Today’s episode features Max Shank, fitness coach and owner of Ambition Athletics in Encinitas, California. Max has written 3 books, taught over a hundred courses in countries around the world and is the creator of the “5-minute-flow”. Max is an avid learner, having picked up guitar, piano, and drums as an adult, in addition to the dozens of physical movement skills he has acquired. As a personal trainer, Max has moved his focus from basic strength training to a holistic approach of overall fitness and health.
One thing that I’ve really enjoyed in observing Max’s work over the years is his passion for movement and learning. Max is a coach who is the epitome of getting outside the box, and taking a holistic approach to coaching, training and human development. His methods of working towards becoming an “athletic ninja” have relevance towards the goals of any trainee.
On today’s show, Max gets into skill training from a practical and philosophical perspective, music’s relationship with training, using play dance in training, developing elasticity, training the foot, and much more. This is a fantastic show that blends a lot of different elements of life itself, to get a deeper view on our training practice. Whether you deal with only athletes, or work heavily in general fitness, there is a ton of gold in this episode.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.Timestamps and Main Points
3:50 How music fits in with physical music in Max’s philosophy 10:50 Why doing work that is more engaging emotionally is a more sustainable practice in exercise 21:20 Why a diversity and love of movement is often lacking in a strength and conditioning environment 25:50 What an exercise program means to Max and why we should pick means of training that come from intrinsic motivation rather than looking a particular way 40:45 How Max views the relationship between play and training 50:25 The mind-body relationship when it comes to difficult work and the sustainability of difficult training protocols 58:00 Some of Max’s favorite tools for strength and movement 1:02.45 How Max views elasticity and elastic strength development“The use of a metronome is outrageous. Playing too slow, playing too fast. Doing it deliberately wrong, and seeing if you can work your way back into it. Being able to express emotional content into what you are doing, whether it’s tennis or boxing, or wrestling or something, and doing the same thing with an instrument, there are so many parallels”
“There’s the part from Bruce Lee in “Enter the Dragon” where he tells the kid to put emotional content (into his physical practice)”
“Music is relationships and ratios put together in time”
“Dancers are savage athletes who have a huge variety of skills and ranges of motion, and fantastic body control”
“You have two hearts, and one of them is your feet. You don’t get amazing venous return from your lower extremities without movement”
“That’s the point of training is for it to be intrinsically enjoyable, so the experience right now, itself should be fun, and it should be something that you would want to do if you didn’t get any results from it… if you didn’t build one muscle fiber from it, would you still do the thing. That’s a pretty good indicator that it’s a rich experience”
“If you are just doing the pushups so your arms will get bigger, then you are sort of trapped. Pick something that you would be happy to do even if it didn’t build muscle or lose fat”
“I probably do at least a few minutes of drumming before I get my training done… it’s just fun, it feels good. All of my training is that way.”
“(Regarding training and play) Ideally you would want to structure your training playfully, so you look forward to it. So you look forward to the stimulus you are trying to elicit, and create games around that, to get the training effects that you want… that’s what I would say”
“One thing a person can do is take all of the movements they are doing right now on one end of the spectrum, doing them painstakingly slow, and then try to see how quickly you can do them with as little effort as possible”
“You don’t get any points for extra effort (in training) if your goal is performance. If your goal is maximum hypertrophy at the cost of everything else and your goal is to be Mr. Olympia, then in fact, you are probably best served by grinding through those last couple repetitions. For the average person, if anything, you want to do your movements as effortlessly as possible.”
“The goal isn’t to suffer and have a lot of effort, the goal is to move as smoothly as possible”
“If the average person took some of their workout time and did a bit of singing and dancing, they would feel a ton better. And I would add… to create some music”
“Don’t live as if you would die tomorrow, live as if you would happily repeat that day 10,000 more times”
“By far the best piece of (training) gear is another human being”
“If you have an enthusiastic partner and a place to hang, you can pretty much get it all done in the best way possible”
“(How to build elastic development) dance for 5 straight minutes”
“If you want to play the long game elasticity is by far the thing you want the most… what’s the opposite of elasticity? Rigid. Brittle.”
Show Notes
Bruce Lee on emotional content
About Max Shank
Max Shank is the owner of Ambition Athletics in Encinitas, California. Since starting out as a personal trainer, Max has switched his focus from basic strength training to a holistic approach of overall fitness and health. Max has written 3 books, has taught over a hundred courses in countries around the world and is the creator of the “5-minute-flow”. These experiences have allowed him to help 10’s of thousands of people across the globe improve their lives through physical fitness.
Max is a firm believer that everyone should be strong, capable, and confident to handle any situation regardless of age or gender. Apart from being very active in Martial Arts, Max plays tennis regularly and recommends that adults spend more time in physical “play.” Max Shank has also received an Official Commendation from the United States Marine Corps for services rendered in the course of enhancing the athletic readiness of the 1st Anglico at Camp Pendleton.
An avid experimenter and learner, Max has picked up guitar, piano, and drums as an adult. Recently, he built his dining room table with his own two hands using no screws or nails.
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