Don Moxley: Sports Performance
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Guest: Don Moxley
Release Date: 11/17/2024
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Steve Washuta : Welcome to Trulyfit. Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and wealth. I’m your host, Steve Washuta. Co Founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101.
Steve Washuta On today’s episode, I interview Don Moxley. You can find everything about him at train recover, wing.com Don is a second time guest on the show, the first time we spoke about HRV. He is the founder of train recovery, win.com he’s an exercise physiologist, a sports scientist, a biohacker, and he has great insights, and I would say wisdom.
Steve Washuta He’s been in this game a long time to pass on to us about recovery, about sports performance, about winning in general, and about, I would say, being introspective with yourself as an athlete or as somebody who is in the health and fitness space to become a better coach, a better teacher, a better personal trainer, a better nutritionist, anybody who is guiding people towards success.
Steve Washuta It was great episode again, train recover, wind.com, or at Don Moxley, M, O, X, L, E, y, on Instagram, with no further ado, here’s Don and I Don, welcome back to the truly fit podcast. For those who have not heard you on the first time around, why don’t you give my listeners a little updates and bio of who you are and what you do day to day in the fitness and health industry? Sure.
Don Moxley Thanks. So my background is, I’m trained as an exercise physiologist. I was, I was, I grew up on a farm in eastern Ohio, and when I was a decent high school wrestler, my parents said, you’re going to college. So I had every intention of going back home and feeding beef cattle for the rest of my life, but I got and I walked on the wrestling team at Ohio State.
Don Moxley I was I was decent, I wasn’t good, but I was able to walk on so I get on the wrestling team, I struggle with injury. I was a big weight cutter. I was one of those guys that would cut weight from like 230 to 177 and struggled with a lot of injuries at that time. But and then, and as I looked for answers on how to do what I need to do to compete, I fell in love with human physiology, and had an Ag Econ class as a sophomore that basically said, you know, unless you’re inherent in a farm, you’re screwed.
Don Moxley So I was like, Okay, this makes this decision pretty easy. So changed over my academics at that time, finished up my graduate work. After I got done wrestling, I went to grad school and studied exercise, Fizz, strength and conditioning, and have been in practice ever since. Along the way, I’ve been a professor for 25 of the last 35 years, teaching the Exercise Sciences. But I’ve always kept a stable of athletes I work with.
Don Moxley I’ve always kept a group the latest that I really had hands on with, 15 through 18 I was, I was a sports scientist with the wrestling program at Ohio State built a data system that we were we were harvesting about three and a half million data points a season on a wrestling team, and we got to where we could make good decisions based on, you know, what makes a difference, what makes you know, we took our team and we broke them into a group of 3333, cohorts.
Don Moxley One cohort was all American or better, and what we the language to our team was, if you’re on this team and you make the starting lineup, we expect you to be an all American, so that that’s really what the goal was. So we had a group of, I think it was nine guys that were anywhere from six in the country to an Olympic gold medalist.
Don Moxley So, you know, a pretty, pretty interesting group. We had a second group that was, these were athletes who had started for us, but never made all American for some reason. And then we had a third group that had never started for us, but these athletes all trained together. They all worked out together. They all did their thing. So we wanted to with this data. We wanted to say, Okay, what really makes a difference?
Don Moxley What really gives the athlete the ability to move from not able to not able to make the starting lineup to making the starting lineup to actually becoming an All American? And so that was, that was an incredibly informative opportunity for me, so and we make decisions based on the data, and I think this is really important as we start to look at things like truly fit, what really makes a difference, and what is dogma, what is, what is the residue of of just years and years of of dogmatic practice?
Don Moxley Um, I tell the story. I when I the last, my last teaching job, I was in this little small school in western Ohio, and one of my students, we had this advanced performance course that we are teaching, and it. The capstone course, and one of my students, you know, we’re talking about philosophies and so forth. And this kid goes, Well, I’m a West Side guy, and West Side barbell is, is a big power lifting facility and, and I said, that’s I said, that’s great.
Don Moxley And I said, that’s good. I said, just know that whether you’re west side or you’re hit, or you’re whatever, you know, fill in the blank. I said, this is the same as Baptist and Methodist. Okay, you’re reading, you read from the same book. Okay, you’ve decided that there’s some practices that you execute that gives you the ability to build your own sanctuary. But that’s those are dogmatic differences. They’re not scientific differences.
Don Moxley And so this is when we start looking at things like, truly fit, what really is a differentiating factor. So that’s, you know, as as my career has evolved over the years, you know, I started training my first client, who went on to become a national champion in wrestling in 1987 that was my first paid personal training gig.
Don Moxley Shortly thereafter, I was doing work with the Chicago Bulls and alver meal out of the bulls organization, and just have worked my way through that for the you know, and to the point now that doing a lot of consulting, working with people, helping athletes understand, you know, what really makes a difference and and it’s not about my program, it’s about what does the data say as it relates to what really makes a difference in you achieving your goals? Yeah,
Steve Washuta I feel like there’s a lot of psychological barriers too, because naturally, people gravitate Donna, as you may agree with this, towards what they’re good at. So what happens is, you might be a West Side barbell guy, because your body type allows you to do that particular type of training in a better way than, let’s say, yoga, right?
Steve Washuta And you might be a yoga person because you you’re born with the mobility and flexibility to go ahead and do that. So, so that’s why the data is so important. Because the data will take away that psychological barrier, correct, and just say, this is what you need. This is what your body is lacking.
Don Moxley Yeah, what, what’s ironic about that is, is my Olympic gold medalist. His name was Kyle Snyder. Kyle was, is just an amazing athlete, and, and, and, but we we have a distinct one of the things that we identified in wrestling is cardiovascular fitness is critical in an athlete’s ability to move from Group C to Group B to Group A.
Don Moxley It’s, it’s, it’s the strongest predictor of success of any of those three groups and and there’s, and Kyle was an incredibly powerful athlete, but we did a lot of threshold work. We had bikes that I could program wattage on, and we would do what’s called Two by 15 intervals, so there are 15 minute intervals at a given wattage, and then we used heart rate as a secondary indicator if we kept them in zone three, where I wanted them. It was a great workout, but Kyle hated those workouts. He just hated them.
Don Moxley And I said, Kyle, I know you hate them, but this is the weak spot. This is, this is the opportunity for you to improve so and you know, I think our challenges is that, how do we effectively help athletes recognize where these weak spots are, because, you know, I do a lot of work. Steve, in in I have a model, and, in fact, I’ll send you a graphic of it that we can put in the show notes and so forth.
Don Moxley But I call it my performance pyramid. And there’s, it’s a pyramid, there’s three sides, there’s physiological, there’s psychological and their skills. Those are the three sides of the pyramid, and what the and each each side has a as a number of factors. There’s 10 elements on the three sides, okay? And what I say to people is that when you look at those elements, you win on your strength, but you lose on your weakness.
Don Moxley And so you can be the strongest athlete in the world, but if you don’t have enough gas to get to the end of your competition, you’re going to get beat. You can be a strong athlete with great cardio, but if you don’t have the right mindset going in, you’re not going to be able to compete. And oh, by the way, if you’re a college athlete and you don’t have the skills to get your ass to class and turn in exams and do the work to remain eligible, you don’t get a chance to compete.
Don Moxley So I don’t care how strong you are or how good your mindset is if you don’t have the basic life skills to get things done. So so when I work with an athlete, I typically go back and I look at that performance pyramid. What are the 10 factors? Where do we need to focus on? Because I think you invest in your weakness and you support your strength and but we’ve all got to figure out what that weakness is.
Steve Washuta Yeah, and you think for athletes, it would be easy to convey, but it’s not so. You know, in sports themselves, there’s so many different components that you need to be good at, right? So for wrestling, I’m not a wrestler. I, you know, I follow Wrestling, you know, how good are you from the bottom? How good are you riding? How good is your, you know, ability to sprawl. How good is your ability to take that right?
Steve Washuta So, if you can look at those things independently and go, You know what, I’ve done everything pretty well this season, except, you know, I my single leg is weaking. I need, all I can do is use the double leg for takedowns. I need to work on my single leg. Well, we can break that same sort of thing down in fitness and health, right, in cardiovascular components, overall strength to to endurance, to whatever those are, right? So we just, we break those down categorically.
Don Moxley And llet and let me put, let me give you a concrete example, and it’s my example. So, you know, again, decent high school wrestling. I showed up for practice. I worked hard. Once I quit cutting weight and started to get strong, I all of a sudden I go from a guy who can’t get out of the training room to I was in the starting lineup. Um, so just by making that decision to stop cutting weight and start training differently, I had a big jump.
Don Moxley Now that first year I was in the starting lineup i was my record was six and 12. Won six matches, lost 12 of the 12 matches I lost. I was winning 11 of them. When I got pinned. I couldn’t get off the bottom, so that summer, I went to a wrestling camp out in in eastern Virginia called the Granby School of wrestling. And Granby is a bottom wrestling school, and I developed the bottom skills.
Don Moxley So I go from six and 12 to 39 and nine, just by eliminating the weakness of not being able to get off the bottom, I became unrideable, and all of a sudden I become competitive at a national level. Now the ironic part about that 39 and nine of the nine losses, seven of them took place in a dual meet situation in our home arena, in Saint John arena. I couldn’t lose on the road and I couldn’t win at home, and so I started, we had a sports psychologist come talk to our team, and I started, and they asked this question.
Don Moxley They said, How many of you would rather train than compete? My hand went up, I love to train back then competition was, was really rough on me and and we identified that I had a situation where I was, I was very anxious, because when we wrestled at home was the only time my parents got to come see me wrestle and and, you know, we were just talking about your, you know, your second child’s on the way, and now you’re in this parent game.
Don Moxley You know, if your kids walking into the living room from the kitchen with a bowl of cereal, and you say, Don’t spill that, well, you can, you can count on about three steps later, it hit in the grounds, okay, you know, because we, it’s called, we call it the pink elephant, you know, you know, don’t think about this. So I worked with a sports psychologist to deal any, any he pointed this out to me. He said, so your parents are there.
Don Moxley So what’s going through your mind? Don’t lose. And I lost, you know, for something, I locked up, and he said, he said, you can’t. He said, You can’t, not think about that thing. You can’t not not think about the pink elephant. All you can do is we deal with pink elephants with what I call yellow squirrels. So my mindset at this point is about, I’ve done the work, I’ve lifted the weights. I’m as good as this person. So positive affirmations.
Don Moxley And I had a I had a mantra that would go through my mind before every match. I developed this mantra. So all of a sudden I didn’t have pink elephants anymore. I had I had a brain full of yellow squirrels. I was able to get into flow. I was able to, you know, turn off that prefrontal cortex, disconnect it and and, and wound up being very successful that year. So I this is when we go back to the model that we discussed. You got to figure out what that weakness is.
Don Moxley When you figure out what that weakness is, you train it, you bring it up in management. We call it constraint management that, you know, there’s a big, fancy term for it that you can study this at Stanford, you know, constraint management, and that’s and that’s all we’re doing in athletics.
Steve Washuta Yeah, turning things to your subconscious sometimes is also important. People are overthinking the process, right? You you may have sprawled 3000 times in practice and no one can take you down, but for whatever reason, you’re overthinking how you’re dropping your hips backwards as the person is shooting when you’re in the moment, and you’re not able to do it with the with the speed and position as you usually are.
Steve Washuta So you know, for putting, I’m a golfer, I’ll count to 10 while I’m putting, so I’m not thinking about my putting stroke. I saw the hole. I know where I want to hit it. I’ve had 1000 putts before. In my brain, I start counting to 10, so I’m focused on the counting, and then I just let my body subconsciously hit the putt, and it’s really helped me. I’ve been doing that for the last year. So it is funny how you can really trick yourself into becoming more successful in a sport.
Don Moxley Yeah, and if you’re thinking in the sport, you’re losing, you know, I saw. I saw an interesting post on on Instagram earlier today talking about this is that we spend all this time practicing to wire in these lower levels, at the at the basal motor level, at the motor level, and when you step onto the field, when you step onto the arena, you know it’s it’s critical for success that you’re able to wipe everything away and stop thinking and just react.
Don Moxley And I think it’s a mistake for coaches or parents to tell an athlete to think during during an event. If you’re thinking you’re losing, you’ve got to get to where you’ve wired this in and you’re reacting. That’s That’s what great athletes do.
Steve Washuta Yeah, I had a coach in football who said, when you think you stink, obviously, you know, not that innovative of a line, but it made sense. And you see that a lot when people change up their format too much. So you’ll see teams who, you know, get getting into football. Here, they always run cover two, and that’s basically all they do.
Steve Washuta There may be some cover two, cover three, and then they switch to man. Well, it’s, it’s, of course, it’s good to switch things up. But the problem is, your guys have gone from this instinctual, I have this area, I run to this area, I cover this area, and now I’m thinking of a totally different process.
Steve Washuta So as much as it is to switch things up, as good as it can be from a, let’s say, a strategic level, you’re also putting a psychological load on your athletes, who now have to be in that thinking zone, rather than that instinctual zone or or
Don Moxley the other side of that is Steve is you’ve gotta practice the transition, okay, this, this is part of preparing that team, so that, so that, so that, that they have worked through This transition from zone to man, it happens automatically that again, they’re again, they’re not thinking.
Don Moxley They just kick in a different set of skills that they’ve wired in prior. So you, if you’re going to do that, you have to practice it, and you have to practice it at a high level many times. So you can do that transition
Steve Washuta to shake that makes sense if you think about all of the lapses that you’ve seen over the years in sports, you wonder, how many of those come from exactly what you just said, Right? There hasn’t been that practicing of that transition, right?
Steve Washuta They had that other thing in place, whatever that thing was, but it wasn’t practiced to the point where it was secondary and every single person was overthinking once the coach or the situation changed drastically, yeah,
Don Moxley overthinking, creating stress. You know, I love I had a teammate that when we started the HRV work at Ohio State, with the athletes we kept, you know, he kept coming back to this is that you know you only have stress when you’re regret of the past or fear of the future. Okay, when you’re present, you have no stress when you’re here.
Don Moxley And this is a reason a lot of these things, like meditation and these practices, are so valuable. You know, back in the early 80s, we called it visualization. So as I was preparing for a match. I wasn’t visualizing wrestling. I was visualizing the walk up a hill back on the farm I grew up on. I was becoming present. I was getting rid of the past.
Don Moxley I wasn’t anticipating the future. I wasn’t thinking about winning or losing. I was using mantras to affirm the fact that I belong there, and those mantras, the creating, that repetitive process. Again, it’s that I don’t know. I’m a huge fan of the psychological concept of flow, the psychology of the optimum experience. The book is called, that’s the name of the book that
Don Moxley I originally read. I think it’s one of the most important books I ever read. But now, Steven Kotler is an author. He’s written the rise of Superman and stealing fire. He’s, he’s really and they’re excellent books. But it’s that. It’s, it’s the process for discontent, for disconnecting the prefrontal cortex, because that prefrontal cortex is where stress lives. You know, it’s, you know, it’s where all those thoughts come from.
Don Moxley And this is where meditation, visualization, all these techniques can become very, very valuable. So when you have an athlete that is struggling in competition, great practice athlete, but struggling in competition, that’s probably where it’s happening. They’re not able to drop into flow. They’re not able to separate and get into the point in time that they’re at so they stop thinking and begin reacting and doing the things that they can do naturally.
Steve Washuta You hope that was addressed earlier. I know in your case, it was. We all know those people, and I happen to be one of those in basketball, specifically, where in practice, you are the best player anybody can walk into a practice and see who the best player is on the team, and then in the game, it just, it doesn’t come to fruition, right?
Steve Washuta You can see that that person is not is not presenting on the court as if they didn’t practice. And so much of it is obviously psychological, not not, not physiological. Of course, there’s components of both, but they don’t have that at lower. Levels, right? Unless you’re a top, elite level athlete, right? And your parents are pushing you towards something.
Steve Washuta They don’t really, they don’t have that sort of help. For a general high school athlete. Do you think it should be in there? Should they start pushing these people in, in, let’s say, in high school athletes, to have someone to rely on?
Don Moxley You know, listen, I think when you take on the responsibility to be a coach, I believe that goes with the responsibility of being a coach, and, and, and this can be a challenge, because, you know, a lot of times, you know, listen, what do we pay people to coach teams in high school? Three, 4000 bucks.
Don Moxley They’re usually teachers. It’s, you, you know, it’s, they’re, it’s, it’s rough, and it’s rough, okay, so I don’t want to, I don’t want to criticize coaches for not, you know, digging in enough. But you know, what’s changed is that we now live in a time. You know, listen, Steve, can you imagine you and I hearing a podcast on this 20 or 30 years ago, and that, in my case, 40 years ago?
Don Moxley No, I was lucky enough to come across a great sports psychologist back then, and I was blessed. I was it was an absolute blessing to me. And I think this is part of my responsibility. You always want to pay for it. You know the woody haste it, man, always pay for it. You win with people, and you got to pay forward.
Don Moxley So that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing and and hopefully along the way, it catches in the universe, puts people together that need to be together, but, um, but I do know, if your objective is to be the best you possibly can be, it goes back to that performance triangle. You have to, you have to address all 10 elements on there, and if you don’t, there’s a weakness, and that’s how you lose with your weakness, you win with your strength.
Steve Washuta Let’s talk about some of the physiological things on that performance metric. You’re talking about from just a recovery standpoint, what are the things that matter in recovery? How do you measure them?
Steve Washuta And then also, if you can add this at the end, what is the difference between someone like me? Maybe I live four or five days a week, go on a run that I should be looking at compared to the elite level athletes. Do we all look at the same metrics, or is it is should I not be as concerned?
Don Moxley No, I don’t think you look at the same metrics. And I think intensity is the how the intensity that you look at metrics changes from elite performer, Olympic athlete to Joe Bag of Donuts, just trying to, you know, increase longevity and improve life. So when I look at that physiological side of the triangle, I look at four elements. Number one is, is movement that if I want to become a better athlete or a better human, I start by moving better.
Don Moxley Okay, so if and it makes no sense to add strength to poor movement. If I’ve got someone who can’t move and I load it with all I do is make strong bad movement. Improve strength on bad movement will not make good. You’ve gotta make movement first. So you focus on movement. Get that first. That’s the bottom, that’s the that’s the way. Then you add strength to that. We add our ability to recruit muscle fiber.
Don Moxley We add strength to that. And there’s lots of ways to do that. The third element is that you gotta be able to produce energy at, really, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the athlete that really is successful is the athlete that can generate the most energy in the period of time that you’re competing. If I’m in a seven minute wrestling match, and I can generate 100 kilojoules more than my than my opponent, I have an advantage.
Don Moxley Okay, so your ability to produce energy, and you can build energy production. And then finally, the top of that physiological side. I don’t call it recovery. I call it re resilience. I want to build resilience. And recovery is part of the process of building resilience. So we look at that entire, at that entire physiological spectrum.
Don Moxley So recovery, there’s, there’s tools that you can use to measure recovery. And this is, you know, I think I used the term earlier. It’s called heart rate variability, HRV. This is something that we’re seeing emerge in athletics. We see it with like aura rings or now watches, or there’s other devices out there on the market, frankly, there’s devices out there on the market that that I do not recommend. They’re basically just their toys.
Don Moxley They’re not tools. And this is really important, but, but you can get good tools that give you the ability to measure and and let me put this in a little bit of a perspective, in 2015 for me to measure resilience and recovery with my wrestling team, I had a $7,000 device that I could only measure one athlete at a time. Well now we can purchase a device on the Internet called.
Don Moxley Aura ring in the $300 price range. Everyone has access to it, and it is an excellent tool. Okay, so all of a sudden I go from where I can only measure one person at a time to where I can have a data flow of my entire program, which not only do I get good interpersonal comparisons, but I get good intra personnel comparisons. And this is so more data is always better.
Don Moxley And this is, this is how fast it’s changing. And basically, a decade I’ve gone to, I’ve gone from $7,000 I can only measure one at a time, to $300 and, you know, this is Moore’s law. This is something we see in technology.
Don Moxley You know, every year it gets twice as fast as half as expensive. But again, the challenge is, when you’re looking at resilience, you’ve always got to pay attention to, is my data Correct? Am I using the Do I have a toy or a tool? And this is one of the challenges that we have to deal with
Steve Washuta what have you learned in your years about warm ups? It’s really interesting. Let’s take wrestling, because I know that’s that’s your sport. I remember watching wrestlers jumping rope, let’s say right before they were about to go into their match, right? Some wrestlers weren’t.
Steve Washuta They were stretching. They were doing different things. To me, I’m optimal at about a 30 minute warm up. This at this point in my life, but 10 years ago, I only needed about a 10 minute warm up. The older I’ve got, the more warm up I need to be in order to give my optimal workouts.
Steve Washuta But it, but it seems, it seems like that is such an important part of being able to produce is making sure you haven’t overly exerted yourself, but also making sure you have enough juice, so to speak, hopping into a match, or whatever it is that you’re doing prior to to giving, giving it your all, yeah.
Don Moxley so I think of preparing my metabolism for the challenge that’s getting ready to come up. So I think it’s a mistake for a wrestler to step out on the mat and not have a full sweat going. I think, you know, you’ve got you you start this warm up, you get it.
Don Moxley And I want to have all of my energy systems turned on, from the standpoint that, if I must, if I’m a football player and I’m getting I’m going out to play wide receiver or defensive back, my ability to produce maximal speed is based on some energy systems that need to be activated. You need to go out and do a short this is an oxymoron, a slow sprint, and then you slowly increase the speed.
Don Moxley What you’re doing there is you’re slowly turning on energy systems, so that when the game starts, you got to go in that first coverage pattern, you have access to all the energy available from your system. It’s turned on. So to answer your question, I think most people do not show up to the event, ready. And so again, when I, you know, I got to the point I wanted a full sweat going.
Don Moxley I wanted to have everything activated so that, what the when from the first whistle, I was ready to blow this guy up. And, okay, so here’s now, Steve, we run into a situation with genetics. Okay, I have the genetics for picking up heavy stuff. I’m really good at that, or being very powerful. We have teammates, though, that, you know, I had a teammate back then that ran the Columbus marathon in two hours and 30 minutes.
Don Moxley Okay, that’s a wrestler, okay, that’s, that’s, that’s borderline a world that’s a national class time. It’s certainly a national class time for a wrestler in the marathon, Bobby. Bobby didn’t win matches in the first period. He drug you into the third period, and when he got you into the third period, what they call it, we drug you into deep water, and we finally, you know, drowned you. That’s the way he works.
Don Moxley So, you know, we can have different genetic differences. You know, while you and I share the DNA as human males, homeosap and males, okay, there can be a lot of differentiation. You may have more fast twitch than slow twitch. I have more. You know, there can be what I think this is important in that we’re not all the same.
Don Moxley Okay, we are, but we’re not, from the standpoint that, you know, I think it’s a mistake for a coach to take a team and say, This is my program and then put that program on every athlete there. While we’re the same, we do have genetic differences. We do have there’s some people that are marathoners. We call them desert people. And there’s some people that are very powerful. We call them jungle people.
Don Moxley They move in three axes, so and and it makes sense, you know that the DNA that we share is probably a million years old, depending on the paleontologist that you talk to. So. But we only have evolution with extinction, okay? With an extinction event, we’ll eliminate a big chunk of DNA, and all of a sudden we’ll have an evolved set of DNA. But we haven’t had an extinction event in humans for a million years, okay?
Don Moxley So in that time, all we have is diversity. So we have lots of diversity. So that’s a reason, Steve, one person may be a carnivore and another person’s a vegan. One person may focus on cardio, the other one is a strength. All of these advantages also create weaknesses. So this is where a coach or a program can step in and say, Okay, where is the weakness?
Don Moxley You know what? What is our challenge here and and I think this is one of the mistakes that sport make in the fact that we get hung up in our dogmas, you know, Imma go back to that. Is that I’m a West Side guy, I’m a high intensity guy, I’m a this, I’m a that, well, I don’t, I don’t give a shit what you are as a coach.
Don Moxley What I care about is that athletes need to adapt, and how can we best trigger that athlete to adapt with the least amount of work in order to get the trigger so that I have extra energy left for all the things I need for them. You know, for athletes, their biggest challenge is training, competing and staying healthy. Injury is what ends a career.
Don Moxley Injury is what causes you not to miss your goals. So we’ve got to get to where we’re able to use the minimum effective dose on everything that we do. Because, you know, we’re in the weight room, we’re doing conditioning, we’re on the field, we’re doing the homework on our own. We’re asking a lot for these kids and then, and then we’re probably over competing them as well, which is a whole another issue, but, but this is, but this is the challenge from a leadership standpoint.
Don Moxley You know, Steve, we’ve all been part of teams, and we go out and we perform on a team. When we do it, there’ll be a group of athletes that will excel, okay? And there they’ll be fine. There’s then there’s a group in the middle, and then there’s a group that can’t get out of the training room, okay, what is the difference? What makes those people different?
Don Moxley Well, I think there’s a lot of things. I think when you look at resiliency and stress, and there’s supplements that we can use to improve this, I think this concept of stem cells is absolutely intriguing. Okay, when I look at what separates that, that athlete’s ability to exceed, you know, there certainly can be androgens on top of this, or people that have naturally higher testosterone levels than others, they have a competitive advantage, because that’s the science of muscle growth and remodeling.
Don Moxley Well, we can short circuit that to a certain degree with some stem cell supplements and some things like that, so that can create an advantage, but we’ve got to identify it first. Why can’t this athlete get out of the training room?
Steve Washuta Yeah, well said, and there’s always coaches who try to fit the players to their model, and then you have the opposite, their coaches that develop models around their individual players. But ultimately, I do think the athlete needs to take some autonomy over themselves, because, like we just talked about, there might be a particular warm up that the wrestling team does in practice.
Steve Washuta Now, the coach can’t make up 26 different warm ups if you have a big team, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have done your warm up in advance, right? So maybe you go and do your own thing 10 or 15 minutes prior to practice, because you think you need more warm up that
Don Moxley is spot on. And that doesn’t just apply to warm up, that applies to the entire training portfolio. Okay, again, back of my example, you know, we had a strength coach at Ohio State in 1980 he came in 1978 we had a string coach. Our team went over and lifted. It became clear to me that I needed more okay.
Don Moxley And you know, I talk about West Side, I had a teammate whose roommate, guy’s name was Kevin Akins. He had the third longest shot in the world at the time. He could chuck a he could chuck a shot put 72 feet. This dude was huge, and I’m over it as a his apartment one night. And he says, you want to get strong. I’ll show you where you get strong.
Don Moxley So he takes me to to Lou Simmons’s garage, the original west side. Okay, so that’s where I that was one of my my original learning spaces and and so. And not only that, but I also had a mentor who was connected with the Nautilus leverage group out of Cincinnati, Ohio, which eventually became hammer strength. So Greg Jones, Arthur Jones, who invented Nautilus, his son, Greg Jones, had developed Nautilus leverage, and then Nautilus leverage was purchased by Life Fitness and became hammer strength.
Don Moxley So I’m I’m going down to Cincinnati, working with people down there looking at this high intensity stuff. I’m going over to the west side of Columbus, working with Lou. Simmons picking up things there, and at the end of the day, Don Moxley developed his own program.
Don Moxley Okay, that that entered, that enter, had elements of all of those. And as an athlete, you have to own your process. You just said it a little bit ago. You have to own that if you want to be great, you have to become an expert in yourself. Okay? You do this with consulting with people, by reaching out, by talking, and again, physiological, psychological skills.
Don Moxley These are all elements that go part of that. Because, again, you can be the strongest athlete in the world, but if you can’t get your grades, or if you don’t know how you know, one of the things with my college athletes that was really interesting is that, you know, college athlete comes and all of a sudden they have acts, you know, they’re living in the dorms, and they have access to the commons, so their food is prepared for them, and they get a pretty good choice of food.
Don Moxley So I just have to teach that athlete how to pick the right food. But most of those athletes will move into an apartment when they’re sophomores or juniors. Well, if those athletes do not have the skills to cook, to go to the grocery store, then you wind up eating pizza and wings every night, because that’s what DoorDash brings nowadays.
Don Moxley So you know, the the child the skill, a lot of times with that athlete, when they move into the apartment, do they have the ability to to to cook for themselves? You know, when you look at big football programs right now, what you see is these incredible kitchens that are being built into these facilities. So these athletes have prepared food for them.
Don Moxley That’s not in the dorm, but it’s now over at the facility, and it’s, it’s very it’s done very well. That’s one way to solve that. Not everybody has access to that. So, you know, that’s the skill. That’s one of the skills can I acquire, the the nutrient dense food sources necessary for me to be able to affect my my physiology and and respond and build resiliency from that.
Steve Washuta Don this has been some great information here. I’m sure we’ll chat down the road about other things pertaining to recovery and fitness, and I definitely want you to send me those 10 principles. I can go over those. I might do a separate podcast on those down the road. Can you let my audience know where they can find you specifically, if they have any questions for you, and anything else that you want to tell my audience,
Don Moxley yeah, the best way to find me there’s, there’s two ways, if you, if you want to just contact me, do it through LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn.
Don Moxley You just have to request to connect, and as long as your request to connect is, Hey, I heard you on Steve’s podcast, on the truly foot podcast. I’ve got some questions, like, I’ll send you a meeting link, and we’ll set up a meeting.
Don Moxley The other place you can go is my website. My website’s called train recover. When T, R, A, I N, R, E, C, O, V, E, R, W, I N. Com, go to train recover, wind, com, there’s information there. I’m my it’s, it’s, my website is nascent. It’s very young. It’s evolving, but those are the two best places to find me.
Steve Washuta I will put all that in the show notes. My guest today has been Don Moxley, thanks for joining the Trulyfit podcast.
Don Moxley Thanks, Steve. I appreciate the opportunity.
Steve Washuta Thanks for joining us on The Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate and review on your listening platform, and feel free to email us. We’d love to hear from you. Social at truly fit dot app. Thanks again.
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