Ep. 27: Future of Fitness with Strength Coach Mike Boyle
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Strength and conditioning training is key to long-term wellness—but many of us do our working out in fitness facilities that have been profoundly affected by the pandemic’s social-distancing requirements. So how should we work out in future? How should gyms change—and how should we equip at-home workout facilities? To find out, episode 27 guest host Stephen Salzmann, Medcan’s director of fitness, consulted with legendary strength and conditioning training expert Mike Boyle of strengthcoach.com and former training coach with the Boston Red Sox, Boston Bruins and the author of Functional Training for Sports.
Social media feeds:
Twitter @BodybyBoyle and @mboyle1959
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michael_boyle1959/
Boyle’s big book: Functional Training for Sports
What you need for a home gym:
Power Block dumbbells — a full set of dumbells that can be stored in a small area.
An adjustable bench.
Some type of pulley apparatus. For lat pulls etc.
Wisdom from Boyle: The parent’s route to success is specialization but the child’s route to success is broadening. Also here’s the link to the “cyclone circuit” Boyle mentions in reference to the “ADD Olympics.”
Boyle had two goals for developing his own kids as athletes:
Play every day with him or her for at least 15 minutes.
Never say no to my kid when he/she asks to play.
Boyles’ articles that he mentions in the podcast episode:
Does It Hurt? If it does, then don’t do it — it’s that simple.
Lifelong Patient Syndrome: the idea that many people spend their lives getting hurt or getting better.
Evolution of a Strength Coach: The truth is, evolution and development are both inevitable.
Please subscribe and rate us on your favourite podcast platform. Eat Move Think host Shaun Francis is Medcan’s CEO and chair. Follow him on Twitter @shauncfrancis. Connect with him on LinkedIn. And follow him on Instagram @shauncfrancis. Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau.
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The Future of Fitness with Legendary Strength Coach Mike Boyle final web transcript
CHRISTOPHER SHULGAN
I’m Christopher Shulgan, Eat Move Think’s executive producer. One of the nice things about doing a show like this is the chance to set up interviews with legends in their fields. That’s true of our guest in this episode. Mike Boyle is a strength and conditioning coach who mentors other fitness trainers and coaches around the world. He ran conditioning for the Boston Red Sox—including the team that won the 2013 World Series—and the Boston Bruins, working with such legends as Ray Bourque and Cam Neely. He’s also worked with Boston University and a gold-medal winning US Women’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team. But Boyle’s status among trainers is so legendary, less for the teams that he’s worked with and more for his writing. One of the bibles of strength and conditioning training—the book, Functional Training for Sports. In this interview, Boyle speaks with Medcan director of fitness Stephen Salzmann about the future of fitness training in the post-COVID age. He also has some wonderful words of wisdom on how to develop young athletes. Here’s Stephen Salzmann talking with Mike Boyle.
STEPHEN SALZMANN
First of all, thank you, Coach Boyle for making the time for us. This is an honour. I've had you as an influence for geez, almost as long as I've been a trainer. What I found was that coming out of university, even from a specialized degree like kinesiology, we learned a lot about exercise physiology and anatomy, but we were out of school a little bit lacking how to figure out what actually happens when you put pen to paper and try to create a program. And your books have been a huge influence on me. And so today it's a real honour to be able to pick your brain and talk fitness one on one.
MIKE BOYLE
No, thank you. It's nice to know—as you get older in the field, trust me, it is nice to know that your work has had value and has had some influence. So thank you.
STEPHEN
You know, let's get right into it. And I want to start by asking maybe give everybody a little bit of context and maybe I'll learn a couple things about you as well. What sports did you play as a kid, and how did you get onto a path that is the widely-known strength coach you are today?
MIKE BOYLE
Well, it's interesting. I've told this story, I've told it a lot during the Coronavirus era because I've done a lot of podcasts, but my father was a high school teacher-coach. So my father actually was an all-American football player in college, who came to a local high school not far from where he grew up and became a basketball coach. Mainly because they needed a basketball coach and became a really successful basketball coach. I was what I would call a basketball wannabe. If you'd said to me, what did I want to be? You know, I wanted to be the best 5'9" power forward in the NBA. Unfortunately, the market for that is reasonably limited. So I actually played football, which I enjoyed. And I swam, because I was good at swimming. Swimming was one of those things that I was always naturally good at. And I realized okay, I can either be probably the 10th man on the basketball team and spend a lot of time with a slightly better seat for the games than I would have if I went with my friends, or I could be a really good swimmer. So I elected to be a swimmer.
STEPHEN
Awesome. No, that's a great story. But what caused that leap? Or how did that leap take place from basketball, football and swimming into actually coaching those athletes and getting them stronger?
MIKE BOYLE
I think it was, as a kid, I was just—I always say lack of size and lack of talent were big limiters for me and big motivators for me. I wasn't very big. I wasn't very good. But I was always trying to figure out ways to get better. So I think I was always kind of that curious kid. You know, reading books. I can remember as a little kid being terrible at baseball, but reading books about baseball. Like, reading books about how to hit. And I always was kind of a student in that way, and I can remember honestly, I was running hills, like Gale Sayers. This is not a lie. You wouldn't even know who Gale Sayers was unless you're an old time Chicago Bears fan. But I mean, I was doing hill sprints 48 years ago to get better. You know, found a hill near our summer house and I would go and sprint up and down the hill. And there was always something intriguing to me about the thought process that I could make myself better at something.
MIKE BOYLE
And I did. I became—like, I was a decent athlete. You know, I played one year of freshman football in college, which I had no right playing, again, I think I was 5'9", 160 pounds and I played offensive line. I played centre my freshman year, and I started every single game. But eventually it all catches up to you. But what it led me to was strength training. It led me to the weight room, it led me to this process of trying to get bigger and trying to get stronger and trying to get faster. And I think it's the same insecurity that drives most of us, to be perfectly honest. I had a friend who I used to train with, because I competed in powerlifting at that time. I started to enter meets say, like, in the late 1970s, early 1980s. And one of my friends who I competed with used to joke all the time, he'd be like, "Yep. Weightlifting, guns or karate, you'll find all the insecure people in one of those places." And I just laughed, I was like, "You're right." You know what I mean? Like, everybody finds a way to deal with their insecurity. Maybe it's oh, I'll get bigger and stronger, and people will look at me differently. Or some people, you know, I'll buy a fast car. Or some people will be like oh, you know, I'll get a gun. And some people, you know, I'll learn karate.
MIKE BOYLE
I guess for me it was weights. And I was very, very lucky in the sense that I was at Springfield College. My dorm director my first year was a guy named Mike Woicik. Again, if you're an NFL fan, Mike Woicik is or was the longest-tenured strength and conditioning coach in the history of the NFL. He has the same number of Super Bowl rings as Tom Brady, they both have six. But he was my dorm director my freshman year. He was, like, one of the first people I met, and was a huge influence on me. And you know, I was just really lucky. Another guy named Rusty Jones, second-longest tenured guy in the NFL, was also at Springfield as a grad student when I was there.
MIKE BOYLE
So you know, there I was just like I was literally in the—if you've read Outliers, I was in the hothouse, you know? I was in right in the middle of this strength and conditioning thing before anybody had jobs, before any of it ever really existed. I don't think any of us at the time knew that we'd ever get a job as strength and conditioning coaches. Or maybe I don't even know if I knew what a strength and conditioning coach was in 1977, when I kind of showed up for that first day of college.
STEPHEN
Awesome. And in those early days, I know maybe you didn't think about having a strength coach be a career necessarily. I mean, it wasn't even on the radar. But in those early days, were you doing something differently than the people you saw around you and maybe saw a niche or a way to do things better?
MIKE BOYLE
Yeah. Well, that's where as I said, Mike Woicik was an unbelievable innovator. He had been a thrower at Boston College, and then had come to Springfield to be the track field event coach. We started out very early. We were reading Soviet Sport Review before the Yessis Journals even became the Yessis Journals. And he was doing plyometrics and he was doing close grip snatches. And he was doing—he was doing stuff that people in the United States, normal sporting event coaches, were nowhere near where Mike was kind of on an innovation standpoint, or from an innovation standpoint. So it was, again, in some ways, it was just the luck of the draw.
STEPHEN
Fair enough.
MIKE BOYLE
You end up in the right place at the right time, and you take advantage of that. I think sometimes you just—you're lucky if you have the ability to recognize opportunity. And I recognized opportunity. I started hanging around with the throwers. And at that time, I thought I was going to be a powerlifter. Who knows?
STEPHEN
Fair enough. Well, they say you got to be lucky to be good and good to be lucky. So yeah, it all worked out.
MIKE BOYLE
Yeah. I mean hey, like, I look at and think I've had an amazing run in so many different ways.
STEPHEN
Let's get a little bit more current. And it wouldn't be a podcast or a webinar or even a fitness discussion in 2020 without talking about COVID-19. What's changed for you and your practice in the last, let's say, four to six months?
MIKE BOYLE
The simple answer is everything has changed. I mean obviously, we were closed for—I think we were closed for three and a half months. I'm not exactly even sure what the numbers were anymore. And then we went back. You know, we were forced to train outside, you know, we were forced to deal with social distancing and all of these other things. And then eventually, we got back inside, and we were forced to deal with more social distancing. So really for us, I mean, it's changed to the degree that we're forced to come up with an entirely different business method.
MIKE BOYLE
Because I don't think that fitness as we currently know it is going to survive in terms of—particularly like I said, not probably as you and I view it, but I think most people—at least this is what's happened to us in Massachusetts, most people view gyms in very much like a Gold's Gym kind of sense of a bunch of big room with a bunch of treadmills in it and a bunch of single-station machines, and everything's sort of jammed up next to each other. Like, there's nothing about that model that fits the social distance workout idea.
MIKE BOYLE
So for somebody like us, Massachusetts is one of the most restrictive states. We're limited now to 14 feet. If people want to train without masks, they need to be 14 feet apart. So we've set up what effectively we're referring to as pods that are basically 14'x14' spaces. We've bought power blocks. Everybody works out on their own now. You know, even the camaraderie is like I'm waving at you seven feet away or, you know, if you're in the middle and I'm in the middle, you know, you know what I mean kind of thing? So we've literally made it so that effectively, people are working out in their own row, their own alley. And they warm up, you know, same thing we have in the other room that we have, everybody warms up in their own row in their own alley. We're trying to minimize shared equipment, you know? It's a very different process.
STEPHEN
Yeah, absolutely. But you said that you more or less shut down for about three, three and a half months. What advice did you give to the clients in an attempt to try and maintain their fitness when they weren't able to make it to your facility?
MIKE BOYLE
We were really proactive. A couple things worked in our favour. One, we had just switched over to a TrainHeroic app, and we were able to get some pretty good home-based stuff up on TrainHeroic. So we put some energy into developing, like, really low-equipment type programs that people could do on their own through the TrainHeroic app. We took just about every social media channel that we had. So we did I think we did an Instagram Live, we did Facebook Live and we did Zoom workouts. So we had trainers working probably I would say six hours a day doing workouts that we were broadcasting out to our clients. So we tried to maintain business continuity, all that stuff, as opposed to simply taking this kind of fatalistic okay, we're shut down. So you go from a business like ours, where we might have had—it would not, I would say, have been unusual for us to have 60 or 70 or 80 people in our gym training at one time, to initially we were at 16. That's a really significant change. And you can't simply say, "Oh, we're going to charge six times as much because we can only fit in one-sixth of the people."
STEPHEN
Yeah.
MIKE BOYLE
That doesn't work. So, you know, we're taking a hit right now. And I think what we're trying to do—and this goes back to your kind of initial thought, we're trying to develop a model that is going to be successful regardless of whether there is a vaccine. So we're working on this pod-style program where hopefully what we're going to be able to do is get eight clients every 15 minutes that will work through our workouts. And we'll be able to get people in, we'll be able to get people out. And hopefully if we can do that, if we can process eight every fifteen minutes throughout the day on a pace like we normally did, I think we can get a viable business going again. So that's our hope.
STEPHEN
People don't need fitness any less. If anything, they need it more than they did. They're more sedentary than they were. And that actually leads me to my next question, which is what advice or what are some of your bare necessities for someone who might be looking at building their own home gym right now?
MIKE BOYLE
If you said to me—someone said bare necessities I would say very, very simply, power block dumbbells. I've always kind of liked the power block dumbbell idea, but I'll be honest it was a hard sell to clients. But I would clearly advocate power block dumbbells, because you can get a full set of dumbbells in a relatively small area. And an adjustable bench, and then some set—and people are making them, you see them now on Instagram a lot, some type of pulley apparatus. And, you know, people have done a really good job of kind of rigging up some inexpensive ways of creating—you know, it's the old—it's back, like, when I was a kid, you know, the lat pulldown was literally, like, a wire and a pulley, and some sort of carriage to load plates on.
STEPHEN
Definitely not certified safety but...
MIKE BOYLE
Yeah, but if you had those three things you could do everything. You know, if you had dumbbells and a bench and some kind of pulley apparatus. A lot of the other stuff really tends to kind of be wasteful, but those three things to me are the big three. You don't need—you know, people talk about cardiovascular equipment. I'm a big—I'm a walk or run fan. I'm not a jog fan. So, you know, if people said, "Hey, I want to do low-intensity cardio," I'd be like, "Good. Go outside, you know? Call me in an hour." You know, and if they said, "I want to do high-intensity cardio," I'm like, "Okay, good. Go outside. Run one telephone pole, walk one telephone pole." You know what I mean? And between those two, you'd be perfectly fine. Or, you know, if you said, "I can't run." Okay, get a bike. I mean, one thing they said, you know, bike sales have increased really drastically. So I think there's easy ways to do this. We just tend to like to make things more complicated than they need to be.
STEPHEN
Fair enough. Some of that is I think, our infusing our expertise and what we think is what needs to happen and be that source of advice for clients. But you do bring up a great point that a lot of what we want to achieve is possible with minimal equipment. Especially if that's all that's around.
MIKE BOYLE
Yeah. And also like I said, I'm a big Occam's razor guy, in the sense of, you know, the simplest solution is often the best solution. And as I said, I think we tend to try to figure out, hey, is there really complicated way we can try to solve this problem? Or can we just look at this and think, you know, like I said, someone said, "You know, I want to get healthy." You know, start walking. It's a pretty good way to get healthy. And it took me a long time to come to that conclusion. My wife used to always talk to me about oh, let's go for a walk. And I'd be like, torture. Like, oh, my God. You know, I can't think of anything I'd rather do less than walk for an hour, you know? It just seems like a waste of a good hour. But as I got older, I started to realize that it was probably the ultimate low-intensity exercise.
MIKE BOYLE
You know, same thing even now at 60. Like, I relish the fact that I can ride a bike, that I can get out and ride a bike. There's so much that's good about riding a bike from even a coordinated standpoint as you get older that is probably really beneficial for people. And, you know, instead people want whatever Stairmasters and climbers and all these other, you know—but it's pretty easy to take care of your needs. Obviously that gets tougher when it snows. That's when you really get in okay, maybe you do—in the winter, you might need a stationary bike, you know? You might need the luxury of a treadmill to walk on or something like that. But as a general sense, I think we make it too complicated.
STEPHEN
Okay, so getting a little bit more specific, and this one really hits home for me. Feel free to get complicated. Get specific. I have an almost three year old right now. And I got the same dream as I'm sure most parents do, and it's for him to play on the Maple Leafs one day. How do I get my toddler prepared—maybe okay, not to be an NHL pro, but at least athletically inclined? What advice do you have?
MIKE BOYLE
I could tell you exactly. Play with him. I mean, it's amazing. So my son, both of my kids are very good athletes. My daughter is a full-scholarship college ice hockey player and was got a full scholarship when she was a sophomore in high school. My son again is a good lacrosse player, good ice hockey player. But we've always played. And even now if you could see my backyard, I bought a house with a backyard that's almost a hundred yards long. And I bought it recently because it makes a great lacrosse field. And I think the problem with kids in sports is that we want other people to do our work for us. You know, with your three year old, go out and play and have fun. And, you know, get outside with your kid. I had a neighbour when I was working for the Red Sox, so that was 2012-13. I was really tired because I was working for the Red Sox effectively full time running the gym. But my son was, he would have been about seven at that time. And all he wanted to do was play catch. And I would literally—every day I'd be like, "Oh my God." I actually wrote a goal that I was going to play with him for 15 minutes every day. And I also wrote a goal that I was not going to refuse to play. Like, if he said, "Can we play catch? Or can we—you know, can you pitch to me?" Or whatever it was, my goal was one, I will play for 15 minutes at least every day. Two, I will not say no.
MIKE BOYLE
So I would go out on the street. And there was some days where I was in the street and I'd be exhausted. And I would literally set the timer on my phone for 15 minutes, knowing that okay, at the end of 15 minutes, I'm telling him I'm going inside. But I would do it. And I would do it every single day. And one of my neighbours came out one day, older than I was, with a huge bag of baseballs and gave them to me and said, "I want you to have these." He said, "Because you're the only dad I ever see who plays with his kid." In some way, I thought, "Wow, that's such a really nice compliment that I'm the only dad who he ever sees play with his kid." And then I thought—part of me was like, "That sucks." Like, I'm unique because I actually play with my own child. Do you know what I mean? And so I think when you say, "Okay, I want my kid to be good." Like we used to always—I used to call it the ADD Olympics. You know what I mean?
MIKE BOYLE
And we'd just go out with whatever. Like, I'd take him to the gym on Sundays. And we'd, you know, throw tennis balls around and we'd bring a wiffle ball bat, and we'd hit tennis balls, and we bring hockey sticks, and we'd pass hockey balls around. And as soon as he'd get tired of doing something, I'd whip out something else. But I'd be like, you know, for an hour, we're going to kick and we're going to throw. And Greg Rose, if you've ever studied any of the Titleist stuff, they have something they call the cyclone circuit, which really is like an ADD Olympics kind of thing for kids. And the idea is basically that kids need to run and jump and throw and strike and, you know, all these things. Like, I think there's 17 things that they say should be in this circuit.
MIKE BOYLE
But as you develop those things, you develop the athlete. Particularly north of the border thing with hockey is that, you know, the early specialization thing starts too early. I always say when I look at the guys, the great NHL guys that I knew, and I'll give you one of my favourites, Brendan Shanahan, you talk about the Leafs, but Brendan could have played pro box lacrosse. And he did go and play in the summer. He'd go up sometimes in the summer and play pro box lacrosse. And everybody was like, he was nasty at lacrosse, you know? And he was also reasonably good hockey player. You know, and all of these guys. Like, I got to work with Ray Bourque when I was with the Bruins. And it was the same thing. Ray was a really good softball player, really good baseball player. You know, most of the great athletes that I know, chose a sport later on in their teens.
MIKE BOYLE
Because I remember I met a guy who had coached the Sedins, the twins, when they were still in Sweden. And I was doing this lecture about the negatives of sport specialization, and he came up and he goes, "I just want you to know—this supports exactly what you were saying." He said, "I was the Sedins' coach when they were kids." He said, "And when they were 14, they had to decide whether they were going to play professional soccer or whether they were going to play professional hockey or whether they were going to play netball." Which I didn't even know what the hell netball was, but apparently it's a sport that you can get paid to play in Sweden. But he said they were the best soccer players, the best hockey players and the best netball players. And they chose hockey. And so, you know, I've done this talk a bunch of times, but as adults we think that early choosing and specializing makes you better, but that's not the reality of the situation. The reality of the situation is that what you really want is early sampling. You know, my daughter was all in with hockey. My son's not. My son, like, has always been, you know, it's kind of like lacrosse season he likes lacrosse, hockey season he likes hockey. You know, you can almost see him starting to transition out of lacrosse and get ready for hockey right now, because lacrosse is getting near the end.
MIKE BOYLE
Whereas my daughter was like, hockey, hockey, hockey, hockey. But I made my daughter—I made her swim, I made her do judo, I made her play soccer. And she was very good at all of them, but really didn't have tremendous interest in them like she did in hockey, but I still made her do it because my goal was for her to be the best athlete possible. Because my experience in the professional sports world was that the people who were the best, most long-term successful, were all exceptional athletes. They were not generally one sport kind of people.
STEPHEN
Yeah, I think that we all know stories of many professional athletes. You know, Steve Nash was a great basketball player, but loved soccer. And it wouldn't be a Hockey Night in Canada without some of the pre-game videos showing the hockey players warming up by playing keep-ups with each other, right? And I think that a lot of it is that a lot of these sports have a lot of attributes that overlap, and being good at one thing will help you be better at something else and make you more versatile.
MIKE BOYLE
But that's the part that parents miss is, you know, the parental route to success is specialization. But the child's route to success is not specialization. And I think that's really hard for a parent to kind of swallow when you look at it and think, "Wait a second, you know, if I'm going to be good at something, I need to focus." But I look at it the opposite and say, "If I want my child to be good at something, I need them to broaden. So I need to take, like, my little three year old like yours? You know, I'd want him to be able to be hit a ball with a stick. Do you want to call that baseball? Go ahead, whatever. But, you know, all that really is it's you know, it's slapshot, you know, in a more in a—whatever—horizontal kind of plane.
STEPHEN
Yeah, it's slapshot, it's baseball, it's golf.
MIKE BOYLE
Do you know what I mean? Exactly. And I want them to be able to do all of those things. And I want them to be able to run fast and I want them to be able to jump and I want them to be able to roll and I want them to be able to throw. You know, ideally I want them to be able to throw with both hands. It's like my son in lacrosse is very good with his right and his left hand, and that's a huge lacrosse skill.
STEPHEN
Sure.
MIKE BOYLE
Because most of the kids don't develop their offhand skills. So there's just all of these things. And what will happen is your kid will find the sport. You may realize that hey, you know, I'd like to have him play for the Maple Leafs, but you may find out that, you know, he wants to play for the Blue Jays. You know what I mean? Like, you don't know that. Like, you have no idea where his real interest is going to lie. Most of the time it will lie in the direction that you show them, but not always. Like, it's funny with lacrosse. I would never have thought lacrosse would become my son's favourite sport. But we just kind of got him out of baseball because baseball when he was a kid was so incredibly boring, you know, when they're seven and eight years old. It was like, I mean, hard to watch. And at least lacrosse, you know, they were running around. We felt like lacrosse—because then, you know, he was all into hockey and we're like, okay. You know, lacrosse is much more complimentary to hockey. You know, he's running, he's catching, he's throwing, he's learning—you know, there's the same scoring techniques that you're going to learn from lacrosse.
STEPHEN
All right, so we checked off kids, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, what would you recommend for someone who's maybe a little bit older, their 40s or their 50s or 60s, and is just getting back into exercise, but can't help but think back to a time when they were a star in high school or college?
MIKE BOYLE
You know, I think the biggest thing for that person, I talk about this all the time with people, is you need to recognize who you are and where you are. And, you know, who you were has nothing to do with this. That's why I wrote one of my favourite articles ever was called "Does It Hurt?" And in "Does It Hurt," the basic idea, you know, people are always asking me rehab questions. You know, "I do this, but it hurts." And I'm like, "Okay, don't do that." And people almost get mad. You know, they say, "I like to run." Yeah, but don't run if it hurts. I think that's the biggest thing is, what I try to tell our adult clients is the goal as an adult trainee is to feel better and to function better. What I look at is like hey, I'd just like you to feel good and to be able to survive, you know, into your 80s by being able to move and do the things that you need to do.
MIKE BOYLE
So, you know, we really espouse, like, what we would call an intelligent, joint-friendly training. Find things that don't hurt, do those things. I read a great guideline years ago, and I can't remember who attributed it to, but basically the person had said you should be doing mobility one day a week for every decade you've been alive. Which means if you're 20, you should do mobility work two days a week, if you're 30, you should do it three days a week, if you're 40 you should do it four days a week, you know, if you're 50 five days a week, if you're 60, six days a week. That's a really good recommendation.
MIKE BOYLE
I only have one personal training client left. It's a husband and wife that are both in their 70s. And we spend probably as much time warming up, foam rolling, stretching, doing mobility work, as we do anything else that we do. You know, I'm never yelling at them about, you know, you've got to lift more weight, you know, you've got to get stronger. I'm like, "Ah, don't worry about that stuff." You know, we move. We do the dreaded agility ladder, you know, which people would think is, like, the worst thing a person could do. But we skip, we throw medicine balls. And yeah, we lift weights, but I mean, we're like, push-pull legs core kind of workout and then we get some cardiovascular work in.
MIKE BOYLE
Another article I wrote was called, "Lifelong Patient Syndrome." And I said some people have what I call lifelong patient syndrome, which is basically, they just spend their whole life either hurt, getting hurt or getting better. And it's because they ignore the "does it hurt" idea, and they think that doctors are going to fix them. Doctors are not going to fix you. They're never going to. You know, I see people all the time and we still get them in our clinic. People are like, "Oh, I'm going to have my knee replaced." And I was like, "Why?" Joint replacement should be when your joints are so sore that they prevent you from sleeping. But people just go out and think, "Oh, I'm going to get a new knee, I'm going to get a new shoulder or, you know, I'm going to get spinal surgery." And they think that these things will make them better when it's literally a Band-Aid. You know, I had a guy, one of my clients get his knee replaced. And the reason he got his knee replaced was because he didn't like taking a cart in golf. So he had a knee replacement. And then after having his knee replaced, he was like, "Yeah, still I got to take a cart." And I was like, "So you let them cut your leg off, and then realized afterwards that that didn't solve your problem?"
STEPHEN
Yeah. I’ll speak from experience that having the opportunity to interview many of the great minds in fitness generally, and in other fields as well—I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to interview Dr. Stuart McGill. And so far, it's just about everybody who really reserves surgery as the absolute last resort. And in the vast majority of cases, you can probably avoid it altogether.
MIKE BOYLE
You should. It should be a last resort. It should be something that you do, to some degree, you know, out of desperation. But if you're doing it so you can keep doing something that hurts at that moment out of hope that you'll be able to do that thing again, that's dumb. And again, I always say "I wrote an article." I wrote another article, one of my other favourites, called, Closing Your Hand in a Car Door." The basic gist of that one was yeah, if you had told me that you closed your hand in your car door and broke four of your fingers, and that you're waiting for your fingers to heal so you could close them in the car door again. I would think that was pretty stupid, right? But that's a lot of times what we see with people in fitness is that people will get hurt in a fitness pursuit, and then will undergo medical procedures to go back to whatever it was that hurt them, instead of just looking at and thinking, you know something—I always say to people, the list of things that you can do is going to get smaller as you get older. That's just reality.
MIKE BOYLE
And the way to age gracefully is to accept those things and to look at that and say okay, like for me? I can't run sprints anymore. So I'm fine with it. Okay, I don't run sprints. There's lots of things that I know that I can't do. I can't do chin ups. So you just kind of cross those things off your list after a while and think, okay, these things are no longer good for me, instead of thinking, "Oh, you know, I can get something fixed. And then I'll be able to do that again." It's like it's the old, you know, put the toothpaste back in the tube, put the genie back in the bottle kind of thing. It just doesn't work that way. Particularly with aging. Aging is you can't reverse time, time is undefeated. You know, there's nobody who's ever lived forever. There's nobody who's ever played forever. Yes, there's the Tom Bradys of the world, those types of guys that will manage to be successful into their 40s. But in general, time wins.
STEPHEN
Time always wins. And it's interesting because well, within the fitness industry specifically, as it relates to rehab, prehab, and just general body composition results, everybody's looking for not just a fix, but they need it quickly. And so you'll see a conveyor belt of trends in the fitness industry. And some of them are perhaps a little bit legitimate or have a nugget of truth, and some of them, anybody with some expertise can kind of see that it's rebranded something else, or it just fundamentally doesn't align with what we know is right and best. Are there any newer trends in the fitness industry that you think have potential? Where do you think we're going in the next couple years?
MIKE BOYLE
I don't think there's any new trends, no, to be honest. And I never have thought there were any new trends that were going anyplace. That's why sometimes if people look at us, you'd think, "Gee, you guys are pretty kind of boring and vanilla." And I think progressive resistance exercise is always going to be a good idea. You know, I think the idea like I said, joint-friendly training, trying to figure out ways to do things that don't hurt is always going to be a good idea. I think trying to improve your cardiovascular system is always going to be a pretty good idea. But I don't see anything from, like, a trendy standpoint and say, "Hey, this is a game changer." Because there's been, I would say historically, very few game changers. I think at least someone like me, you know, again, I'm 60. I've known for at least 40 years that interval training is a good idea and that strength training is a good idea. I think we've gotten better about strength training and about selecting exercises and about things like that as we've gotten older in terms of I think, that part's gotten better, but in a general sense, I don't ever expect there to be this big kind of game-changing moment.
STEPHEN
I wanted to know before we wrap up, is there anything you would like to close with, and leave our audience with?
MIKE BOYLE
I guess the big thing is, you know, particularly in the fitness field, is just to encourage people to sort of use their common sense and to realize that it's a people business. You know, most people don't—they don't care about looking good naked. You know, they're not worried about if they're ever going to climb Mount Everest. Most people just want to feel better. And I tell people this all the time, that if you can make people feel better I think both physically and mentally, you'll be able to stay in this business a really long time and you'll have clients for a really long time.
MIKE BOYLE
So I think a lot of times as fitness people sometimes, we don't get past our own insecurity. It's more a male thing than a female thing, but I think there's a huge ego component in fitness, you know, about how we look and how we act, as opposed to looking at this and realizing this is a customer-centric business. There's a reason that there's so many unsuccessful fitness people. And a big part of that reason is that people are not—they can't get past their own insecurities and realize—you know, when you start to realize that this is very much about everybody else, and not you, you'll be really successful at this.
STEPHEN
Yeah, it's as much about relationships as it is results.
MIKE BOYLE
Oh, I think more, yeah. Because I think people will come over and over and over again for the relationship, even if they're not getting the result.
STEPHEN
Yeah.
MIKE BOYLE
Because a lot of people—I mean, what happens, I say to people, sometimes it's just really about not getting worse. Because I look at people and think I'm in great shape for 60. I'm not in much greater shape than I was when I was 40. But the fact that I've made it to 60 at a relatively similar spot is a huge success.
STEPHEN
Yeah, many people would consider that a win.
MIKE BOYLE
Yeah, and I would. Like I said, I can move around. You know, I can go to my kids' games. I can go where I want to go, I can be where I want to be. You know, I'm healthy. I can drive, I can fly, I can walk, I can—you know, I look at and think, you know, "Can I do 10 chin-ups anymore?" Nope. Have I tried in the last decade? Nope. Do you know what I mean? Like, I just have had a slow list of, "Sorry, can't do that anymore. Sorry, can't do that anymore." And I live with that. And I think that's part of the process is looking at this and realizing that I will not live forever, I will not be able to do the things that I could do when I was 20. And that the sooner I accept that, the better my quality of life will be.
STEPHEN
Wise words. Thank you very much.
MIKE BOYLE
Thank you guys very much. I appreciate it.
STEPHEN
No, it was our pleasure. I'll admit, I almost couldn't believe we got you. I was fanboying there a little bit coming up with the questions. And, you know, you've always been just the name on the front of the textbook, or the book for the first several years of my experience in the fitness industry. So it's been an honour. Thank you. Thank you again for taking the time.
MIKE BOYLE
No, no problem. Like I said, I love to do this. So I enjoy it.
CHRIS
That’s a wrap for this episode of Eat Move Think. We’ll post links and highlights on the website at Eatmovethinkpodcast.com, including links to Mike Boyle’s entertaining Twitter and Instagram feeds, and links to the many articles he cited in this interview. Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. Senior producer is Russell Gragg. Remember to rate and subscribe to Eat Move Think on your favourite podcast platform. Follow Shaun on Twitter and Instagram @ShaunCFrancis—that's Shaun with a U—and Medcan @Medcanlivewell. We'll be back soon with a new episode examining the latest in health and wellness.