TRAV: Okay guys, welcome to the fitness education online podcast.
A very special episode today of BroScience joined as always with my brother, Craig.
Thank you very much for joining me.
CRAIG: Thanks Trav excited to be back here and excited to have an awesome guest today.
TRAV: Yeah, always great when we get guests and it's always very special if we get a guest who's joining us from another part in the world because we know that they're giving up their time.
I don't know is it late night there? Early morning there?
KEEGAN: Yeah, morning. Eight o'clock in the morning.
TRAV: So eight o'clock in the morning. So we're probably not too bad but coming from us, from the other side of the world.
We've got a very special guest we've got Keegan Smith.
Now if you guys aren't familiar with Keegan Smith, he is heavily involved in the ATG system.
He's the ATG mentor and one of the coaches of that whole system.
He has been in and around rugby league and professional sports for a long time working with the Roosters, working over in France with the Catalan Dragons and a whole heap of people, individually as well including Sonny Bill Williams, and just been in and around the training and strength game for a long time and so we're really looking forward to having a chat and just seeing where it goes today and yeah thank you very much for joining us.
KEEGAN: Thanks for having me on. It's good to chat with some guys that know what rugby league is.
In the habit of talking about just saying rugby to save having a second conversation about what rugby league is.
TRAV: The intricacies of the sports and stuff like that and I think where I want to probably start though is just your own experience, I mean really a little bit about yourself and I read that you were a small guy growing up and at least a lighter guy growing up and wanted to put on weight, you've grown up in a family that's pretty well known for rugby league, obviously, was rugby league what you wanted to do as a kid or was it not really was strength or what did you want to do growing up?
KEEGAN: I didn't really see myself working in rugby league. I was around it a lot. I went to training with dad from early on in life and in the dressing rooms and waiting around outside the games and I love going to the games and I sort of knew all the players and I was just thinking about we collected a lot of the footy cards with NFTs sort of going wild at the moment my brother and I were fanatical with the footy cards for a couple of years and we got them all signed and all that sort of stuff.
So like, I was into it but as I got towards sort of the high school and thinking about what I was going to do with my life, I wasn't thinking I was going to be involved in rugby league, I didn't play and I didn't really see any future for myself in it.
I didn't really know what I wanted to do at university, I just sort of stumbled into doing exercise science because I liked sports and I played hockey actually, I wanted to go to the Olympics for hockey.
So I sort of just did that. My brother was doing it and it was just it was at Wollongong uni which was the local university.
I wasn't really ready to move because I wanted to keep pursuing my hockey and things.
So I stumbled into the university degree, they told us on the first day you're probably not going to work with sports and so the whole degree there was no sort of tone of like you're going to work with elite athletes or elite sports and I wasn't thinking about it.
I did stumble into some work experience with the Illawarra Academy of Sports and then I had to do my practicum for uni and I went and did that at Parramatta which was really just the lazy options, if I’m honest.
My dad was working at Parramatta at the time and I was like “okay I’ll get my hours done” and then I kind of, I enjoyed it and I got on really well with Hayden Knowles, who's gone on to sort of being a legend in the strength world, in rugby league especially.
Hayden was amazing in terms of really showing me what a strength coach could be like and kind of started me thinking of “okay well yeah I could actually do this” and I did.
Got some enjoyment out of it, got a lot of personal growth from just being in the environment and but it was very challenging because I wasn't really a footy guy and it's a strong cultural environment, it's different, every sport has its culture and I'd been around it but I wasn't really of it.
So it was a challenge as a young guy when I wasn't a big strong guy but I wanted to.
I started to work with young players and NRL players and I didn't know where it was going but I really just stumbled into it.
It wasn't what I was thinking was going to happen.
TRAV: Interesting, obviously.
I remember reading, now that you're a hockey player obviously, hockey and league, running is still involved.
One thing actually when from watching the hockey in Tokyo that I was talking to my wife about this.
Completely off topic of what I was going to talk about, is surely running around bending over with the stick at that sort of that level for those taller guys surely, it's a short-person sport, hockey I'd imagine.
KEEGAN: Well the reach actually helps with the stick length as well.
So there were a lot of really tall German and Dutch players that they were kind of really strong hockey nations for quite a while.
I think the game's changed a bit, they changed a lot of the rules and you really have to run a lot and you have to be pretty fast.
So I think it became a shorter man's game because of the way they adjusted the rules to make it less stop-start but yeah I haven't been too much in the hockey world for a while now.
I sort of stopped playing at 22, or 23, that's 15 years ago now.
TRAV: So, one of the things I wanted to ask about was your own personal training journey because I'd imagine, what you did growing up to what you're doing now and what I see you doing now on Instagram and Facebook and stuff like, I'd imagine there's been a fair evolution into exercise selection programming, all that sort of stuff, personally?
KEEGAN: Yeah, I mean it was, you guys probably similar vintage to myself.
TRAV: Yeah I think we're the same age actually.
KEEGAN: There, cool.
CRAIG: I am a little bit younger.
KEEGAN: But there wasn't a lot of information. It was more difficult at least to come across information.
There were some books and Hayden put me on to Mike Boyle's, I think first book on functional strength training and I was reading and I was looking at what was out there back then and also sort of T nation and just bodybuilding influenced stuff and some weightlifting was intriguing and interesting but it was kind of forbidden at that stage to attempt a snatch or a clean and jerk without a Ph.D. in strength, was kind of blasphemous, everyone was sort of warned away from those movements at that stage.
But Hayden actually liked using weightlifting and he was using weightlifting within his programs in the early 2000s because his background was athletics and they used those movements through the 80s and 90s and it never left the athletics culture.
I was lucky to be exposed to that.
Hayden sort of got me, was teaching me how to clean and there were a few guys at Wollongong uni that were into their weightlifting and I started to learn those lifts and over the course of the years, I’ve sort of tried lots of different things.
I’ve been deep into the body weight training world with coach Sommer and Gymnastic Bodies.
I spent a bunch of time with him and Ido Portal and did an internship and I’ve taught a lot of sort of gymnastic strength type workshops for a while there and I’ve done work with some of the top CrossFit guys and had them come and stay at my place a few years back and so over the years I’ve pretty much-given everything a run and the common theme through it all was I would always overdo tension or overdue intensity and flare up tendons and I was prone to tendon issues.
I think my first tenant issue was about 10 years old and I had the one in the heel, the growth plate issue that you can get,
CRAIG: Sever's disease
KEEGAN: Sever's disease is the one, yeah exactly.
I sometimes call it Sherman's but that's the back one but yeah I had the severs thing and then always good sliders and all that stuff so from 10 until all the way through, I was battling on and off with overuse injuries, like partly because I’m a bit obsessive and I would train want to train more than everyone else and probably some health stuff as well, gut issues and things like that but I didn't really know why but I sort of always was on the brink of injuries, tendon injuries, all through the body so that was the common theme.
I loved strength. I loved developing it.
Gradually started to develop a little bit more muscle.
I sort of thought for a long time I just wasn't going to put on any muscle no matter what I did because it seemed to be a very slow process but I didn't really know what I was doing with different aspects of training and nutrition.
So looking back I could have done a lot better, a lot sooner and the biggest thing is probably why I was so excited about seeing Ben Patrick and seeing ATG in 2018 when I was running Real Movement just looking at it and saying “oh someone's finally cracked this code” because I’ve sort of been working on how do you solve tendon issues and I knew that Charles Poliquin had some stuff there that people didn't really understand and I could see some of his students sort of doing it in different ways but I couldn't decode it, I didn't know what the underlying formula was for it and then I saw what Ben was doing and I'd been playing around with different ideas and I was like “yeah this is the real deal”.
So finding that has been the biggest moment in my training career, like all the different ways of whether you're weightlifting or gymnastics or whatever, none of it's fun if the tissues aren't working properly.
So like there's this unifying underpinning theory, that's been the biggest change.
TRAV: Well we grew up in a gymnastics sort of family. So our eldest brother was, he do, Craig ten times.
CRAIG: Nine times I think. He smooshed his foot. He went to the nationals.
TRAV: He was quite an elite level gymnast and he's won the masters and stuff like that as an older gentleman, did standard, not do gymnastics for the 12 months or whatever, and then trains for a month leading into masters and goes and does his flips and wins it and comes home very sore and does it again 12 months later.
He hasn't done it for a few years now.
I think it's been two or three years since he did it and won it but there are not many…
CRAIG: Definitely need to do a bit of tendon work before he got back out to do that again.
TRAV: Well he's 40, well how old was Duncan, Craig? 42?
CRAIG: Yep.
TRAV: Yeah so he would have been 40. For us growing up doing gymnastics and stuff like that and seeing the way you're moving and you're balancing and stuff like that at 37 and something that you, again from all my reading and evidently you didn't do it growing up, my brother was always doing gymnastics from the time I was two and I did it for about 20 years right so you're someone who's obviously learned that skill later, which is crazy impressive and one of the things that I was going to touch on, is some of that tendon stuff and the first time I ever heard about that was which with coach Sommer.
He speaks about that a lot with their program with Gymnastics Bodies.
KEEGAN: He definitely does and there's stuff there that he's onto that makes sense, I mean one of the things that he had us do was 50 calf raises, just standing calf raises, with the toes pointing in and then with the toes pointing straight and then with the toes pointing out and he said that it was a method that the Bulgarian gymnastics coach taught him and it was designed to bring health back into the Achilles tendon and he said that that coach had talked about autopsies on people with chronic tendon issues and showing that the tendon was actually kind of gangrenous like it had like gunk and stuff in it and so that the idea with that was to pump fluid through the area and to heal it.
Now looking at that like that is kind of a short-range exercise where you don't stretch the tendon very much and that's really how we start things in the ATG sequence is to start from short range, where there's less stretch on the connective tissue, towards long range where the connective tissue stretches more.
It's a very simple concept once you understand it but it's like I hadn't heard about it and didn't know how it worked for the first 20 years that I was sort of training and well from my first injury that's when I probably, sometime before that I should have started to prepare to not have those issues or to recover from them.
In gymnastics, I guess you're forced to look at it.
I think when you start doing planches and things like that or the iron cross, which I haven't done, there's potential for things to pop and so you are forced into thinking more about the connective tissue rather than just thinking about the muscle, which you can kind of get away with not developing these concepts when you just bodybuilding training or even traditional weight training.
Gymnastics forces you to look more at the different structures there and their adaptive times and those sorts of things.
CRAIG: So I would have assumed, in your earlier days of sort of training and when you're doing your internship around the sporting world, I assume the only time you heard people talking about tendon injuries and tendon loading stuff was when they had sort of injuries and when they were in sort of a rehab phase because one of the things that we're sort of trying to move forward towards and I’m actually an army doctor usually so I work in a sort of military sphere.
There's a lot of that sort of prehab type of approach and trying to integrate that sort of protective exercise model to preventing things before they flare up.
So it is really interesting like looking into a lot of your content and looking at the way you approach things, actually trying to get appropriate load into these connective tissue structures to promote them, to form in a healthy way because that's interesting thing like really common.
We're dealing with lots of Achilles issues and also that sort of stuff and the evidence is really all about reloading those tendons and getting those tendon structures back into a linear fashion because, as you sort of said in that example in the autopsy, like when your tendon's dysfunctional and unhealthy, you go from having nice straight well-structured fibers to having a mishmash of unhealthy tissue and random little blood vessels going into there to try and to heal, to stimulate healing and all that sort of stuff.
It's really good to see this sort of more holistic approach where you're trying to actually load those tendons before rather than just doing in a rehab fashion.
Is it accurate that you probably only really saw this stuff in injury sort of areas or you just didn't really see it at all?
KEEGAN: Prehab was always there. At Parramatta, prehab was a big thing like that was really the first club that I was involved in.
Every club that I’ve worked with has had sort of prehab.
The difference is just the understanding of what prevents tendon injuries, the muscle injuries, and even still if you look at the hamstring research and guys talking about it's all about the fascicle length and all about the Nordic.
I worked with a high-profile Australian athlete this year who has had multiple hamstring issues and I asked him if he could touch his toes and he said no and he was ”all go” according to Ph.D. scientists and the guys who were doing the research in terms of his fascicle length and his strength but he couldn't touch his toes and when he could touch his toes then he went and played all year and didn't have any issues where it's gonna cost him millions of dollars if he kept it up and so it's not that people haven't been trying to prevent injuries, it's not that prehab didn't exist or we didn't have a holistic approach, it's just that we didn't understand the physics of it well enough and it's sort of coming out now in the muscle growth research.
If you look at recent stuff and it's just you can create more muscle growth if you cause more damage, right?
It's obvious that we're chasing muscle damage to stimulate hypertrophy like that's one of the key factors is damaging the tissue, the tension that we've talked about, time under tension, those sorts of things but it's really the quality of tension and if there's a bunch of bleeding caused inside of the muscle then we're going to get some attempt from the body to prepare itself so that next time it doesn't bleed so much, so next time it doesn't get so much damage.
That stuff is fairly well understood.
For some reason, we just haven't understood that if the tissue is already under stretch when you load it with external load or when you contract the muscle, then that's going to cause more damage to the muscle than if it's not on the stretch.
So this is the short and long-range kind of concept and it has to be applied to understand strength training it's this is an underpinning that it's not spoken about it's not accepted yet.
The long-range concept is now like in the research and people always dm me when something new gets published but they don't explain it as that, they explain it was full range of motion and it's not full range of motion because you can do full range of motion like do you guys know what a spider curl is? Like if you're sort of leaning forward into the bench and you do the curl…
The hardest part of the movement is when it's in here close to the body, right?
So the muscle is not under length but you can use heavy weight.
So you can create tension but there's no stretch there.
Where the reverse would be when you're back in one of those pelican-type positions or the back lever with the tip where there's a ton of tension and already feels like it's ready to pop.
When you maximally contract the muscle in that lengthened position or you move into that position with load, you're going to cause a lot more hypertrophy, you're also going to cause relatively much more tendon adaptation because the tendon is already under stretch and stress so when you do the spider curls, you don't have much tension on the tendon, you don't have that resting tension on the tendon, so it's a completely different training effect that it's not about full range.
Because you can do full-range spider curls but the thing is when when you're leaning into the bench and your arms down straight.
If I show you. I don't know if you're putting this on Youtube or not.
If your arm's down straight, you're leaning into the bench, this is the hard part, right?
The hard parts up here.
So it's a short-range exercise and people understand this passive insufficiency stuff, we just haven't spoken about when you train like this, you get relatively more muscle adaptation and you can bring a lot of circulation to the area without challenging the tendon a lot and it's not because it's full range of motion because you do straighten the elbow in that movement it just doesn't mean that you straighten the elbow because the bottom part of the movement is relatively unloaded.
So it matters about the strength curve of the exercise as well but for someone listening to this or a coach listening to this, it's really simple of like is the muscle under stretch while you're contracting it, like when you're doing an RDL, you're going to cause a lot more remodeling than with the Nordic curl because you're under stretch at the same time.
So you're going to get more connective tissue deposited into the muscle.
I don't care to really look at the research too much in terms of like has this been proven how many studies say yes, how many studies say no, it's going to come out that you get more connective tissue deposited in the muscle with long-range strength because the body's not stupid.
If you're stretching the muscle, the muscle has to respond like “okay this body is continuing to do this thing and if we're not really good at this, it's going to snap, we're going to tear the muscle and we're going to die, we're going to get eaten by the lion because we can't run away.
So it's an adaptive process that's just really intuitive once you look at it.
The tendon is going to be relatively more challenged with those high stretch RDL-type movements.
So the tendon is going to become stronger, it's going to have more adaptation than if for example, we do a lying hamstring curl or a kneeling hamstring curl, which is more of like an inner range strength exercise.
Charles Poliquin played around with all of this stuff and it was clear within his programs that he was manipulating the strength curve and he was using this theory but it wasn't something that was explained.
I went to a bunch of his workshops and I know dozens of coaches who did his stuff.
It wasn't explained and I’m not sure if it was as systematically applied as it is within the ATG program but when I saw Ben had done this for the knees, I was like you're getting results that other people aren't getting because you solved this thing that no one else has ever.
So you need to know short and long but then you sequence those movements.
So what I saw with what he was doing was he'd sequenced it where the program started with the short-range concentric only.
So we know that concentric only causes the least amount of stress and adaptation but it's going to bring a lot of blood flow.
So we're doing short-range concentric only first with the reverse sleds, which is like a huge fan of and he didn't invent the reverse sled but he's the guy who put it there in the sequence.
It's like you don't have to invent the cake to be a Michelin three-star chef, it's the way that you put it together, whether you're making a crappy cake or you're well-classed in terms of your cake.
So what he did was like oh you got to put that stuff first and then you go into step-ups and then you go into some mid-range type stuff with either the split squat or the squat and then you go into something like the reverse Nordic, which was partly all the way through we've been going backward and forwards on what needs to be there and what needs to be there something like the reverse Nordic.
Now you can see by looking at it it's like okay yeah that's going to cause a lot of connective tissue adaptation, that's going to cause a lot of stress on the muscle remodeling, bleeding, etc.
TRAV: So there you're talking strictly around the sequencing of the exercises.
So for me with my limited knowledge around a lot of the sled stuff, I go to someone like Dan John or someone like Louis Simmons, Westside Barbell, I know you've spoken about Louis Simmons in the past on other things, where the sled is like this supplementary conditioning tool that's usually thrown in at the end as a bit of I wouldn't say an afterthought but it's a bit of a let's go in at the end, let's get some conditioning, let's get the lungs blowing out, whereas, with the ATG system, it's usually done very first within the sequence.
KEEGAN: Louis used it first as well he will talk about or like I’m sure he's done a lot of things over the years, he's had some time to train but I have heard about him doing it before, the sleds come in deadlift, like straight into…
I’ve heard about that sort of approach, nothing none of this is new, it's what's different is the way it's understood and explained and when you understand it and apply it like this, you just get results that you didn't get before and it's no longer a mystery.
It's not like the hammer is a new thing but if you use the hammer and you can consistently get a result that you couldn't get before then that's an important thing to know about a hammer.
So none of the exercises aren't new, nothing's really new, the thing is that when you understand it differently, then you use it differently and you get different results.
TRAV: So when we're talking results, what are we talking, less injuries?
We're talking about quicker recovery?
We're talking about better performance athletically?
What is the definition thereof results?
KEEGAN: For Charles, I think it was that you could make athletes stronger faster.
You could add muscle mass to athletes faster because you knew which were the anabolic exercises and which were not the anabolic exercises.
Just because you do 10 sets of 10 or biceps doesn't mean you're going to have the same amount of muscle growth.
If you choose an anabolic exercise versus a neural dominant exercise that's not anabolic you're going to get a different result.
The short-range exercises are neurologically dominant, use them for higher reps and they're not very anabolic.
Long-range exercises are highly anabolic because you cause a lot of inflammation and damage to the cells.
So you can make someone stronger faster.
If you do happen to go too hard with doing plyometrics and things like that, a lot of coaches, will just stay away from doing plyometrics because it's too much of a hassle if you mess it up because you don't want to give an athlete an annoyance in a tendon which can easily hang around for years and change a career.
So coaches will shy away from doing super high-tension exercises and really developing the tendons because it's there's too much risk, for rugby and rugby league, I think you'd hear a lot of coaches will say that they're very tentative about them or they don't use them because of those reasons.
Some programs do and they do it successfully but it's a double-edged sword.
But in terms of results, it's a user-led revolution the ATG stuff like it's the athletes and people who've spent tens of thousands of dollars on surgeries and interventions and years and years of frustration, they're the reason ATG is changing the way the world trains.
For every person that's doing ATG online, there are probably 10 or 20 other people that are using the program and the strength training world is gonna wait for the research to an extent and the athletes and some coaches especially the coaches who've had issues themselves and they solve those issues, like I get the message all the time from coaches, like “I had this tricep thing for five years and now just to apply this logic and it's gone like thanks” and it's not because they weren't training triceps, it's not because they didn't try and fix it.
They're training the triceps the whole time, they're still bench pressing, they just didn't understand.
You have to go short-range concentric dominant into mid-range, into longer range and using the super high reps like Louis Simmons was doing a lot of this stuff, it just wasn't explained or understood in this way and you can to an extent get the result just by doing super high reps.
That in itself is huge whether you think about it as short and long-range or not.
The thing with Louis was that the goal was to do powerlifting and so long range and extreme long range wasn't so important whereas, for gymnastics you have to have extreme long-range strength, you have to be able to hold yourself together under extreme tension length of the muscles.
So he didn't have to explore that quite as much, obviously, anabolics then play a part as well in whether you can get maximal hypertrophy without going into long range.
If you look at someone like Tom Platz, best legs ever, extreme long range was a big part of what he was doing, anabolic's there for sure, but well I don't know for sure, but whatever.
TRAV: Good assumption.
KEEGAN: Potentially but if all the other guys use them as well like he was using more of that extreme long range, if you look at Arnold and his pecs and you watch the go back to the pumping iron, he had great range in his chest, in his pecs and he had huge pec development.
So Vince Gironda was a huge influence on Charles Poliquin.
A master of choosing exactly the exercise that was going to get the result that you wanted and you can see, these things are there, it just wasn't understood as a universal theory of “okay this is how it works” and it works for every muscle and it works for every tendon issue, muscle injury.
Once you see it then you can't unsee it and you'll see it in every training program and every issue that you come across and you are going to see the results are in the testimonials and the results are in, this thing bothered me for a long time, like I’m working on the one arm chin and freestanding handstand push-ups at the moment, the only reason I haven't been able to nail these movements is because I always get a tendon issue because they're near my maximal strength.
They tend to respond well to frequency as well and they have like they have a skill component to them but if you're going at that stuff that's like 90% plus intensity with frequency then you're asking for trouble.
Now with being able to include some short-range work with it, touch wood like
folks it's going really well, no issues because I always do some short-range stuff.
I just get more pump into the muscle, just the high reps has allowed me to get like I’m at the best I’ve ever been in freestanding handstand push-ups.
I’ve only been focusing on them again this month.
The coolest thing about it is I don't have like a niggle in my elbow or a niggle in my shoulder, where in the past I just push through it and just be like whatever it's part of the game of strength training but it doesn't have to be and I think that's what we want to change and what is changing.
TRAV: That's one of the things I want to chat a little bit about is within the ATG system like those who haven't seen it on Youtube knees over toes guy and yourself on Youtube as well.
To me, I don't know, I’m just like the algorithms hit me and it's just everywhere all over my Youtube, that's for sure.
One of the things that I’ve been sort of seeing and playing around with it is like yourself and Ben are obviously in phenomenal shape. right? like super lean, very muscular, like a lean muscular appearance sort of thing.
When I look at the program in my head, I look and go like they're all very prehab, like okay this is what I’m going to do to warm up before I do the big thing.
How much of that, I assume that's probably not the case, I assume what you see on Youtube is the program essentially, or is it like “oh well this is only this is the 20-minute warm-up and then we go and squat for 40 minutes”?
KEEGAN: They're asked what's in the program and most people who try to piece it together off Youtube especially if they don't understand the short long-range stuff are gonna mess it up and a lot of people do mess it up and they say like “oh yeah I’ve been doing ATG but I’ve got this issue with my xyz” and then I ask “have you actually done it?” and then “no, I’ve just been piecing it together” and the thing is like if you just pull out the most aggressive joint exercises and you just like “oh yeah my muscles can do this”.
So I guess that means I can smash away.
Like if you look at the Peterson step-up, it's a joint exercise, it's not for the muscle, it's for the joint, and if you just go as hard as your muscles can go then you might tear the joint to [ __ ] because it's not meant to be “oh how much weight can you lift on this”. It doesn't matter what your muscle can do.
It matters what your joint can handle and this again is like kind of new terminology, like when did you ever hear someone talk to you about strength training like that it's sort of logical of like “oh the joint hurts we should stop”, like yeah coaches would say that but have you ever identified an exercise as “this is a joint dominant exercise”, we don't really care what the muscle can do.
We don't care how much weight you can lift.
We want to be watching the sensation in the joint and if the joint capacity exceeds the muscle capacity then we need to talk about the muscle.
But if the muscle capacity exceeds the joint capacity, which is pretty much always the case in the Peterson, then you push it to maximum muscle capacity and you're opening the door for an ACL injury because you're putting more strain into that tissue.
That was what the Peterson step-up was invented for, was to prevent ACL injuries and downhill skiers, it was extremely effective.
It was developed by a physical therapist but you've got to know what you're actually training and that's why if you just go and try and piece things together off Youtube like it will work for some people and it won't work for others and it can be quite catastrophic if it doesn't work.
If you really mess up what you're doing because you have no idea how it works, it's like you wouldn't just go and build a bridge to your house under your own, this will probably work and then you drive a truck over it, and like in engineering, things have to work.
Where in strength training, we've sort of been allowed to mix and match things and just like “oh yeah probably it's okay” but if we understand better what we're actually doing and then maybe we can have more consistent results and I think that's what we're attempting to do, that's what I’m attempting to do with this terminology.
It's not that there's the new exercises but if you think about it in a different way and you use it in a different way, in the construction of a program and building a muscle, then you can get a different result.
So as far as, is the small stuff the big stuff, like in a large way? It is.
ATG is about building strength from the ground up.
In terms of knee ability and Ben's programs, that's really what it is.
For me, you can use it for kayak and not train the legs hardly at all.
I imagine kayakers don't train the legs that much and you could use all the same principles and you could be training ATG and only training the upper body.
Someone who's in a wheelchair, they could be using ATG principles and it could be very distinctively and clearly ATG programming and training that doesn't even train legs.
In my mind, it's the principles of understanding the short to long, the sequencing, and the progressive tension.
So you go from reverse sleds to eventually dunking or sprinting.
So the sprinting is kind of a little bit longer range.
So that's why you get more, you don't really get quad injuries when you jump because it's more of a short-range position, where you get hamstring injuries because the knee is straight.
So the hamstrings under some tension, it's not under a full stretch but yes, people use ATG before they go and do…
One of the guys, squat a thousand pounds for the first time after he'd been doing ATG because his knee stopped bothering him and he was squatting like 875 or something, he wasn't like he was… his second workout on ATG and he scored a thousand pounds but he did the split squats, got his knee feeling better and scored a thousand pounds for the first time.
ATG works well as a supplement.
You can definitely use it as like “I’m going to do this stuff before I go and do other stuff.”
It's not attempting to be a sport in itself, in the way that CrossFit or powerlifting or bodybuilding or these things are sports but it can also be standalone especially if you want to go play sports.
You want to go run and jump then just do this and you don't actually need to squat bench deadlift to be able to move pain-free through life and be well-prepared for athletic endeavors.
There are some squats in the programs and the dips and chins and I think people assume because Ben isn't a big guy that you couldn't develop size on it.
Some of the guys have got massive legs and I’ve seen them blow up over the time they've been training the program.
It is a good leg hypertrophy program.
Most of the guys don't push the upper body very hard because they want to fly and it doesn't make sense to have a big upper body if you want to dunk.
High jumpers, just don't hypertrophy.
TRAV: It's not conducive to be heavy if you want to jump.
KEEGAN: Yeah not maximally.
There are NFL wide receivers and whatnot that can jump really well.
It's not like you can't jump well if you have good upper body development but if you're looking for that last five percent then you don't want exercising upper body.
TRAV: So this is probably a bad question based on what you've just said there about not bastardizing it off of Youtube but with that in mind like I’ve seen a video that you spoke about previously and we might link it in the show notes rather than go over it here about what things you would do differently if you were back in like a strength and conditioning role with an NRL club.
But with that in mind, let's say let's just talk about everyday athletes because that's what this, I mean obviously, it caters to everybody from the sounds of it, but anyone who's listening today as a personal trainer, obviously.
We'll give you where they can go to study and learn more but what are some things that you think people should look to be included in their program?
Are there any things that you like universally that need to be in someone's program…
KEEGAN: To me, it's not about the movements, it's about these principles.
If you understand what I’m talking about with the short and long then that changes everything.
The next concept to understand after short and long is tension.
So just because you're training with a 10-kilo dumbbell doesn't mean you're training with 10 kilos worth.
It doesn't mean anything to the muscle, the muscle only knows what happens in terms of tension.
So if you drop it and catch it, it's going to be very different in terms of the stimulus to if you very slowly lower it down and very slowly lift it up.
If you drop it to the midpoint and then lift it back up as violently as you can if you drop it and catch it, lift it back up then 10 kilos can be extreme loading and if you do that in a long-range position then you may well be able to get someone to tear their biceps and need it to be surgically repaired with the 10-kilo weight.
Often I’ll have people do like lying bench curls.
I have NRL players and guys like big muscley guys do lying bench curls, lying back on them on like a bench press but I’m generally elevated, or depends how you can do it on the incline bench.
These guys have curled 20, 25-kilo dumbbells like fine, you give them the five-kilo dumbbells and they're like the face is like telling the story of like “oh [ __ ] something's about to pop”.
You give them the 15-kilo dumbbells and it's just unbearably painful for them to do the lying bench curls because of
TRAV: the leverage…
KEEGAN: The fascia, the connective tissue, the muscle, everything is just going to… the tension is something that they can't handle.
So the short and long is how you're playing with the connective tissue tension and you're playing with the dominance of the adaptation.
So if it's short range and then it's going to be muscle dominant, it's not going to be, it's not going to develop as much connective tissue as if you use the long-range stuff, which is going to develop more connective tissue but then it's also true that the more speed that you use, the higher the tension is going to be and therefore the more connective tissue dominant it's going to be.
So when you train high jump, you get some muscle development but you get relatively a lot more connective tissue development than if someone goes and does super slow tempo calf raises to develop their calf, like you'll see big calves on high jumpers and dunkers, you'll see solid calves but the way that they've built them will be more connective tissue biased.
So we want to progress towards being able to handle more tension.
Firstly, we can do that with short to long but then we can also do that with adjusting the repetition types and that is kind of probably the next key concept to understand for athletes.
Now the reason we get away with not thinking about this sort of stuff to an extent is because the sports will give us that and if you're wrestling with people then you get it somewhat for the upper body as well for like the footy guys but if someone is just only training in the gym and they're not doing any of the long-range stuff and they're not doing any high-speed stuff then it's no surprise that they go and pop something as soon as they get into the real world and put some tissue, put some tension into the tissues and there's no preparation for that.
So it's not about any one exercise, it's better to understand this across the whole body, and understand getting a lot of blood flow into an area is powerful for healing.
So yes you can use the flossing and that sort of stuff but the main thing is to get lots of blood into the area if you want it to heal.
So they're probably the three key things that a coach could take away from listening to this today.
It's like really just get the idea of like short and long, is the muscle under stretch or is it under the opposite of what would be stretched for this muscle?
The body's complicated you can have two joint stretches, and one joint stretch, some muscles cross two joints, and some muscles don't.
Knowing the functional anatomy helps but even without getting too wacky about like the exact details of everything just knowing “oh yeah like there's clearly stretch here or there's not much stretch” is a huge change and then if you think about just bringing a lot of blood flow to any area that's annoyed like that in itself like without even choosing the right exercises or the best exercises just bringing a lot of blood flow into an area, getting a pump, the high rep work can be… it heals a lot of things a lot faster and you can avoid taking different medications and icing things and getting a lot of therapy just simply through to understanding using the high blood flow and then if we progress tension, in the ATG system most of the guys and for Ben it's dunking.
So it ends up with these extreme high-tension exercises but it can sometimes be missed from the system because it's not in the gym but it doesn't matter whether the tension is created in the gym or the tension is created on the training field it's like people say footy players are naturally strong.
They're not naturally strong, they've just been strength training on the field, they've been bashing each other, carrying each other, wrestling each other.
So when they're 16, 17, 18 they've never been in the gym before they're not naturally strong they're just strength trained with uncommon indifference,
TRAV: With a different input…
KEEGAN: So if we can recognize that then we understand training better and then we can see the sport's filling in these gaps and this is… but if they're not playing the sport because they're injured then that's what we need to get them back to and again if we go back to the rehab type stuff, Craig, and prehab you're not going to prevent injury with stuff that doesn't have super high tension because on the field it's going to be super high tension and most the prehab stuff is low weights and low speed.
So it's not great prehab, strength training has always been better prehab than prehab because it's higher tension and so therefore it's preparing the tissues better.
We just didn't understand that we needed to get to long range and that we needed to consider and continually progressing the speed.
It's just systemizing the thinking around it.
People much smarter than me are gonna break it down into models and quantify the loads and it can get infinitely complex in the details but there's a simplicity of the concept as well that anyone can go and apply.
You don't need to be a strength and conditioning coach to understand what I’m talking about today.
I know a lot of guys have just got it after watching the videos and they're like “yeah okay I get it and I’m doing it and it works now”.
So to me, that stuff is bigger than “you need to do xy exercise” like there's no one exercise…
CRAIG: So often there's no… in the medical field if there was one solution of these things we wouldn't have so many options on the market.
So it's all about getting that dynamic answer and obviously stuff to fit the individual.
It's so good to hear talking about structures other than just building muscle and the importance of strengthening those connective tissues because so much of the injury stuff that we deal with once they end up in the sort of medical world is all around those structures and we've spoken about this before on the podcast but…
Over time that experience and playing sports and training over time is what helps to develop that tendon and connective tissue strength but being able to actually isolate it and train it is really awesome and obviously stuff that's been done previously but being able to sort of put a label on it, make a systematic approach to it is great and hopefully, you'll put me out of business.
This is good stuff.
TRAV: One thing before we sort of head to sign off. I’ve been wanting to ask you because I’ve seen on your Instagram and it is outside of the strength world and hopefully we've got a little bit of time… juggling.
I see that you play around with a bit of juggling and you play around with a bit of that.
Can I ask, is there a brief answer to some of the benefits of juggling and why people should be doing it?
KEEGAN: I can go on for a while as you've probably noticed already but there are a lot of reasons why I like it.
The reason I like it most is probably because it's uncomfortable for people and they don't want to do it and they think they can't do it and then after a few minutes they realize that “okay like I’m progressing quite a lot here” and then within a short period of time they reach a level of mastery and Ido Portal said “you try not liking something that you're good at” and often athletes forget that they weren't always good at what they're good at and so if you can reintroduce the concept of “hey like in 10 minutes you can go from being hopeless with this and being demoralized by it” to actually being okay at like what elsewhere in your game?
Could you just add a big piece to your game because with 10 minutes of focused work, it's often not that easy but if you get that mind ability, if you get that flexibility of mind of like “whatever I need to add to my game, I’m just going to work on it until I’ve got it”.
I had this kind of conversation with Sonny Bill in 2016.
He came and did a camp at my house and this stuff underpins everything that we do like we talk about it but it's also like just there in what we do and we talked about him adding a kick to his game and he kicked for tries in rugby games that next year and I think he had a couple of stinkers as well.
That's Sonny, he's got the confidence to go after things, and he went kicked for tries in 2017 because we were kicking the juggling balls and we opened the conversation of “what if he could” and he just started kicking after practice and I think he got some pushback from other players and coaches and whatnot but he ended up kicking for tries and games and if it wasn't already scary enough to have Sonny Bill running at you with his offload and his footwork and his vision in the short ball and he added the long ball, getting out of the kick as well so good luck.
That's probably the biggest thing but there are big benefits in terms of coordinating the left and right brain, it's proven to increase the white cell and grey cell density in the brain.
It's one of the most proven things neurologically to improve the brain and it's like a really quick win and it helps to build rapport also with people.
If you can, if you're the one to teach them something new and they've got that for the rest of their life like there's something there.
There are a lot of different reasons why I like it and the more we can get rid of the labels, the better the world will be.
If we get rid of the label of being a strength coach and just be someone who develops the physical capacities of someone or someone who improves the lives of the people that they work with.
The best coaches are doing a lot more than being strength coaches and there are guys who are doing amazing work with blood work and psychology stuff and helping people to improve their relationships and all sorts of things that are happening in the world of personal training and the labels can really hold us back from doing what we're capable of doing.
Juggling can also open up that thing like “what else are you scared of doing, what else do you not do because you're worried other people are going to laugh at you and what else would you do if you knew that you could learn really quickly” and all these kinds of conversations is, I think, a big part of why people are… I’ve been able to inspire some people to do things that they weren't doing before.
All these kinds of conversations of what we would have at the training camps and things that are run whether it's with athletes or with coaches and people just tend to reflect on things and just maybe find an extra five or ten percent of new ideas and creativity and new thought.
Juggling is a great symbol of that.
The handstand is a more enduring, injurious one.
You tend to get niggles in your wrists, it's very uncomfortable, it's a bit scary to start with, so it's like a higher buy-in and it's much slower than the juggling but it's also like a tool for mental transformation.
When you go through the physical transformation, you have a mental shift as well.
TRAV: One of the things that I like, I’m gonna say I’m gonna pat myself on the back here because I started juggling when I was a kid with cricket, and when we were just on the side waiting to battle whatever I started juggling cricket balls out of a bit of boredom and then start juggling cricket balls and that's sort of where I started juggling and having a bit of fun with it.
But one of the things that I think trainers can do as a really effective tool, I’ve never thought about the aspect of juggling but now I think it's probably an excellent idea because of other benefits, is the idea of when a client comes in, is to get them to do an activity that requires 100 focus and I’ve seen the ones where it's like, get a little bit of dowel and like try and walk through a maze or whatever while they're balancing something on their finger and it just like their life melts away because if they don't focus on this one thing then it's gonna fall off their finger.
If they don't focus on that one thing right in front of them they're gonna they're not gonna be successful at it and so it's a way that you can have people leave out the outside noise and I think the idea of juggling is a really cool one as well because obviously there's those other bigger benefits evidently.
I suppose the advantage of learning a new skill and we've spoken about previously with Craig about the advantage of doing things you're not good at.
Everyone in Italy always does things that they're good at and without challenging yourself in a mental or physical way, that's another huge benefit.
KEEGAN: You can introduce people to like a flow state where there's the right degree of challenge.
You can also juggle and not pay attention at all once you're used to it or handstand and be chatting and thinking about your groceries.
It's like getting to the edge of your skill capacity and people just being aware of that “okay yeah I’m overloaded, this is beyond what I’m capable of, and like how do I deal with that?”
This is right where it's like I can pretty much do it, it feels really good or this is where it's like kind of boring and I can think about something else.
All that stuff is good stuff and it doesn't need to be part of every program.
I’ve never really tried to sell it as “everybody needs to do this”.
For me personally, it was a huge thing.
I tried to do it when I was younger and I couldn't do it, it was like a mental block and so I got rid of that mental block when I was like 23, it was when I was backpacking Guatemala actually.
It was with Lemons out the back of the bar and I'd been kind of breaking down limiting beliefs while I was backpacking and like just kind of rewilding myself after the domestication of mainstream schooling and I taught myself to juggle then I taught it to a bunch of the kids at this orphanage that I stayed out there and that was the symbol of the juggling for me was kind of like rediscovering freedom and just taking on things that I'd been convinced that I wasn't going to be good at.
Language was one of them as well.
I became fluent in Spanish on that trip and… we all have those things.
Yeah, I can hear the accent.
TRAV: Sorry everyone there who doesn't speak Spanish but well there's another thing I was planning to ask you about the time you spent in Central America and South America because I was going to ask you how that was, how that played a role as well and learning a language is another difficult thing.
KEEGAN: I think it's along that same theme is going to new environments and challenging situations.
You've got a really good accent as well, by the way, a lot of people don't try and take on the accent when they learn a language.
It's probably the biggest mistake you can make like going as hard as you can with accent and the expressions and then people will actually talk back to you in that language and they'll respect you.
TRAV: I learned on the streets.
I played rugby in Argentina for a couple of years.
KEEGAN: Okay very cool.
TRAV: Just learned on the streets and was the random gringo playing in the Argentinian rugby tournaments and stuff like that and getting picked on and getting yellow carded and going like what do I get a yellow card for all that sort of fun stuff.
KEEGAN: Those experiences are priceless.
I really encourage people to immerse themselves in other cultures and other languages.
You learn, you actually become someone else when you speak in a different language and you experience yourself in a different way and it's deep thought.
But we do have different selves, the self that shows up to a podcast is different to the self that is down there playing with the children, or when you change languages, you really do change selves and between like…
I lived in France as well, Catalans and you feel like you're a different person when you go between french and then Spanish and then English and it's cool, it's a powerful experience, and the more of these experiences that we have the bigger the frame of reference.
We have to deal with the challenges of life and the possibilities for things that we can create, I’m a huge proponent of putting yourself in these challenging situations and taking on new patterns of thinking and new ideas and that's why I love the ATG stuff but it's like I’m still looking for other ideas and other ways and where it's missing things and like that's the fun of life I guess is to continue to take on those things.
Now living in Montenegro, like I’m learning a bunch of Serbian Montenegrin and it's great that's the best stuff in life I think.
So yeah we should all continue to put ourselves in those situations where we are challenged for new vocabulary, and new ways of being.
CRAIG: Beautiful, growth and play, and all that sort of stuff.
It's interesting it dovetails in quite well to other recent episodes, we've had travel, we've talked about all this holistic stuff and you know the importance of how that helps you to recover and how that sort of nourishes the soul and the spirit and all that sort of stuff.
So yeah it's cool to hear.
TRAV: As we sort of sign off today, most of our audience are trainers, and 90, 99% of them probably are personal trainers and strength coaches and that sort of stuff, if people want to find out more about either yourself about ATG, I know you're predominantly or you're all ATG now.
You're not the Real Movement anymore.
KEEGAN: Yeah, no I don't have Real Movement anymore.
TRAV: So all ATG, so what would be the best ways for people to reach out, get in touch, learn more, study all that sort of good stuff?
KEEGAN: Instagram is probably the way “ATGMentor”.
I also have a new program called Uncommon Success which kind of brings some of the other side of Real Movement with the skill development and it's a bit broader education than the ATG stuff.
So Uncommon Success is, it's only 100 bucks a year.
So it's like the cheapest program that I’ve run and it's a lot of fun.
We've been doing it maybe the last six weeks or so and so that's a nice entry level if the kind of philosophy resonates but if you're wanting to just really deeply understand the strength system and probably the big play for coaches is to understand that ATG has gone from unknown to the most influential strength program in the world in two years and it's not slowing down and the new ATG app is going to showcase the trainers so there's finally going to be a place for people to be able to find a coach that they can trust and it's not to say that there aren't a million great coaches out there in the world because there are, there's just no way for the consumer to know whether they're getting a dud or whether they're getting someone who's really good, other than a referral or their own experience of having a bunch of crap trainers and going to crappy gyms.
So ATG gyms are going to be opening.
I think there are three or four already, I fully expect that it's going to be a much smaller buy-in than the f-45 similar sort of buy-in that there was for CrossFit and it's a more universal system than CrossFit.
You look at how viral CrossFit went but it wasn't really for everybody, it wasn't for most people in fact.
So I do think over the next couple of years you're going to see tens of thousands of ATG gyms and you're going to see people using the ATG app to find a coach and coaches can actually have their own programs on the app as well.
So if you're sort of a business inclined and you get what I’m talking about then there's definitely going to be a lot of careers made in this process and we're not going to pile the gems on top of each other like CrossFit did as well so you can imagine if CrossFit hadn't done that, how much money gyms would have made if they didn't let someone leave them and open up around the corner.
It was like one of the coaches would leave and so you just divide the business in two every time it gets to a decent size.
That's not going to happen with ATG gyms so if this stuff is making sense and you can see this could have the mass adoption that it is having, Joe Rogan shouted out a bunch of times and there's if Ben doesn't tell the world, the athletes that he's actually training like he's trained a lot of the highest profile, American athletes, if that was public, it would already be 10x what it is but the app is kind of the big piece, his custom app, it's better than any of the training apps that are out there.
So you'll have a better training app as well as be advertised within it.
So it's pretty interesting, it's going to be an exciting sort of couple years ahead and Ben's books are going best sellers on Amazon and he's got more books coming and so if you were looking to be part of a reputable brand in strength and athletic development like it seems as though there's finally something that's going to go mainstream.
There are a lot of great brands out there but nothing's actually been able to go mainstream other than sort of CrossFit and f45 type of deal but this is something different.
TRAV: He definitely smashed the Youtube algorithm and just blew up and I mean the ability to create the content and just constantly be doing it and it's amazing.
It really is amazing.
KEEGAN: He's a phenomenal human and it carries across, it's challenged me and it's made me a better person and a better business person but I see a lot of other ATG coaches as well because we have a chat there with him, we have a chat group on Telegram and he's in there every day talking to the ATG coaches, like what program do you know that’s like that?
We've got hundreds of coaches around the world.
He's got tens of thousands of clients himself.
He really loves what he's doing.
It's not a business. It's like it's a life mission and I see the other coaches taking on, looking at their own role in the world, in their own life, their own business in a different way.
It's very early days at the moment and I hope I’ve just given a little bit of a peek of like what this might look like in the next couple of years for those coaches who get it and want to participate.
TRAV: Get in early.
KEEGAN: ATGforcoaches.com if you want to sort of join the program.
It's a hundred dollars a month.
So you know we've also priced it like we didn't price it at five ten thousand dollars, like the Poliquin stuff was, yeah you get the programs, you get there's the daily kind of support chat with people posting whenever they get issues with anything, you get the deeper dive explanation of sort of how the system works and why it works, you get access to live events as well.
So they did one in Sacramento, there's another one coming up in Florida which I hope to go to in April.
So they're sort of coaches only, there's a hundred coaches going to the Florida one.
Ben's putting that on so those sorts of opportunities are only there for the coaches in the community and would definitely love to have events in Australia and you know everyone's waiting on being able to travel more freely but even without that we're looking for regional leaders as well to be able to continue regardless of what goes on with the world.
So that's happening as well.
So yeah, there should be something in Australia in 2022, whether it's myself and Ben or other guys who've been in the community and know the stuff well leading that.
TRAV: That'd be awesome.
All right mate.
Well, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for a bit of time in your morning.
If you've enjoyed it guys, go to Instagram, and go on the website there, and everything will be in the show notes as well.
Keegan and Craig thanks for being part of another episode here of broscience.
KEEGAN: Thanks so much for having me.
Great to meet you, Craig, and Trav.
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