Listen to The Matcha Guardians Podcast Season 1 Episode 11 | Ancestral Health and Fitness with Jameson Mohammadi

Listen to The Matcha Guardians Podcast Season 1 Episode 11 | Ancestral Health and Fitness with Jameson Mohammadi

Ancestral Health and Fitness with Jameson Mohammadi

Does being more active from a younger age due to parents being more active have a lasting impact? Do you have to be uncomfortable during workouts to really see progress? Should we be working out barefoot? In this episode, we cover a range of fascinating topics and questions with Jameson Mohammadi, a health specialist based in Salt Lake City, UT, with an academic background in anthropology and health science. He is the owner of Two Foot Training, a service designed to educate people in movement, nutrition, and behavior, heavily based on the rationale of human evolution.

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TRANSCRIPT FOR SEASON 1, EPISODE 11 | Ancestral Health and Fitness with Jameson Mohammadi

Presenter: Welcome to the Matcha Guardians podcast, brought to you by matcha.com. Here we focus on the biggest trending health topics of our time, featuring the greatest and upcoming wellness advocates. Now, here are the Matcha Guardians, Licensed Dietitian Diana Weil, and Medical Journalist Elara Hadjipateras.

Elara Hadjipateras: Hello, hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the Matcha Guardians.

Diana Weil: This week we have Jameson Mohammadi, who is one of my favorite people on this planet. Jameson is a Health Specialist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with an academic background in anthropology and health science. He is the owner of Black Wolf Training, a service designed to educate people in movement, nutrition, and behavior, heavily based on the rationale of human evolution. Welcome, Jameson.

Jameson Mohammadi: Thanks, guys. I'm excited to be here. I'm really flattered for you having me.

Diana: Do you ever feel like when people read your bio, it's like being sung happy birthday to?

Jameson: Yes. I wasn't looking at the camera. Feeling like rosy cheeks.

Diana: Well, so to just jump off here, I hear one of the things you talk a lot about is human evolution and what we can learn from our ancestors. That's where I want to start with you. What health lessons do you feel like we can learn from our ancestors, and why is that something that motivates you, and what you base your trainings off?

Jameson: God, that's a loaded question for somebody like me. You know what I think it is, Diana. I think that science is so great, and we're in the golden era. Because virtually everybody with an internet connection has access to anything that's been made public, any research that's been made public. We can all comb through and we can see it for ourselves. You'll find that there's often really good research done to support like say, for example, two opposite approaches to diet, like a vegan diet and then a meat-based diet.

I think that leaves an individual at a loss for which direction to go when they meet that fork in the road. I think the nicest thing is that evolution provides us a timeline to retrospectively observe. If it works it's going to last. The Mediterranean diet and the Middle Eastern diet, that's been successful in that part of the world because not only is it a cuisine be built off of what's available to that region. If it was consistently making people sick and compromising their ability to procreate, then it wouldn't have lasted.

We can look back and just see what's done. That's obviously not the only thing that we should be factoring in. For example, I like to remind people that we didn't necessarily evolve to be healthy. We evolved to survive long enough to procreate. Now when we're far exceeding our childbearing age, we're wanting to find ways to thrive and break the bonds of a traditional evolutionary constraint. I think it just sets a really good foundation for how we can navigate this crazy experience.

Elara: Diana, when you say the word ancestors, the first thing that pops into my head is my parents. How did my parents impact my training and my sports performance in the way that I look at exercise? My question to you, Jameson, is, as far as the research goes in your experience, how would a parent's training impact their kids? Is there an impact? Is there a connection?

Jameson: There's a huge impact. There's a massive impact. One thing that not just humans, like different species, of animals have been shown to exhibit different cultures. We are a very cultural animal, and so a lot of what is our experience is, is our experience itself. It's funny, like I was saying, I was just having this conversation with my sister. She's got four kids. I have three sisters and they all have kids. I don't have any kids myself, but being an uncle has been a primary theme in my life longer than it hasn't. One particular study that I actually have right here pulled up, a study that was really cool because it was investigating the effect of the physical activity behaviors of parents on progeny.

What this particular study concluded is that children with active mothers were two times more likely to be physically active than their peers with non-physically active parents. That number was 3.5 per fathers. If both parents were physically active, regularly physically active, that number is a factor of 5.8. So basically if you're lucky enough to have two parents who are physically active, you are 5.8 times more likely, of course, according to this one study, to be physically active. I'm sure we all have had that experience. A big reason I'm physically active is because my father was very, very physically active.

Elara: What types of training did your dad like to do?

Jameson: For anybody in Salt Lake City, my dad was a University of Utah walk-on. He was just always like a very imposing, physical character. He liked competitive sports. He liked strength training. He liked running and endurance. He was just kind of a work the gym before I come home. Then if we were ever traveling, I remember, if we were staying in a hotel or staying in a relative's basement, I'd wake up to him off in the corner doing pushups and sit-ups, just getting it in because it was important to him. He probably wasn't privy to all of the science that I am because this is what I do as a career, but I think he just understood that made him feel better. It was definitely beneficial for his health, which was important to him.

Diana: Do you think that when it comes to parents being active, what matters the most is just that they're active or that you're active with your kids or that your kids are like watching you be active?

Jameson: That's a great question. I could say, this is just anecdotal, but scientists it's like your greatest source of information is your experience around you often. My sister, she lives in Hawaii, her and her husband have four kids. They're grinding away, making a living out there. I used to get to see it firsthand every summer when I go out there to stay with them. She will somehow carve away time when the kids are occupied to get a little bit of a workout window for herself. Pretty consistently, whenever she does that, the kids will come out and they'll find their own little operation to do and share the space with.

One of the kids will grab a skateboard. One of the kids is in gymnastics, so she'll roll around on the bar. I think that if you can indicate to kids that it's not necessarily a chore that it's actually fun, I think you could easily argue that imprinting that idea of struggle onto them doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Which I think as a society, like our current paradigm is that we identify hardship and struggle as a bad thing and something to be avoided. You can make evolutionary arguments as to why that happens, but it's obviously having a lot of collateral damage.

Elara: One of the funny things that just made me think. Jameson, I have a newborn who's two months old-

Jameson: Awesome.

Elara: -and my husband, we do tummy time. That's the big thing you do to build their neck strength and stuff. My husband has gotten to the habit of whenever our son Koa is doing tummy time, which is really hard, they don't enjoy it at first. He does a plank right in front of him to be in solidarity like, "I know this is tough, but you're tougher and we're going to do this together." We're starting off showing at a young age.

Jameson: I think that's great that you could extrapolate that in any direction. You wonder what that does to your young child's idea of what can and cannot be done.

Elara: We'll see. Maybe he'll be planking at six months. I don't know about that, but we'll see.

Jameson: Hey, dad better watch his six. Your son might be on his heels faster than he expects.

Elara: Oh, yes, absolutely. Right. That's the goal to be a better version of ourselves. We'll see how it goes.

Jameson: That is evolution right there.

Elara: Right. Exactly. That is the purpose of evolution. This question of training in front of our kids and impact housing them leads me to this idea I've been wanting to discuss with you, Jameson. I don't know if the listeners out there have heard of the pain cave, but the pain cave is a term that I've used to describe the state you hit while training where it is incredibly painful. It's really hard. About 80% of your brain is telling you should probably quit right now. I don't feel good. Then you enter the pain cave and you push further, you go harder. That's when the training really happens.

That's when the growth and development really happen. I have a high-performance sports background. From a young age, I'd say that I learned to enter the pain cave. Now fast forward 30 years, I'm going to CrossFit classes. There's a lot of people in my CrossFit classes who are just like, "You know, I didn't do that much training when I was younger, I'm into being fit now, but I find it really hard to break into that pain cave." What advice do you have for someone who maybe didn't train when they were younger, and now they're older they want to increase their physical endurance to enter the pain cave?

Jameson: Yes, I love that. Obviously, somebody who practices science on a daily basis, I think the first thing is it's useful to deconstruct something and understand its parts and then its whole. I think that it's important for people to remember that that's an evolutionary adaptation for us. Pre-humans first left forested environments, food became more and more scarce. That was a cornerstone of our evolutionary story. It became very important for us to be calorically responsible, calorically conservative. In theory, if you have one calorie left in your body, once that calorie is gone, you're done, you're dead.

Imagine that you and me are 75,000 years ago in the wild, and it's been two days and we can't find any food. We are going to want every piece of software in place to prevent us from unnecessarily using the calories that we have. The issue there is that historically there were always external motivators for us to keep moving. For example, storm on the horizon, we need to repair the shelter or build a shelter. There's a predator chasing you, or you're hungry and you're chasing a prey. If you're in an unfamiliar territory with your child and you need to get back home as fast as possible.

These are all things that are motivating us to move. Nowadays, that conservative adaptation that all humans have, it clicks in and your brain is telling you, "Hey, stop, there's no reason for you to be moving right now." In this day and age where most people's experiences are primarily sedentary. As much as somebody like me encourages people to regress to a more natural way of behavior, there are some things that we have to artificially do to mitigate, say, this sedentary behavior. We didn't evolve to exercise. We evolved to move as little as possible, but it's usually the environment we evolved in, it required a lot of movement.

In this situation, exercise mitigates sedentary behavior. There are, I think, certain mindsets and it differs for everybody. I've worked with people where I've encouraged creative visualization. Literally, imagine that you're running from a tiger. I think the barest version of it is, I think Nike hit the nail on the head. Simplify it down to a mantra that you can just repeat over and over in your head. Just do it. Just push. I think an important takeaway is that you're not wrong. You're not weak for feeling tired. It's just you have yet to develop your own toolkit, how to justify all of this extra movement. Does that make sense?

Elara: Yes. that you don't have the toolset where you've done the work to shift the comfort zone to expand it, to feel okay outside of that.

Jameson: Yes, comfort is relative, pain is relative. I would argue that it's never really supposed to be always comfortable. In Las Vegas, his name is Michael Easter, and he actually wrote a book, a really great book called The Comfort Crisis. I think it's this idea that, yes, we are historically designed to always be in pursuit of comfort. We have now over-engineered this comfortable experience that is now at our expense. A hyper-palatable, energy-dense foods, DoorDash, water coming out of your tap.

You can flip a switch for your heat, where traditionally, all of these things would have taken a lot of energy. There are things that we are going to need to do to mitigate it. More than anything, it is important to remember that it's okay to be cold for a small period of time. It's okay to be too hot for a small period of time. It's okay to be out of breath and feel your blood pumping and wanting to not be there anymore. In the context of exercise, that's how you know it's working.

Elara: Yes. It's temporary. The pain is temporary.

Jameson: Pain is temporary. You're right.

Elara: Get comfortable with discomfort.

Diana: There are people like Elara and Jameson, you guys are athletes. There are people who, maybe for the very first time in their life, they want to get in shape. That pain cave comes a lot earlier for them. One of the things that I find is that maybe someone goes out and they're like, "I'm going to run a mile," and they have never walked a mile. They're in that pain cave immediately, and then they never want to do it again. Do you feel like there's any caution to say, or is there any advice that you could give someone of like, "Yes, we want to be uncomfortable, but also you want to keep this realistic?" How do you even explain that to someone who maybe is just starting out?

Jameson: That's a great question, I think, because a lot-- what I found when I first came into this field, or when I chose to become a professional in this field, I was preaching to the choir. I was speaking in a language and to a cohort that were already on my page. They didn't need to be sold on this anymore. I think that the public health crisis we're all a part of right now is saturated with people who do need that help and aren't sold on all of this. I think the biggest, biggest thing is sustainability. We can focus on really pressing their threshold.

Extending their potential down the road when they're a little bit more convinced of the mental benefits, the physical benefits, the systemic benefits of healthy behaviors like exercise. I think in the meantime, yes, it's important to give them micro victories. Diana, I'm sure you've seen me before tell people that whether they're coming in from injury, or they're coming back from pregnancy, or they have not been in a gym for six months, or they've never been period. We'll say, if this is your space of operation, just be there. Whereas say like Elara, your space might be here as somebody who's been athletic their whole lives, stay in this space.

You just having had a child maybe your threshold regresses to about here, we stay in this space, and we just build that out little by little comfortable adaptations. That's how adaptations work. It's like small challenges onto the body, onto the mind, and then we make micro-adjustments. Usually, they're not noticeable until we see little milestones like, "Oh, I've never lifted that much weight before," or, "I've never run that long before. I have never done this that fast before.:

Elara: As far as the type of exercise someone does, like say they're a mom like me, they have young children, they have limited time, just like your sister. In terms of being efficient with your time and growing that pain cave. Building that mental stamina to work out more efficiently and break that sweat faster. What type of exercise do you think people should do? There's the craze of CrossFit. Some people are just super into going out for a really long run. Other people are just into lifting. Other people like hot yoga. In your experience, is there a particular way of training? If you just have 30 minutes a day, what would you recommend?

Jameson: We're in the social media era, right? I think that people want to make headlines. They want to say, never do this again, or only do this forever. I think American culture is fixated on this one-stop shop, this singular solution to the problem. When in reality it's a little bit more complex and it's much more balanced than that. For example, right now the US Department of Health has minimum recommendations for the general population, the adult population. For aerobic activity, we can think like cardio, respiratory. We're looking at greater than or equal to 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week.

You can regress that to 75 minutes. 30 minutes, five days a week of vigorous-intensity, aerobic activity. That is in either of those options or somewhere in that spectrum, in conjunction with a minimum of two days of strength training per week. I think that both are important. I'm actually really happy that we've arrived at that place because that-- you could call this confirmation bias. I think that fits into this evolutionary perspective really well because both of those types of physical activity would have been required for regular humans for a majority of our evolutionary timeline.

I think each one of these camps-- I think CrossFit is awesome because it's this full-body approach. It really does check both boxes. My only issue with CrossFit is that-- I try to get as much information about a new individual as I can. If I had a dollar for every time I heard the sentence, "I used to do CrossFit until I got injured." That's the issue with CrossFit is, I think, the intensity isn't appropriate for a lot of the population. I do think that resistance training is probably the thing we need to sell people on the most.

I think that endurance training like jogging has successfully proliferated the zeitgeist. Most people probably understand that, "Okay, I should go for a jog. I should get my heart rate up. I should sweat." I think resistance training specifically for the female population is something that we could in the health space do better at convincing them of the benefits. Because I personally would argue that-- it's necessary for everybody, but I could argue that it's more necessary for women actually than for men who have traditionally saturated the strength training space.

Diana: That's exactly where I was going to go. I was going to say, can you speak to the women who maybe are afraid to do resistance or strength training because they don't want to get bulky? Also to men who maybe don't want to do cardio because they are so focused on building muscle.

Jameson: Okay. I would say starting with women, I think so. Women are, more than men predisposed to osteopenia or osteoporosis. About 30 to 35 years of age, no person, male or female, will gain any additional bone mineral density. From that age, we will all progressively see our bone mineral density taper off. That slope drops at a greater rate for women than for men. Women, unfortunately, once they reach menopause, that slope drops off even sharper. What we can do are certain behaviors, for example, adequate vitamin D, calcium, vitamin K2, protein, in conjunction with adequate resistance training. That's really the prescription for protecting that bone mineral density.

It's actually really scary the numbers of people in the older population that die shortly after traumatic bone breakages later in life. It can legitimately extend lifespan by decades. For women, Diana, like you said, I've heard that many times. If I added that dollar per with what I mentioned earlier, I'd be a rich man. That apprehension of resistance training for the fear of getting too bulky, well, we could deconstruct that. Anatomically, men and women are different. As far as an endocrine profile, hormonally, it's not really built into the female experience to build that much muscle, you are going to have to try very, very, very hard to get "bulky."

You probably have to dedicate your life as a professional athlete in that capacity. Also, it really should be in every woman's benefit to preserve that bone mineral density. That's not even considering all of the gender or biological sex non-specific benefits of exercise that men and women should be benefiting from. Then for men specifically, afraid of cardio. There's a lot of research out there showing that there are certain behaviors that can mitigate muscle loss. For example, an increased protein intake.

I guess it really depends on your outcome and your goals. You could speak to a lot of competitive strongmen, and they'll acknowledge that type of lifestyle and behavior it's not sustainable long term. Honestly, competitive sports in general, it's difficult to sell those as sustainable because it's just such an intense experience. It can usually only be facilitated for a small window of time when you're looking at an entire person's lifespan.

If they have athletic goals-- if anybody came to me and said, "I don't want to do cardio." Okay, here, actually, this is perfect. If we're talking about women being predisposed to bone disease, like osteopenia and osteoporosis, men are similarly predisposed to cardiovascular disease. Right now cardiovascular disease is the leading noncommunicable killer in, at least, the United States, that might be worldwide. Therefore, and one of the greatest protective behaviors that you can have, is a good cardio-respiratory fitness. You're going to get that from, hence its name, cardio exercise.

Elara: Not all cardio or strength-building exercises have to be uncomfortable. Not all of them have to be CrossFit, where your cortisol levels are spiking, your blood pressure is going through the roof, all that stuff, your heart rate is going through the roof. For example, I like wearing one of my smartwatches, so I can see what my heart rate is all the time. About a year ago, before I became pregnant, I taught a lot of hot yoga. One of the things I noticed when I was teaching a lot of hot yoga and doing a lot of yoga, where my heart rate would still go up a reasonable amount, it wasn't skyrocketing when I was doing CrossFit.

My resting heart rate when I was sleeping was about 10 beats per minute lower than my resting heart rate when I was just training CrossFit. Do you have any recommendations? You touch on the fact that men, in particular, are at risk of heart disease, of exercises that they should do, like more relaxing strength-building exercise, such as yoga. Also, I've just been very into looking into just what are relaxing ways we can work out and burn more calories. I was living over in Denmark, another popular thing was sauna and cold plunge.

Jameson: Great point, Elara. Again, media sensationalizes things, I think a lot of the times when we look out at what's happening in the exercise space, you see people deadlifting incredible amounts of weight, you see people competing in competitions. Nothing against any of that. You're right, it's how valuable is that for the general population. Again, we are in the golden era of science. There are these cultural behaviors that now science is beginning to illuminate why they are specifically valuable, like heat exposure, cold exposure. There's a lot of intervention, I would say, like how you can adjust your resting metabolic rate.

Your resting metabolic rate, for those who don't understand what that is, basically it's the amount of energy required by your body to maintain basic life functions, circulation, your heartbeats, vasodilation, things like this. People with more muscle mass have an increased resting metabolic rate. Just by you having more lean mass on your body, you are going to be burning more calories at rest. Then you're right, there are behaviors like cold plunge, heat exposure. To be honest, those are hot topics right now. There's just constantly new research coming in, time intervals, temperatures, combinations with different things.

What I would say for people, no, it doesn't need to be remarkably intense. I think that there's a great principle that I refer to often, and it's called the SAID principle, as in you said something. It's specific adaptation to imposed demand. Basically, we've already touched on earlier, the body is highly specific-- well, it's specific and it's highly conservative. That's for its number one priority, again, from the beginning of our conversation is it's the preservation of energy long enough for you to successfully procreate. You really could simplify the human experience down to those two goals.

Specific adaptation to imposed demand, basically, it's sending the body a message that this is the demand that I need you to adapt to. For example, if I'm consistently lifting heavy things, or I'm sitting in a squatted position, or I'm walking to the grocery store, and it's exhausting for me. The body will make the adaptations in response to protect you in that experience a little bit better. That works both ways. Again, the body is highly conservative. We learned a lot from the Apollo missions, a lot of research NASA did on how fast the body lost bone mineral density and muscle tissue just by leaving Earth's gravity.

Unless the body has reason to maintain these certain functions in these certain tissue percentages on the body, it's going to let go of it. Especially the expensive stuff like bone and muscle. I think the biggest tools in the toolkit for regular people is to make adjustments to your environment that force you to move regularly. For example, I'd say, if you are watching Netflix, get off the couch, maybe sit on the ground, that's going to force you to change postures. If it's in a decent proximity, try to walk to the grocery store, try to walk to the restaurant you're going to.

This is a tough sell because, again, we are all biased toward comfortable experiences. Really it's the small-- we call it like ADLs, activities of daily living that really do have the potential to make the greatest impact. Exercise alone inside of a 45-minute window is not enough to mitigate unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. The more that you can just scatter challenges that are going to force you into these positions that send that message to the body to be and adapt in a certain way, I think that that's going to be the most approachable for people.

Diana: So interesting.

Elara: It makes sense.

Diana: Jameson, one of the things that you talk about a lot and you've influenced me on is our feet. We talk a lot about our feet [laughs] and using either not wearing shoes or having wide-toe boxes. I was just thinking about these small changes that we can make to have a better living experience or to feel better. I feel like this is one of those things that people can start to do that doesn't take a whole lot of effort. Tell us about our feet, please.

Jameson: We have another four hours. [laughs] No, that's okay. I've unofficially been dubbed as the foot guy. Growing up I wore conventional footwear just like anybody. I was a skateboarder in high school in my youth. I also have a genetic predisposition to like a certain foot shape in response to wearing constrictive footwear. About 10, 12 years ago, it was about 2010, my feet were regularly a mess. I was regularly experiencing common things like bunion pain, plantar fasciitis, shin splints, tight calves, all these things.

Looking at the footwear experience in 2024 can help a person understand a lot of what's going on. I think a good example is that the people deciding our footwear are not the people that should be deciding our footwear. It's a reminder that the people with their hands on the steering wheel aren't always the people that should be driving. There's a recent movie called Air, and it's the feature film about Michael Jordan and his contract with Nike.

Diana: Great movie.

Jameson: Great movie. There's a really great part, and I don't know if they were intentional about this. When they were designing the Air Jordan, the designer says to them, he says, "Do you want function or do you want fashion?" They say fashion, which is hilarious because Michael Jordan has said that those were some of the most uncomfortable shoes he ever wore when he was in the NBA. I think he said that his feet would bleed sometimes afterwards. If you don't want to take it from me right now, there's a total legend and I believe she's the head of the Department of Biomechanics at Harvard.

Her name is Irene Davis, and she among a lot of other professionals in academia, higher ranking people in academia, are in the same school of opinion as me where modern footwear, you could really deconstruct to three primary issues. Number one, it's very rigid, okay? The foot itself is meant to be a mechanism with many moving parts. To hold something in a certain position, if anybody's broken a bone and they remember what it was like to have the cast removed, we can go back to that said principle about specific adaptation to impose demand.

If you break your arm and they put it in a cast, your body's going to identify very quickly that you're not using your arms. It's going to atrophy, and that's a preservation mechanism. The same thing has the potential to happen in the shoe. If you're just constantly wearing constrictive footwear that hold the foot in a certain position, it's going to atrophy and it's going to affect all of those tissues. The body's tissues are always in flux, including bone, which a lot of people forget. Number two is, if you look at a baby, Elara, you just had your child. Diana, it's been a deluge of these like foot pitches and articles for Diana because her and Harley are about to have their baby.

If you look at a baby's foot, the widest part of the human foot isbig toe straight across to the little toe. Yet footwear tapers in this direction toward the midline of the foot. It's constricting what we'd call the toe box. Then the last thing is that you'll find this very big padded elevated heel. Now humans walk, when we walk, we walk heel to toe. When we run the heel bone, the calcaneus, ceases to be a component of that gait pattern, generally speaking. Really it becomes more of a mid to forefoot experience. For example, if you see competitive prosthetics in track and sports, there's no real replacement for the human heel. It's just this mid-to-forefoot device.

Mechanically, if you affect the foot, you're going to affect the ankle. If anybody wants to find me in Salt Lake City, I'm more than happy to walk them through a very simple presentation of how this works. For example, one of the beautiful adaptations of the human body is the bony arch of the human foot, which looks quite like an arch. Then you have four layers of muscles that connect that arch. Like all muscles in the body, other than smooth muscle and cardiac tissue, they're meant to lengthen and then contract. If strong, mobile, healthy muscles, the foot should pronate and supinate. Again, it's this very kind of moving mechanism. Okay, I'm trying to rein it in a little bit.

Diana: No, I love it. Keep going.

Elara: I love it. Keep going. You're making me flex my feet right now. I'm so glad that I'm barefoot. My husband has a like, "We should be wearing slippers in the house rule." I'm like, "Preach, I'm barefoot all the time." This is making me feel great about my no-shoe habit.

Jameson: That is great. It truly is. That's the first and greatest intervention for anybody is to wear shoes less of the time.

Elara: Yes. No shoes in the house rule. Anyway, you can continue.

Jameson: No, really quick. Mechanically, there's kind of an epidemic of chronic, what they call hyper pronation, where the arch collapses, you know collapsed arches. That's going to internally rotate the ankle, which is going to internally rotate the hip, which is going to affect the low back. Again, it's this difference between reductionism and holism. Unfortunately, we have these specialists a lot of the time scattered about the health space. You have a podiatrist and then you have a hip doctor. You have a back doctor. It would be nice to get all of them at this table where they can have a conversation about how one is affecting the other.

Elara: For example, I went to a store a couple of months ago and I got a new pair of sneakers. The first time in my life, they were like, "You know you should get inserts, support your arch. You have a high arch." Are inserts part of the problem? Are they making us lazy?

Jameson: They can be. I think that they can be an acute intervention like many things. if somebody has had an ACL reconstruction, they might benefit from having a support sleeve wrapped around their knee. That honestly could be like a long-term intervention. Again, the body didn't necessarily evolve to be healthy. It evolved, like we said, just to have kids. If we get to a place where something starts to malfunction, it's not necessarily that we can expect that the body is going to perfectly adjust itself to bring us back to this place of perfection, if there is an idea or is a perfection. Inserts can be a tool. I think there's value in varying the foot experience.

Yes, I feel like we could go down a rabbit hole with inserts. Inserts can be a problem. If we're constantly propped up in this position and the foot rarely has a challenging environment to successfully pronate and supinate. Then, yes, that could result in a mobility issue and a mechanical issue of the foot and further up the kinetic chain. I think that could be very much one of the problems. I think those padded heels are affecting the gait pattern of a lot of people. The heel drive when running, it's pretty exciting. If we had a designated conversation about this, then I could just dump really interesting research on the difference between a forefoot strike and a heel-foot strike.

On loading rates and ground reaction force and how that affects a load on the body. All the way back, Diana, yes, I think that if anybody wanted to change anything about the way that they're wearing shoes, in my perfect world, and we are trending in that direction, it seems there are more positive examples. Actually, back to pop culture, there's a great moment in the Barbie film where she's wearing her high heels and her foot just stays that way.

Then when her foot drops down, she has a line that's something like, "I would never wear shoes like this if my feet were flat." I would say for people, try to find footwear that resembles the barefoot experience as much as you can and that means a flexible sole. We call it zero drop. That's the same depth beneath the toe as it is the heel. Then, again, as wide of a toe box as you can get that allow your toes to sit in their natural position.

Elara: You've opened up Pandora's box there. Do we have two more hours to go into the-

Diana: I know. We will have to come back with Jameson.

Elara: I know. We're going to have to do a whole another episode on just feet, which-

Jameson: More than happy to.

Elara: -we will definitely pencil in for season two, but to round things out a little bit, just really quick-fire answer, Jameson, first thing off the top of your head, give me one workout trend that you love right now and one workout trend that you're not so in love with. I'm not going to use the word hate, but that you're not into.

Jameson: Are you familiar with the farmer's carry?

Elara: Yes. Big fan of the farmer's carry.

Diana: Okay, wait. I hate the farmer's carry, so talk me into loving this. [laughs]

Elara: I love it. I'm one of those people who every time I go grocery shopping, I'm like, "Let me get all the bags at the same time so I don't need to go back."

Jameson: Diana, like we said earlier, is that if you hate it, then you're doing it right. I think the farmer's carry, I really like the farmer's carry because the farmer's carry is very approachable.

Diana: Can you explain what it is for anyone who might not know?

Jameson: Great point. The farmer's carry basically would be you, obviously with responsible mechanics, you bend down and you pick up weights, one in each hand, and you're just walking. Usually, it's heavy enough to where that is quite a challenge. The nice thing about that is that humans, there are only a small handful of bipeds, which mean an animal that walks on two feet on the planet. Birds, kangaroos, humans, I'm pretty sure that's it. The human ability to carry things with our hands is very unique to us. that's one of the reasons that we sacrificed millions of years ago, our climbing abilities were for our abilities to walk on two feet and carry things with us over long distances.

You're doing a very authentically human behavior. Again, it's very approachable for the general population. You could pick up anything heavy in the house. Then it's also easy to perform an asymmetry. Holding weight on one side of the body, because I think one of the biggest issues in the world right now that isn't regularly spoken about is the lack of core strength. A little bit more illumination for those who aren't privy to what the core is, but the core are a series of muscles in the pelvic floor and the middle trunk that support that empty space between the ribcage and the hips where only your lumbar spine connects the two.

We have this beautiful network of muscles that help us create these postures and movements in stable positions. Due to our generally sedentary nature nowadays and our chronic sitting in chairs, no offense Elara, no offense, Diana.

Elara: I know. I'm like, "Why don't I have my stand desk?”

Diana: Out of the three of us, Jameson's the only one standing.

Elara: I'm not using it. I have one in the other room. I'm just choosing not to use it. Honestly, it's because I fidget too much. I'd be like a cockatoo up here.

Jameson: You guys are professionally still. I'm sure if you fast-forwarded this, I'd be dancing all over the place. Putting an asymmetry on that or say instead of carrying two heavy things, you just carry one, all of a sudden that's a great core challenge.

Elara: Holding a baby.

Jameson: Holding a baby. Exactly. That's actually a very big one. We could have a whole episode on why humans are born at a certain time and what that did to the female experience, et cetera. The other part of your question was, something that I'm not crazy about?

Elara: What's a workout trend that you don't love right now?

Jameson: I got to be honest, I'm sure that there's a few out there, but I think I'd say CrossFit. I think CrossFit is awesome. CrossFit seems really great, again, at putting together full-body movements using free weights, which is very educational. It seems really great at community building. I do think, however, that-- and I can't necessarily say this is the fault of CrossFit itself, because it's just become such a phenom that I think it would go on a gym-by-gym basis to regulate this.

I think it's just a really high-risk approach to exercise. Like, "Hey, here's this very complex multi-joint movement with a huge amount of weight, and I want you to do 20 of them as fast as you can." I think the margin of risk is increased significantly. If we could just find a way to approach those same exercises, as a lot of gyms do, as I do with my clients, it's a very slow progression into those movements where way down the line, you are doing more CrossFit-esque movements.

Elara: I'm one of those people that if I spoke to you, you'd have another dollar, I think you said, where I've thrown out my back, once a year. I throw my back in CrossFit. It's because I get weight bullied. I go in after not training for two weeks, CrossFit, I've been doing something else. Then they're like, "Oh, Elara, you got to RX." I haven't been RXing. You sit on the board. Then you do it and then you throw out your back because you haven't been doing it regularly. That's where I think the problem really lies is that is the RX workout where it's like you get naturally weight-bullied, like, "Oh, this is the ideal amount you should be using. If you're using less then you're weaker."

It's one of those things where it's intrinsically connected to your ego. If you're able to detach your ego, which I've gotten better at. When I go in, I just am like, "Look, I'm never going to be RXing, honestly, for the near future, because I'm not in here regularly enough." It's fine, but I just think it's hard for people to detach their egos to the workout that are going into CrossFit, at least in my personal experience.

Jameson: I think that's a great point. I'm glad you said that, because I think that is motivation, which some people require to move forward, right? I think that that example lacks a few basic questions that I think every trainer should lead every situation with. For example, if you were with me, a couple of basic questions. We're in Utah and it's winter, I would ask you, "How have you been sleeping? How have you been recovering since your pregnancy? How many times a week are you working out? Did you ski today? Are you fighting off an illness?" There are so many initial questions that should be asked before we consider that you are in a place where it's time for you to PR or to make that progression, right?

I think that it's really important to guide the client into a place where they can make that decision themselves. Because peer pressure, I think, is as detrimental as it is potential for people.

Diana: Then just for anyone who might not know, you guys use two fancy little things. RX is the CrossFit will give them, “This is how much weight you should be using.” Then PR is a personal record for like, "I've lifted this amount of heavyweight and this is my first time."

Elara: One of our questions to round out is, myself, I just had a C-section in January. I just gotten the go-ahead at week eight because I went too hard after five weeks and ripped open my stitches. Now eight weeks in, I have to clear to start working out. At this point, in your opinion, how many weeks or months, or years would it take me to get back in shape to go for a personal record?

Jameson: I tend to be wary of standardizations when it comes to prescriptions for people. I think all people are different people. All experiences are different experiences. It would be, I think, ignorant of me to expect that you and Diana shared the exact same timeline of recovery and return to that space of competition. It is really exciting that the first time you build out potential in the body, specifically say muscle tissue or muscle function, motor patterns, it's never going to be that difficult because the body has this ability to rebuild it. The rebuilding process is quicker than the initial process.

Your return will not be as long as it first took you to get there. That said, I think that the more important question is, are we respecting all of the variables in place? Like we said, who knows how Koa is going to behave? Are you getting adequate sleep? Number one. What are you eating like? Number two. Did you experience a diastasis recti? Are we focusing on certain core rehab exercises, pelvic floor rehab exercises? I think that it could be a pretty fluid return, but again, I just don't think that anybody should expect it to be that simple of an answer that you could look up on a piece of paper and say, "Okay, this is where I should be in X amount of time."

It's similar to a diagnosis of somebody saying you have six months to live.

Elara: The way that I like to think about it is some people are crazy. They're like, "Oh, you bounce back in three months." I don't like that term bounce back either, but I was pregnant for 9 or 10 months. I assume it's going to take 9 or 10 months to be unpregnant and come back that way generally speaking.

Jameson: I love that you think about it that way because I think a lot of people, they expect progress to work at a faster rate than regression. For example, I think it's one thing, the way I like to remind people of this is that it's slow in both directions. For example, going and eating out at fast food isn't going to give you cancer in one day, It takes a long time to lose something just as it can take that much time to gain something. While we may be banging our heads against the wall, wanting a process to move faster, we should also, I think, probably be grateful that it doesn't move so fast. I've heard a lot of people come in from, say, a two-week vacation and be like, "Oh my gosh, I lost all my progress." It's like, "No. Don't worry. It does not happen that fast." Patience, I think you're right, Elara. I think patience is probably a valuable tool in a situation like this.

Diana: I love that perspective shift of that we should be grateful that we don't gain it back instantly because we also don't lose it instantly. I never thought about that, but I love that perspective shift. Last question before I move into our final two for you. What is an underrated exercise and an overrated exercise? Besides farmer's carry, you have to choose something else. [chuckles]

Elara: Mine's plank, underrated plank. I'm a big fan of planking. I've done like an hour-long plank back in my day.

Diana: She is crazy.

Elara: Big fan of planking. I think it's great for mental, physical, all things health.

Jameson: To be honest, I was going back and forth between plank and a bird dog, which is, for those listening, it's just a prone position. You're on your hands and knees and you're extending one leg and the opposite arm out overhead, either for repetitions or isometric, which is just holding position that challenges the muscle. I'll flip it over and I will say, I think dead bug.

Diana: Dead bugs are good.

Elara: You can do them up until 10 months pregnant. Up until you give birth, you can be doing dead bugs as long as you're not conning.

Jameson: That's a very approachable exercise that's very easy to progress or regress. It checks that box that we mentioned earlier, core strength. A dead bug is basically you've supinated the position, you've flipped over the position of a bird dog. Imagine you're lying on your back, your knees are stacked vertically just above your hips, and your knee joint is at a right angle, okay? Then you are extending the elbows so that your wrists are stacked on top of the elbow, which is stacked on top of the shoulder. Okay?

It's like if you were in a tabletop, hands and knees, and you just froze your body and flipped it over onto your back. Now that's a dead bug. Hence the name, aptly named dead bug. You look like a dead bug. Now, what that would be is the exact same movement pattern as the bird dog, where I would extend one arm overhead at the shoulder, and then I would extend the opposite leg out, reaching in both directions, above and below.

Diana: It's great for core.

Elara Then you alternate.

Jameson: Diana, what's yours?

Diana: I'm going to go walking. I think that people really underrate walking and they think that it's not hardcore enough, my heart rate's not getting up, and then people don't do it. Really, I've seen incredible changes happen for people just walking. I'm going to go walking. Overrated?

Jameson: I'm jealous of your answer.

Elara: Biking. Stagnant biking for me. People that are into Peloton class or Peloton and SoulCycle. Not into it. It doesn't grind my gears or trip my trigger.

Diana: I can see that.

Jameson: Trip your trigger.

Elara: No. I loved biking. I lived in Denmark, so I was biking, all over the place, all over the city. That's different. I'm talking about stationary bike. I'm not a fan of this-- Overrated.

Diana: Jameson?

Jameson: I'm going to break the rules and I'm just going to say categorically, I think that single joint movements are overrated.

Diana: Wait, tell us what that is.

Jameson: A classic single joint movement that a lot of people are familiar with would be a bicep curl. Basically, if your arms are hanging down by your sides and you're standing up, if you were holding on to a dumbbell and then you just hinged at the elbow, that's a bicep curl. Targets a specific muscle group. I think you could pretty easily argue that that's probably a very popular exercise because movements like that are a relic of the weightlifting days.

I think a lot of people don't appreciate the huge influence Arnold Schwarzenegger had on the US population's enthusiasm for exercise. Which is great, but I think that we should still appreciate that he had a very specific outcome goal, which was bodybuilding. Whereas in our approach, if we're more focused on health and functionality, there's a very rare situation where you're going to isolate the entire body and you're going to use a single joint to move something heavy. Whereas we could look at multi-joint movements, right? That's usually what the human experience is filled with.

Multi-joint movement would be a push, which is at the shoulder and elbow. It would be a squat, which is the hip and knee. Again, I think multi-joint movements are much more functional and realistic.

Diana: Is there any way to turn a bicep curl into a multi-joint movement?

Jameson: Absolutely. There are many ways. One, for example, would be, I would say, you could-- again, one of many, but if your feet were, say parallel hip width and you drag a toe just back to the heel, so you're in a staggered stance, I would say you could hinge at the hip. You could extend the hips and use a little bit of that momentum to curl at the elbow. You get another hinge in the knee, contract, engage the core, and then you press overhead. You've just taken a single joint movement to a full body movement. Obviously, there are a few moving parts there.

Diana: I'm also going to break the rules and I'm going to say overrated is doing any exercise that you're doing just because you think you have to or because it's going to give you a certain body. We should exercise because it's fun and we like the movement and it feels good.

Jameson: Nice.

Elara: I like it.

Jameson: I'm voting for you.

Elara: I vote for you. Diana for president.

[laughter]

Diana: Okay, Jameson, we always end our podcasts asking two questions. The first question is, what is something in life that you have had to learn the hard way?

Jameson: Something in life I had to learn the hard way was part of the reason why I named my business Black Wolf Training is A, I wanted to take the attention away from me and I wanted to create an idea that other people could relate to and attach their journey to. Because at the time, the wolf was a consistent theme for me in my life. One of the initially inspirational ideas of a wolf but later came to be a misunderstanding, was this idea of the lone wolf. This is all in retrospect, right? Hindsight is 2020. I found that I was always a pretty sensitive kid and that carried into my adulthood.

Anytime I felt hurt or let down by people that I relied on, I would pull away. Often that was in conjunction with a big move. I've lived in a lot of places thus far, even so far as abroad. I really held on to this lone-wolf mentality. I don't need anybody's help. I can do this by myself. I'm the only person that's required to fulfill my experience. The irony there is that similar to humans, the lone wolf concept is actually more appropriate in that the wolf requires the pack and the lone wolf does not survive alone in the wild.

I think you can use that to mirror the human experience, where humans, we're not fast. We cannot fly. We cannot breathe underwater. We are not strong by any measure compared to a lot of other animals on the planet. One of our superpowers is our ability to work together and rely on each other. I think one thing I had to learn the hard way was how valuable and not just actually valuable, but how necessary it is to be a part of a community, to contribute to that community, and to allow that community to support you.

Diana: Good answer.

Elara: Very good answer. Now this one's a little bit more of a softball. What is a mantra or lesson, some piece of sage advice you've gotten from a family or friend that you've used during your lifetime? Something you haven't had to learn the hard way, just a good piece of advice that stuck and was good advice.

Jameson: This is one of those moments where I feel like George Costanza, where as soon as the podcast is over, I'm going to think, "I should have said something else." [laughter] No, I say that because I am very grateful and blessed to be the beneficiary of a lot of wisdom from a variety of people in my life. It's so hard to pick just one. It's like saying, "What's your favorite hike?"

Elara: Right now, what's something that's been sticking with you?

Jameson: I don't know if you could call it a Kung Fu movie, but it's a martial arts movie with Jet Li. No offense to my family, because again, the support and wisdom I've gotten from them is beyond bountiful. At this point in my life, there is this Jet Li moment where he's this, wise, masterful, Buddhist Kung Fu monk, and he's sitting in a cave and he's meditating. They're on the eve of a battle. The kid who's new to this whole martial arts battle experience comes up to him and he just starts unloading all of his fears and all of his concerns and anxieties, "What if this happens? What if I do this? What if I can't?" Et cetera, et cetera.

After this rant, all the while Jet Li is just sitting there postured and his eyes are closed, he opens his eyes and he turns to the kid and he just says, "Don't forget to breathe." For me, I think that in this chaotic experience, take a breath and reset. There's a lot going on, especially in 2024, especially in the United States. I think that we're all doing our best. Just taking a breath every now and again gives me a chance to sit back and give myself a break.

Elara: That speaks to me. Taking a breath and resetting. How taking a deep breath, that's something anyone can do anywhere, any time of day, any place. Just take a breath, reset, continue on.

Diana: Yes, so important.

Elara: Really good advice.

Diana: Jameson, I think that we got through a quarter of the questions that we had for you. [laughs] We'll have to bring you back on. We didn’t even touch on mobility, which I was so excited to talk to you about. We'll have to do a mobility, a foot, a whole other episode with you. For anyone who was delighted, every time I go to one of Jameson's class, I just sit there. My husband and I call him, what do we say? Jameson's preaching the good word of mobility. [laughter] You just have such a way of speaking that just makes everyone want to pay attention. I love the way that you explain things. Where can people find you?

Jameson: Thank you for that compliment, Diana. I appreciate it. www.blackwolf.training. You could find me on Instagram @blackwolftraining.

Elara: Awesome. If you have any questions or other topics you think would be really interesting for us to cover with Jameson, drop them in the comments below and we'll try and address them next time we'll bring him back on the podcast because we're definitely going to have a repeat performance. More to come. It was great having you Jameson and can't wait to see you back.

Jameson: Thank you so much, guys. It's so nice to be here and I'm really grateful. I'd love to come back anytime.

Presenter: Sip, savor, and live well with new episodes of The Matcha Guardians every Wednesday. Follow our show for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening right now. Leave your questions and comments below. Find us on Instagram @thematchaguardians or click on matcha.com.