Protecting Your Body & Mind From Your Personality - Jordan Shallow - #267

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What is happening, you beautiful people, welcome back to the show.
Onto today's guest, I'm joined by the muscle doc, Jordan Shallow. He's a chiropractor, strength and conditioning coach, and powerlifter, and I've been meaning to get him on for a long time. I really enjoy his Instagram, and he puts some really insightful posts out. Given that we should hopefully be returning to normal this year at some point, I wanted to ask Jordan about how he balances his desire for improvement with protecting his body and mind from becoming damaged. Anyone with a classic go-getter type A personality knows that you kind of vacillate between doing too much and then realizing that you've done too much. And finding that balance in the middle is something Jordan seems to have. And I wanted to find out his tools and tactics for that, from both a physical and a mental standpoint. So today, expect to learn whether Jordan thinks there's a balanced way to use social media, how we can avoid injury when re-entering the world of training in 2021 He runs through a brilliant sort of prehab sequence and a bunch of rules and tools that you can apply to your training as we get going again this year. And why being obsessive about balance can counteract an all or nothing mentality. It sounds quite circular, but I actually really appreciated his point of view. And it's nice to hear from someone who has been through the fire of working super hard and come out the other end with some good insights. So let's get going. Please give it up for the wise and wonderful Jordan Shallow.

**Jordan Shallow** (1:42)
We did a long time in the making, this one.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
Rearranged by an Achilles injury and then a trip to Dubai and a global pandemic, but we're here.

**Jordan Shallow** (1:50)
Yeah, all's well that ends well, as they say.

**Chris Williamson** (1:53)
For sure. I saw something on your Insta that I really thought was interesting. Have you tried trying?

**Jordan Shallow** (1:58)
What's that mean? It means, especially where I operate very much in an academic space, and there's a large push into optimization. And I think a lot of times what we miss is intentionality, and we just actually miss the follow-through and the execution and actually just trying. So a lot of people are just becoming a repository of useless information to prove that they're smart on the Internet. But that's not why I got into this. I got into it to get stronger, and everything I've learned was just to break a certain plateau. And really, at the end of the day, I think what separates people who do things and who do things well is how they actually do things. So people who try when they do shit tend to just by a consequence of trying to do shit better.

**Chris Williamson** (2:43)
That highlights something I've been thinking about a lot, which is the bridging the gap between insight and execution, being where almost all of the gains are to be found.

**Jordan Shallow** (2:54)
Yeah, because I mean, you know, I work decently close with professional bodybuilders and you could fill a very large room with things they do poorly or correctly. But the one catalyst that seems to set them apart in their sport is that they will just, regardless of if running through walls is the way to do it, they'll do it more and harder than anyone else. So it's like it almost creates, you know, not that the intellectual pursuit is a moot point, but it's if at the end of the day, are you trying to be big? Are you trying to be fast? Are you trying to be lean? Are you trying to be smart? Because, you know, rarely do those things coexist. It's not that they can't. And when they can, we can reach something akin to optimization. But unless you have that execution, that veracity in the way you execute, then you're really just collecting IQ points for no reason. I'd rather add two inches to my arm than 10 points to my IQ.

**Chris Williamson** (3:51)
That's spoken like a true power lifter. Yeah, we have a buddy who's often on the show, Youssef, and he speaks about a period while he was a med student where he said he uselessly indexed information for the ruthless hell of it. I think that mental masturbation and the cerebral game that a lot of people can play, it does lead to an action. Certainly 2020, it's been the year of people ruminating, right?

**Jordan Shallow** (4:18)
Yeah, it can cripple you too. Being the negative effects of your own intellect, like falling in love with your own creation, right? I think it's a lot of times leaving people to just be this giant one-dimensional intellect, and I don't know how deep into the religious or philosophical psychosocial rabbit hole you want to go, but that was one of the breakdowns of religion in Western society. That was what led to the proclamation of God being dead, was the fact that it fell in love with its own creation, right? And I feel a lot of people, albeit maybe not as profound a result of that, but lead them to that sort of crippling in action, because they do fall in love with their own creation, with the more they know. It's just like, it's not why I got into this.