Ep. 388: Injury and the Stockdale Paradox, feat. Alex Sterner

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 2: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 388. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach and I am excited because we've been trying to set this one up for a while and we made it happen. I've got Alex Sterner from Electron Performance on the line. Alex, my friend, how are you? Speaker 3: I'm doing great and uh I'm happy that we were finally able to make this happen. Speaker 2: Hey, it's worth it, man, and I think everyone's gonna find out why. First, maybe let's introduce yourself. Who are you and where might people know you from? Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm a strength coach. I'm also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and I own, like you mentioned, Electrum Performance here in San Diego, California. I work primarily with Jiu-Jitsu and combat sport athletes in the weight room and really try to give them, you know, the benefits that a lot of other sports have in terms of getting their body ready for the sport. It was a long-time dream of mine, really took uh kind of a wayward route to get here, but yeah, now I have this, we have our own gym here, we see clients all throughout the week and also have an online platform where I have, you know, the pleasure to train lots of people all around the world remotely. Speaker 2: Nice. If people want to check out the online platform, where can they find it? And we'll plug things again at the end, but I just like to sandwich. Speaker 3: Yeah, so my personal Instagram is alex.sterner and my business, if you want to just keep it strict to strength and conditioning for Jiu-Jitsu, Electrum_Performance. And also, we've been pouring a lot more into YouTube lately. Our YouTube channel is Electrum Performance as well. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, I will link all of that in the show notes, but let's dig into the topic here. Strength and conditioning is one of the most commonly requested concepts that we're asked to get into. Same with injury rehab. I mean, all of this, as you know, is tightly related. It can be challenging to talk about on a podcast though, because my experience has been most S&C coaches, they really thrive in a one-on-one environment where they can give people direct guidance. But to take that away and put them behind a microphone and say, you got to give me the concepts, it's been kind of a challenge and this is outside of my skill set. So I am not really able to fill in the blanks like I might be able to when we're talking Jiu-Jitsu. However, the thing I love about you is that you are extremely good at conceptualizing this kind of material and making it accessible to lay people in a way that I think will really add value through just an audio conversation. You had talked before we hit record about the psychology of injury and some of the conceptual frameworks that you use around helping get people back on the mats and build a mindset that is conducive to that. Would you want to maybe dig into that and we can use that to start this off? Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay, so the first thing that I would say on this topic, and I think this is huge, is the understanding that pain is a feature, not a bug of this biological system. So, we are going to feel pain. And it's a useful way for our body to communicate with us. It also doesn't necessarily scale one to one with injury, right? But I think there is value in expecting the fact that we will feel pain at some point and, I mean, even for people who don't train Jiu-Jitsu, but especially for people who do something as intense and demanding as Jiu-Jitsu, you're going to get hurt. And I think that expectation is important because a lot of us start to develop a little bit of fear avoidance, naturally, right? You touch the hot stove, you don't want to touch the hot stove again. And that can sort of like have us retreat into a box where we want to tread perfectly so that we don't get hurt again. And there's elements of that that are natural, there's elements of that that are beneficial. However, a lot of that can slowly morph into some sort of belief that if you just do everything right, you'll never get hurt. And I think it's it's important to understand that you will get hurt, it's okay. And not only that, to help develop the skills to come back from that injury. And and an analogy that I use with a lot of my Jiu-Jitsu athletes is kind of like, you know, when you have your A-game planned out for a competition, it's probably not that you're going to get swept in the first 30 seconds of a match, right? Maybe you're setting up a passing sequence you really like, you're really visualizing the next steps and then they set up a grip or something and you get swept. If your head space is still occupying that like, oh man, I I was so close to that passing sequence. I was one grip away. And you keep living in the past with that, you're not going to fare as well as somebody who as they're getting swept, accepts that that's where they are. And they start maybe setting up single leg X, they're setting up one of their best guards so that they're immediately ready as soon as their butt hits the ground to start to attack and work from that position. And something like getting injured is the same. If somebody has certain goals, whether it's the next belt in Jiu-Jitsu, whether it's an upcoming competition, whether it's a certain number on a certain exercise in the weight room, and they get hurt and they just keep being fixated on that thing that they had in front of them when conditions were different, it can prevent them from really seeing what's in front of them right now and dealing with that productively. So, the whole first step with this is understanding that pain is something that is ideally meant to be understood and expected, and that injury is probably going to pop up. And when you expect that that's going to happen, much like someone in Jiu-Jitsu, you could be a really good passer, but you're going to get swept at some point, right? That's just the reality of it. That's not your A-game, that's not what you're trying to do, but it's probably going to happen. So, if you expect that that's going to happen, when it does happen, you can react to it much more productively. That's that first step. The second step is like, okay, I got injured. What the heck do I do now? And with that, something that I really try to throw out there, and it's funny, I've really preached these elements for a long time before I knew that it was represented in what's known as the Stockdale Paradox. But where I found out about the Stockdale Paradox was actually from Ben Askren, you know, when he had staff, it went to his lungs, he died, he lost a ton of weight, had a double lung transplant. As soon as he was conscious again, he was talking about these small productive steps he was taking. He started to really talk about the Stockdale Paradox. And I was like, hold on a sec. This aligns way too much with how I like coach people through injury. So I did more research on it. And the Stockdale Paradox was it's named after John Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War for seven years, which is far, far longer than most people survived those conditions. And once he got out, he started to really speak on his experiences. And he formulated this thing where he married two seemingly incompatible principles that led to productive action. And he saw that a lot of people gravitated towards one or the other of those two principles and it led to their ultimate downfall. So, those two principles were optimism in terms of your ultimate goal, your ultimate success, combined with a brutal acceptance of the current reality that you're in. And it can be tough to have both of those. And like I said, most people will gravitate towards one or the other. What Stockdale noticed was that people who had that optimism side, it tended to be a bit of a blind optimism. They might set a date and say by Christmas, I'm going to get out. And they would actually do great all the way up until that date. But if that date passed by and they still didn't get out, they would decline rapidly. They didn't have anything to hold on to anymore and just like open-ended blind optimism doesn't tend to work out all that well. And on the other side of that, the people who were immediately brutally honest with themselves about how unfortunate their situation was, never even made progress in the first place. They were depressed because they were a prisoner of war. So, he really married those two concepts. At any point in time, used the combination of those two things to plan out productive action that he could take that kept him going. And I think injuries, while significantly less dramatic than being a prisoner of war, can sort of throw us into this same tendency of of gravitating into one or the other. And as a coach, I see this all the time. People will tend to have one of the other. Some people, they'll have this optimism, it'll be great, but they'll be like, all right, how many weeks do you think until I get better? And I'm very hesitant, especially when someone wants that date. I don't really want to provide that date to them. It could be good, right? If they are better by that time, but it could be a double-edged sword and and we could see something in terms of their rehab that is very similar to what John Stockdale saw with those prisoners of war. And on the other side, you got the people who are super wrapped up in their brutal reality that something like Jiu-Jitsu was taken away from them. And they're just depressed about it and it leaves them incapable of even wanting to take productive action. But when you marry those two things together, and let's let's now shift to the individual who's hurt, right? They're optimistic that they're going to get through this. And sometimes, if someone is struggling with that optimism, I can be that optimism. I can be like, hey, I've seen people with this injury plenty of times, we're going to get through this. And I also like to bring up some of the most gruesome sports injuries that are out there that people did bounce back from to show that like, you know, very few injuries are truly a life sentence. Certainly, sport injuries. Yes, maybe something like a motorcycle crash could be, you know, uh life-altering permanently, but very, very seldom does something that happens on the mats, even if it feels significant, even if it's like you tore your ACL, even if it's you've got this crippling back pain and sciatica and you can't move right now, it is probably not a life sentence, right? So, as a coach, I'm going to see which one they gravitate towards and I'm going to sort of infuse a little bit of that other one. Because when we have both, you are optimistic in the fact that you're going to pull yourself out of this. You're going to leverage me or whatever your support structure is to add some tools to your toolbox so that you can start to use those tools to take that productive action and to line up, I like to view rehab like a staircase, right? And as opposed to giving somebody just an arbitrary timeline, I'm going to be like, okay, so it's a lower body injury. One of the first things we want to be able to do is hit lower body with maybe an emphasis on other joints, the ones that are less affected. And then the next step is we're going to do something, let's say it's their knee. Then we're going to start to introduce some more stable, you know, slower strength movements for that joint and start to directly train that joint, right? And then we'll work our way up and I continue that staircase with stuff in sport. What I'll have them do, they'll start to explore positions within Jiu-Jitsu. What we want to do first, whether it's specific to the sport or the weight room, let's map out the areas that are currently safe for you. What are the things you can do that don't worsen symptoms, right? And at whatever stage in that rehab process we are, okay, this is our safe area. These are the things we can do and we don't even really have to think twice about it. And then we we map out some of these other things where we're like, okay, it's kind of symptomatic over here. Maybe when you come up from a sweep and try to post your leg out, you're like, oh, it's not ready there. So, maybe you've got some trusted partners where you're doing some lighter situations, you're playing guard, but you're not finishing any of your sweeps. And again, that's further along on that staircase that allows people to build not just the physical resilience that allows them to really like get back to sport, but also the mental resilience and trust in their body. And this is something that I think a lot of people miss out on. When we're younger, you can kind of just rest and then dive back into it and you'll usually be okay. And when we're younger, we're a little less risk averse. We won't really lose trust in our body quite the same way. But as we get older, we might fixate a little bit more, get a little bit neurotic. We lose trust in our body. So by setting up this staircase, we're not just taxing the physiological structures that need to be taxed so that we can rebuild that capacity, but we're also going to start to regain that trust through demonstration. I'm not just going to ask you to blindly trust your knee again. I'm going to give you a series of events that we're going to do where, you know, you're doing these explosive multi-directional plyos again. You're starting to do situations and things that were formerly a limitation no longer are. And we're letting that process prove to you that you can in fact trust your body again. And I think this is where a lot of times people love to separate the mental and the physical, but they're so closely intertwined. I think self-efficacy is it's damn near a superpower. If you believe that you can do something, you are far more likely to actually do that thing. And self-efficacy can be built up. We don't have to just fake it till we make it. You know, with that staircase model I was talking about, you're actually proving to yourself that you are increasingly ready and capable and able to do that thing. And that is so important once you go through that process. Once somebody's gotten swept in competition and then swept somebody back and then passed their guard, they're like, oh, I can I can do that again. Getting injured is no different. So, if we view that injury as a skill, we build that skill and we build self-efficacy and your belief in the fact that you can pull yourself out of this, the next time an injury rolls along, even if it's a different joint and maybe you need different specific tools to be able to work on that joint, you believe in the overall process. You're like, I've done this before. I man, I did this when I blew out my ACL. Now that I, you know, I jammed my wrist, like, I'll be able to do this, right? You need you'll plug and play a couple different tools in there, but that belief, that self-efficacy just improves with each time that we do this. And that's also why I think the active approach to injury and rehab is so valuable. Because if you can get somebody to genuinely believe that, oh, an injury rolls along, that's not such a big deal. That's such a powerful thing. Then doing things like Jiu-Jitsu become so much less stressful. You're not constantly like, I saw this, it was a YouTube video that went viral. It was called how Jiu-Jitsu saved my life but destroyed my body. And he kept talking about this mindset that he was in where he was thinking about all of his past injuries and he wasn't having a very proactive approach to rehab. And each injury actually moved him further and further back in terms of self-efficacy. He felt more and more helpless each time he got hurt to the point where he cornered himself mentally and said, I'm one injury away from quitting Jiu-Jitsu. I go as far as to say, if you have entered that mindset where you say, I'm one injury away from quitting Jiu-Jitsu, you've already, you have prematurely ended your Jiu-Jitsu career. And on the flip side of that, we can avoid getting into that dead end by focusing on that skill of bouncing back from injury, by improving our self-efficacy, by focusing on our locus of control and starting to expand that as we rehab. There's so many positive, optimistic ways that we can view this process that all comes from some visualization, some mindfulness, all of these things that go into, quite frankly, a lot of other areas of Jiu-Jitsu that we just have to apply to this. You got a little problem solving in there. There's a good amount of problem solving in Jiu-Jitsu, right? Self-efficacy matters. Sometimes you don't have the perfect grips to set up a sweep. You just kind of believe that you're going to take this person's base out and stand up, right? It's not always picture perfect. There's there's a lot of overlap there and those lessons we've been learning on the mats, we can just sort of apply to this other set of skills and build them up to the point where you're very confident in your ability to bounce back from it. And I think that's such an empowering thing. I think it's so powerful. I think it spills over into other parts of our life. We start to view ourselves as far less fragile. We start to embrace the process of building our body up. We take a genuine interest in it. And that, I would say, overwhelmingly is the thing that I try to impart on my clients. I have some crazy weird goals in the weight room for all these, you know, for anyone who does find their way to my Instagram and stuff. I do these weird lifts and stuff all the time, right? I understand that I like to lift heavy circle a little bit more than everyone else. I don't necessarily need to impart that on people, but if I could impart that self-efficacy and that belief that you have control over all of these details in the four walls of my weight room. And we're dealing with inanimate objects. If a 25-pound dumbbell hurts you, well, guess what we're not going to pick up today, the 25-pound dumbbell. We're going to go with what we can handle that day. And it's just such a productive way to handle these things and it it empowers people to really continue to be active as long as something like Jiu-Jitsu will serve them. So, that's kind of like a microcosm of how I deal with injury and the value that I try to provide to people who maybe don't love the weight room like I do, but can use it as a means to an end to allow them to train Jiu-Jitsu as frequently and for as long as they would like. Speaker 2: Man, it's kind of eerie how relevant what you said is to my situation as I've been sitting here listening to you. I've been thinking, man, a lot of this describes some of the challenges that I've been going through. A while back, I had a shoulder injury, had to get surgery on it. It's the first really bad injury I've had in my Jiu-Jitsu journey. And, you know, at first, that really put me in a negative head space that I had this injury because it was really getting in the way of my ability to do pretty much anything. But after the surgery, I got access to one of the best surgeons up here in British Columbia, got it done, it was a complete success, everything went great, and I sort of mentally committed to myself, I'm going to rebuild and get better out of this. And I spent the next six to eight months just working my ass off to rehab. The rehab process went great. My physio was like, you did an amazing job with this rehab process. I was super dedicated. I was super proud of myself. Got cleared to go back to Jiu-Jitsu. Basically, the first day back, I didn't even do anything weird. I was just kind of moving around. But after one or two really light movement sessions, my shoulder flared up like crazy, started clunking around out of the joint again. We were worried that I might have returned it or reinjured it. My physio said, you got to stop right away. You got to take, you know, a few more months off, can't do it anymore. That I did not expect and I was not ready for. I had mentally prepared myself for the six to eight months rehab journey after already losing over a year of training. What I had not prepared myself for was that after all of that, I would immediately get hit with another setback. And that one really impacted me and it's something I've been struggling with. I felt after getting cleared at first that I was ready to get back into this. I felt strong, I felt great, but then immediately coming back and getting knocked right out again and seeing my physio freak and pull me out, that really impacted my mindset in a way that I still haven't quite gotten back from. And I am very risk averse right now. Even just getting back onto the mats for me is a challenge because after all of this time doing rehab, I'd basically re-architected my life so that I was doing other exercises instead of Jiu-Jitsu. And so, you know, Jiu-Jitsu doesn't even feel like it it's this thing that I need because I sort of demonstrated over the last while that I don't need to actually go here and be training hard all the time. There's other stuff I can do. So, that was a challenge that I was not ready for. I had prepared myself for the first initial process of getting back in, but I had not prepared myself for putting all of that work in and immediately hitting a setback again. And it sounds like part of what you do is mindset work to prepare people for the realities of the fact that this is not going to be an easy guaranteed thing. There is no magic path that guarantees the result that you want when it comes to physical performance. It's more an like with Jiu-Jitsu itself, it's more an ongoing process of climbing the stairs one step at a time and proving to yourself that you can move in that direction. Speaker 3: Yeah, so, man, there's a lot there and I think this is a great microcosm of the principles I'm talking about and I can actually lean a little bit more into some of these. So, yeah, another thing that I think is really important is separating people from thinking that like they need the perfect tool to fix it or, you know, they need the perfect set of exercises. There's a ton of data that's come out that shows that, you know, corrective exercises aren't all that specific in nature, even though a lot of times we feel that they are. And and the approach for building both tolerance and capacity, which this could be another discussion entirely, but tolerance and capacity are a little bit different. But to build those things back up, we don't need a ton of tools. We just need a set of heuristics to work within and and we could really sum it up one really, really easy way. And that is to heal it like you hurt it. And the reason that I wanted to draw attention to that is that is the antithesis of that risk averse mindset, right? As opposed to avoidance, fear avoidance in particular, of, oh, this happened, this was bad, can't do that. I actually take the other direction with it. I'm going to start to talk about other scenarios, but then I'll I'll circle it back to you. If a client comes to me, particularly one that is training for an outside uh less controlled endeavor, something like Jiu-Jitsu, right? They're not just trying to build a little muscle, but they want to actually perform in a sport environment. And that person tells me, whenever I bench press, it hurts my shoulder or when I deadlift off the floor, I always hurt my back. That to me, I go, the most important part of what I'm going to do with you is get you to safely train the exact exercise that is symptomatic. Because the forces that are present at those exact angles are either loading some structure in a way that it is ill-equipped for or it's triggering some sort of pain response or series of symptoms. Whatever it may be, those things are all present when they do this exact exercise and that illuminates to me the very nature of the problem. And especially due to the nature of this podcast, the analogy that I use for them is if I was your therapist and you came in to me and you told me, hey, I've got some trauma as it relates to my parents. I would be a terrible, terrible therapist if I was like, cool, we're never going to talk about your parents. I'd be a terrible therapist. Like we got to get to the root of that. We have to unpack that. Now, if I was a good therapist, I would know that both timing and dosage matter a ton, right? Maybe, God forbid, one of your parents just passed away. Timing might not be right now to spend a full session talking about your parents or maybe not even at all, right? Maybe we work away from it for a little bit first. But over the course of, let's say you're with that therapist for a year. If they are worth their salt at all, they will, you know, the way to deal with that trauma is to find a productive way through it. So, just like the therapist being told about the parents, if you tell me about a specific exercise that elicits symptoms, I go as that skilled therapist, okay, maybe we're not going to do it now or this month, but there will be a point where we're going to do that symptomatic motion. And we're going to adjust dosage, whether that's reps, whether that's the specific loading that we use, whatever. We're going to try to dose it appropriately such that it's productive and whatever that structure or sequence of triggers is, we're going to desensitize ourselves to it. We're going to build up the capacity within those structures and make it such that that exercise is no longer symptomatic, that we have worked through that trauma. And the same can be said about potential motions that occur. So, maybe you, you know, someone listening doesn't necessarily have a background in strength and conditioning or uh rehab and they're like, okay, cool. Well, I hurt my elbow and I don't know any magic, you know, elbow exercises that PTs know. That's okay. You can find some things that are symptomatic. And those things that are symptomatic, timing and dosage will matter and your body will talk to you a little bit to help guide you through that, right? Pain is very valuable in that sense. But those things that are symptomatic are perhaps the most valuable things you could be doing. And I like to really break that that fear avoidance down and get people on board to that very direct heal it how you hurt it type of approach because that is the way out. That's how you get your body to do enough things in this controlled setting like the weight room to then also make another significant leap to that open uncontrolled setting where you're fighting another human being, where all of a sudden there's force vectors, angles, twisting motions that aren't present in the weight room necessarily, that all of a sudden we want to be accommodated to. We want to be prepared for. So, I think that is a huge element of that as well. I actually did a case study on myself. It was uh wow, we are just over one year ago. I think it was April 3rd of last year. Another thing with my training, because I really like it, sometimes I fly too close to the sun. And I'm not going to get into the specifics of it, but I was on a very intense training block for myself involving both lots of like squats, sprints, et cetera. And long story short, when I was miked up for a YouTube video, um I tore my adductor, my groin muscle while I was squatting. Speaker 2: YouTube is serious business, man. Content creation is no joke. It's a risky endeavor. Speaker 3: It is, it is. But I actually, you know, I leaned into it and I shared it immediately. Like the first thing I was doing, as my leg is still throbbing, I'm back here editing the video. I'm like, can you hear it? I'm like, oh, that's brutal. Like you can hear the muscle tearing. And I shared the process. And what's crazy is, now, as a disclaimer, I was very determined to do this myself and I was very aggressive with my rehab, but I wanted to show that you can not only heal something how you hurt it without all these special tools that might be used in something like physical therapy, but that can actually be super fruitful. And if you look at, I had what was likely a grade two tear and, you know, you look at the timeline for that and it's usually, you know, eight to 12 weeks on the fast end. And within a couple days, I was able to do an, you know, a body weight unassisted squat, started to do some of those. One full week after, granted it was a fraction of the weight, you know, with just 95 pounds, I did the exact squat variation that hurt me, but with a much reduced load. And I would actually do that exercise on the same day, one week out, two weeks out, et cetera. Four weeks to the day, I squatted the same exact weight that injured me. And it was about, I was more cautious with this than I needed to be, but about three weeks out, you know, I started doing some actual controlled live rounds in Jiu-Jitsu. By six weeks, I was sprinting, I was training Jiu-Jitsu as hard as I wanted. There were no residual issues. And like by eight weeks, I literally, it was not a thought in my mind. So, I think there is value in that though, right? I didn't use any magic exercises. I literally used the exercise that tore my muscle, but I dosed it and timed it appropriately to use that exact exercise to rebuild the structures that experienced too much stress. And I I kept putting the right amount of stress into where it adapted, it adapted. And that degree of self-efficacy, most people never experience that. So, I try the as best I can, obviously I'm bought in. Obviously I believe in this process. But the reason that I also documented it is because I wanted to show people, I'm not infallible, injuries happen to me. And I also took it in stride and very productively used the very exercise that hurt me to get back to where I was. So, yeah, I think there's a huge element of that. I think understanding that physical trauma will go hand in hand with mental trauma. The only way out is through, both physically and mentally. Using graded exposure, right? You look at things like um with PTSD and exposure therapy. I mean, it's the same thing. As I started to do that same exercise, I won't lie, like I love the weight room. I was scared. That first at four weeks, everything told me I should have been able to squat that weight. I was scared, man. But on the flip side of that, when you're scared of that and you prove to yourself that you can do it. When I did that at four weeks, I was like, oh man, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm right there. You know, rehab wasn't perfect. I only squatted it one time and it was only 80% of my max. So like, I was still a ways off. But it was such an empowering moment to just face the very thing that hurt me. And what that did for me to really allow me to believe in my ability to improve my current state was so valuable. And that's the thing that I try to impart. So, you know, not to say that there aren't going to be sometimes, you know, setbacks in rehab. Shit, it could have been a setback the day that I tried to squat that same weight. And I sort of accepted that risk, right? I went into it. I was documenting the process, so I wanted it to be kind of fast, but I knew getting into it. Part of that fear was the fact that I'm like, okay, there is some risk associated with this. I'm not treading this perfect path. You know, there are there's a little bit of an educated guess, but I may miss step. But if I got myself this far, if I miss step again, I can build myself back up again. And that again, that's just such a valuable thing. And and so many of us develop that mindset as far as Jiu-Jitsu goes, right? When you get shown, you know, a pass from your instructor and then you go for it and you get swept, you don't immediately go, ah, I knew it, that pass didn't work. You go, okay, wait, let me let me hold myself accountable. Let me sort of audit what I did there. Let me figure it out. Let me use some problem solving. And maybe you don't have the same tools as your instructor, right? You don't have the same base of experience and everything else. But you'll figure it out. And I think it's the same thing with injury, but for whatever reason, if we aren't exposed to people that are being optimistic about this, right? I think there's a lot of charlatans online about living this pain-free life when in reality, that just doesn't even make sense, right? If you have a dog, your dog, unfortunately, despite how cute it is, will feel pain at some point. And that's not it's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you use that pain for something productive, right? To avoid a harmful stimulus. So, yeah, I think it's that empowerment, that self-efficacy, that belief that you can do it. And it really can be boiled down to healing it how you hurt it. I think that just cultivates such a productive head space to deal with those adverse events. Speaker 2: Yeah, I really like that approach because you're kind of getting to the reality of not just Jiu-Jitsu, but life, which is that look, if you want to do anything, there is always a risk. And many people who are not lifelong athletes, and I very much include myself in this category, when you see physical activities like this, you tend to think of the risks and maybe you overthink of the risks. You weigh them too heavily without thinking about what the alternative is, which is to do nothing. And that comes with far greater risks over the long term. But the example I give, take a look on Reddit, take a look at the beginner questions and so often you will hear people saying things like, I want to start Jiu-Jitsu, but I've heard that you get really bad injuries and so I'm scared. I don't want to injure my knee, so therefore I'm afraid to do Jiu-Jitsu, so therefore I'm just not going to do it. That kind of mindset comes with its own risks because of course, when you do anything physical, there is a risk of injury. So what's the alternative? I mean, I guess the alternative is to do nothing. But that comes with a far greater series of risks to do nothing. I mean, you could theoretically just sit on the couch and never do anything with your body that would put you at risk of injury. What you will find is that over the long term, you are going to be worse off because by doing nothing, you don't see the gains that come along with taking those physical risks. And so, yeah, you might over a short term be less likely to injure your knee. Over the long term, however, you will accumulate just a lifetime of bad habits and health issues and you will be far worse off than the person who showed up to Jiu-Jitsu or whatever exercise there was. So, this kind of loss aversion is a real challenge and it's not just restricted to Jiu-Jitsu. You see the same thing in investing as well. People who are afraid to put their money into the stock market because they've heard stories of how people can lose everything, so they just park their money into a savings account. And if you do that, then you've already lost because inflation will guarantee that by itself. So, the fear of loss holds us back from so many of the opportunities to really make gains. And I think that comes up especially when you're talking about the psychology around injury or the fear of injury. I would love to hear you expand on that for people who maybe come into this with that loss averse mindset that is so common amongst people who are just not natural athletes. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, first off, humans are terrible at actually assessing risk. And there are countless examples we could come up with for that. You know, you've got people who are terrified of flying, right? But they drove their car to the airport to take that flight. I mean, driving your car is objectively far, far more dangerous than getting on the airplane. Yet, that's triggering that fear response. So, understanding that fear sometimes will fool us, right? And and and having like sitting with that and really knowing that um, you know, I like to really with anything that we do, I love with my clients drawing a line between caution and fear. Again, to bring it back to driving. If you have somebody who when they get on the highway is fearful of those higher speeds, right? Fear is far more of that emotional response. Are they going to be a better driver than somebody who is aware of the fact that at higher speeds, there's greater kinetic forces, you can obviously get hurt more, and they're cautious of that, right? Who's the better driver there? The fearful one or the cautious one? And I'm not saying to be reckless, right? I don't think the answer is to be reckless and to throw all caution and fear out or to suppress it and stuff it down. But to understand that like the intentions that you have can actually be far better executed by caution than they can by fear. And caution will usually still involve doing that thing, but just being aware of the things you can use to minimize that risk. Now, the other side of this that I think is really important, and I think again, for anyone listening that doesn't have a ton of a background in strength and conditioning, this can really start to illuminate some of the things that you see people talking about on social media and wielding fear for what I think are very unethical reasons. And that is conflating short-term versus long-term risk. Or what I would even venture to say for a lot of things in the weight room, anything that is a short-term risk, you will probably have a long-term benefit of a decreased rate of that short-term risk if you do that thing. Let me give you a couple examples to sort of illuminate that. Probably the most popular one is doing deadlifts. Deadlifts can hurt your back. True. There is a short-term risk. Before I do a deadlift and during that set, my short-term risk for injuring the structures associated with my spine has gone up. However, if I dose it appropriately, over time, my long-term benefit is a decreased risk of back injury by training those structures in a way that causes them to remodel, become denser, more resilient and more resistant to injury. Now, that one can be tough for people to conceptualize, but here's an easy example. And once you realize that this is just how biological systems work, I want you to try to actually in your mind, just drip this understanding to other things. Take a series of intervals on the assault bike, right? Brutal. Anyone who's done it, you know it's brutal. You know, we know that is good for your heart, right? If you don't want to have, if you don't want to die of a heart attack one day, you should probably be doing some intense cardio and the assault bike is a great way to do that. There is, just like before I stepped onto that deadlift platform, me standing looking at the assault bike versus actually getting on it. My short-term risk of a cardiac event has climbed, right? If I already have some of those risk factors present, and then I tax, you know, the crap out of my cardiovascular system in a short window, I could have a cardiac event there. But we all understand that by doing that, and again, being aware of dosage, timing, et cetera, by doing that, I can make that our vital organ, by the way, less prone to that negative adverse event. And it's just really no different with a ton of things in the weight room, right? If you look at, you know, oh, squats can hurt your knees. Yes, they can. They can also make your knees far more resilient. Your cartilage will get more dense and more resistant to various forces. Your bones will get denser. Your muscles will be capable of producing and absorbing greater forces. The tendons that those bones use to attach to the skeleton will become thicker and stiffer. Your ligaments in your knee, I mean, a lot of people aren't aware of this. The ligaments in your knee over the course of time through squatting, greater and greater loads, your ligaments will get thicker. They will hypertrophy and become harder to injure, whether that injury would occur squatting, whether that injury would occur sprinting, or whether it would occur in the rotation of a heel hook. And that's that value that I again want to provide to people. Yeah, we're going to navigate some of that short-term risk. I can help you with some dosage and timing so that we can elicit positive adaptations and the very thing you fear, we can make less likely by facing that fear, by doing that actual thing and exposing ourselves to stress. I mean, another thing that I love throwing out there, there's all these things that have negative connotations, be it stress, impact, load, uh heavy weight, right? Those stressors elicit positive adaptation in the body, right? Impact isn't bad. It's a super, super potent stimulus. You can use impact to make your body way harder to injure. It can make it where your body can experience greater impact. And we have the power to improve those things. Once you start to understand that, things get so much more fun. You won't be as risk averse because you understand that you can improve those things. And it's not just for injury. I think this is also crucial for aging. If you look at all of the physiological variables that Father Time will rob you of, right? Your max heart rate will decrease over time on average as you age. Range of motion across pretty much any joint will decrease over time. Muscle mass decrease, bone mass will decrease. Velocity, after the age of 30, velocity slopes off faster than any of those other variables. The crazy thing is, at population level, we see those things slope off. What's kind of wild is that on an individual basis, if, let's pick one of those variables, your max heart rate. If someone is regularly exposed to their max heart rate at the age where on average that max heart rate goes down, they'll maintain it. They'll be able to maintain the max heart rate of a younger human because they regularly expose themselves to a very potent stressor. If we look at bone density, you can maintain it. You can improve it. I've had clients that are a 60-year-old woman with osteoporosis. We can actually improve bone density to where technically, you do not have osteoporosis anymore. Your body is so adaptable and so capable of change. You just have to be willing to problem solve those different things like you would any other part of Jiu-Jitsu. It's actually training your body is so much simpler and more straightforward than fighting another human. I promise you. If you are listening to this and you are confident in your ability to force a human being to, you know, work them through increasingly negative positions and then eventually tap out, that is more difficult to learn than how to get your body a little more explosive, than how to assess your joint's current capability and improve it in every objective way, to increase your bone density, to do any of those things that I said. Like, the stuff that I do is actually pretty freaking simple. And again, once we start to have that self-efficacy and you just start to believe in the fact that, no, you know, okay, I want to get more explosive. I I'm tired of having that old guy Jiu-Jitsu. Okay, well, how do you get more explosive? I got a young kid at home and he jumps all the freaking time. And we all get to an age, usually around high school, where we just never jump anymore. To the point where people running my programs, sometimes they'll be like, man, you know, the plyos, I feel weird jumping in the gym, which is crazy to me. Like in a place where people are supposed to be working on their body, they feel socially weird jumping and expressing their athleticism. But we get to an age where we just don't do that anymore. So, is it crazy that at at a population level, after the age of 30, that we see explosiveness and velocity decrease? No, that actually makes perfect sense. So, yeah, I think that ability to understand risk, to understand that short-term risk is usually, if you navigate it appropriately, you'll decrease that risk in the long term. And your ability to build these different things that age will rob you of, that injury can rob you of. No, you can actually claw and scrape and regain those things. You can even potentially push them further than they've ever been in your lifetime. It's cool. It makes you believe in your body again. And again, the process is not so different from Jiu-Jitsu. Trust me, if you survived the white belt phase, that is way harder than anything you're ever going to do in the weight room. There's days as a white belt, you go in there and you are just the nail. The weight room's never like that, right? The weight room's fun. You're in there, you start to string together a couple good weeks, you're improving all the time, right? The first, man, the first few weeks, first few months of being a white belt, sometimes you're like, man, am I even improving? The weight room is so much nicer than that, right? And again, I think it's gives this like empowered like mindset to be able to handle those things. Aging and injury are things that just scare the crap out of people and they're not so scary when you know that you've got some sort of weapon against them. Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that, man. And we've talked about this on the podcast before, this push and pull of how sometimes the things that you need to do in the short term to benefit you in the long term can be a bit of a paradox. I mean, you see this in Jiu-Jitsu strategy where the tactics that you have to take to get good in the gym might not align with the things that you want to do long term. I actually just shot an interesting episode about this talking about the sharing of information, right? I mean, over the long term, the sport probably is going to get better if people share their information freely and openly. However, there is an argument to be made that in the short term, if you've got a competition coming up next week, you might not want to go and put your entire game plan on YouTube right now. Maybe wait a month, right? And so, there's this this push and pull between things that benefit you in the short term versus things that benefit you in the long term. And I think you're doing a great job of illustrating how sometimes the things that you want to do right now, they might be scary now and they might even carry with them risk right now. But if you look at things through the horizon of 20 or 30 years or longer, you realize that the risk of not doing those things is far greater than the short-term risk of doing that thing right now, right today. Speaker 3: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I think for skill development, it's pretty similar. Sometimes I'll have a client, they'll be talking about their Jiu-Jitsu and they're one of those guys like, oh, I don't pull guard, right? I'm like, okay, I mean, that could be your strategy, that's cool. Do you have a guard? Because if you're not good at playing guard, it might actually benefit you to just take one month and pull guard every single round. And sometimes they'll be like, oh man, I can't do that. I'm like, okay, really? Last Wednesday, what rounds did you have? Who'd you train with and did you win or lose? And they're like, I can't remember. I'm like, exactly, neither can anybody else. Do those rounds, do the thing that in the short term is going to result in your guard getting passed and these different things happening. And that's going to result in more long-term growth. That one month of pulling guard might have like a ripple effect on the next 10 years of your Jiu-Jitsu in a very positive way, just because for one month, you weren't afraid of the negative of Johnny, who you have your, you know, you normally have these neck and neck rounds with that all of a sudden Johnny feels like, oh man, I'm getting way better than this guy. In the long run, you'll probably get better faster because of that. And and I think that's again, that's like it's just a different context for the same type of mindset that I'm talking about in the weight room. I'd love to use some of this time to get your thoughts on just common misconceptions that you have to constantly correct with people. You talked earlier about how one of them is this belief that at some point you can just make pain disappear and there might be things that just make it go away magically. Like if you have an injury, if only you just cover your body head to toe with Anaconda knee braces, suddenly the pain will will just evaporate, right? And I think there are a lot of really easy promises that get made on the internet and not even on the internet, just floating around in our community, particularly around strength and conditioning and injury recovery. And I'm sure that you find yourself constantly having to correct these. What would you say, just in terms of the space that we all share, are there any common corrections that you would want to use this opportunity to make, things that you just find yourself having to say over and over again that like, hey, that's not true or it's oversimplified or we need to think about this differently within the sport? Yeah, uh feel free to take this out if uh you don't want this in here, but I've got a long-lasting beef with Anaconda braces. I think they have some of the most predatory marketing imaginable. I have one that I did a a post on a little over a year ago where it was talking about a guy who had, you know, tore his ACL and and four weeks after surgery was back on the mats with Anaconda. Like it's literally counterproductive. And it's taking this well-wishing thought of like, I want to address this problem that I know I have. And people would so much rather throw money at something than actually use problem solving and like change their habits or learn a new skill. There is no data to support that knee braces decrease the rate of injury or knee reinjury. There's none. Like there's actually a ton of data on it and it shows that it just doesn't help. Even the metal braces that you'll see like alignment use in the NFL has an extremely, it's not even statistically significant. It may slightly improve your chances of not reinjuring a knee, slightly. But we also can't use those metal braces in Jiu-Jitsu because you would just like, you know, shave skin off someone's head like it was, you know, tomato peel. But yeah, so that is definitely an issue. And I think that not falling for the quick monetary fix, but actually just addressing the problem. There's a lot of data on how strength training and plyometrics directly decrease the rate of injury. I mean, there's a massive study that shows that strength training alone decreases the rate of injury in sport by 69%. If you think about the next five years of your Jiu-Jitsu, like what would you pay to have 69% less injuries? And that's before we even look at the fact that the injuries that do happen will be somewhat mitigated, right? I mean, that is invaluable. And if you were willing to put a price tag on that, instead just put some effort into doing just a little bit of strength work. And I guess with that, I'll get to one of the main misconceptions that you got to spend forever in the weight room to see those benefits. One to two 45-minute sessions in the weight room is enough to see a pronounced benefit on the mats. You do not need to kill yourself in the weight room. You don't need to quit. I get this all the time. I'll post like a sample program on one of my platforms and someone will be like, oh yeah, I got to quit my job. No, you don't you don't have to quit your job to fit a little strength work in. And quite frankly, you'll start to find like people at first they're like, oh man, I just get too sore. I can't do, you know, both in the same day. If you stick to a program, you're actually hitting the same movements for a period of time, like let's say four, six or eight weeks. That soreness will decrease dramatically and it will only, what we're doing there is we are wielding stress to make your body more capable of handling stress, not just in the weight room, but also on the mats. You'll find yourself less sore from your Jiu-Jitsu sessions. It's man, it's like a superpower. Two other big misconceptions. One, like circuits or that what you do in the weight room has to feel like what you do in Jiu-Jitsu. And it just does not. Split your strength and your conditioning work. Circuits are a really piss poor way to elicit strength or cardiovascular adaptations. Heart rate isn't actually a great measure of cardiovascular stimulus, contrary to what a lot of people believe. I mean, if you want some obvious examples, if I were to wait around a corner and startle you, your heart rate would go up dramatically. That's not going to make your heart more capable of handling stress. If you take a stimulant and it increases your heart rate, that is not a cardiovascular stimulus. Likewise, when we move weights around and we brace, that'll increase heart rate. That will not stimulate our cardiovascular system. And even the occlusion effect of your muscles contracting will essentially place pressure on your blood vessels and increase your heart rate not relative to the cardiovascular stimulus. So, if you have cardio goals, do not try to do those with strength training. You could do 30 minutes of strength training and 15 minutes of intense intervals on an assault bike, way, way better than that same amount of time being spent on a circuit. So, that's another one. And then the last one is like functional training or sport specific training. Things do not need to look like what you do in the weight room or what you do on the mats to transfer to that thing. If you vastly increase somebody's VO2 max by the assault bike, they can apply that ability to generate cellular energy in a pool. They can do that while running. They can do that on the mats. If you feel like you did some cardio and it didn't translate to the mats, that is by all definitions a skill issue. I think there's a huge element of how conditioned we feel on the mats called fight economy. And it is actually central to what we do in Jiu-Jitsu. You are trying to maximize leverage and technique so that a minimal input results in a maximal output. And of course, you know, part of that is maybe when you're drilling it or when you're doing more controlled scenarios to try to to minimize that input. But then, if you can maximize output for a given input, then when you're going at actual competition pace, you can really impose your will on somebody. Now, people who aren't aware of fight economy, let's think of like those more spazzy lower belts. I mean, this idea of an endless gas tank is a bit of a facade. You can take anybody, you can take Mighty Mouse when he was at peak physical condition. He can overexert himself. Anybody is capable of doing that. The skilled technician is going to sort of be aware, I like to call it, I'm a bit of a nerd. I like to call it like your HP bar. Like you're aware of how much of that HP bar you're putting into stuff and still trying to get a desired output from that. By doing cardio, you're just going to increase your HP bar. It's still finite, but it can be significantly larger so you can be more active. So, yeah, and then I say to continue that with a final myth is that, oh, if you want to be better conditioned for Jiu-Jitsu, just do more Jiu-Jitsu. There is a degree of truth to that, but the better you get at Jiu-Jitsu with that whole fight economy thing in mind, the less of a cardiovascular stimulus that activity will be for you. Train your cardio off the mats. It will translate to the mats beautifully, especially if you are also getting more technical at the same time. Speaker 2: Beautiful, man. Well, as we tie this up, one thing I want to ask you, just quick actionable things in terms of activities or or just routines, little hacks that people could deploy without too much of a change to just immediately improve their physical health, reduce their risk of injury. Anything that you would suggest. I bring this up because earlier you were talking about the massive benefits of weight training. One thing I would ask, you mentioned that one to two sessions is already a huge improvement. Did you mean one to two sessions a week? Speaker 3: Yeah. So, I could just give like a really simple sample program for somebody to to just take and use themselves if if that sound Go for it. So, yeah, if you want to just hit a passing grade in the weight room, four movements, four compound movements will hit the majority of the joints and muscle groups in your body. We're going to have two lower, two upper. We can break them down a little more specifically if we want to. We want a hip dominant lower, knee dominant lower, upper body push, upper body pull. You do that in a session, in a single session, you're getting a passing grade and you do that in 30, 40 minutes, even with three minutes rest, training pretty close to failure. I would say two to three sets of each exercise done at a high degree of effort. Seriously, it doesn't take much time. Get good at those movements, repeat those movements. So, it could be, let's say a squat, whatever squat variation you like. If you follow me, it might be acquainted with Zercher squats. Do you like back squats? That's cool. If you like a leg press, that's cool. Anything that's that's knee dominant in that squat pattern, right? Hip dominant, that would be something like an RDL or a hip thrust. If you want to go above and beyond, make one of those unilateral. So, like instead of a squat, maybe a lunge for your knees. Instead of a, you know, instead of a a bilateral RDL or deadlift, do a single leg RDL. So, one of them bilateral, nice and heavy, let's say the squat and then a single leg RDL, right? We got two exercises. Then an upper body push could be an overhead press, could be a bench press, could be a dip, anything along those lines. And then an upper body pull could be a dumbbell row, could be a seated row, a barbell row, could be a pull-up, a lat pull down, could be, you know, vertical or horizontal. So, you just pick one, right? So, I'm just I'll lay it out for you. So, you got a squat, you got a single leg RDL, say we're doing it with a dumbbell. Got a lat pull down and a seated overhead press. Boom. That's your day one. Do two to three sets of each. Do it close to failure. Track it, write it down. Day two, let's just swap those up. So, now our bilateral will make a deadlift, any sort of deadlift. Zercher deadlift, could be conventional, could be sumo, could be a Romanian deadlift, could be a hip thrust. Then we'll do a unilateral knee dominant, like a lunge. So, a dumbbell walking lunge, could be a Bulgarian split squat if you really hate yourself. Then we'll go bench press and then we'll go dumbbell row. Those two days, two to three sets of each of those, look to improve your output over time. You have achieved a passing grade. You will decrease your rate of injury in sport. Pick the same movements, do them each week. Treat each movement like a technique in Jiu-Jitsu. Try to get good at that skill. It will take you very, very far. Now, if you want something a little better than a passing grade, pick a jump movement and do that at the beginning. It's a great way to warm up as well. Not a huge fan of box jumps because I like impact. I want to expose our body to impact. So, it could be as simple as like pogo jumps, could be like lunge jumps, could be a broad jump, could be a seated broad jump. Pick a jump, do a couple reps, nothing crazy. We're not trying to do it for cardio, right? And then if you want an even better grade, throw some conditioning on at the end. A nice easy way to do something like an assault bike, 15 seconds on, 45 seconds at a recovery pace, comes out to a nice minute for each rep. Do three to four reps per set, do two sets. That's a beautiful and go hard for the sprint portion, right? So, for the 15 seconds, you're going really hard. For the 45, you're going nice and light. You do that, a jump and those four exercises, you can do that in an hour. You are getting an A. That is like a really good session. If you're not too concerned about cardio, maybe swap that out, do some isolation movements, you know, attack a weak point that you have. You could do some grip work for accessory stuff. You could do some neck work. You could do arms. I think arms are great for Jiu-Jitsu. If you've got like, maybe your knees are a point of concern, so you'll do some hamstring curls or some leg extensions. Those are great. So, yeah, I mean, you only have to do those four exercises. Quite frankly, you could do three. You could pick one lower and the two upper. There's no actual rules. This is all made up. And if you're currently doing nothing, do something. Something that I like, I like to lift more frequently throughout the week. And the majority of the time, I'm doing two motions. I'm doing one lower, one upper. Maybe I'll sprinkle in some jumps. Maybe I'll sprinkle in some cardio, but I'm basing it off of those two strength movements. A nice lower body, a nice upper body. And so that I do it more frequently and my sessions are shorter. There's no rules. But just do it consistently, do it over time. It will serve you and you will feel empowered. You'll feel better on the mats. And when you're injured, finding a way to modify to work away from those symptoms and then slowly back into them again will teach you so much about your body and it'll allow you to regain that trust so that when you start to transfer back into your work on the mats, you'll be confident in your ability to do so. Speaker 2: Amazing, Alex. Well, thank you so much for all of this. If people listen to this conversation and they're thinking, man, I need to learn more from this guy or maybe work with them. Where can they find you and how can they do that? Speaker 3: Yeah, so again, my Instagram, alex.sterner or Electrum_Performance. And then Electrum Performance is my channel on YouTube. And feel free, like if you got a question, shoot me a DM. I have my own training app where for 30 bucks a month, you get access to over 60 programs for Jiu-Jitsu. I write a new one every four weeks. I've got a Facebook group where we do form checks, answer questions. I like to be accessible in an age where everyone's got stuff that's automated and AI and whatever. You will actually be dealing with me. Um I love talking to people, answering questions, even if you're not one of my clients, ask me a question. I am more than happy to answer those questions, whether it's on one of my posts, whether it's via DM. Yeah, and if you want to train with me, I will make sure that it is worth your while. We have minimalist programs on the app. We have some that are for conditioning. We've got some that are for flexibility and range of motion. We've got some rehab movements on there. If you want some of those tools to help usher you through that more injured state. I just like to be a hub of resources that people can use to really just enhance their time on the mats. Speaker 2: Amazing, sir. Well, I will throw links to your social and to Electrum Performance in the show notes to make it easy for people to find. So just pop open your podcast player if you can't remember the name or the URLs and they should all be there. I will also throw links to our stuff. Everything is at BJJmentalmodels.com. I always suggest that people check out all of the back catalog of episodes like this. We've also got mini episodes that introduce individual concepts much faster if you understandably don't have the patience to listen to about a thousand hours of me talking over a seven-year period. Our newsletter is also one of the top ones in the sport as far as I know and is completely free. We send out accompanying thought pieces to the podcast every Friday and also sometimes some cool freebies like instructionals and stuff too. Again, all of that is completely free, no ads, no charge. If you do want to commit to leveling up with us, you can check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. That is how we float the boat here. It is the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu master classes, as well as a whole series of premium Jiu-Jitsu Pro podcasts that you can only get by being a BJJ Mental Models Premium subscriber. If you like Emily Kwok or Rob Bernaki or Drew Foster, their podcasts are available only to BJJ Mental Models Premium members. The first week is free, so please do consider checking that out. The free stuff and premium is all at BJJmentalmodels.com. Again, though, I will just put a link to that in the show notes as well as to your stuff, Alex. But thank you so much for doing this, man. Really amazing chat. I had a blast with this one. Like I said at the beginning, this kind of information can be hard for some people to carry on in a conceptual audio format, but man, I thought you just did a fantastic job. So thank you so much for coming by and sharing all of this. Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you for having me. It was uh it was a blast on my end as well. Speaker 2: Sure was. And thank you to the listeners as well. Appreciate you and we will talk to you in the next one. See you then.