Sorry for the length of this.
My JL letters.
If you've been following my Dear JL blog posts, and the posts that I've been making on Facebook in regards to the same thing, you've noticed that I've been working with JL over the past few weeks in regards to some aspects of my training. We haven't really said what he's been doing or how he's been helping with these aspects of my training for a lot of different reasons. I'm going to share what they are now and why we haven't said anything about it to kind of bring everybody up to speed.
About 3 or 4 weeks ago, roughly before my fist JL letter, I get a text message from JL telling me that he just got certified in something. I will post what that is here in my blog. He really thinks it can help me and was wondering if I can stop by so he can share this information with me. Whenever somebody reaches out to contact me who I know and have great respect for, I'm going to listen, and I'm going to go see what they have to say. JL's one that ever since I've known him has been a person who is constantly learning, is not from the business sector, the training sector.
From both angles he's constantly, constantly looking for an edge or new things or to find where his weak points are to better educate himself. Over the past few years we've met on sometimes monthly and quarterly basis just to toss business ideas back and forth with each other because while we're in the same industry we really do different things, with him being a training center wonder and I'm in eCommerce. He can offer different perspectives and I can offer some different perspectives to him as well.
When you are in business and even for training for that point, it's always good to have somebody who lives and works in a little bit different paradigm than you do to look at what you're doing because they're going to have a different view than what you do, a different perspective that you won't see and vice versa. JL was actually over the years gone from being a training partner to a elitefts team member which he still is as an author and advisor.
When I got his text messages I was all over it. There was no if and's or but's at all. There was no question. The next day, I believe it was, I went out to see him and it was after my MAT session, and I get there and JL is like a little kid in a candy store and he's all excited and he's drawing diagrams on the board and he's explaining all this shit to me and I'm following what he's saying but it really is radically different than what I've heard before, but it made sense. It was hard for him to really explain it at the time because he was only a couple days from being certified.
I just kind of let him ramble on, because as he's rambling, he's thinking, he's processing and as a side note, that's something that you all should do if you go to get certified in something or you take a course in something or you're learning something. As soon as you learn it, start trying to teach it to other people because it's going to reinforce the learning process for yourself. It's going to force you to look back at your notes to make sure what you're doing is correct and to make sure what you're saying is correct. It's going to make that information that you invested in be worth 1,000 times more than if you do nothing with it.
I let him ramble on about it and after about 20 minutes I kind of tuned him out because JL was really excited about it. He's worse than I am when it comes to repeating himself. Then he throws me on a table and he starts doing what I would consider deep tissue work in a way. It's not MAT it's not deep tissue work, it's not massage therapy, it's just fucking pain is the only way I can explain it. He's just fucking me up.
Keep in mind that this dude is 300 fucking pounds. He's got a grip like a fucking world champion. His finger tips are calloused. Each finger's the size of a fucking banana. He's digging into my fucking abs and my ribs and just busting the shit out of it and I can honestly say for the 2 hours I was there, without a doubt it was the worst pain I've ever been in in my entire fucking life.
Anybody that's gone to see him that's a friend of his, he is not a massage therapist or nay type of therapist in that respective ... Has all said the same thing. That is, it fucking hurts. Nobody that I've spoken to has just said it hurts. Everybody, everybody, even people who don't even curse are telling me it fucking hurts. I sat there and battled through it. I'm not going to lie, I wanted to tap out a fucking hundred times, but I wasn't going to give that cock sucker the satisfaction. I just let him keep fucking tearing me apart.
When he was done, and there's some muscle testing that's done with this and essentially what he's trying to do is to get things activated that haven't been activated and in some cases he was hitting some muscles that should be a little pliable and they should move and they weren't bricks. They weren't moving anywhere. He's obviously strong enough to get the fuck underneath it or around it or whatever he did to be able to get in there and break the shit apart, which I'm going to circle back again and say it was fucking painful.
After that first session, on my way home, actually my way back to work, I decided about halfway that I needed to go home and just sit down, because I was fucked up. I went home, sat down, passed out for 2 hours and then woke up and realized I need to go train and he told me to go in and train and see how it was going to feel and he gave me a list of activation drills, exercises, whatever you want to call it. Ways to beat on myself, I suppose.
I went into the gym and B-activated myself for lack of a better word. Started working up on the spider bar squat to which I was only planning on doing some speed work that day because I did some max effort work on Saturday and this was a Wednesday and normally I'm not going to do 2 max effort training sessions in a row, but as I was working up I felt fucking amazing. I kept working up, figured fuck it, you know? Everything feels good. I haven't felt this good forever, and went up and hit a 90 pound PR, which was a video that we put out and not only did I hit the 90 pound PR, but on my last set the heaviest set, I didn't shake, and I normally shake like a tree blowing in the wind. It was all locked in and didn't move. I haven't been that locked in since early 2000's if you want me to be totally honest.
At that point I didn't even do any accessory work. I just went and sat in my car and had to decide if the 2 hours of pain was actually worth the PR and how I felt. Let me step back for a second. After I did the lift, there was no doubt the 2 hours was worth it. But after I processed it a little bit and thought back about how it fucking hurt, I really needed to sit and think about it because it really hurt.
After thinking about it for damn near an hour, I called JL and let him know what had happened. He wasn't that surprised because he's seen some similar things with some of the other friends that he's worked on with this. From there, I went back to see him the next the period of that week, I'm breaking PR's and everything, and I figure, you know what? Fuck it. If this doesn't last I'm going to milk it for everything it's worth, because I haven't felt like this for 15, 20 years.
I knew I was walking close to the edge, but I haven't even been close to the fucking edge for 20 years. Once you get close to the edge and you can actually start to look over, I can't walk away. I decided I'm just going to keep fucking pounding shit until I break it and see if this shit that he did will actually hold up the second time I went in to see him which was the next week, everything was pretty much on point. I was still hitting PR's and doing well. There's no problems. It still hurt, but it didn't hurt anywhere near as bad as the first time and it didn't last anywhere near as long as the first time.
I kept drilling away and trying to hit PR after PR on everything I could possibly think of. The third time I went in, and I knew this before I went in, I was fucked up. That's because 2 and a half weeks of going balls to the wall on everything and lifting weights that my body hasn't even handled or touched for 15 years, I broke his shit. Everything that he fixed, I broke. I think either A, I really pissed him off or B, I was really fucked up, but all I can say is that third session was far worse than the first.
On that third session there was a couple times I did tap out and told him he had to fucking stop because it was awful. Just absolutely awful how bad it hurt and so after that, we discussed how this can be used as a training regulator for me, because I'm not really training for any meets, I'm not really training for anything, I just like to train really fucking hard but I do understand you can't do that 52 weeks out of the year. I get that. I know that. I'm not that fucking stupid.
I would have backed down in time anyhow, it was just I wanted to see if I could break what he did. Whenever I have any type of work done like that I want to see how long it's going to last because that helps me to know how frequently I need to integrate it into my program, into my schedule. There's a lot of things I have to move around to make this kind of shit work, too.
It's not just one side. It's a 2 sided thing. From that point, we decided that it would be really cool to use this as a training regulator. Instead of my trying to auto-regulate everything with my training on a ... He can help to regulate it by what he sees when he comes in and tests me. When I left on that third week, I was told to keep things at a 7 and I don't want to go in and define how I define what a 7 is and what we agreed upon with that because it's not really an RPE because I'm not using percent based training. The way that I fluctuate my training between using body building methods and power lifting type methods, a 7 could be 70% or it could be leaving 3 reps shy on an exercise or it could be going to failure with a slow tempo and really super tight form.
I know what the 7 is. He knows what the 7 is and I'm not going to lift how I regulate 5 through 7 or 5 though 10 or what not. My regulation of that is going to be different than everybody else's because I know what I can recover from and what I can't recover from, but I will say a 10 would be basically being able to do anything. Even those thing that are really hard for me to recover from. A 7 means I can do almost everything except for that top 30% of either exercises or training methods that are very hard for me to recover from. An example of something that's very hard for me to recover from would be a max effort type dead lift or any real single max effort type of movement that I'm going to strain for more than 5 seconds on from the time the bar's unracked to the time that it's racked.
I left that third week and was told to keep it at a 7. Went back this week, did keep it at a 7 for all last week. Went back this week and was told I could take it up to an 8.5. the reason there is I did something total funky to my hamstring when I was going balls to the wall on everything. Everything else is basically testing at a level that would be a 10, except for the hamstring, which that's not ready for that yet. When he does say that I'm at a 10, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to push it at a10. It means that I will start to regulate up to the 10 based upon wherever I'm at. If I'm at a 6 at the time or an 8.5 or whatever it is, it's going to move up over a couple weeks to that 10 and then base it on the regulation that we're seeing through his muscle testing.
That's bringing everything up to speed on what this is and what he's doing. I know this is along post but I also know there's a lot of people who are interested so JL will be writing an article with more information. He's actually going to have the people who he went to get the certification from come out to his gym to certify his staff and he is going to open it up in case anybody does want to come out to become certified or learn more about this. He'll put his phone number in there for those who may be interested.
I think the interest really is going to fall in people trying to find a practitioner, trying to find somebody who is doing this, and then people who are actually going to be looking to be certified. I'm getting nothing out of this. The only thing I'm getting out of this is JL beats the fuck out of me and it hurts really bad. I don't even know if that's a benefit in any way whatsoever and he's not going to get anything out of ... He's not making any money on the certification either. What he's looking for is to get some of his staff certified so he can have people that can work on him.
He can speak during the seminar or if you have any questions he can talk a little bit about how he's going to integrate it to his training center and with his clients, because there's a gray area here where it isn't massage therapy and it isn't any type of treatment type therapy but it still is a gray area. There are things that need to be considered when trying to apply something like this, or even muscle testing for that matter. When you're working with clients you can't just jump in and do that without knowing all the regulations or state regulations that are associated with that.
JL can touch on that a little bit because some of the clients I believe he's having work on himself and I do most of the stuff on myself. It's in time I won't need to see him because I won't be able to do everything that he's doing to myself and that's the whole goal of this process is he does not want to be in a room fucking digging and jamming his fingers in people's jaws and ribs all fucking day. Actually he's going to have 2 businesses to run or 2 training centers to run and clients to train and a staff to manage. He doesn't have time to sit there and do this shit all day long. That's not the goal behind what he's doing.
The goal behind what he's doing is to be able to teach people so they can do it themselves and he can then have his athletes and clients do it themselves, which is going to lower their injury rate which has already been shown to be the case with the lot of the universities that are implementing this and JL can touch on that a little bit more if you speak to him and how they've been integrated as well. It seems like voodoo, I'm not going to fucking bullshit you. When he was talking to me about it, it's like I've been down this road 100 fucking times before with so many different variants of deep tissue muscle testing. I can't even begin to list them all.
If I did, it would take an hour. It just kind of seemed like just a different version of the same bullshit that I've already tried so many times before, but the difference is the shit actually worked. It works for me, let me put it hat way. A lot of the questions that I've been getting from people I know that know what's going on is is it working for me because I'm super fucked up? In other words is it going to make a difference for someone who's not as fucked up? I don't know. That's a question to ask somebody else. That's a question to ask JL. I don't know. I can't answer that. I don't know that much about it. That's been what's going on with it. I've been making the dear JL posts because they make me laugh. They're funny, they crack me up. Nobody really knows what I was talking about so if you go back and read them now knowing what was going on, they make a little bit more sense. They won't be as funny or maybe they'll be more funny. Who knows. That's what this is been all about.
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