373: DJ Murakami on Exploring the Social, Motivational and Inner Factors of Physical Training

Today’s podcast features trainer, lifter of heavy and varied objects, and philosopher of movement, DJ Murakami. DJ has over 15 years of experience in the coaching realm with a wide history of movement practice, including training in bodybuilding, Olympic weightlifting, strongman (rock lifting), movement culture (such as Ido Portal), rock climbing, and more. DJ has created training courses such as Chi Torque, the Predator Protocol, and others, and mentors coaches and fitness enthusiasts through his Human Strong training organization. As life, in general, becomes more disconnected from our actual reality (think of relationships via social media, decreasing amount of exposure to nature/outdoors and local community), we can also consider how this has impacted the process of physical training. Where we used to move purposefully as part of the daily routine, our “innate” physicality has now been replaced by treadmills, indoor training spaces, lines/lectures/laps, and the reduction of training to either the simplest of drills or fancy movements that try to replicate sport, without actually being sport. The more we can regularly connect physical movement to the meaning and motivation behind it, not only will we have a better present-moment experience actually moving, but we can also find ourselves becoming stronger and better conditioned in the end result. On today’s podcast, DJ speaks importance (and oftentimes, lack of) of consequence and danger in many of our modern tasks and exercise activities, as well as the difference between play and formal training. He also goes in-depth on how we regulate our training from a mental, emotional, and social standpoint, and how this goes into fatigue, our music selection, “mental toughness”, and DJ’s own training methods. 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Timestamps and Main Points 2:28 – Thoughts on creating a story around the process of training and the related motivation factors 10:27 – Advantages of training athletes with higher possible levels of complexity 18:37 – The nature of physicality in DJ’s training sessions, such as manually resisted corrective training, or “human resisted” strength work 35:22 – The lack of consequence and danger in tasks, and its impact on the nature of training and coaching 40:33 – The role of music selection and training, such as how many males go towards a more angry place in training, and thoughts on the sustainability and health of that practice in the long term 51:36 – The role of emotional regulation through fatiguing movements 59:14 – DJ’s view on mental toughness, in light of a typical team sport training situation 1:05:03 – Thoughts on kid’s games, on the level of engagement, flow, and learning 1:12:04 – DJ’s primary goals in his own training routine DJ Murakami Quotes “Team sports is basically a replacement for military warfare” “The splits is something.. there is a population that really wants that. I think it is less, “ I want a certain capacity in my hips, I want a certain mobility in this joint; no it’s an “I want that skill”.” “If you could take a group of people and work on spinal segmentation and waves facing the wall, and then take people, and get them to learn the worm, which would have a better, more applicable outcome?” “Kids playing tag, versus, “were going to run a lap”, or do gassers… kids move very differently” “I think there’s something about danger and consequence that we are missing from exercise” “When you have all of these corrective drills that you don’t load up, they don’t respond to that very well” “I think there’s something about another person trying to find your weakness; you are instinctually, naturally going to try to fight against someone trying to push you over” “You can use yourself to create constraints that are made by machines” “When you have doubt and fear going into a movement, it completely changes how you execute the movement, and I think it becomes a more dangerous movement” “Looking back to times I hurt myself lifting, there was doubt before the lift, there was something off in my head” “If you put it in a different context, you can easily do the movement; I had a lady who picked up a sandbag and was pressing it, but when I told her we are just going to deadlift it and not press it, she said “I can’t, my back hurts”, because she had a history with it. Pain is psycho-somatic and social” “I started playing around with (IFS principles) before lifts; and lifts went up, perceived effort went down” “For 20+ years of my life I’ve been training/competing with anger…. Look at the music we choose… hardcore rap, rock, etc.. It’s very taxing to go to that emotion constantly” “When you go to the place in a workout where you are scared/extremely fatigued, watch your thoughts” “You can get 10-15 more reps, just by changing your mindset… fatigue is essentially an emotion… It’s your body saying, “we don’t need to spend resources on this” so I’m going to send this signal” “It’s very weird, butterflies in your stomach come up, I’ve seen that with some breathwork, pelvic floor stuff… people will have these big emotional releases, and they all seem to be related with a giving into an experience, not fighting and going away from it” “I think the mental toughness is a part (of training) when you are going into training for yourself, maybe at a later age, I think you can go a little deeper, and it’s less numbing… there’s a part that’s “shut up and do it”, and then there is a part where it’s deeper” “If you look at younger kids, (fatiguing/tough training) is about competition and social consequence” About DJ Murakami DJ Murakami has over 15 years of experience in the coaching realm. He has a wide history of movement practice, including training in bodybuilding, Olympic weightlifting, strongman (rock lifting), movement culture (such as Ido Portal), rock climbing, and more. DJ has created training courses such as Chi Torque, the Predator Protocol, and others, and mentors coaches and fitness enthusiasts through his Human Strong training organization. DJ Murakami also appeared in episode #339.