation.
Ben: It is, it's threat inoculation. You are preparing yourself further for future threats that you dunno about yet. And by doing that, it's, prepare for the worst hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
[01:19:00] By doing this, you know that you have some degree of competence in difficult situations, so you're gonna be more controlled. If you're more controlled, you're more emotionally regulated. If you're more emotionally regulated, you have greater control over optimal arousal. If you have greater control over arousal, neurologically, you're going to perform better.
So the psychological concept of it is not just, go to do hard things and prove the fittest person in the world, or you can handle X amount of load. It's that it's also reinforcing hardship in your brain that you can handle it. And I think, it's, I think it's prevalent in society now, even amongst athletes and just general populations.
People aren't competent in handling difficult situations as much as they used to be. Things, we've been. Especially in western cultures, a very prolonged period of safety and security and ease, comfort, availability, where it's reduced the need to ex to be forcefully exposed, and so people aren't going out and seeking that exposure.
To [01:20:00] me for true cognitive development of grit, development of mental toughness, mental resilience, mental fortitude, long-term, delayed gratification. You need to be exposing yourself to harder degrees of things with delayed deadlines and timeframes so that you can adequately develop the mental skills to handle not just your sport, but life.
Life progressively gets more difficult. It gets tougher if you don't have that background of, and we'll use grit. I have no qual using grit as a construct if you don't have the backing of some form of grit in your life. When that thing in life hits you, it's gonna be so much worse than if you prepare for it.
If you develop it, and that can be found in any sort of physiological endeavor, whether it be, a combat sport or martial art, whether it be training for different things, high rocks CrossFit, whatever you wanna call it there, F 45 resistance training. Putting yourself on the greater degrees of load, physiologically taxing yourself, proving you can handle it, coming back and doing it again.[01:21:00]
You're reinforcing cognitively that you can handle more stuff and greater degrees of difficulty of that stuff. And it's one of the reasons why I use compre to teach so many lessons, because to me, I've played high degrees of sport, played varieties of sports, run businesses, multiple businesses.
There's been nothing more life difficult than prepping at the same time as operating a life. There is nothing that I've found. As all encompassing as an endeavor, as bodybuilding requires. So for me, it's the greatest proxy of this concept that I can utilize and it pushes me to my utmost extreme every single time I do it.
And I can usually get a bit more extreme with it. I get a little bit leaner, I can get a handle a little bit hungrier. I can push a little bit more load. Physiologically I don't break under the same amount and I psychologically handle that next thing. So to me, that's what makes bodybuilding so rewarding outside of whatever medal I get or place I get on stage because it literally embodies this very thing that I talk [01:22:00] about.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, I love that. Last question as we wrap up. So one of the things I started doing in 2020 was I'm like, okay, so if I want to train myself and I want to air or move the needle more towards the mental side is I. There's something that's very hard to do that I could do every day, but doesn't have a high physical cost associated with it.
And in theory would not require a lot of time. Yeah, you could maybe do some, horrible windgate repeats or things like that, but there, if you even take a 62nd wing gain and you go like literally to an RP of a 10, there's a much higher physical cost associated with that than I think most people realize.
Assuming you've, you've been trained for a little period of time, and what I ended up coming up with is, oh, cold water immersion. It sucks every time I do it. I know where your
Ben: answer is going. Yeah,
Dr Mike T Nelson: [01:23:00] I physiologically, maybe I'm a little bit better, eh, probably not any worse. Doesn't take a lot of time.
Granted, you need, so I converted a freezer, did all this stuff, and when COVID happened. I was doing it probably six or seven times a week for, almost like two and a half years, wasn't really traveling, was at home. And my thought process that I talked about on the podcast was, if I'm doing the stressful thing and I'm repeating it, it should be very easy over time.
And what I noticed was it definitely got easier. I could withstand colder temperatures, longer duration without shivering lower RPE. But the super interesting part was, even to this day, right before I get in, there is still a huge amount of hesitation of your body going, Hey, dumb ass, what are you doing?
This is stupid. Don't you know, this is dumb. Like you shouldn't be doing this. This is the worst thing you've ever decided to do. And I would've thought that sort of resistance or limbic friction, if you use Andrew Herman's [01:24:00] term, would've gone away. But the interesting part was it didn't.
And I've talked to other people who've done a lot more cold water immersion than I have. I think that's a positive because each day you have to then overcome that thing. To be like, Nope, I'm gonna do this. This is gonna be great. And you feel better afterwards, even though during it still, the first 20, 30 seconds always just sucks.
What are your thoughts on that? And do you have any other things along that area? If someone wants to skew the dial more to the mental side, what are things you would have them do?
Ben: Yeah, I think the interesting note that I would have, that I guess query I would have that is, is the fear response that you have.
Do you notice a decrease or probably, you probably have, but the answer would be from day one to year two and a half later five years later now, have you noticed. [01:25:00] A decrease in the decisional action to move from thought fear response to entering the cold water. That to me would be a big indicator of the mental resilience, the fortitude, the belief and confidence.
You've overcome that fear response, which is, Hey, don't do it, which is the inhibit inhibitory response. You've bypassed that now by sheer exposure and hard, deliberate, hard thing, hard work. You've shortened the distance between the fear kicking in and you're making the decision to do it anyway, which if we look at it a lot of the time.
People are scared of making hard decisions. They let the fear or impulse response tell them not to, and they listen to it, they validate it, and they avoid the hard thing based on a perceived threat response or a perceived fear. My guess would be, without you answering yet, is that you've probably decreased the time between first thought of fear, Hey, this is dumb to [01:26:00] getting in the actual water.
Dr Mike T Nelson: I would say overall, yes, but the other interesting part is it seems to be very short and the adaptation is extremely asymmetric, meaning that, so now I've been in self padre for a while. We'll be back home in a bit. I know the first day I go to do it. I am going to hesitate and pussyfoot around a lot longer than normal, even though I've only been gone six weeks.
There's this weird thing where it seems like that one to two week mark, and I've talked to other experts on this, and I don't know if it's so much the physiologic adaptations changed that fast, but on the psychological side, it seems if I just stop doing it for two weeks, they want to go back. I know I will do it, but I know I spend more time hesitating it.
It seems like the skillset I think is beneficial [01:27:00] long term, but it also seems to, I don't wanna say disappear, but change very fast. Where I think of adding muscle mass, like adding lean body mass or muscle mass takes quite a while, however. Unless you're completely catabolic or your stress is off the charts.
You can retain a fair amount of that by doing very minimal work for quite some time. It takes longer to a crew. It's longer for it to disappear. On the other side, the cold water seems to have this weird asymmetric thing where it takes quite a while to get up to the top, but the second you remove that stimulus or even reduce it, it seems to go back to a baseline really fast.
But I think that's more on the psychological side than Yeah, the physiology. And part of that may have to do with that. It's just the, it's a limbic, hardwired thing where it, if you're exposed to cold water too long, you are dead. Like there, there is, right? This is a controlled environment. You've got a huge therapeutic window.
[01:28:00] As long as you're not some numb nuts, you're probably gonna be fine. But I think there is, based on a very real physiologic thing, that your body is trying very hard to protect you from.
Ben: Yeah. And I think the real world application for that is you can find you can find a lot of areas in life where, one of the things, so I wrote an ebook called Ancient Systems in a Modern World.
And it was about the concept of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, omic nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and its responses in life from where we first developed it to where we are now, the implication that the stress system has on the body and the way anxiety's played such a role in the last sort of, 50 years.
If we really look at it, what used to be a system to help us detect threat responses, and our physiological response to that threat has now become, my boss yelled at me, so therefore I'm having an anxiety and a panic attack, and my heart rate's 150 beats a minute, and I'm basically gonna go cardiac arrest.
If we looked at that, really it's because you haven't developed or you don't have [01:29:00] a very strong ability to handle stress and load that would prevent that from occurring. And the thing that I find, what's interesting about things like ice plunges and cold water plunges and immersion is. Because you've recognized that fear, confrontational conversations, hard conversations, deliberate exposure to confronting environments, that is also a fear response for a lot of people.
Isolating that fear adaptation they have, and going well, exposing something like ice cold water. That's also a fear response. What we hear, what we're seeing is a very similar physiological response. It's just the context and environment is different. If I can train you to do this thing, and that is expose yourself to ice cold water.
When your brain's telling you this is dangerous, don't do it. Chances are we can cross translate this to the field of your workplace, your relationship, your friendships, your business, your training, and say, Hey boss, this was not my fault. Here's the evidence I did these things. I take accountability of my workload, but this wasn't on me.
It was on you. Or, I'm not gonna let you speak to me like that, or, these are the [01:30:00] boundaries in my relationship. The ability to do the hard thing here translates to the hard things that you're ignoring elsewhere in the rest of your life. And that's what I find is so useful in developing mental resilience, developing mental toughness, and these exposures, deliberate exposure that you're doing here to me, would have those implications elsewhere in the rest of your life.
That's what I like about the cross translation. I try to teach this to my athletes is that these developers' exposures and these stress responses are beneficial outside of your sport. They're beneficial outside of the, single playing environment that you operate in. You'll notice that you start to do things harder, things in other areas of your life.
You'll notice that, if you regulate emotions, regulate impulse control like confront fears or do something that's fear inducing, you'll be more confident to do that somewhere else for a productive, beneficial reason. So, to me that would make a wonderful sense that, it's. It's probably never not going to be fearful, [01:31:00] but you are able to confront that fear and still do the thing anyway.
And even with time off, it's still able to be returned. It's not, it's completely absent. You're still able to I guess if we compare it to a training stimulus, muscle memory and satellite cells are quite beneficial and they do develop over time. We know that even if you did take time off to get back to where you were, it is probably gonna be a shortened distance.
Yeah. Comparatively than if you never started. So that's pro, if we were really conceptualize it, that's probably what's happening when you come back from like that six weeks off, you know it, yes, it's gonna suck. There's the first week from no training doms, everything has doms, every muscle group, you train every, explosive power, every fiber type, you just, everything's doms.
But you think they're like, oh, I've trained for 10 years. Why am I getting Doms after, only taking four weeks off. The reality is, it's just getting back to that stimulus, getting back to that exposure. It's gonna be hard still, but it's gonna get better at, it's going to adapt quicker. Back to that, [01:32:00] precondition baseline.
I guess would probably be the fairest example to that. That would make the most sense to me. And yeah, it's even if you apply that in the rest of your life where you are looking at those gritty things, those hardship things that you're avoiding by developing that ability, by confronting that fear, I am almost certain that crosses over to places where it's I'm no longer as well.
Fear, if we look at it as a arousal response, as a physiological response to excitation, is your heart rate's gonna be more regulated. So you're less fearful, you're not gonna be less reactive and emotionally excited, so you're gonna be more controlled of emotional regulation. Which then keeps you in more control of the situation.
So to me it's like that directly translates over because you have better regulation of the overall system. You can handle tougher things which to me, it aligns perfectly with the idea of developing, a physiological grit that would then lead to the development of psychological grit.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And that's my bias for the physiologic flexibility cert is what, once you're like a B student in [01:33:00] exercise, nutrition, and sleep, like what are the things, what are the areas you would target to increase resilience?
My bias there is temperature, right? So you've got cold and hot pH, low pH, i, pH, PH, expanded fuels, lactate, and ketones. And then breathing O2 and CO2, and all those obviously overlap with each other, but if you can train those systems specifically, not necessarily to move your body temperature off, 98.6.
But to increase that, what I call HDR, human dynamic range, or just that physiologic headroom, that when you encounter those things outside of that training stimulus, like your capacity is actually enhanced, therefore it will physically be easier. And like you were saying, with transfer, I think there's a lot of what they call cross adaptation between those areas.
Like one, a really cool study they did was they exposed people to a hypoxic, or I'm sorry, they gave people cold water immersion. One [01:34:00] group they didn't, and they exposed both groups then to a hypoxic environment, so low oxygen, which is very threatening. The group that had the cold water immersion before reported that same hypoxic condition as not as threatening.
So there's some weird cross adaptations, I think, between those systems where, they all kind of overlap on each other too, which I think is pretty fascinating.
Ben: Yeah, I think to go back to like your sub question, I guess to give an answer to, something that I would have clients do is it's very individualized, but I try to find the thing that a client is scared of, and I'll try and have them do something like that at least once a week in a micro dose environment.
So, one of my clients he's a young lad, but very started off very insecure, very shy, very timid and had complete fears of chasing anything in life by himself because he was very shy about trying. So when we really applied a reductionist lens to that, I was like [01:35:00] understanding him as a person.
He was actually just very shy and being lonely, didn't like to be alone or by himself. So one of the things that I had him do was pick out a location of interest as something that he likes and to just go do it gradually by himself. So, one week it was like, go to the arcade. He's a big nerd like me, so I'm like, go to the arcade late at night.
Doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be when it's busy. The mall stays open till 11 o'clock, go there half an hour on a day off or a Saturday just to relax. Chill out, have fun. Did it, loved it. Take yourself to dinner. Go to a steakhouse, go to someone that's actually dying in. Cool. Loved it.
Go do half a day at the beach. Cool. Loved it. And gradually those exposures are getting bigger and bigger based on the fear that he had initially. And what I found is he become more confident in other areas of his work life. He's, pushing more goals. He's progressing in life, which in turn I found him able to progress in his training.
He is, he came from an anorexic background. He was 40 kilos in the age of, I think 17. He's now, [01:36:00] we just finished his first growth phase, we got to 80 kilos. Literally doubled his body weight. Went through a body, I went through a cut, got down to 70 kilos, like the first one he's ever done.
A structured cut before. All these things where he's a lot more confident to do these things. Because we're deliberately more than the physiology side, psychological identifying a fit. If you don't have time to go do that, I think a really powerful thing that people are scared of doing is internal introspection.
Sit down and ask yourself, what is what you are not doing well? What are you not exposing yourself to? What are you scared of? What are what are you worried about? What can you do better? Where are you failing? Let yourself down. Where are you not living up to your own standards? Whilst it doesn't seem physiologically taxing, psychologically, that ability at first is gonna be very, surface level's gonna suck.
It's gonna be, you won't be able to get very far over time. This journaling prompt, or this just journaling behavior, this introspection. When tailored and done [01:37:00] consistently, you're going to unravel deeper and deeper levels of yourself, and the body's gonna wanna resist it. And that is gonna be where the friction point is to psychological development.
You're going to find that you can get a little bit deeper. There's resistance, a little bit deeper resistance. What is that like? Any other form of training that we do, you get a little bit stronger and the resist resistance, a plateau a little bit stronger, it's a plateau, a little bit stronger, progressive overload, so on.
So for me, that's a huge one that Dr. Peterson talks about Jordan Peterson. If you don't know where to start, sit on the end of your bed one night and ask yourself where you are sucking. Ask yourself where you'll let yourself down and implement that weekly by daily, like every second day if you need to.
That is a very low physiological yield fatigue generator, but psychologically leads to huge levels of development that. You show yourself, you expose those greater degrees of difficulty and also produce a reference point for where you can improve. Most people deep down though, they don't do it, know where they suck.
They know where they're lapsing, the way they're lacking, where they're holding back and not committing themselves. [01:38:00] Run that exercise A, you're gonna feel crap at first. You're gonna feel like it's not doing anything. Then it's gonna feel hard. Then you're gonna go, oh, it's working.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Love it. Awesome. Where can people find out more about you?
All the programs and everything you guys do? I know you got a lot of stuff going on there.
Ben: Yeah. So at the moment you can well, you can find us on matter athletica.com. You can find the YouTube matter athletica. You can find my Instagram, Ben Mayfield Smith. You can find the matter athletic Instagram with the same name.
From there you can sign up to our email lists. A certain person on this podcast really pushed us to make sure we're putting out email blasts. I think yeah that's going really well. We've got we try to take these concepts. I, we have now what we call the matter micro lessons. I try to every two weeks we produce a 62nd, like a one minute snippet information piece and action will take away.
But with a phy psychological concept or performance concept, you can implement. You have, weekly blogs, eBooks, and sorry, monthly blogs, eBooks, articles all up there as well. So we got a lot of [01:39:00] stuff out. And there's also our podcast channel, as well matter athletic, are on Spotify. So there's a lot of stuff, free content.
Free engagement and interaction and yeah, I just, we just like to give stuff out.
Dr Mike T Nelson: And who do you primarily work with? I know you've got some corporate programs, I know you have individual programs also, correct?
Ben: Yeah, so we have just finished up a corporate wellness program, a boy, a cultural development and wellness program that we built out for a company here in Australia.
We've standardized and we operationalized that, so we're running that as well. And then we've got, a spectrum of body composition and performance clients, right. From national level bodybuilders to performance athletes, individual sports team sports, and then general body composition populations as well.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that, that's awesome. And yeah, I had a physique athlete that just competed this last weekend and she did great. And Ben was super, super helpful for me to. Bounce ideas off and get his opinion. And was awesome to have your support on that too, because
Ben: it's a never
Dr Mike T Nelson: ending thing and especially with clients you're so close to and [01:40:00] you know how much work and everything they've put in, yeah, I know.
I'm so biased in one direction. So even just for mentorship and to have people you can bounce ideas off and, hire them, pay them for their time it's super, super beneficial. That's probably one thing I wish I would've done earlier in my career, is just the simple thing of realizing, oh, if I don't know someone and I really want their opinion, I can just pay them for a consult.
What a novel idea. It's like even if that client, I lose money on them on one month, I'm gonna make that money back on future clients. Even if I had clients originally that I didn't make any money on at all, I can then keep that knowledge and parlay that into the future. So. One thing, if you're a coach listening to this podcast, I would say one of the mistakes I made early on is one, just not even simply realizing that, so if you have issues, you have problems. I know you do one off consulting and other programs [01:41:00] too. Look up people and pay them for their time and it'll be more than worth it long term too. So I'll throw that in for you.
Ben: Oh, a hundred percent agree.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
This was great, and we will chat with you all soon. Thank you so much.
Ben: Thank you, Seth. Appreciate you having me.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Really appreciate it. Huge thanks to my buddy, Ben for all the wonderful knowledge he's shared with you here. Make sure to check out all the wonderful things he has on his YouTube channel. Instagram he is got a newsletter going to lots of wonderful stuff, so be sure to check out all the great stuff he has going on there.
So huge thanks to him. For being on the podcast again, sharing all of the knowledge that he has acquired over many years. If you're interested in acquiring more knowledge, check out the Flex Diet certification. It opens again June [01:42:00] 16th this year. So coming right up. Best place to go is onto the exclusive Free Insider newsletter.
We'll put a link down below. We've got some very cool fast action bonuses, other bonus items once again. This is the only time it'll be open, probably this year. I think we'll have the physiologic flexibility cert open again in fall. And then as of now, the Flex Diet Cert doesn't open again until January of next year.
So check that out in the newsletter. Sign up below. This is your certification. If you're interested in metabolic flexibility. It meets flexible dieting. We have eight interventions ranging from protein, fats, carbohydrates. All the way to neat fasting, micronutrition, exercise, sleep, and much, much more.
This is done on a habits based. You don't have to worry about counting macros. Now, if there's anything wrong with that, I just find that a habit based approach is a much better starting point for [01:43:00] individuals. We have a big picture that'll explain to you the concept of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting.
We've got eight intervention modules where I've got one hour to tell you all the technical details about protein, how carbohydrates work, sleep, et cetera. All based on a ton of research explained in a way you can actually understand it. And then we have 40 explicit action items throughout the cert, so you'll also know exactly how to apply it within a flexible framework for clients.
So you'll learn the big picture, the context. You'll learn the details so you're educated and you can make the best decisions. But then we'll also guide you through a flexible framework using exact action steps that you can apply with yourself or your clients. So you'll have not only the knowledge, but you'll know how to apply it.
And for this round, also, you'll get direct access to me. So if you have any questions during the [01:44:00] certification, you'll be able to email me directly and I'll do whatever I can to help you out. So hop on the newsletter if you're interested in that. Thank you so much for listening. We've also got, if you want ketones, check out Teton.
If you want electrolytes, check out our friends at Element. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We really appreciate it. If you could take just 30 seconds and it can give us a like, download, subscribe, leave us some stars, review, all that stuff makes a huge difference in helping us with distribution.
Of the podcast. Thank you so much. Talk to all of you next week.
Speaker 3: Hey, what are you doing? I dropped my gum. Hey lady, would you toss my gum up?
Speaker 4: You could have taken it out of the wig first.
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