51. Mike Boyle - Author of Functional Training and Former Boston Red Sox, Boston Bruins and USA Hockey Strength & Conditioning Coach
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“Our body made is designed in this spiral, diagonal, beautiful neurological way. And then what we do is we make it dumber, and dumber and dumber by hammering it with bilateral exercise.” - Mike Boyle
Coach Mike Boyle is never one to disappoint. What many would consider to be the father of Functional Training, Mike Boyle has made a career out of focusing on results vs. tradition. Owner and trainer of the Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning Center in Boston, Coach Boyle has worked with elite professional athletes in all major sports leagues to aspiring amateur athletes of all kinds. As a strength and conditioning coach at the professional ranks Coach Boyle has formerly worked for the Boston Red Sox, Team USA Hockey and Boston Bruins. He was also a staple of the Boston University Hockey Teams.
In today’s episode Coach Boyle expresses the need to get back to reason when it comes to training. He explains why bilateral training is inherently unnatural and not the optimal to approach training the human body or improving sports performance. We discuss programming, when to write your own and when to defer to a “master chef”. We talk squatting, unilateral alternatives and the critical components that he felt compelled to add to the second copy of his book.
Mentioned In the Show:
Books: “New Functional Training for Sports” By: Mike Boyle
Train Heroic Website: https://www.trainheroic.com/
MBSCTV: https://www.mbsc.tv/
Follow Coach Boyle:
Instagram: @michael_boyle1959
Twitter: @mboyle1959
Website: https://www.bodybyboyle.com/
Show Transcription:
Ken Gunter
Coach Boyle. Welcome to the show.
Mike Boyle
Thank you very much for having me. I love doing this.
Ken Gunter
Yeah, absolutely. I know, I know, you've done a lot of them. We were just catching up about that. A savvy vet. So thank you for making the time to do this one as well.
Mike Boyle
Not a problem. I'm trying to do one a week, just because I get a lot of people asking, and it's become a really good way to keep tapping into kind of new audiences. people that haven't maybe, you know, aren't familiar with what we do and haven't really. I mean, heard of us, you know, one thing you realize that, you know, you think you're making an impact, and then you realize this frickin billions of people in the world who have no clue who you are so
Ken Gunter
well, you know, and that's one of the amazing things that I found about this podcast. So you know, I'm actually coming up on a year of doing it, and not that I had, like, a small vision for it, but I didn't anticipate how global it could be. And so to your point, yeah, I mean, there's billions of people, you know, and there's people in every country who, for whatever reason, may not have been exposed to your work. So I'm completely with you, man, the more opportunities that you can take to kind of get your message out there, you know, the more opportunities you have to make an impact on someone's life.
Mike Boyle
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing I because my last book, I think, is in about nine languages now. And one day I said, You know, I started thinking, well, gee, it's in English, and it's in Spanish that must hit, you know, 80% of the world. Right? So I just googled most spoken languages. And I realized that Hindi is the number one spoken language. And so
Ken Gunter
Isn't that amazing?
Mike Boyle
Yeah. If you're not in Hindi, you're not hitting the largest percentage of whatever listening viewing. And obviously, people can make a case for, you know, what are the economic factors that go into that, but it's just crazy that, that that's the you know, that's first and I think, Mandarin Chinese, which my book is in his second. But I think I figured out that I had only basically developed the ability to communicate with about 40% of the of the world by being in nine languages.
Ken Gunter
That's incredible. Well, yeah. And you know, it's kind of, it's very easy to get focused first on like the US, right? At least you had it in Spanish and English, and now you've moved on to nine languages. But yeah, it's like, Look, if your goal is to help people, there are so many people and it's like, you gotta then figure out a way to like, how can you make it accessible? Right. Let me ask you, okay,
Mike Boyle
podcast, go ahead, please. Like podcasts, Instagram, I would say, half my Instagram followers are not in the United States. And I have about 100 and brain 1000 Instagram followers. And, you know, you just realize that I mean, it's amazing. You know, I communicate regularly with a rugby guy in Sri Lanka. And what I have communicated regularly with a rugby guy in Sri Lanka, in the pre internet world. No, there's no chance. Right?
Ken Gunter
Yeah, you would have been like parchment, and long form mail and yeah, weeks between communications. Yeah, it's incredible. I love it. Well, and to your point, I'm excited to share, you know, granted, we only have an hour. So it'll be a snippet of kind of what you do, but, you know, just introducing people to the idea and concept of functional training. And maybe that's a great place to start, you know, in your own words, would you mind describing what what functional training means to you? Yeah,
Mike Boyle
I've gotten very good at this functional training is training that yes, that makes sense. It is the opposite of dysfunctional training. So when you think about most of the training that we do, it's Really dysfunctional, we spend a tremendous amount of time training on two feet, although almost nothing that occurs in sports occurs on two feet. So a lot of training by nature is dysfunctional. And we started looking at this and saying, Hey, you know, I mean, I always say I use the example of rowing is really the only sport that is consistently competed at 100% of the time, with two feet in contact with, you know, quote, unquote, ground, not even the ground, but really, you know, the footplate right in the boat, other than that, everything else is one leg at a time. So when, and the other thing we talked about is functional training is training muscles, according to their function. It's the understanding of functional anatomy. So, so much of what we do is just dysfunctional stuff that everybody else did. And we just keep repeating. Well, this is how everybody always did it. So we're just gonna keep doing it that way.
Ken Gunter
Yeah, and, you know, you said something to, I had a lot of fun going back and reading your book again. And, you know, there's a question that that kind of needs to be asked whether it's a movement and exercise, it's like, hey, are we are we improving strength? Or are we improving performance. And it's, you know, I admittedly, looking back and even today, it's very easy to get caught up in that desire to improve strength, add more weight, break through a PR, right, even if you're doing at the expense of proper form and function. So just like looking at things through that lens even kind of helps me when I'm assessing, you know, I'm no longer a competitive athlete, but I have a bunch of goals that I've set for myself, looking at it through that lens even helps me kind of stay oriented towards my task.
Mike Boyle
Yeah, because ultimately, when you look at particularly, you know, this is called the professional athlete podcast, if you're training a professional athlete, they've generally already become professional prior to meeting you, that would be you know, there are a few of us. And I will say, I am in that minority of strength coaches, who've trained people from the time they were young, until they became professionals. And then throughout their professional career, there's a couple of guys that have done that, but not a lot. And so one of the things you have to realize when you do professional athletes is somehow some way they got here without you. And you have to understand that part. And then you have to look at it and think, you know, we in the strength world have like a fascination with strength sports with, with Olympic lifting with powerlifting with bodybuilding. But the reality is, those are their own pursuits. They're not the pursuit of the professional athlete that you train, that person might want to be better at baseball, or better at hockey or better at basketball, whatever that is. And then you have to figure out what can I take out of those other disciplines that may help this person become better at their sport? And I mean, that's, that's the kind of essence of the job.
Ken Gunter
Yeah. Well, and let me ask you this, because you mentioned it already. bilateral vers first unilateral movement. You know, I don't know if you were the first to really bring this into the consciousness of the strength and conditioning community. But certainly, I think unilateral movement is often associated with the programming that people at least perceive you to do. Can you kind of talk about the difference between the two a little bit and and you know, if one is more beneficial as we think about functional training or training for sport?
Mike Boyle
Yeah, I mean, I think when you really look at it, bilateral training is really dysfunctional. neurologically, my feeling is the body doesn't like bilateral training. You know, and I use the example so if someone if you ask somebody to, to jump as far as they could, let's use standing. You know, Kyle, I'm a standing long jump, people are going to run and jump off one leg, right? You know, you'll never see a you know, you ever see a guy say, Oh, he held the world record the triple jump, and he hopped the whole thing or a double leg jumped the entire time. Our body made is designed in this spiral, diagonal, beautiful neurological way. And then what we do is we make it dumber, and Dumber and Dumber by hammering it with bilateral exercise. And if you look at this, and I'm an ex powerlifter. So I could say it. But I would not
Ken Gunter
you're an x one
Mike Boyle
and x power lifter. I competed in powerlifting you know, as a as a young man in my 20s. And, but I think if you go to a powerlifting meet, I could politely say you are not impressed by the athleticism of the participants. You know, you don't look at the guy so they are the women and think wow, I bet that guy's really good at basketball. Wow, I bet that guy you know, he's a really, really good baseball pitcher. No, you look at those people and think, very, very good at lifting weights with two feet, touching the ground. And what you really is if that had the performance enhancing properties that we, you know, sort of attribute to it. A lot more of those people would be in the Olympics and other sports, they wouldn't be, you know, off on some Saturday afternoon competing against other like minded individuals, they would be at the Olympics, or they would be in the NBA or they would be in the NFL and they're not. And in what we realize is that this sort of, you know, we've gone into this blind pursuit more is like, it's the, the American way, right? more is better. You know, if running a mile is good, running two miles is much better. And running a marathon is way better than that. And that's just not reality. So when we start looking at this, like bilateral versus unilateral, I mean, to me that debate you like, look and go, okay, watch, just put the TV on watch every game, what are they doing? Are they not moving unilaterally? And most of the best players move unilaterally really, really fast. So when you start looking at that, you think, Wow, if I could develop training techniques that help people move unilaterally really fast, that would probably be performance enhancing for what I'm watching on television right now. I mean, it is so common sense. But we have a lot of people who are very wrapped up in their own belief system. So the difference for me, is I'm not wrapped up in a belief system, I'm wrapped up that my belief system is I want to make my athletes the best I possibly can be. And that has led me to investigate lots of things and not become fascinated with some sort of, simplistic thing. So
Ken Gunter
yeah, there's certain seems to, there certainly seems to be, you know, some some folks who take like a dogmatic approach, and like you said, it's okay, this is the way we've, we've always done it. And also, you know, on powerlifting, because look, I also, you know, one I love watching it, I love doing it. And there's there's a place for it. Right. But I think kind of what you're saying is like you need to be really honest about what you're training for. If you're trying to be a better power lifter, I would assume that you would say well, then go for it. Right, because those those exercises are specific to that sport. But if you have another pursuit, football, basketball, baseball field, whatever it is, to your to your point, just watch what's happening. And clearly unilateral, you know, single leg is is like the driving force behind who's successful. Right?
Mike Boyle
I mean, and that's so to me, it's, you know, we've talked about, you know, functional training is training that make sense, functional training is just using your common sense. So, so much of it to me, and it's as you said, but to be able to step away from the dogma to be able to step back from what you've always, you know, what you believe this is what I think this is what I was taught, this is what my high school coach told me, this is what my college coach told me. But to be able to, to sit there and question that to look at that and say, Wow, is that really true? And I think that applies in a lot of areas of life. But, you know, when we look at that, we think, Wow, is that really the best way to do that? And I did that a long time ago, 30 years ago, I had some of these epiphanies at seminars, listening to people and thinking, wow, are we doing the right thing here? And if we're not, should I be doing something different, and that led me to experiment. And the experiments led me to, to kind of, at least in my mind, verify that what we were doing was working because suddenly we're getting people better and healthier. We're not you know, because again, the crazy pursuit of like the big squat, the big deadlift, the big bench press, generally leaves like this orthopedic wreck in its, you know, our trail, right? where, you know, people's got, you know, bad bad back, bad shoulders, whatever it is. And they're constantly trying to work around these things in the consistent pursuit of, you know, five more pounds in a lift, 10 more pounds in a lift. And you look at that and think like from for, you know, for my guys, I should be my guys or my girls, because we have a lot of like, you know, women's national team, players that we train. The truth is they don't care about No, that's not important to them. What's important to them as being the world's best at their particular activity.
Ken Gunter
Yeah. What what what are you looking for in when you consider adding a movement or an exercise, you know, to your programming? Like, what, what
like, sort
Ken Gunter
of traits are you looking for that that movement might be able to deliver to the athletes,
Mike Boyle
I look for something that's better than what we're doing right now? I think that's the thing that I really look at. So if someone so I've always tried to figure out, okay, who's the best in the world? at whatever it is they do? You know, I'll give Stuart McGill is a really good example. So if Stuart McGill is the leading expert on helping people with low back pain, then I should probably listen to Stuart McGill when he talks about low back pain, I should probably look at the exercise. Sounds like I need to. Yeah. But look at the exercises that he says are important. Look at the things that he says, Here is kind of my to do list. Here's my not to do list, here are my recommendations. And I think that's
all you really need
Mike Boyle
to do when and as you begin to do that. What happens in our field is that people think, Oh, yeah, I listen to him, and he doesn't agree with me. So therefore, he's an idiot. You know, and you're kind of like, I mean, that's basically how most strength and conditioning people evaluate things. They listen to people. They seek agreement or affirmation, that they're correct. Yeah. And then if they're not, well, I'll begin to argue with this person on the internet. And I'll tell everybody how much I dislike them because they don't think like me. And that's, you know, that's like my Moyles life. You know, there's, there's the mike Boyle. acceptors. And there are the mike Boyle detractors, and, you know, they could be equal groups. I don't really know. Yeah, but the truth is, I don't really care because my job is not my job is to attempt to educate. But you know, it's not to try to sway the people that don't want to agree with me, it's only to sort of, hey, I want to draw into like minded people who understand and who I what I would consider the intelligent people. But yeah, that's just me.
Ken Gunter
Yeah. So what are you using to measure whether a new, you know, not to oversimplify an exercise or an approach or some means of training? What are you using to measure and determine if that's going to stay in your programming moving forward? Like what sorts of things you look at
Mike Boyle
a bunch of things you're looking at one like I always, I always say, there's, there's two ways to look at an exercise. An athlete looks at you and says, This exercise sucks. And then you have to look at it and think, Well, does he think it sucks? Because it's really hard to do? Or does he think it sucks? Because it's a waste of time? I need to delineate which of those two it is, and be able to look at that. So what I'm really looking at is, I think athletes are super intuitive and really smart. And that's one of the things that I realized what I kind of rejected the bilateral back squat idea. I can't tell you how many professional athletes said to me, Oh, that's awesome. You're never gonna make me put 500 pounds on my back again. I was like, Nope, never. And they will literally like, oh, man, high five, you're the best, you know, and what you realize they're worse. And the people who were mad, tended to be the grunts. Right? You know, the offensive linemen, those types of guys were like, Oh, you know, you're crazy to know what you're talking about. But all the really high skilled people thought, wow, I always hated that to begin with, they never felt good. It always made my back sore. I'd never felt good The next day, you know what I mean? And I started to realize, okay, that Oh, there's clearly some affirmation here from the gifted athletes that I'm working with that, that this is a positive direction. But then you also have to look at it in terms of like, I like to analyze injury rates. You know, yeah, I mean, in in training, I want an injury rate of zero. So I don't want anybody to ever get hurt training. If somebody gets hurt training. To me, that's disastrous, right? And then I want to look at people when they go to their season, what's their incidence of non contact injuries, you know, contact injuries to some degree, you're not going to be able to prevent that from happening. But non contact injury, that kind of muscle pulls the low back pain, those types of things. Should ACL Yeah, should be Yeah, should be decreased. And what we found is that our sort of emphasis on functional training one was our like, set ACL. We did one year one, not one year, one six year period, we did six years where we were involved in Women's Professional Soccer. We didn't have one ACL.
Ken Gunter
Six years, really? of women's Yeah. The female.
Mike Boyle
Oh, yeah, the status female athletic population that the average there should have been based on you know, let's say we were working with a team of 25 women. You know, even if you said two women, we should have had somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 ACLs. And we had zero. And we continue to I mean, it's not that no one has ever torn ACL that works with us, but it is not something that we see with great frequency. We were talking about this the other day, we don't see a lot of hamstring strains. We don't have a lot of hip surgeries. We don't have a lot of back pain, you know, and, and people, but the big kind of drag on me is oh, you know, he's afraid, you know, he doesn't want to do things that are difficult, and I'm like it particularly in the professional athlete world. Absolutely. am I afraid? Yes. Do I not want to do things that I consider to be high risk? Yes. Because the you know, the first year I went and worked for the Red Sox, one of the things that I said to every guy that I talked to us, okay, you got here without me. You're here like you're playing Major League Baseball. You're one of an elite group of people.
How can I help you? Yeah,
Mike Boyle
you know not not me saying it. Oh yeah, I know the way to train and I'm going to tell you what to do. Because, again, the average professional athlete is going to reject that premise. They're gonna look and be like, Who's this like bald little old man who was all of a sudden going to tell me how I'm going to do it, right. And I saw a bunch of people like professional sports, they're guys who get fired all the time, because they come in and think I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna change the world. I'm gonna tell everybody how to train because I'm the world's biggest genius of training. And a lot of the players just look and go like, whatever. Yeah, sorry. Got here without you don't really have much interest in your, your ideas, right? I'm
Ken Gunter
hitting 300 as new
Mike Boyle
Yeah, exactly. If you're not like, you know, you don't strike me as a team player, like a guy wants to help me get better. You're telling me that I don't know what I'm doing. And I want to look at you and think I know what I'm doing. You know, I had guys used to be like, I made $10 million. I know what I'm doing. And I was kind of like, I can't really argue with that. If you make $10 million in Major League Baseball, you're obviously doing something right. So I, you know, I want to focus, like I said, and and the guys were incredibly receptive to what I wanted them to do, because I didn't force it on. I guys, I actually started when I first went, all I really did was work. I almost personnel trained all the injured guys. We had a whole bunch of guys from the year before. We had 11 disabled list players who had had surgery the year before. And I just kind of threw myself into these 11 guys, I'm going to train these 11 guys, I'm going to help with their, you know, with their rehab, when they get done in the training room. I'm going to take them and do what I think I need to do to help them to get back to play. Within about a month of that I had rostered players coming to me and saying, Why are these guys getting all the attention? You know, why don't you make time for us? And I was like, okay, that means I've just done my job because the roster guys have taken notice
Ken Gunter
struck a chord.
Mike Boyle
Yep. And yeah, and but it was initially just, hey, here's where I think I can do the most good. And the interesting thing the next year, we started the next year with zero guys. On the disabled list we had, we had no one to have surgery after the season was over. And we won the world championship the next year. I believe there is a strong call Oh, yeah, there's a strong correlate. And not to be your my work. But to healthy players. You know, they always talk about in professional in
Ken Gunter
a game if you're not on the field, right? The
Mike Boyle
number one ability is availability. You know, like you're gonna win, I always say to people, you know, what are the chances of the Lakers winning if lebrons not playing? They drop way down? Right? You know, Brady doesn't play in the Super Bowl, what's the chances of Tampa Bay winning, they drop way down mahomes loses two offensive linemen, you know, in the last couple of weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, what are the chances of Kansas City winning the Super Bowl, they go way down, you know, when your best players are no longer available. So our focus should really be on availability first. At least that's my mind.
Ken Gunter
So what's going on in the body physiologically, when you're you're training guys unilaterally, and you put a ton of content out online. So you know, I encourage people to go to YouTube, and I'll link to your book, to see a lot of the exercises that you're doing. But, you know, okay, so I totally follow you a sport is not done bilaterally, you know, almost exclusively, right? So understanding that like the way that we perform sport, you know, unilateral is really critical. But when you're training guys in that way, like what is actually happening that's helping them perform better or reduce the risk of injury.
Mike Boyle
Well, I mean, when you're training, if you think about functional anatomy, you're training the right muscles. If I put two feet on the floor, all of the muscles of my hips and my core do not have to do the same thing that they do when one foot is on the floor. So this is the sort of incredible common sense argument that I like to make for people. I get you, I put you on the floor and I say take your right foot off the floor stand on your left foot. I have now asked your abductors to stabilize your pelvis. I've now asked your glute medius to stabilize your pelvis. I've now asked your quadratus lumborum to stabilize your thighs, your pelvis. I've asked all of the muscles probably, you know from below your pecs to your knees to perform a different function than they were performing when we were doing bilateral exercise. You know, and we now have a neurological specificity that relates most strongly to what we're going to do on the field. And that's what I mean about common sense I look at that and I say to people okay, argue that premise with me on this same scientific basis on which I am arguing it with you Don't argue it with me on all squats or king of all lifts you got to do it to get strong and like that's a freakin half assed bullshit argument, right? But that's generally most of the people that I argue with. Default back to Oh, it's good enough for me when I play it or you know, some other sort of moronic kind of approach. versus No, wait a second, let's have an anatomical that's actively assess rice, you know, as far as what's happening. And so I guess that's what we're looking at, then you get into the idea that there's a concept that they call bilateral deficit. And this is really like the clincher of the unilateral versus bilateral debate. So bilateral deficit basically says that the easiest way to you know, we're using video we use just audio when this goes out. Yeah, using video to video too. So imagine I'll use my hands as examples, because it's really easy. If I gave you a hand grip dynamometer and said, squeeze it as hard as you could with two hands, you would get a score grip strength score, let's just say that strength score is 100. To make the numbers really easy, if I then gave you the same dynamometer, and said, squeeze it in your right hand, then squeeze it in your left hand. And I added right plus left together, right plus left would be greater than right and left combined. That is indicative of bilateral deficit. If we did that, you could do that in in lots of exercises. And again, I'm not a leg extension, then we don't do leg extensions. But leg extension is a really easy example. If I had somebody do a two leg leg extension, for a max, some sort of Max, let's say a 10, rep max, then I had them do right leg and left leg, the addition of right leg, left leg would be greater than the two legs. If I measured your vertical jump off of two legs, and then I had to do a single leg, right, and the single leg left, the combination of right and left would again be greater. And what this is, is it it to some people's mind. It's neurological proof that the body is inefficient when you ask it to act bilaterally. Because think about this again, from a neurological standpoint, you're asking your brain to send impulses to both sides of the body saying do the same thing. But when you ask that the exact
Ken Gunter
same time, right, and
Mike Boyle
when you ask the body to do something in a sport skill sense, it's like, okay, throw a baseball. You know, you don't give somebody to baseballs and say, you know, if you gave somebody two baseballs and said, try to throw them both, you'd see a really inefficient baseball throw, right? even think of asking somebody to go with throw a left handed think about neurologically how driven we are. Most people can't throw it all with their left hand. Right? Because there's a clear hemispherical nature to the brain, which gives you a certain side dominance. And we know that all this occurs, but in training, we reject the idea, even though the data is there, anybody can look up I have people doing well, with bilateral deficit, if you train really hard with two legs, you can probably equal it out. And my thing is, you can close
Ken Gunter
the gap.
Mike Boyle
Yeah, like you don't want to close the gap. That closing the gap is idiotic. You know, it's like saying, I'm inefficient, but I want to make myself as inefficient as I possibly can. Right. And so we saw for the sake of proving my point, right, we saw this with unilateral, you know, any of the unilateral squat type variations that we did. People very, very quickly got way stronger in these unilateral activities than we expected them yet. And it was almost like that was like I was doing it from a specificity standpoint, from a sports standpoint, from an agent rental standpoint. But what I realized from a pure performance standpoint, it was better. I had a friend last night sent me a video of his baseball players doing step back lunges. Now these are, you know, not Superman, but they're doing step back lunges with 315 pounds. These are not guys who could squat they couldn't squat or RDL or deadlift or whatever. 630 pounds. I am very certain of that. I've seen hockey Sooners do 500 pounds in a one leg squat. 500 pounds like easy like, like breaking sticks. The guy's not 1000 pound squatter. So I could I could go on forever. I like no,
Ken Gunter
no, I love it. I love it. This is great. This is great. No, but I was just gonna say, you know, I played college football. And looking back now and rereading your book again, I have to imagine influenced a good deal of what we did, because we did do a lot of like, you know, single leg squats, split squats, things of that nature. And I'm one of those guys. Yeah, I'm taller. I'm like six, three, the time was probably like 230. So I would have lower back pain, right? And I just was like, well, it's just kind of kind of is what it is. But to your point, what I found is like when we did like our single leg squats, or you know, whatever it's called the rear foot elevated single leg squat with like a barbell. Not only could I do much more on a single leg, like in this might have been like, indicative of some sort of, you know, dysfunction I have with my regular squat, but I could do substantially more with a single leg squat and I always thought that was so interesting. And to your point, like the amount not to beat my chest, but the amount of weight I could do was like very surprising because it was nowhere near if you were to add the two together, reflective of what I would be able to do with two legs. So reading the book, it makes sense logically, but I can also kind of attest to just my own experience. Just how true that actually is.
Mike Boyle
Yeah. And I mean, if you think like you said, You're six, three, that taller somebody is like one of the things I wrote an article on rowing one time and one of the things that I said is what makes you a really good rower? It makes you a really shitty weightlifter, the taller You are the worse weightlifter you'll be. Because it's it's leverage again, it's like anatomy. This is physics, right? It's about lever arms. I always said the guys that encourage you to squat, the guys that are like huge squat proponents. Do you know what they look like? squatty that would be their description of them. Right? They're squatty. Right? They're short, they're muscular. They have really leverage, which allows them to be really good at weightlifting type tasks, you very rarely see like a six eight basketball player espousing how much he loves back squatting. You know, I love back squatting. I love dead lifting up No, you don't see it. You know, there are maybe there are some maybe you could find one or two. But in general, because the other thing you find in strength training, right, the disk is a constant. So if you were gonna lift weights off the floor, the person who has the highest probability of lifting a weight off the floor heavyweight is the shortest person probably who has the greatest amount of mass per inch. So you know, your best power lifters are going to be short and stocky. Particularly your best deadlift, just because that plate is 18 inches. And it's a lot easier for a guy who's five, eight to get 18 inches off the floor than it is or actually, you know, with nine and a half inches, really, if you think of where the center is then a guy who's six, eight. Yeah, right. I mean, and this is all the light travels a lot less. Yeah, like I go to seminars all the time. And I get I sort of espouse all of this common sense stuff for people like you look at this, you know, here's the diameter of a disc. That's why we don't clean from the floor. You know, people have to clean the floor. I'm like, No, you don't have to clean from the floor. I said, You've obviously never trained like elite rowers, or NBA players or, you know, big left tackles in the NFL, they're all going to be shitty at cleaning from the floor. They're also going to be lousy back. squatters, you know, they're going to be, and I could tell you this historically, you know, because again, tall people tend to have a lot more length within their femur than their tibia. It's what makes them tall, I have a great video are great picture that I show of interesting one of my interns and one of my athletes. The intern is for 11, the athlete is 511. seated. They are identical in height. their spines are the same length.
Ken Gunter
Oh, wow.
Mike Boyle
But you can literally see the one girl. So if you look at Sidney, who you see in the picture, you see that her knees are about four inches above the knees of the other girl. And you realize that her tibia is at least three inches longer, and her femur is about eight inches longer. And that accounts for the 11 inches or 12 inches difference in their height. It's not in their spine, you know? And so it's just all of these things. I mean, there's so much evidence out there. But the problem is our field is so dogmatic that people don't want. Well, people I would say again, that Mike Boyle, people are very ready to accept the evidence. The other people, you know, the powerlifting people, the Olympic lifting people, they just want you know, they're the science deniers. They don't want this to be true. It's not sure. In spite of the fact that you're talking to me about the nervous system, and you've talked to me about functional anatomy, you're talking to me about all these things that make perfect sense. It's like, you know, like little kids, la La, la, la, la, I can hear you. And that's how they are like they don't they don't want to hear. Because then they become less significant. The things that are important to them become less important.
Ken Gunter
Yeah. Well, and actually, you know, I had another question, but maybe this is a this is even more relevant. Because right, you, you did create a second iteration of your book. You know, so one, like I said, I enjoyed reading, I think you even do a good job of saying, look, I put this in 1015 years ago, I no longer agree with what I wrote then based on what I've learned in the time between so like, for you, you know, what was kind of the why was there a need to write the second version of functional training?
Mike Boyle
Because the first one was terrible. It was written. It was written in 2004. It's actually a funny story. So Ted Miller, okay. Ted's a editor for Human Kinetics. And he grabbed me at a seminar and said, I really think you should write a second edition of the book. Now one thing that you'll realize if you ever write a book, is that you do Don't ever read your own book, right? Like, I don't read my own book every year and say, hey, how relevant is my own book? And I my literal response to Ted was Ted, the book is fine. It still sells, you know, I sell for 5000 copies every year, what you know, and he said, All he said was, I'd like you to review the book. And if you feel it doesn't need revision, that'll be the end of the conversation. So I went, and I reviewed the book, and I sent him an email. And I was like, Ted, this book sucks, Who wrote this? You know? And that led to Okay, here's the rewrite, because my this is the thing I say to people all the time that was if in 16 years, our DAX I think it was 10, or 12. From the original writing to the new one coming out, I think it was 2016, the new one came out. But if you haven't learned enough to make your own book, no longer relevant, then you probably weren't working during that time. Right? I mean, yeah. Cuz I looked at things, you know, things I said, you, I didn't even mention foam rolling in the first book. And if someone said to me, first thing you should do, if you're gonna work out, I'm like, foam roll. First thing, foam roll. In the first book, I said, Don't static stretch, because it's been shown to reduce power. I since realized that that was not true. And that that research was, at best, questionable and, at, in reality, probably completely wrong. So the first two things that we do at a workout I said not to do. In the first book, I was like, we didn't even mention foam rolling, and I said, Don't judge. Now the first thing I tell you to do is foam roll. Second thing I tell you to do is stretch. There was a lot of still bilateral training talk in there, there was a lot of talk about front squatting. And there was, you know, at that time, because it was functional training, there was a little bit of talk about like, you know, unbalanced unstable surface stuff. And there was a lot of unilateral in there, but not nearly as much as there probably should have been. So, you know, I think I always say to anybody, any book that you read, is out of date. Because by the time you get the book in your hands, that author has had some change as to how they feel about something that's in that book.
Ken Gunter
Love that? Well, and, you know, I'd be interested to hear from your perspective, because because we have talked a lot about not being married to a philosophy and ideology, right, following the science. For you specifically, you know, you are a very well regarded expert in the space like, Where are you turning for education and like kind of continued learning?
Mike Boyle
Twitter? That's where everybody goes, Oh, hey, here
Ken Gunter
we go. Yeah.
Mike Boyle
That's a half joke. But the reality is, you know, a well curated Twitter, Twitter feed, is going to be a wealth of information. Because you'll get constant updates on research on science on whatever it is. So I can look at my Twitter feed in the morning and find out what all the smart people that I know are thinking. And that's a really good thing. And the other thing is, you create a network of smart people. I'm at the point in my career, where I know most of the good people in my field, who I think the good people are, so and I can't tabs on those people, what are they thinking? What's their direction right now? What are they into? You know, what? are they finding industry? What are they reading? Are they having thoughts that are changing about training, this is all things that you should be doing anybody, I don't care what business you're in, you should be doing the same thing you should know, okay, who's you know, like, if I'm gonna you know, if I'm whatever, if I'm an inventor, or Carmel manufacturer or whatever it is. I wouldn't know what Ilan Musk is thinking. Right? I may not like Elon Musk. I may think Ilan Musk is the greatest guy in the world. But either way, I want to know what he's thinking. Because he's a thought leader. He's a guy who's, you know, he's now currently the richest man in the world do I want to know what Warren Buffett's thinking? I want to know? There's a lot of things that I want to know, in the world. Yeah. And I jokingly say, but Twitter is a really good place to, to keep up on a lot of that stuff without, you know, having to go to the library constantly. Imagine go to the library. Yeah. Do you know anyone that goes to a library?
Ken Gunter
I don't know where my nearest library is. And I
Mike Boyle
know exactly where it is. And I've never been in it. Because I can get all the internet. I mean, the internet is, you know, I'm talking to you right now via the internet. You know, this morning, I was doing research I was looking for, you know, whatever, on the internet, right? You know, I can look for whatever I want. On the internet. Anytime that I want. I get up. I get up at five o'clock in the morning. And that's the first thing I do. I look at emails, I look at Twitter, you know, I try to figure out okay, what's going on in the world, what's happening in my space that I might be interested in reading about. And it's the same with whether it's part two So whether it's, you know, subscribing to somebody's Email Feed, so you could look and think, okay, here are the people that I think are thought leaders. And I can be current. You know, today I bookmarked a couple of podcasts that I want to listen to business kind of fitness business related podcast, so that I can keep up on what other successful fitness business people are going to be doing.
Ken Gunter
Yeah, I love that you're right. Like there is just, you know, the social platforms. It's funny, like I'm constantly torn, because on the one hand, it can very much be a time suck. It's non productive. So I often avoid it for that very reason. But you're absolutely right, like well curated. There is no better access to like real time information as to what you know, the best, the best in the industry are thinking, right?
Mike Boyle
Well, go ahead, right. It is the word. That's the key. The key is well curated. Because, yeah, you know, you can it is a big time suck. You know, you can look at tic tocs forever. Have a bunch of idiots dancer, you know? It's like, who cares, right? And watch the same, you know, I watched I was indifferent girls do the same dance on tik tok today. But you know that that, to me is a waste of time. But, yeah, and even Instagram can be a little more of a waste of time. Because of where it's driven, whereas Twitter like I always think I hate to say a well curated Twitter feed, can really save you a lot of time. It could also be a time you're
Ken Gunter
inspiring me to get back on Twitter.
Mike Boyle
Oh, if you're not, I would say like, literally I shouldn't be if you're not on Twitter, you're an idiot. Because it's so easy. It has to be sorry, I called you an idiot. Right? But it has to be right. You know what else $240 whatever it is. But bite. So by its nature. Its brief. Unless you decide to get sucked into what you do on Twitter, the key on Twitter. And I learned this. I should I wish I could think who my friend was who told me but somebody told me this and I should give them credit. muting and blocking. Right? You idiots sort of invade your feed? You simply block them. Okay, I'm blocking this guy's an idiot, you know, he's on. He's only here for the argument. I don't need him. Right or maybe I think eyes only if the argument but he's actually kind of smart. I'm gonna mute him. I generally block more than you. You know, if I look at people after a while think okay, these are these are just kind of turf defenders, then I'm going to block those people. And yeah, and then you know, so I can literally I curate my own feed. But then if you follow me on Twitter, you get the benefit of me curating my own feed. Because now you fall out and you see what I'm going to repost. Okay, what did I repost today? Yeah, or what did I favorite or what did I you know, what discussion? Did I get involved in? And then you think, okay, I should go look at that. Yeah.
Ken Gunter
Yeah. No, it makes it, it makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, that that's part of the problem that people have, too. And I've got a couple questions on so let me think about where I want to take this. But there's now so much information at folks fingertips. It's, it's very tough for the well intended person to differentiate, like, the actual expert from the snake oil salesmen. You know, working in this space for so long, and I wasn't planning on talking to you about this at all. But now I'm interested, you know, for folks who are like, Look, I really want to get better. I have a very specific goal. I don't know who to follow who to invest my time and money in like, you know, do you have any sort of like things that you recommend criteria that people look for? When assessing? You know, whose information they're going to put validity into?
Mike Boyle
Yeah, well, I'm going to give you my friend Alan cause groves criteria. Been there, done that still doing it? Okay. That's what you want. Someone who's been there, someone who's done it and someone who is still doing it? Because those are people with skin in the game, and real world experience. The internet, you're right. absolutely freaking overpopulated with frauds with fraudulent routing resumes. I mean, just and I always say in the fitness space, I could, you know, call it names. I always say like, at some point, I'm gonna get like my mother. You know, when my mother kind of got old, she became like, one of these people who just said, whatever was coming into your mind, and sometimes you have to like mom, like, relax on that. Okay? But I want to be that when I'm old, where someone's like, total fraud, like absolute loser, I can't believe you. But I can't do that. But when you look, I said, Yeah, look at people. Here's my criteria. People who never post a video that's not like them or their girlfriend or their mother and the videos look like that. They're done in somebody's basement, but they swear they're in a garage. And they swear they're one of the world's leading, you know, performance enhancement specialist. And I'm like, Okay, if you're one of the world's leaders, performance enhancement specialist specialists, you are not filming videos in your frickin garage or your basement. Here I am filming a podcast in my basement, by the way. So just just to state what a total fraud I am. But you know what I mean, when you have to look at stuff like that you have to look at their resume when their resume is nebulous. People always Oh has trained numerous professional athletes, you know, MLB NHL, like they got all the league names. But no guys, like, yeah, who are the guys like, if you ask me whom I got, like, I've trained the best women's ice hockey players in the world. I can tell you their names, you know, Hilary Knight, Kendall Coyne, like, you know, Megan Keller, I can go right down the list of the best women's ice hockey players in the world. I've trained most of them if they're American, right? I trained the best women's lacrosse player in the world Kayla trainer. And if you look on my website, you'll see videos of Kayla trainer training. You know, I've trained some of the best NHL players in the world. I've trained literally guys that are in the Hall of Fame. You know, and I get just look at the jerseys in our gym, and you'll see the names of the people that we've trained, you know, I've, so we have been there. And we have done that, you know, like, I've got two national championship rings, I've got a World Series ring, like I have the whatever the bonafides that you need to have to present myself as an expert in this field. But you know, so everybody's resume on the internet looks just like mine. Mike is one of the leading experts in performance enhancement in the world, a widely sought after speaker who's trained athletes from the NHL, NBA MLB, whatever. Everybody's got the same bullshit resume. It's like they went to my website and copied mine off and just put it on there. You know, and I
Ken Gunter
might just use that for your intro.
Mike Boyle
Yeah, some of those people, right, have probably met, you know, guys from those leagues in an elevator somewhere. Or that guy like, you know, stopped by the facility once because he was in the area. But so you have to really delve into the backgrounds of people and say, Okay, yeah, if you say you train Olympians Who? And I always say this, if anybody says I can't tell you a huge red flag. Because you don't have any clients I've ever had and said I couldn't mention their name. I'll give you a wild guess. How many?
Ken Gunter
I'm gonna guess. 110 exactly
Mike Boyle
right. I had one. Well, hey, all right. When I was trading Jennifer Garner, she didn't want people to know she was in Boston. She was like, please don't mention that. I'm here. And this is the best part about Jennifer Garner, who is a doll. She said, I will make it up to ya. Do you know Jennifer Garner made it up to me awesome. She had thought about training with the BU hockey team on the freakin Jay Leno show. She literally just Jay Leno was asking her how she got in shape for the movie. And she was like, Oh my God, I've trained with Mike Boyle at Boston University, and always be you players. And they were such great guys. I get a clip like someone I get the video clip in the morning from one of my friends. They're like you won't believe this. And of course, that's amazing. Yeah, I'm not up at 1130 watching Jay Leno, right. But here I am what I write, I tap on the clip. And here's Jennifer. Now, she was the only one who ever said don't use my name. And she went on national TV and used by name. So by all right, my only point being the guys who tell you they can't tell you who their clients are don't have any clients. And yet, that's their way of covering them. Oh, yeah, I got a secret client list. You know, if it got out, you know, it could cause a lot of problems. Like, what problems would it cost? I don't understand what those problems would be. So that's I mean, I could write a book I actually wrote an article one time on internet frauds. I can't think of what I actually I can think of, I think what actually called it but it was, it was exactly what we're talking about right now. Because it's amazing how many Yeah, there are there every wish.
Ken Gunter
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and maybe let me ask you this to end. Because, you know, I even find myself in this camp. I look, I'm super passionate about these topics. I love it. I do it myself. I played college football. But I still, you know, I'm like, could I write a good program? Like, probably not like I understand what works for me. I understand the movements if someone wrote something up. Something that I enjoyed in your book was talking about, you know, are you a cook or a chef? And how do you know when you become one or the other? So you know, for a lot of folks who listen our strength and conditioning coaches of all levels, could you maybe just just offer some perspective with regards to being a chef and a cook and as it comes to actually writing programming versus implementing something that has been kind of To use the word again, is curated or put together by an expert.
Mike Boyle
Yeah, the article was called stick to the recipe. And one of the things that we talked about in the article is that training is a recipe. It's not a menu. And in if we think of the concept of a recipe, a recipe is very specific about the ingredients, the amount of ingredients and the order of ingredients. You know, if you change any of that, you risk screwing up the recipe, right? Training is identical. Because it's not a matter of like, Oh, I like this, I'm going to put twice as much of that in. You have to like we always say like, you look at everything as a pie chart, and you figure out okay, how about, you know, when someone asked me, okay, write a program. First question, How much time do we have? And they're like, well, I'm like, No, you gotta give me like, do we have an hour? Do we have an hour and a half? Do we have two hours? How many days a week do we have? You know, what time of the year is an in season athlete or offseason athlete? And so I think a lot of times you have to recognize, you know, much like the culinary world. If you are a line cook, you do what the sous chef tells you, right? The sous chef says, you know, cook me up this and you cook it and you give it to him exactly the way that he told you to do it. You don't look at him and think oh, you know, I'm thinking I might do this. If I throw a little of this. And I might throw a little of that and be like No, do exactly what I told you to do. You need to know that yeah, that's you know, are you Where are you on that scale? Like, are you a chef, sous chef, no second in command? Or are you aligned cook. Most people are line cooks who think they're chefs. And most of the chefs behave like line cooks. And, you know, in the real world, so I always think the key and I tell people all the time, the key to success in this field, is I always say Mike, Mike Boyle University, the first class will be cheating. I will teach everybody how to cheat. Because in strength conditioning, everybody gives you the information like you can go, you can go on trainerroad right now, and download our programs might cost you you know, 20 bucks or whatever. But you could get, you could say I need a program for hockey. Okay, go to trainerroad COMM And you'll get a program that has all the video clips on it, everything will be done. And one of my coaches will chat with you online and answer your question for you. Like, that's a pretty easy way to get a program. Or you could try to put it together yourself. And generally, I have, you could tell me like on an allergist, right. I love one of my favorite quotes is a giraffe is a horse made by a committee. And, you know, right. And but that's the way like,
Ken Gunter
I don't I love a good stain. I've never heard that one in my life.
Mike Boyle
All right, that one dusty and make sure you use that again, but I want credit. Yeah, man.
Ken Gunter
I'm gonna steal that one. Absolutely.
Mike Boyle
But when you think well, you know, I say most people write giraffe programs, when they mean to write horns and programs. Yeah, because, because they can't they, you know, it's like, oh, I really like the long neck. You know, I really like the long, spindly legs, you know, whatever it is, it's like, they inject so much of their likes into the program, that when you look at the program, you're like, this thinks like, this is really bad. Whereas I say to people, okay, I could say exactly, write a program. You know, start with foam rolling, you know, move to static stretching, put in some sort of, you know, whatever mobility activation, core training, do some type of dynamic warmup, do some power exercises, do a strength program in which you push something, pull something, do some D dominant unilateral exercise, do some hip dominant unilateral exercise, finish with some sort of interval conditioning. Okay, end of class, right? It's all over. You know, all you got to do fill in the blanks, we literally sometimes, you know, we'll put like a worksheet together. And all you got to do is fill in Okay, you know, our proportions. What's my exercise? upper pull? What's my exercise, right? You know, knee dominant, unilateral. What's my exercise? hip, dominant, unilateral? What's my exercise? You know? You mean, it's like, it's not very hard to do. But then you look at someone else's program and you think, oh, you have five pushes. Like, yeah, but I like inclines, and I like flies, and I wanted to do some overheads. And you're like, Okay, we gave you one block. You had to pick a push, that was your job. Don't tell me what you like to do. Don't tell me about like getting a good contraction of your pecs, just freakin fill in the blank, you idiot, you know, and go to the next thing. But people can't do that. They do you know what I mean? They they in general, they can't get out of their own way. When it comes to programming, they can't get past their own bias. And that word becomes problematic.
Ken Gunter
That makes total sense. And last question, I'm sneaking this one there only because you just brought it up conditioning. You you do conditioning at the end of your workouts even on like a strength based day.
Mike Boyle
Yep. conditioning because again, if you think about our situation, our professional athletes have come into us four times a week. I don't want to rely on them to do their conditioning on days. They're not with me because if you know most athletes The thing they like to do least, is conditioning. So if I said, Hey, on Saturday, I would like you to do a really hard interval workout on the assault bike, I'm going to tell you that 20% of my guys are going to do a really hard interval on the assault bike and 80% are going to golf and get their interval training, maybe, maybe they'll carry their bag, right? So for us conditioning is at the end of the workout. And we are not big conditioning people conditioning for us generally does not exceed 15 minutes. It is almost always entirely interval in nature. We do 00 steady state conditioning, zero distance running with you know, because again, the science does not support that very strongly.
Ken Gunter
Yeah, for support. Well, that hour flew by this has been awesome. Um, so like I said, you have a lot of information available, but for folks who want to follow you, you know, we already talked about your Twitter feed, which Yes, I am, I'm gonna piggyback off your your crew of experts. You know, where do you recommend that folks start by following you?
Mike Boyle
So I have a website called strength coach calm strength. coach.com is a paid site you pay to be a member? And we answer questions every day for like, every person's questions get answered every day. Brand New Relic and Kevin constantly the guys that I work with, were on there. So I would say to somebody, that's the number one place to go. Twitter is easy. I'm at embroiled 1959 on Twitter. I am at Michael underscore Boyle on Instagram I I'm pretty active on Instagram, too. I actually have more Instagram followers and Twitter followers. I'd have to like Twitter better. We do have programs on trainerroad. We do have our own certification. We got a lot of stuff going on. Our company website is body by Boyle calm. We've just relaunched our body by Boyle online website is NBS CTV. So we've got almost like a, you know, where I said, Netflix is gonna sue us somewhere along the way. But we've said, it's like a Netflix for trainers. Because you know, we've got something like 300 hours of video presentations, we have every one of our staff meetings. So that's at nba.com we just the bad part about us. We probably my friend Anthony Renner always says that got the strength coach podcast, he said you have too many offerings, and they compete with each other. And I'm like, yeah, we probably do, but I don't really care. The good thing is I'm very like, I'm in a good spot in life. So I'm not really that worried about it. I probably should be more organized and have a better feel for these things. But reality is I don't.
Ken Gunter
Yeah. Ah, well, that's awesome. Yeah. And like I said, I've had a ton of fun reading and watching your videos. And yeah, what maybe we'll have to have you back on the future because I feel like I got through maybe one quarter of my questions, but this was absolutely awesome, man. Thank you.