This week has been, admittedly, pretty electric in Philly. In case you truly don’t pay attention to current events, the Eagle won the Super Bowl and people take that to be a Very Big Thing™ around here. Within a few minutes of the game being over hundreds of thousands of people had already clogged Broad St. and were marching towards City Hall. No idea what their plan was from that point. We’ve since had a parade and everyone is way happier than normal.

Now listen I am not big on the pigskin. In fact, I had purposefully boycotted the entire season and didn’t watch a single down. I don’t watch much football to begin with, but this season I made a point not to watch even if it was on around me. Between the systemic racism and total disregard for the health and wellness of players (not just the reckless disregard for the severity of concussions) I just can’t in good conscience contribute to it.

But, god damnit, sometimes your principled stand runs right into what is, whether you like it or not, a major social and historical event for a city. So I caved and watched the last two games.

You could write a dissertation on all the interesting things going on with something like this, but here’s what I really liked.

Listening to the analysts and commentators it was absolutely painfully clear that they neither expected Philadelphia to win but they didn’t even want them to win. Every possible opportunity to lean towards the Patriots in analysis and commentary was taken. At the end they were literally talking about what they’d “hope for” so that Tom Brady could pull off the comeback win.

And the Eagle simply did not give a fuck.

In a hilarious and impassioned rant, the Eagles’ center explained the team’s attitude towards all of the talking heads that dismissed them all season long.

And he closed it out with a rousing rendition of the famous “No one likes us, we don’t care​” football hooligan chant.

Here’s the thing. In probably the majority of cases where you are doing something fantastic people are going to expect you to fail, and they’re not even going to be disappointed when you do. If even a single guy on that field had decided late in the fourth quarter that he was just really tired and you know what, the Patriots really just are the better team and there’s no sense in continuing to push forward no one would have blamed him at all. The analysts would have talked about the Eagles’ improbable run that ended exactly as everyone expected it to.

But these guys decided they were going to ram through the dip with every bit of everything they had, talking heads be damned.

And look how that turned out.

You know it’s like I said the other day, you have to know when to quit and when to keep going.

But if you’re going to keep going, you better keep going no matter what anybody else says.

Nobody likes us?

It’s ok.

We don’t care.

You know those questions people ask rapid-fire at the end of podcasts? It seems like everyone sourced their list from the same place because they’re often the same, and I still manage to totally flub one here and there, like this one. But anyway generally I love doing podcasts and I like that part.

So a question people often ask is what book do you give away most often, and it’s a great question because I’m always able to answer it immediately.

Seth Godin’s The Dip.

I’m a big fan of Seth, I met him in 2004(?). He doesn’t like shaking hands, he really doesn’t like hugging.

I’ve given away literally hundreds of copies of this book. I like it mostly because it’s not some rah-rah about how you need to keep pushing forward at all costs, but instead it’s about quitting and cutting your losses when it’s not worth pushing through.

I got to thinking of it the other day because of the big dip we went through with Lift Weights Faster Daily. Most people wouldn’t think of this, but the fact that we have a database of over 550 exercises that have all been completely photographed with beautiful and instructive exercise descriptions written for them, not to mention about 50% have instructional videos and then on top of that we have a database of over 400 workouts that are all tied back to those exercises…

Well it’s just an insurmountable dip, let’s say a competitor who wanted to copy the idea, for someone to go through. I don’t remember if Seth makes this point in the book but it’s almost like the opposite of the dip is an asset in the sense that once you go through the dip what you’re left with is a massive asset. Do I need to explain the power of assets to you? Probably not, right?

Anyway, my point is not that you should keep pushing through and persisting no matter what, nor is my point that you should quit everything!

In fact knowing which route to take is exactly the challenging part and anyone who tells you they have the answers is full of shit.

But, you should have an overarching method and strategy to how you make those decisions. Mine is borne out of the same ideas that underlie my training philosophies – ease, lack of tension and friction, and congruence and resonance with what is best for me and my body.

What’s yours?

One of our friends stopped over the other day to pick up a load of bread.

Exhausted from a long week of coaching and digging deep into professional book learnings she sat down at our counter and said:

“David, the more I learn about more systems the more intrigued I am about biofeedback.”

It’s an evolution I’ve seen lots of trainers and coaches go through, so I wasn’t surprised to hear it.

There are dozens and dozes of three-letter systems out there all purporting to give you the last piece of the puzzle you’ve been missing all along. Some people think they’ll get out of pain if they learn the next system. Others think they’ll be able to unlock the missing potential and hit that next big PR.

Maybe they will.

Probably they won’t. At most it becomes another tool in the crowded toolbox.

The problem is that none of the systems connect. You can’t reconcile what you learn in one with what you learn in another, which leaves you trying to deduce which is the correct answer using the only overarching system you have – logic – which is ill suited to the task. Someone smarter than I has said “just because it’s logical doesn’t mean it’s physiological.”

Which is why you inevitably end up circling back to biofeedback, that thing you heard about briefly but thought was a little too weird or a little too improbable to follow-up on.

Biofeedback isn’t about giving you more tools, it’s about discerning which tool you should use, and which tools you should put in the trash.

I’ll give a quick example. A couple years ago Jen and I were at a big fitness seminar, and one of the presenters who is very smart and a great presenter was doing his thing and was trying to prove that more stability and rigidity would give greater range of motion. That was his whole thesis and all of the application was built around that idea. Well he had everybody following along and when the great “reveal” came almost everyone in the room had greater range of motion except Jen, right next to me, whose range of motion got worse. I whispered “try closing your eyes, taking a few deep breaths, and shake out the tension.” She did, and immediately had greater range of motion.

Why?

Because Jen was powerlifting heavily at that time, and tends to run pretty high-strung and tense and rigid as it is. The last thing her body needs is more rigidity. She needed to relax, and let tension go.

But you’d never get there if you predicated your whole pursuit on the idea that stability = range of motion.

Remember last week when I talked about association vs causation? Stability is associated with range of motion, but if you start thinking of it in terms of causes or equals, you’re going to have a bad time.

Anyway, this is the mental model and framework that biofeedback provides you. But of course you have to learn how to apply it and then actually do so.

I’m going to be scheduling some dates for workshops over the summer and fall coming up here, let me know if you’re interested. Of course I also teach this in my programs, like Off The Floor and Get Stronger Faster.

And if you need to learn some more three-letter systems before you’re ready? That’s ok too, I’ll be here.