SHAWN STEVENSON: Today you're going to find out some things about fitness and training that you've never heard before. What if the quote perfect form when doing an exercise is actually a big old myth? What if there's no such thing as a perfect form? And it's really about the perfect form for you? Also, you're gonna find out some things about the gluteus Maximus, AKA, the cake's, a k, a, your Buns, AKA your assets that are going to blow your mind. All right. When you find out how important your glutes are in your performance, in human movement in athleticism, it's just like, how could you not show some love to the booty? Now, you're also gonna find out about one of my favorite fitness tools that this leading sports performance expert also loves as well, and utilizes on a regular basis with his incredible clients.

And again, it's one of my favorite things. I utilize it multiple times a week, but I hardly ever talk about it. And it was a perfect opportunity to talk about it with my guest because he's all about high performance. He's all about pain-free movement, and you're absolutely going to enjoy this episode. So let's dive right in. Our special guest today is Dr. John Rusin. Dr. John Rusin is an internationally recognized strength coach, physical therapist and injury prevention expert. With nearly 20 years of elite level experience in training major league baseball athletes, NFL Pros, Olympic gold medalists, and world record holding, powerlifters named a top 50 health and fitness expert by Men's Health Magazine.

Dr. Rusin has taken the methods proven at the highest levels of sport and adapted them specifically for everyday people making elite level injury prevention, sustainable health, and lifelong physical performance accessible to everyone. Let's dive into this conversation with the amazing Dr. John Rusin.

My guy, Dr. John Rusin. How you doing today? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Of course. It's my pleasure. I've got so many questions for you, man. You know, this is something I'm deeply passionate about and all of us want to live a life of movement, of activity to do the things that we love. But we are also faced in our culture today more than ever, with issues with pain and dysfunction. And I absolutely love your book. I've just been tearing through it and some of these ideas are groundbreaking, kind of ruffle some feathers, but also when I read them, it made complete sense. And I want to ask you about the first one.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Okay.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Which is, you talk about, there's a huge misconception about having "perfect form". Let's talk about form. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I grew up in the university classes that said, Hey, here's the textbook and here's how you're gonna move. And it was textbook form for squatting and deadlifting and bench pressing and there was one right way to do everything. And I think that wasn't necessarily correct. There was a right way to start, but in terms of optimization of health and performance, and definitely unlocking longevity, there is more available to us today to know that people are different, right to left. People are different then you or I. And I think the individuality of the way that somebody moves it is their unique human movement system profile that needs to be uniquely trained in a different way. And this is so counterintuitive to anything that we hear in our industry today because we look at the perfection of form, which is this unicorn out there because it doesn't exist. Your perfect form is really the only thing that stands up to injury prevention and also just performing at your highest rate. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, that's great. Such a great insight. So I remember working in the gym when I was going to my university and always like, why are you pointing your toes out, right? Trying to just get people to like get their foot in the right position. And just certain things would just kind of naturally go into certain places for people. And I would see it as dysfunction rather than like, let me work with them. Because if they do something this other way, maybe that brings about discomfort or pain or something up the chain.

So can you talk about, for example, let's just say somebody is having pain when they do body weight squats, right? They have knee pain. What would you do in that case? Like would you let them kind of adjust how they're positioned? Can anybody squat is basically my question. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I do believe that anyone can squat and not squat as the exercise with the barbell on your back. I think that's where people end up going wrong, is that they look at a human movement pattern as a way to train a specific exercise. And that's just not the case. But I do believe that everyone has a unique squat pattern for them to be able to do things in daily life and able to get full range of motion.

But it's gonna look different at their stance. It's gonna be different at their knee position, at their torso angle, at their depth. It's going to be unique to their anthropometrics, their body shape, their body size. And a whole lot of people don't have an appreciation for that because again, we're looking at a one size fits all model and movement. And we are really in pain-free performance looking at trying to mix and match the two most objective things in the world, which are pain and human movement. And if you look at those two things together, how can anyone ever squat the same as another person if their body is totally different? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. With that being said, what are some of the things that you would do with an athlete or a client, if they're having discomfort while doing what they believe to be a general back squat, for example. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Well, there's two different ways to go at it. So it's like, do we want to train today or do we want to gain data? So if we want to train today, we can use common sense strategies to be able to position them into a good enough position. This is where we look at like screening a squat pattern for an example, is that you have certain setup forms, certain technique cues that you can use to get somebody moving good enough that day so they can go and train. They're not gonna get hurt, and they can elicit that stimulus that we're after.

So whether that be changing their stance, whether it we go wider or more narrow foot, a deduction. A deduction that's basically toe out position, or whether we actually start to teach them how to brace and how to create tension throughout their entire pillar, which are the shoulders, the hips, and the core together. That really unlocks their ability to feel safe and feel natural and feel stabilized so they can take that parking brake off of their system and actually start moving a little bit better. And when I think about moving better, it's more range of motion and more neutrality at the spine. The hips and the shoulders and something that you would look at and say, Hey, that looks natural, and that should feel good for the person.

But that's where a vast majority of people need to go, is that they need to explore their movement a little bit more and know very well that they can't shove a round peg into a square hole with a good amount of success. But that's just the way to get somebody started. Optimizing is a whole different conversation.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Exploring movement, that in and of itself is something that I just, I don't think a lot of people do or give themselves permission to do. And so I'd love to just dig a little bit deeper in the realm of squats, because I'm thinking about, as I'm asking you these questions, I'm thinking about just being human. And evolved in conditions to where we had to squat to use the bathroom, for example. And today, most people never see anything remotely close to that position. For example, like I saw in the gym where somebody would have difficulty with a general back squat. And just even being able to move their hands, right to a front squat position, for example. Or using a box instead of them trying to, you know, go ask the grass. Like all of these things help people to have a progression. So I want to ask you about progressions. And I want to ask you specifically about spending some time exploring, like, what do you think about a resting squad?

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah, so progressions are key. I think many times people go into a conventional barbell back squat or a front squat for an example, and those are really hard positions to get into. You have a fixed bar on your body in non-natural positions at the shoulder, and you have to manage your right and left side of the body symmetrically and try to go down into a range of motion. You got weight on your system. Oh my God. Like you're not broken if you can't barbell back squat right off the bat. That's actually an advanced exercise. People think, oh, a barbell back squat is a basic exercise, and maybe it's simple, but it's actually an advanced progression at pain-free performance that is like four rungs up on the progression of how to learn how to squat naturally for your body.

We don't start anyone with a barbell back squat because it is going to be something that lines up for them, either plateauing too early or not having the proper mechanics, the stability and the mobility or the strength to actually scale it up safely. So we start them down at body weight squats. We move through things like goblet squats and box squats into front loaded squats, and then maybe into back squats. But there's no mandatory rule that says in order to make lower body gains, you have to squat with a bar on your back. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I love this and this leads to something else that's really a game changer. And again, when you set it, it just, it was just like, of course, that makes sense. And this has to do with breathing. This has to do with breathing during these different exercises. You just mentioned the goblet squat, and I thought about the breathing pattern, how it's different from other types of movements, but we're taught also to the Valsalva maneuver, right. Can you talk about what you were educated on as far as breathing and the truth about how we should be breathing and we're training?

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I was educated in the wrong realm. When it came to my advanced, uh, exercise science and my doctor physical therapy. I was necessarily learning from people that were strength training themselves, and they definitely weren't working with clientele that had a progressive nature of strain training. But what we learned in terms of breathing and the way to do that, while strain training was two totally wrong things. The first thing is like, if you're gonna lift heavy, just hold your breath, hope for the best, and hoist the weight. And then we're like, ah, I don't think it works that way. And then the other one was like, Hey, more conservative people would teach, Hey, you're gonna breathe out. And then you're gonna breathe in, and then you're gonna go breathe out fully, and then you're gonna breathe in fully and all of a sudden you're under load.

And this is the wrong cue as well. And I think that a Valsalva maneuver doesn't tap into the neural connectivity of the pillar complex. To be able to actually get a robust breath and brace protocol down into the core, but also breathing out and then breathing in as you go up and down, that loses your entire core complex as well. So we try to teach something right in the middle. So we try to breathe and we try to brace and we try to stabilize the core and the pillar based on the activity at hand. Like you alluded to a barbell back squat one repetition max, being totally different than doing a crazy set of 25 plus goblet squats at half your body weight is something that we like to do at pain-free performance.

You're obviously gonna have to breathe when the set takes you 60 seconds on the goblet squat for 25, and you don't want to be exchanging air when you're going for a one rm. But I think that we look at things so black and white when it comes to our breathing and our bracing protocols, it's either an all or none phenomenon, but many times we just need to have more common sense. Look at what the activity is, what the exercise selection is, what the goal of the exercise is, and then also the set in rep schemes. So is the goal to grind? Is the goal? Muscular endurance is the goal to set a pr. These are three totally different things, but we need to be able to brace and breathe accordingly. The more time under tension you're under, the more you need to exchange error. The more total duration of a set, the more you need to exchange air, the heavier the loads get, the less air you want to exchange. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm. This is great stuff. You know what's crazy is if we're exploring our movement and if we're, you know, " trained", there's an intuitive thing there that we can pay attention to. Because I noticed, and this was just, and I'm so grateful to be talking to you today, this was probably about a month or two ago, I was doing some pushups. I had a weighted vest on and I was just like, I breathe so much differently when I'm doing pushups versus when I'm doing a heavy chest press, right.

And I tried to synchronize what I thought to be the correct breathing, but it just, it didn't feel right in that position. Like I felt more unstable when I was trying to breathe the same way I would be breathing during a chest press. And so like your body kind of gives you feedback. Of course you wanna have certain cues, but there is no textbook way to do it.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Going back to that goblet squat challenge we call it. So you take 50% of your body weight, you put it in a kettlebell or a dumbbell, right in the goblet position, and then you go and squat for as many reps as possible at 50% of your body weight. We've had tens of thousands of people go through this challenge. We've had 20,000 certified coaches at pain-free performance do this right in our certification course. And with that amount of people doing something like this, you see huge amounts of data points when it comes to people's breathing strategies and also their bracing strategies. And some are better than others.

You know, the ones that do it the best are the ones that are able to keep minimum. Effective brace while they're able to exchange maximal amount of air while keeping that brace and all of a sudden 25 reps at a goblet squad challenge is no big deal. You see people getting in the fifties, sixties, even up into the seventies. Clifton Husky who works for me at pain-free performance, he has 73. It's the world record and he's 215 pound guy. And the way he's able to do it is he's a great mover. He's very efficient form does indeed matter, but he's able to breathe and brace 'cause he has great connectivity between his shoulders, hips, and his core.

And I think that is a skill. Breathing is a skill. Bracing is a skill. It's not just moving a weight from point A to point B. It's the quality of the context of the way you put all these pieces together. Why do you like goblet squats specifically? Goblet squats are full body movement. It's not just a lower body movement. And this is why some people will hate on them as well. They look at goblet squats as this, oh, this pseudo physical therapy rehab exercise. It's for broken people that can't squat with the bar on their back. This is what people think. And I'm sitting here thinking like, Hey, do you, can I goblet squat the 180 pound dumbbell today for a set of 15?

You can progressively overlay load it, but the way I like it is that it forces your pillar to be on. If you don't have great front rack shoulder stability and being able to potentiate the Blats and the pecs co contracting and being able to manage the upper back, manage the spinal position, have the load anterior to center of mass so you can get more a range of motion, and then also utilize almost every lower body compound mover, quads, glutes. Hamstrings, isometric at the lower back, it trains everything. But I think another misconception is like, oh, you have to hold the weight in your hands. Absolutely not. I could front squat almost everything. I'm not the strongest or the most Jack Guy in the world because the shoulder mechanics are there, the spinal mechanics are there, and it almost forces good form. It allows you to tap into better range of motion and also better authentic movement, especially for the squat pattern that many people definitely struggle with. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back.

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SHAWN STEVENSON: The thing that I admire most about you, that I immediately kind of connected with, you know, our colleagues, we've got several people who are amazing thinkers in the domain of physical therapy. To me, you are the most action oriented of the physical therapists that I've seen and that I've been exposed to. And you really do put the pedal to the metal. You know, you, you apply what you teach. You are really about that life with training. There's so much training focus in this book. And specifically, and this leads me to my question. When it comes to physical therapy, right. There's an emphasis on the therapy part. And we tend to think about like getting better rehabbing, but there's also prehab, there's also just being able to optimize, like you said earlier as well. I want to ask you about this because there's a, there tends to be extremes and you talk about this in the book.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: When we are dealing with pain, completely lay off, right? Just don't touch it. Just maybe six to eight weeks or whatever the case might be. And then there's immediately trained, just don't stop training. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Right. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And you say this usually somewhere in the middle. So why does movement matter so much if we're dealing with pain slash and or an injury? 

We are generally taught, not physical therapists, but just the general population to completely restrict movement. Alright. Whether this is like, you know, just keep the leg up or whatever the, and where I'm just, I'm talking about not somebody with a broken leg, right? But maybe they've got some inflammation, maybe there's an injury there. Why does movement matter so much with recovering from an injury? Is it ideal to completely stop moving? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Well, I think there's two different contexts here. You have clinical based pain and injuries, like go see a physical therapist, go get checked out by your physician. Make sure that something isn't a red flag, that isn't a vast majority of people, you know, 90 plus percent of the people out there in gyms today are dealing with chronic low level aches. Pains and old injuries, and that's where we need a reactivation model and not a deactivation model. If every single time that we got an ache, pain or an injury, we had to sit out for six weeks, we would be weaker, we would be fatter, and we'd be more unhealthy than we already are in our country, and we already are struggling with many of those different metrics.

But I think that reactivation versus deactivation two totally different things, very rarely is it. Ever a good thing to just go out and do nothing. There's always something that we can do, but again, it comes to your mindset. Can you take your ego away from things and can you get back to doing things smarter so you can do this forever. A lot of the people that I work with, they want to be able to train forever because they enjoy physicality, they enjoy strength training, they enjoy going out and running five Ks. They enjoy being 60 or 70 years old, being able to play with their grandchildren and be able to go out and live a thriving, active life.

But this isn't something that is just given. It's something that is earned. And I think that we need to navigate the natural tendencies of aches, pains, and injuries that shouldn't necessarily happen in the gym, but they are gonna happen over time. We need to re lens the way that we're looking at things and say, Hey, there's more solutions. Then there are barriers. So if I can't barbell back squat today because something happened, it doesn't mean that you maybe can't go in and be pain free with a goblet squat and be able to still train that same movement pattern and get that momentum going forward. When we deactivate, we lose all momentum.

We lose it up here, we lose it inside of here, and we definitely lose it mechanically at our body's tissues as well. And that's something that we just want to avoid. But I think a lot of what my training centric approach comes from is that I've always been a coach. A lot of people don't know this, that I went through three and a half years of graduate school to become a physical therapist and get licensed only to go back into personal training and sports performance right away. That's where I started my career and outta 70 people that graduated in my class of DPT in Buffalo, New York. Shout out to Damon College. I was the only one that didn't take a job as a physical therapist. I took a job as a personal trainer down the road in San Diego, California, and North County. And I did it because I wanted to get back into performance.

I was a baseball guy, I wanted to move back into baseball. And I knew that having that higher level of education, especially with the anatomy and the physiology and the biomechanics, it would allow me to keep my athletes a little bit healthier because I knew how to put them back together. But that's where the prehab model comes in. If you know how to put 'em back together, you know how so they can't be broken in the first place. But that's where all that training comes from, is that I've always coached, I've always trained and I've dabbled in a little bit of physical therapy and a hybrid model for some of the athletes and the clients that I've worked with. But predominantly it's always been strength and conditioning. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It all makes sense. Yes, it's a perfect life. Qualified you to do what you're doing and to express the way that that you're expressing. And that's again, like, that's what I really admire. Just like, oh, this, he's really about that training. And what I, what I noticed initially too is just like all the variety of these different movement inputs, and so this leads me to, you know, if somebody is experiencing pain or just, you know, discomfort, whatever the case might be with trying to lift heavy when it comes to squats. There's so much that we can do even with one leg, right? Let's talk a little bit about that. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Well, I think that squats versus single leg training, they've battled each other over the years. I had a client Dave Tate from a lead FTS almost 10 years ago now, but he said it the best when it came to single leg training after decades and decades of squatting and deadlifting. As a powerlifter, he was finally working with me doing single leg work for the first time. We started 'em with basic split squats, literally going up and down in a split stance, and I smoked 'em right away. This is somebody that was going to squat a thousand pounds, and he goes, John, this sucks. He goes, this is twice as hard with half the amount of weight, and it's hard every single time.

And I'm like, that's single leg training. You can get a whole lot out of asymmetrical lower body, single leg work. Then you can, from bilateral, but it's not one against the other. Of course, we train the whole movement system, but I look at single leg training or asymmetrical lower body training as its own category of the human movement system, because we spend over 80% of our movement lives in single leg stance or asymmetrical stances, right?

But very rarely would you look at somebody's training program and go, Hey, do you have 80% of your lower body directed work in an asymmetrical stance? It's usually the opposite. There'll be bilateral hinging, bilateral squatting, doing maybe a couple walking lunges at the end of the training day and then calling it a day. But that's where we tend to really run into chronic pain at the lower back, chronic pain at the knees, and then usually dysfunction when it comes the hip and the ankle complex as well. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Just makes sense. We're spending more time, especially again, if we're active and doing things functionally with one leg being, you know, again, we don't do a lot with both of our legs together in this perfect position, and so being able to train single leg or a split stance, it's just, it's more akin to real life.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah, in, in pain-free performance, I deep dive into the lunge pattern. So we call the lunge any sort of single leg directed work, but it's not just a squat on a single leg, and it's definitely not just a hinge on the single leg. The lunge pattern is a distinct pattern in itself. And why is it that, that's the question that I always get. It has all of the best biomechanical properties of the hinge at the hips, meaning that we're glute dominant. We're hamstring stability dependent, and we have the lower back engaged. So we should have a hinge at the hips when we're doing single leg work, but we should also have a knee forward position at the knees relative to the toes.

So all of a sudden you have this knees over toes position, and then you have a hip hinge position that is perfect in terms of load capacity, in terms of centration of the hips, meaning like a central point of stability, but also muscular recruitment. If you can bring the knee forward a little bit naturally, according to your body that's gonna recruit the quadriceps, if you can bring the hip hinge a little bit more deeply with your torso angling down, that's gonna engage the glutes the strongest, the thickest really the key driver of human strength across the body spectrum.

If you can do all of these things simultaneously, you are in the perfect position to be "athletic". You know, you think about any athletic movement or any athletic endeavor, usually it doesn't have a huge heel on the ground position. It doesn't have a vertical shin, definitely doesn't have a vertical spine. It's in these natural positions that are best mimicked in the lunge pattern, forward knee plus hip hinge. And because we're on single leg and we actually have asymmetrical stance at the lower body, we can mitigate the stress of the spine and we can redirect that stress to the muscles where we want them.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So what did you just say about the glutes and athletic movement? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: They are the cornerstone of all health, performance and physicality. They are the central line of tension and stability at every lower body directed pattern. And they're also the potentiator at upper body patterns. They're the forced transducer of any rotary or lateralized planes. They are the glutes are everything. If we're not training glutes directly, if we're not training glutes and compound patterns, if we're putting emphasis on glutes during single leg work, also bilateral squats and hinges, we're just doing ourselves a disservice. And it's for the men as well. It's not just for the ladies. You heard it here that the glutes are for the men because that gets you to where you want to be in terms of your strength, in terms of your muscle, and the physique. The physique goals are there too. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Okay. So now we're opening up this compartment, which is, especially in, well, things are changing, of course. Many more women are training. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But the emphasis tends to be lower body, right? Especially the glutes for men. Men, we've been doing this for quite some time, and you know, there's this phenomenon, it's a meme. Skipping leg day, right? And that's changing fortunately, but still the emphasis on the glutes. And so what you're saying is men need to start training like girls. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I wouldn't go that far, but I would bring the pendulum swinging from stereotypical women to stereotypical men. Somewhere in between, we all know the stereotypical male head. He's gonna go in there, he is gonna be bench pressed on Mondays. He's gonna skip legs on Wednesdays. He is gonna hit a back session on Fridays. And then on Saturdays of course, you're gonna hit a full arm session. And then they skip the lower body. And even if they are doing lower body, it turns into piss poor squats, half ranges of motion with the bar in your back always, or it turns into machine work.

And there's really nothing that trains the posterior chain directly. This is a huge mistake. On the opposite side, you do see an overemphasis on lower body directed work with the women, but I would say that that is an outlier. Most women are going in and they're gonna be cardio heavy, they're gonna be mobility heavy, and usually they are gonna be dabbling in strength training, not really investing in progressive strength training that has been changing over the last three to five years. 'Cause we do see a trend in females going through resistance training, but it's not like females are out there power lifting. That's not quite where we're at right now. But if you bring both of these things together, we just need to be training more well-rounded, no matter if you're a man or a woman or whoever you are.

Well-rounded training leads to better gains across the board, but it leads to longevity in your training career. It leads to longevity and health in your life, orthopedically and systemically. And if we can just simply train well-rounded, I think that we would be better off altogether. You know, the name of the game is health. And if you can train in a well-rounded way, you allow yourself to get to the next year, get to the next decade, to be able to physically thrive forever because you are able to withstand a lot of those stresses out there and those challenges out there that you don't necessarily know that are coming.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing. So train like a human. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Train Like a human. Exactly. We call it the six by six protocol. Every human out there should be doing squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, carry patterns. Those are the six foundational movement patterns. And then on top of that, that's your human movement system. We need physical characteristics. That's power, strength, cardio and conditioning, mobility, hypertrophy and athleticism. If you have the six patterns, the six characteristics, you put those things together, you are gonna be unbreakable. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh, this is so good. And of course, you cover all of these and put together protocols with all of these in the book.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah, probably too many. We deep dove in on the programming sections and we wanted to allow people to go in and match three day a week full body or four day a week, upper lower splits, five day a week, regional splits, but then also splice in different things like pain prep and then mobility protocols so people can actually like, plug and play all these different things together to create their basic solution for their unique health needs.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing. I wanna ask you specifically about athleticism, and I haven't talked about this on the show before. Medicine Ball. This is one of those things that I utilize every week, several times a week, doing various exercises, whether I'm, you know, throwing against the wall, slamming to the ground. What do you think about medicine ball exercises?

DR. JOHN RUSIN: They're great. They're great because we can start to tap into the rotary planes. We can get lateral lies, we can have unilateral emphasis. Those are all characteristics of being athletic. And also we can display power at a low level of load. So medicine Ball is one of these tools that I think that I got introduced to 20 years ago, and it was like only the functional training gurus were using that stuff. But all of a sudden we think about trying to redefine how we train power and how we train athleticism. This is one of those key tools. I think when it comes to athleticism, specifically, body weight's, the king, it's always gonna be the king being able to dominate your body, stepping and moving through space again in rotary.

Unilateral and lateral planes of motion, that is gonna be the name of the game. But the other tools that we really like are Kettlebells, awesome landmine bands. And then when it comes to body weight, that's still gonna be the king. But athleticism isn't just Olympic weightlifting. Athleticism isn't just doing a super aggressive depth jump into a vertical jump. It's being able to actually train and move like an athlete. And I think that there's a little bit more of a conversation there on what an athletic trait actually is, because it gets very confused today. We got people talking about hybrid athlete. Well, there's nothing real, too athletic about power lifting or going out and running a marathon.

Both are amazing strength and cardio based goals and skills to have. But athleticism isn't either one of these. There's nothing athletic about that. Athleticism is moving your body through space with tempo, with agility, with symmetry, with smoothness, with articulation of movement skill. That is how we would train athleticism. But many times you have to wrap your brain around. It's not gonna be super heavy. Maybe it's not even gonna be super fast, but it should be articulate and it should be a skill that is full body in nature. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That reminds me of Luca, right? It's not necessarily fast, but he's an incredible athlete. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Of course. Yeah. He has things that you just cannot teach. But athleticism is something for like the average person that you can get better at. But most people, when they get to 30, 35, 40, they just quit. When it comes to their power and athleticism, they're like, I'm just deep diving in on strength and muscle. 'Cause that's a. All I heard that we need to do, and that's a huge mistake. You know, probably age 30, 31, we start to have power reduce as the first physical characteristic that we lose due to quote unquote normalize aging. That can be reduced just by moving athletically. But what I don't necessarily recommend for people right away is to go, Hey, I need to move like an athlete.

I need to train athleticism. I'm gonna jump into rec basketball after 20 years of not playing and I'm gonna go full court and I'm gonna go balls to the wall on this thing. Don't necessarily do that, train the trait and then translate it back into sport or function. I think we just need a re-exposure to even like 20 or 30 minutes a week across the span of your program, just these exposures into moving like an athlete again.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So would this. Be prehab if we're, again, we're, if that's our aspiration is to play a particular sport and we haven't been doing that thing for a while and we wanna be able to perform at it, just say there's a lot of explosive movements off of one foot. Should we start training, you know, one foot movements, bounding, that kind of stuff to kind of build our body to be able to translate?

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah, you need to callous the system. There is definitely science behind the transference between, Hey, we're gonna stress the body in a certain way in the gym and then hopefully it's gonna stand the test of time when we actually get there out into a reactionary sport. Something like basketball. But there's not a direct correlation between these two things. But you're always better off trying to prepare the body for performance than you are just hoping and praying that you stay healthy, doing an activity that you're not ready for. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So what would you define prehab as? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Prehab is anything that you're gonna be doing with a more direct and acute approach? So at pain-free performance, we're gonna prehab during the six phase warmup, we're gonna prehab on off days that are gonna have more of a mobility and an activation and a corrective exercise realm to the focus of that training session. And really prehab is anything that we can do that allows us to put more concentrated efforts on busting weak links.

What is the weakest link that's holding you back? What is the place that needs to be strengthened? What is the pattern that needs to be strengthened? What's the skill that needs to be improved? So we can then translate it back into function, we can translate it back into the gym and hopefully the rest of our daily lives.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing. Amazing. I wanna go back to the medicine ball. And I don't know if this has ever hit anybody like, I'm gonna say it, but medicine is in the name. All right. And just thinking about why was it named this? 

And I think again movement is medicine and it's this incredible tool where we can get all this dynamic movement, these different inputs potentially, you know, whether again, it's like doing something explosive or, I was just training with my buddy Louis Howes and his trainer, and one of the things we did was a split squat.

So we had a foot up on the bench holding the medicine ball and the leg that was on the ground is jumping. And we're coming down, but coming down and moving right into a rotation, right. So it's just like all of this and, but it's being fluid, right? It's not, I'm not trying to jump as high as I can or, you know, but it's like being able to. Come down to the ground and like go right into that rotation with this kind of grace and, you know, so what do you think about that? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I get that exact exercise sent to me by every like general fitness client that I have that is also a golfer because they see that on the PGA tour of all the golfers doing that exact exercise right now. And it's like, well, why are pro golfers doing that particular exercise with rotary motions at the medicine ball? And also single leg work, because that's what function is. And when it looks at trying to rotate on a single leg with a unilateral emphasis, that's the definition of athleticism, maybe minus the step.

But when you think about something like that, it's beautiful because you have to accelerate a medicine ball, but when you don't necessarily throw it, you have to decelerate it. When you're talking about athleticism, especially for health and longevity, it's not all about this ballistic work, ballistic power. Concentric power. It's really about being able to harness into force, decelerate force and being able to protect yourself in that way.

So deceleration and being able to rapidly stop and be able to have positions that hold up against your mechanics, that's gonna be key. But a lot of the medicine ball work that we do are ballistics. I would say 50% are that, and then the other 50% are actually holding onto the ball and doing something like a throw and not actually throwing it, because then that trains the decelerating properties that are the opposite of the acceleration properties. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So you're talking about like what we used to do with the, like our siblings would like fake throw the ball.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Exactly. Exactly.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh man. So this goes back to, shout out to Luca, Dante again, and you know, as of this recording, we've got a new version of Luca. He's been training, he's looking lean and focused, but he is arguably the greatest in the world at deceleration, right. When we talk about athleticism, the ability to decelerate is one of these capacities again that we can train. And you just mentioned how important it is. If we're talking about functionality being pain free, athletic movement, it's not just the go, go go and the ability to accelerate, it's also the ability to decelerate. So with that said, what are some things that we can do to train deceleration? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: There's a lot of drills out there that get poo-pooed on. You know, you think about things like agility drills for 40 plusers, or you think about bringing out the agility ladder for people that aren't necessarily trying to go to the NFL combine and people go. What muscles does that train? You know, how does that get me jacked? Well, it's not all about that, but being able to actually step through space or take a number of steps through space, that's gonna be huge.

There's certain kettlebell drills that are naturally decelerate, and that's why we move into that tool as a number one. Functional training tool for athleticism itself 'cause every time that you move a kettlebell, whether it be a swing, whether it be a snatch, whether you're moving it across your body, there's an acceleration and then there's a natural deceleration. And just because of the shape of the force plane, it is a centrifugal force plane, meaning that semi-circular that's allowing us to actually have more rapid deceleration capabilities with less load needed. And this is something that we utilize hugely. You know, the same thing could be said for the land minus that same force profile.

And that's why these training tools just really stand up to the test of the time. But for my clients, we're gonna work on body weight agility. We're gonna work on athletic movement with multiple steps. And then we're also gonna utilize kettlebell and landmine almost every single time. And this tends to be a priority for people too. We use it in a training program that is gonna be more well-rounded with a blend in something called a primer. A primer is called a power primer in our system and essentially we're priming the brain into alert, utilizing new skills. We have a little bit more of a power emphasis, but we have acceleration and deceleration, both being trained and we're moving our bodies fluid leaf through space so we can learn a new motor skill. The more diverse we can do, we can be in terms of our motor skills and our spectrum of movement, the more resilient we are gonna be against pain and injuries. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing. You mentioned the landmine a couple times. Can you describe what that is for people that are listening? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah. I think about putting a barbell just on its one side. So you can either put it in these special things that they have on a squat rack that is a landmine holder. So one end is down in contact with that thing or on the ground and you're holding the opposite collar. And just by doing that, you create the most functional training tool on earth, which is the barbell.

And people go, yeah, I love the barbell. Well try the barbell with one end down on the ground. It totally changes the game. So the landmine is something really interesting that we utilize a lot too, because a lot of the people that I work with, they don't necessarily have gold to gym at their disposal every single day, but they want to have diversity in their exercise selection and also being able to challenge their movement patterns.

That landmine allows us to be able to have like a poor man's machine for many of these different movement patterns all of a sudden, because the one end of the bar is down on the ground. We have natural stability from that. And because that bar is grounded and we have it in our hand or on our body in another position, we have natural compression that happens at our shoulders or at our lower body.

So essentially we bring the stability components down or the stability requisites down, and we have our ability to move fast and move explosively up. So this is the perfect scenario for somebody to be able to train power more safely and more effectively with a training tool that they're not necessarily like putting two and a halfs on and trying to PR with every week.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm. Amazing. So you mentioned the implement. With the squat rack. What about if we don't have one, is there another way we can do a landmine? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah, you can put a weight, just a normal Olympic weight down on the ground and you can put one end of the barbell into the hole on the ground, or you can just push it out into a corner of a room or you can just stick it between two dumbbells. That's what we do many times if we have a group training class going on, we're gonna create landmine out of two dumbbells that sit like this. You put the end of the barbell right there and it won't move anywhere, and you'll be able to do what you need to do with it. You don't need any crazy equipment with it. Just turn the barbell over on its side and get going. 

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SHAWN STEVENSON: Well, since this is about pain-free performance, I gotta ask you about, you know, we tend to think. If we are just, you know, going through the motions, that pain is a side effect. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Mm-hmm. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right. But you talk specifically that it's far more than that. It's really a warning sign. Right. We just look at it as like, this is a side effect, but our body's giving us feedback. Let's talk more about that. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: It is feedback and it's not always a red flag sign, but it's a sign that shouldn't be ignored. And anytime that we're having something that's coming back in terms of biofeedback of a pain response, we should be paying attention to that. But I think where people go wrong is they go, Hey, this set is really burning up my quads. This is pain. Well, that's discomfort. We're talking about pain being more elicited into the joints, sharper, more acute, something that you feel is going wrong or could be potentially injurious.

You feel like that? It may be, but it may not be. You know, a pain science is a deep. Deep topic that we could spend 10 hours on the podcast talking about. But essentially we need to respect our movement system. We need to respect our bodies. And if our body is giving us some feedback, we don't just go no pain, no gain mentality, and just push through because you're not a real man if you don't do that.

We just need to be utilizing that data to make some smart adjustments to continue to train. You know, there's no one really caring. If you do a dumbbell bench, press one day and then do a barbell bench press the next day. Your body doesn't necessarily know the difference, but it will know the difference if you continue to force feed certain exercises that do elicit chronic pain responses. And in that, that's where people tend to go down a bad rabbit hole of pain and dysfunction. Range of motion gets less, pain goes up, results plateau or revert, and that's when we lose our will to want to train hard. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So again, the spectrum. We've got no pain, no gain over here. You know the, what is that? Was that Rocky three with Mr. T Pain? We got that. And then we've got completely just if there's pain, don't do anything, right. And as you talked about, it's, it's in the middle here. And you know, one other thing I want to ask you about. You got your 10-year-old son cam here. You brought along incredible athlete. Baseball, basketball, judo. Is Cam doing some of this training? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Cam is not doing training right now. He just turned 10. So he's not doing a structured training program. He will dabble in training with myself or my wife, or maybe some of his older teammates will come in and train and he'll go on with him. But we're not having him on program two to three days a week. We're not progressing different exercises. We're letting him have his sports and also just be a kid and play. I think that exposure to different movement scenarios is what he needs to do at this point in time. I think that age is gonna be different for everyone in terms of starting a progressive strength training or a well-rounded physical preparation program. But usually 10 years old is a little bit young. Anywhere from 12 to 13 is about the right time to start putting load on the kids. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Awesome. And this is another great question again for people who have young athletes, you know, parents, grandparents, coaches out there. And there's this big transformation that just happened in our culture the last decade really with specialization.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Hmm. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: In sport, right? So getting your kid in to get the advantage where they're training pretty much year round on whatever that particular sport may be. Maybe they're playing travel baseball and they're just a baseball player and there's no, again, there's no textbook way to do this. But from your perspective and your experience and being able to work with all these athletes, and also now again having, you know, your son right here who's an athlete, what do you think about specialization versus, you know, and the reason I'm asking this is, I remember this interview with Kobe Bryant and Kobe is very inquisitive whenever he got the opportunity, especially asking players who were doing things that he wanted to accomplish. So he was talking to Michael Jordan and he was asking about basketball because Kobe played when he was very young, obviously. Yeah. And he said, so, you know, what were you working on when you were 12? And Michael Jordan was like, I was playing baseball.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know? So what do you think about specialization as a father?

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I get it when people want to go in and get a leg up on the other 10 year olds in town. I think there's an emotion to it. I think there's a biosocial physical aspect of wanting to be the best and perceiving that if I do specialize a child early, that they are gonna get the leg up. So to say it's just not true. It's just not true. We have over a decade of research and really good studies on the highest performers in sport, and over 94% of professional athletes and Olympic athletes today played multiple sports before their 15th birthday. Oh, so you, you start talking about that in the wrong circles with your sports, family, teammates, and all of a sudden people go, whoa, what I'm doing is the right way?

Maybe, maybe not. But I look at it from a father, but also I look at it from a sports scientist and also a strength and conditioning coach that has been around the block. You know, we've seen high levels of success for some outliers, but we've also seen the vast majority of people that have a well-rounded training approach or well-rounded sport approach, especially early on, just be healthier long term. We have great data on that, but also perform at the highest levels or get to those D one scholarships, get to professional baseball, get to the major leagues or the NFL, just because I think the correlation leads to the best athlete being the best athlete as soon as they do turn into specialize. Not a whole lot of people know that.

I worked for the Chinese Olympic committee about 12 years ago and I was in charge of a couple of their athletes that won medals previously to prep them to win their next medal. But then I took over a couple teams programs in terms of their youth development model and that was a wild experience. 'Cause all of a sudden you see the ultimate early specialization, they'd be going into elementary schools, across regions and they would be looking at potential for a four or 5-year-old to be able to go into whatever sport and then they pull them into Olympic Village and they'd start specializing the kids and four or five years old and then.

I would be one of the people at Village that would be putting programming together for five year olds, and they'd have a couple hundred of them. And the reality was I was also training the 25-year-old that had just won silver or just won gold in the previous Olympics. And yes, they made it through that athletic development model, but also thousands of kids had fallen off that they got sent away from Olympic Village.

They got hurt, they're no longer anywhere, and it was the strongest survived. I think that is absolutely inappropriate. We don't necessarily see the strongest surviving here in America. That's not the model that we run. But I have friends and I have people that we play baseball with that grew up in Dominican, grew up in Venezuela, and the model is very similar there as well. But it's a totally different scenario that early specialization was to get out. We don't necessarily have that here in America, but what we do have is a lot of social pressures to want to be the best at earliest ages. But anyone who's been around the block, a long enough time knows that who cares if you're the best 10-year-old?

Nobody cares if you're the best 12-year-old. Very rarely does anyone care if you're the best 15-year-old. It gets serious at 16, 17, maybe 18. And we're now seeing in professional baseball that some of the best players on the face of the earth today didn't even have division one scholarships. So everyone develops at a different rate. But if you want to give your child the best chance to succeed in their. If you want to give their child the best chance to succeed physically in life, you need to be able to have them have more diversity in what they're getting out of their sports or even their activities. It doesn't always need to be the sport.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. And there's something to be said and thank you for that. That was amazing. There's something to be said for enjoyment. There's something to be said for passion for a thing as well, and not having the opportunity to experiment, to play, to try different things. You might not get the chance to find that thing that you really love and are connected with. You know, and so giving our kids the opportunity to have different exposures and I'm a big fan of unstructured play, right. Just being able to just go play with their friends and just do stuff and you know, it tends to turn into competition one way or the other a lot of times. But just being able to play, have fun, experiment and it, you know, again, there's no right or wrong way to do this, but you know, from what I've seen, especially if a kid really locks onto something.

You can't stop them. Right. And I asked your son when I, when I got here and when I shook his hand, like, so which one is your favorite of, you know, judo, basketball, baseball? He's like, just whatever's in season. It's a great answer because I know that he's just having fun and he's, he's doing different stuff and it's not about like, I'm supposed to be in love with this one thing. And if, and when that happens. So be it. I know that you'll support him to the moon and back, but you know, this is, we got such a great opportunity now to, like you just mentioned, there are some kids who are in positions like this is their way out. Where we have the opportunity to, you know, have some more grace and just be there as a support system and put our kids in position to figure things out.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I was growing up in a really unique household because my dad was an athletic director of 27 schools in the Western New York area, Williamsville Central School District, and he was the man in terms of being the athletic director. He knew all the coaches. He went to all the games. When I was born, I was right at the football field. I was at the basketball court, I was in the weight room, and that's how I grew up. And I played every single sport because my dad, like a crazy person, would throw me in with the modified and the JV teams when I was like seven years old. So that's what I grew up doing. I grew up playing lacrosse and swimming and playing baseball and basketball, did martial arts.

I did everything because everything was there because I was just there with my dad. And that was a different day and age, you know, that's it, 30 plus years ago. But I find myself as a father today, going, that was the right thing to do. I came up, I played baseball, basketball, and football, and I excelled in baseball. And I took that to a division one level and I did well with it. And I find myself trying to do that exact same thing with my son Cam today. But it is so much harder. You know, my mom and I will have these conversations and every time she'll bring up, Hey, well your dad did this with you. I'm like, Hey, it's 2025.

You know, the social pressures to fall in line with certain travel teams or certain early adoption exposure to different tournaments, things like this. It's hard because you want to be able to do the best. You want to be with the best players, but you always have to step back and go, Hey, we're 10 years old. We need to be able to know that we're gonna be great kids. We're gonna learn how to compete, we're gonna have fun. You're gonna build mental and physical resilience by what we're doing here. And overall, you're gonna develop as a human being and not just as an athlete. I think that we're losing that a lot with early sports specialization because you only play a season and then you specialize in that season with different kids and it's all about me, me, me.

How good can I get? And the thing that I took away from sports, playing all those sports when I was growing up is that I had a team mentality. I had a team mentality that stays with me today 'cause I run a team today and I couldn't imagine my life without that team mentality. Even in individual sports, there's still that team around you. You know, cam does judo and he has one of the strongest teams because of all the kids helping each other out. You know, without the team, there's really nothing. I think we're losing that a little bit with this me-centric approach to early sports specialization today. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. You know, this is, again, speaking to, you know, your, your, your unique qualifications and how life qualified you in hearing about your father and that exposure. I could see there's a legacy in this book. You dedicated this book to your son. But also the influence of your dad is in this as well. And so what does that mean to you? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: It's everything. We were talking before, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and when I graduated with my doctorate, my dad and I drove from Buffalo, New York to San Diego, California. During that drive, I was given up jobs and making good money like everyone else in my class. And I decided to take a job for $19 an hour doing personal training in SoCal. And he drove me out there and he dropped me off and I lived at a Days Inn off the highway in mission Valley, and it was the cheapest rent I could get and it was the best because you know, that was him going, Hey, go chase your dreams.

And I do think he thought that he did expose me to enough to be able to go out and do something a little bit more unique. And it was definitely against the grain, but it was one of those trips that was like, it was a coming of the guard. It was like he was also Dr. Rusin, but he was like, you know, now you go do your thing as Dr. Rusin. And that was one of the last trips I took with my dad because he died about, uh, eight months later, terminal cancer. But I always remember that because it was like, man, he drove the cross country trip with me and drop me off and kind of said, Hey, go do your thing. And that was the most liberating thing of all.

So when you talk about something like writing a 600 page textbook, you know, with the system that I've developed over the last 20 years, like my life's works in there, a lot of those experiences I talk about in the book, I try to make a little bit more human than just the science of pain-free performance. And it's about all the different people that had helped me along the way. All my early mentors, those aha moments that I had putting the readers into where I was at that time and saying, here's where the system comes from. It's not something that is just based on the science, it's based on my entire life's work.

And I think that that brings it full circle for many of the readers and definitely our certified coaches out there that go, holy shit, we're all a work in progress and we will always be a work in progress and I will be as well. But I think the evolution of a non-dogmatic system of always trying to learn more and how to implement more and how to be more well-rounded and knowing very well that there's so many different ways to get at to a goal. But I think the number one thing is if you're healthy, you can go out there and do anything. If you're struggling with your health, nothing else matters. And if you can put health before anything else, you're always gonna get to that goal. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that man. Right now, and as of this recording, the book is available everywhere books are sold. It's a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book. And if you could, can you share what you want people to know about pain-free movement? Like what are they going to find in this book? You've got, when we're talking about training, you're showing people, you've got the photos, you've got the programs, you've got the education as well. Talk about that a little bit. 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: I want people to just be able to have the confidence to go in and have a health centric fitness approach so they can unlock their goals no matter what they are. And I think that if we can do that, we need the tools in order to achieve it. And this book gives them the goods, it gives them programs to follow. It gives them pain protocols to be able to get healthy. It gives them protocols to be able to build muscle and lose fat and be able to have longevity with their training. But also it shows them exactly what to do and why to do it. And we busted our asses and we did something very unique in this book.

We queued over 400 different assets. So you can watch the videos and you can go through the programs and you can see me moving and my staff moving exactly how we want you to move as a starting point. And I think that's something that brings a book to life. You know, one of the struggles that we had with pain-free performance was this was coming off of the back of almost 1,002 day in-person certification courses over the last 10 years with pain-free performance specialist certification.

This is very tactile education. How do we bring it down into a textbook and not lose its essence? So I think that we needed to overdeliver on the programming. We needed to deep dive into the education and the actionability of that education, but we also needed to make movement come to life. We need to watch movement. We can't just look at a picture. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. Can you let everybody know where they can pick up a copy and also follow you for more? 

DR. JOHN RUSIN: You can pick up a copy at Amazon or all places, books are sold, and you can check out more on social media, at Dr. John Russon, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. And then pain free training.com is the site.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing, man. I'm so grateful for you and your life experience and life qualifying you to do things the way that you're doing them. It immediately, it resonated with me because I'm about that life too when it comes to actually doing the training and not just theory. I love the theory part, but I love the train as well. And so this deeply connected with me and I just appreciate you so much.

DR. JOHN RUSIN: Thank you so much.

SHAWN STEVENSON: The one and only Dr. John Rusin, thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. Listen, it's incredible to have access like we do today and to have resources like we do today because taking 20 years of experience and putting it into a book like this is just very, very special. And like I said, something that really resonated with me. About our special guest is he's about that life and not just that he's about that family life as well. Bringing his son here today was just really special for me. It really resonated with me and just to see the quality of the character as well.

You know, his son stood up immediately shook my hand, looked me in my eyes and all the things and but also just this joy that they both have this kind of childlike energy and I'm just so grateful. I'm grateful that we have these incredible connections. We have access and education like this at the push of a button.

That's why podcasts are so powerful and so easy to share. So I encourage you to share this conversation with somebody that you care about today to encourage them on their health and wellness upleveling and being able to do this together as a community. Of course, one of the best ways to share is to take a screenshot of this episode and share it on social media. Of course on Instagram, you can tag me. I'm @shawnmodel, I'm gonna keep an eye out for it. And also tag Dr. Rusin as well. He's at DR John Rusin, spelled R-U-S-I-N. Show him some love. I'm sure that it would absolutely light up his day. We got some incredible masterclasses and class guests coming your way very, very soon.

So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to the model health show.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions videos for each episode. And if you got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome and I appreciate that so much and take care. I promise, to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.