Starting Running With Confidence

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So you're thinking about running, but not sure how to take the first step? My name is Brian Patterson, and I'm here to help. Welcome to Brian's ROM podcast. Welcome back to Brian's Run Pod, and it's me, your host, Brian Patterson, on some more hints and tips about running. Continuing our conversations with Dr. Ben Baumgartner, a sports performance practitioner for team year today. In our last last episode, we talked about how underfueling is a root cause of injury and how tracking your sleep is a good way of monitoring your recovery. Also, if you still feel sore after day four of your session, then maybe it's a sign to alter your training session. Now, if you haven't listened to part one, then please do go back in our catalogue and give it a listen. In this week's episode, I kicked off by asking about how what we can learn as commonal day runners, garden runners, what we can learn from the professionals and how we can incorporate this into our training. I really do hope you enjoy our conversation.

Three Recovery Habits From Pros

SPEAKER_01 1:22

I think the key thing is, and what I'm getting is that the overriding thing is that there is this continuous monitoring and self-improvement. And you're trying things to see as to what that uh what that limit is, and then you either you pull back or you you you progress it. So in terms of uh sort of simplifying this for the commonal cord garden Joe or Jane, as it were, what would be sort of the sort of actionable takeaways, the three habits in terms of us um as common old garden runners in terms of injury prevention, better recovery and long-term consistency. What what do you think you you know from your perspective, you know, and your professional advice, you working with elite athletes, but obviously you can see some lessons there that we can we can that you we can you can give to us.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Yeah, I would say the one of the biggest things that separates our professionals from all the rest of our athletes is how serious they take recovery.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

And so we are putting in 20 hours a week of exercise stress. We need to be putting in 20 hours a week of recovering from that stress. Most of the time that looks like sleep and prioritizing sleep, I think, is a big one. I think eating and hydrating enough is also a big one. When we hydrate, we mean electrolytes as well as water. A lot of people like to throw around this statistic that 70% of your body body is water, but what they don't realize is that that water is in an alkaline state, which means you have to have those um electrolytes to get it into that state to actually be able to hold it and then be able to use it later on. It's not just water hydration, it's water and electrolytes. I would say scheduling easy days and true recovery periods and stacking those inside of your heart sections is one that a lot of our people don't consciously make an effort to do. So I would say the big ones would probably be consistency in recovery um activities, whether that's sleep, extra sleep, taking a nap when you can take a nap, it's nutrition, and then it is consistency in your progression of your runs specifically. It's making sure that we are when we are progressing, we're not progressing so fast and we're not spiking our load before we put ourselves in that area, that gray area where we could be getting injured.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Yeah.

Using AI For Training Plans

SPEAKER_01 3:55

And do you think that um I know this uh we are in uh either in a good way or in a bad way, or whatever your opinion is, we are in the world of AI. And so people are gonna take training plans from Chat GPT or or so um because they may not know uh at all about what's involved in me progressing as a runner. Uh what's what's your advice uh to them to for the initial starting point?

SPEAKER_00 4:30

I think chat um open AI does a fantastic job of pulling information from the internet. The biggest thing that I've had that I've learned, one of my friends actually helps to train AI systems to sort of have a look at what do like when we were prompting an AI system, what are some things that we need to make clear to the AI so that it's not just feeding us information?

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Oh, good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

That's what it will do. In the beginning, AI was you asked to prompt like it did in Google, and it would just give you facts and things it would pull from the internet. Right. Now AI is so advanced that it will take snippets of research articles over here and what somebody else said over here, and they may not correlate with each other, but it will try to feed you information and give that as its evidence to give you an answer that things that you want. And so one of the things that I have been taught to do is to there are settings specifically inside of chat that you can go into that says, hey, every prompt that I give you, I want you to always remember this. And one of the things that I have said is I want it fact-based, I don't want it checked versus multiple sources.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

But I think chat, when we have those guide rails on there and we have those kind of parameters of saying, like, hey, I don't want what they what AI calls an AI hallucination, which is where AI will make assumptions and then it will feed you information based on what it thinks that you want. Yeah. Say, hey, I don't want any AI hallucinations. I want fact-based answers only, and I want you to be able to cite the sources that you're using. And then I will say, these are the sources that I trust, these are the sources that I do not trust. So it'll pull um from those sources that I like, and it'll also be able to tell me, like, hey, these are adequate. And then I'll say, what is best practice? What does the British Journal of Sports Medicine say about this when it comes to injury prevention? Right. So I'm gonna pull information from there. So I think chat works a phenomenal and does a phenomenal job, especially in today's day and age when we have so many of our coaches that are putting their stuff online.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

So I think it's a phenomenal tool. We just have to prompt it quick, which is why I think Elon Musk was famously quoting to say, like, AI's not anti AI.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

So it's prompt it correctly to make sure that it's not feeding us what it thinks we want, and it feeds us what we need. Yeah. So I think we can make phenomenal training programs out of there. Um, I mean, I would use chat to format my stuff all the time. I will type a bunch of stuff into a PDF, I'll upload it, then I'll say, hey, format this to where it's just visually more, and then it'll go through and it'll format it for me. So I use chat a lot. Um, I think it's a great tool, but again, it's a tool second, so it's happy.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

You know, like if you a screwdriver or something that you need a hammer for, it's not gonna do a great job.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Yeah. Yeah. It's a two-way thing. You've got to learn how to, you know, use the prompts to to give you what you want. You can't just do a a generic thing and then you've it will give you what you feed into it.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

So it may not give you the more descriptions you can use with any AI system, the better. Because you can say, I'm a 36-year-old male, I've worked out this much, I have run this much in the past amount of time.

SPEAKER_02 7:56

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

My nutrition looks like this, my sleep looks like this. Please help me run or please help me make a running program that will allow me to get ready by we have a lot of people that do half marathons for those runs. They'll say, okay, in December 10th is when the BCS marathon is going to happen. I want to run the half marathon. What do I need to do to get ready from now until then? Today, this is today's date because AI doesn't know what the actual date is in the date in which you were chatting with it. But you put that in there, and then it should be able to run a scenario and say, okay, as long as you can do these things, you should be ready to go based on what these people have said, based on what this training program has said, based on these resources that we've been able to pull from. And it can make you a pretty decent uh training program. And I know that because one of my best friends is trying to do this exact thing.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Oh right.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

What's your training program look like? And he literally sent it to me in a PDF and I said, Was this chat? And he said, It was. I said, Wow, actually pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

But also at the same time, and what I've been, you know, hearing from you and and from the podcast is very much to monitor what's how how you're doing, you know, during the tr your training, and also to very be very mindful of that and to be very aware and maybe to be looking to either to to change that at the same time.

Listening To Pain And Intuition

SPEAKER_00 9:26

We we always have to monitor how our body is feeling. We are way smarter with what's going on in our body than what we give it credit for.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

What am I for says a well-nurtured intuition is seldom wrong. So if your intuition is telling you, hey, I think there's something going on with my hip.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Right. Yes, very true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

Three-day to four-day rule again. I'm like, if three or four days down the road, I'm still thinking, hey, I think something's going on with my hip. Let's go get it checked out. The worst case scenario is there's something actually going wrong with your hip. Best case scenario is uh something was a little tight, you got it worked out, and now you feel a little good.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's

Working With Team USA Track

SPEAKER_01 10:04

very true. I just want to get into because I know you've touched on it um before, is that you've been working with Team USA track and field. What's that experience been like? And then um how, you know, when when were you introduced or to to working with the team?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Um I would say back in 2019, we were able to hire the head athletic trainer for USA Track and Field. Her name is Christy Coach. She is a phenomenal, phenomenal practitioner, very, very smart. Yeah. G because she works with them and because she was in her office. Her husband was a sport or is a sports scientist and is rentation coach, the head coach of football at that time, Jim Bisher. He now works for the New York Giants and is just crushing. Um, so during that time that they were through with us, she worked in our clinic, and I think it was probably the first week that she worked with us. It was right after the 2019 Doha World Outbreak Championship. Yeah. I think 12 gold knuckles walked through our doors. I was like, 12. That's kind of cool. Yeah. I was like, I want to do that. Like I love tracking. I ran track in high school. Um, if I hadn't gotten injured, it would have been fast enough to run in college. I was still fast enough to run, just not in the colleges that I wanted to run at. So I didn't know how to do that. I was like, I would love to do this. Like I'm a fan of the sport, and I also love working on the athletes. Yeah. So she taught me some things that ATs are taught that chiropractors are not taught. So I was able to expand my kind of tool belt of things that I have access to, skills that I have. And she said, okay, I can give you a shot, but you still have to be good with the athletes. And everyone at this level is good with athletes. They said, but then the athletes have to enjoy you, and the providers that are already there have to enjoy you. So it's not just, are you good enough to be there? But are you good enough and do you have fun with the people while you're there?

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Because they can they can choose from anyone. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of providers applying every single year to work any of these events.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Um, and the Lord has blessed a lot of the efforts that my wife and I have put in. Uh, both of us were in New York City two weeks ago for the USA outdoor championships to go work together. He's doing massage and I'm doing soft tissue and adjustments while we're there for the whole entire week, which is awesome. Newer's not like great, but you know, it's a great meet to be at because normally that's what's qualifying our athletes for the world outdoors. This year's just we don't have one, just have the ultimate championship, which is purely based on world rankings. But she gave me the opportunity to get in there. And by the good Lord's grace, I went in. I did the things that she taught me. I did the things that I had been taught and used the things. Um, one of the things that I think that helped is when you go in and you're just constantly trying to serve the people that you're around. Uh, it helps. Um, it helps to keep you humble, it helps to keep you good to understand that like the reason that I'm here to help these athletes do X, Y, and Z to what their body can handle right now. Um, it also helped that she taught me, like, hey, you're not fixing anything. You're seeing these athletes for 15 to 20, maybe 30 minutes if we're slow at a time. We're not fixing their plantar fashitis in one day. We're not fixing their patellotininitis in one day. We're getting them good enough to where they can go run as fast as they can in this event right now. And then they'll we'll do the same thing again to get them ready again. So it's actually taking my doctor hat off a little bit and putting on my, okay, how do we get you from point A to point B right now? Yeah. Those are two different styles of practice. Yeah. So I was able to kind of learn from the physical therapists that were already there, the chiropractors that were already there, and the ATCs that were already there, and just be able to be able to blend a little bit of what they all did into the tool belt that I now use.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Because you're, you know, when you're going to championships, you are so key because there have been times I've I've seen athletes who are who are doing the warm-up, and then suddenly it just goes. There's if it's the Olympics, it's like four years and that's it. Sort of thing. So you're such uh a key part of the team. And like she said, you are there to you know make sure that they it it it's kind of your you're you're topping them up, topping it up, making sure that they are at that, you know, it's like having a a uh it's probably like a living musical instrument at this to a certain extent. You know, you're you're you're fine-tuning it.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah, it is very much that, and it is very fine-tuning, and that's actually a great way to describe that because we've had providers who have come in, who've been given chances, and they end up spending an hour with a single athlete. They do way too much stuff, they go out onto the field and that's flat. Yeah. Because they've done so much with them, they've lost their pop, they've lost their spring. All of a sudden they have the worst performance they've had all year round. Uh, we had that happen to a couple of our pole vaulters um for the US at the last Olympics, and it's just like, man, it's just so sad. But it's because we changed up how we've been doing things. We also I was taught very early on we don't do anything new for an athlete within the week of a major competition. So if they've never had dry needling before and we're three days before the competition, and they say, Hey, I want to try dry needling, the answer is no. No. You can respond great, or you could get real flat and now we're up and it's my fault because I did it to you.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

That's one thing that we don't want to do. But getting to work with Timus A has been a very humbling experience. I love being able to travel across the world and go do that. It also gives me a ton of motivation when I come back into the clinic. So I was gone two weeks ago and I've been very motivated getting back into the clinic to get back to my athletes and be able to utilize new things that I've learned each time that I've gone out there from the amazing providers that we get to work with.

Fine Tuning Without Overdoing Treatment

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Building on that, so you've decided to is that you've created your own company, Alpha Sports, is that right? Or is that part of the university or not? Or is that something separate?

SPEAKER_00 16:01

We're not officially affiliated with the university. What happens is when our athletes turn pro and they stop competing collegiately, they lose access to the sports medicine that the university provides.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

We step in and we start taking care of them in their professional career. I think we have about six professional track athletes. We've got one professional football athlete, um, we've got a professional archer, and professional tennis athletes right now that all competed at AM and have lost access to Sports Med, and they're all trying to get ready for the 2028 LA Olympics of here until he goes and starts playing for the Dallas Cowboys.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Yeah. All right, okay. And um how how's that been sort of like building that up? I mean, do you have regular re regular runners who are part of part of your clientele?

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Our track athletes, we have a couple pole vaulters, we've got a couple hurdlers, um, some sprinters, a high jumper, and then we've got uh some 800 runners and a 1500 runner as well. Um, and then we have a lot of our athletes that just love to run. And they're bunkers, they're doing ultras. We've got uh one of our outfits is gonna be going to Phoenix, Arizona. I think oh wait, no, that was the last one. She's going to Bamp, which is up in Canada.

SPEAKER_02 17:22

And oh yeah, yeah, actually. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

As she was really increasing her training distance-wise, and then also supplemental uh strength training, we were in there making sure she was being able to recover as best as we could.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Making sure that her muscles are being able to withstand that and getting her to those uh mile markers that she wanted to be able to hit to be able to say, like, yes, I'm gonna be able to do this before I get there.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

Do you think in terms of let's say going forward in the next, I don't know, five, ten years or that although a lot of these um specialisms were very much that could be accessed by professional athletes, they're increasingly now becoming a lot more available to people who are, you know, just regular runners and they're going to be looking more to the support services like yourselves, um, even more so. I've had people bought psychologists, you know, on the podcast and that kind of thing. Do you do you see that being coming even you having much more of an impact for regular runners now?

SPEAKER_00 18:40

I think so. I think I think the

Building Alpha Sports For Pros

SPEAKER_00 18:43

statistics are showing that we are increasing by almost a full percent every year for the last five years, yeah, of this specific style of practice being utilized by our everyday athletes that are coming in, whether they are our brand new pee-wee footballers or players, our little nine-year-olds, all the way through our 18-year-olds, that demographic is getting significantly bigger. They're also trying to specialize them way too early, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

But I was gonna say that.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

I say very much so, yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

When we're trying to have a nine-year-old play five baseball games every single weekend, yeah. And then they come in with and they need Tommy John surgery on their elbow, and like, well, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

And we were having that at nine years old when the average age used to be, I think, twenty-three or twenty.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Twenty, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

It's kind of wild and crazy. Yeah. So, and most of our athletes, most of our professional athletes are all multi-sport athletes. Yeah. We try to get them specialized right now. It's gonna be interesting to see in the next 15, 10 years, 10, 15 years as those people, as our next new wave of professional athletes start to come on the scene, yeah. Did they only play one sport as they're coming up and does it look like our athleticism is kind of going down a little bit because they didn't get challenged early on in different ways?

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

I think we will see the few people that make it to the professional stage will still be multi-sport athletes. Right. They would not have specialized so quickly, so early.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Yeah. Yeah. Um, wow. Um uh 50 minutes, and you know, you've been such a wealth of information. Um, I just want to ask a few quick fire questions. So what's your I mean, and and it's something that maybe you covered already, but what's your uh best advice to any new runner who's who's coming into the sport?

SPEAKER_00 20:42

Any new runner coming into the sport needs to understand, or what I would like for them to understand, is that you are gonna have bumps over eight games when it's running. It is a hard impact sport. Um, you're not necessarily making an impact with other people, but you're making an impact with the ground a lot. Listen to the body. If your body's telling you something, do something about it. Don't ignore it. Because when we ignore it is when we get to our true injury states to where it takes us months to get back to where we want to be. I would say understand that it's gonna be a little bit uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is totally fine.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Listen to your body.

unknown 21:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Because there's a difference between uncomfortable and being in pain.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Great, great. And you kind of answered my next question, which was Baker's mistake to avoid, sort of thing. But like you said, he's just, you know, half my final question is to where can we find Ben online?

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Online? Um, man, I've got Facebook that I never use or do anything with. I've got an Instagram, which is dr underscore Ben underscore Bumgarner on Instagram, which is what handles most of my stuff when I travel and I get to like see behind the scenes type stuff, is what I like taking um photos and videos of just so like people can kind of

Sports Medicine For Everyday Athletes

SPEAKER_00 21:53

see like, okay, what does it look like when I get to travel? What is it actually happening when we go there? Our clinic handles that same exact thing for myself. My wife, when she travels, she was just in California with Texas AM's swimming team for their summer national.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Oh, really? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 22:07

So I follows her as well doing that. And then Dr. Tanner, who's one of our other associates, that travels and treats with um professional CrossFit athletes. Like when he goes to the games and things like that, it helps. Um, we just kind of like smorgasport, put all those things together, and that's Alpha Sports underscore CS, because we're in college station. And our ultimate goal is to have multiple locations, honestly, all over the US and then ideally all over the world, just because our multidisciplinary style of practice is so different than what is traditionally being done, which is why I hope in the next 10 to 15 years it becomes more of the norm because it is what is what I would consider to be best practice. Yeah. So after those athletes are coming on, we will be ready and available to go to take and walk alongside them. Because our ultimately, our why is people deserve people on their team. Yeah. And we want to be the people on our team.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm always conscious of the fact that when I do interview people from the states and positions like yourselves, is that you have had such a wealth of experience because on the educational side, unlike here in terms of the uh university system, you're you've for decades, you've you've had, you know, it's it's very much part of the curriculum, or even going from high school to uh to college in terms of all the you know wealth of information. Do you feel that you being a practitioner in a very in that um sort of scenario, do you feel there's a lot of pressure on you or or or do you kind of welcome that you were in a very privileged position, as it were?

SPEAKER_00 23:43

I don't know if I necessarily feel the pressure like that. Yeah. I'm also saying that just with the sports backgrounds that I've had, I love the pressure if I feel it.

SPEAKER_02 23:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Um so it's not a it's not a negative thing for me. No, I don't think I'm making any conscious or aware or conscious awareness of it. Um, if anything, I'd probably love it.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

I love the getting kind of put underneath the spotlight and being grilled on certain things because I'm confident in what I do and I've been able to work out the experience, and I can back up things that I say with other experiences or research or what is the to work, which is what we do every single day in our clinic. So um I don't really feel a lot of pressure when it comes to that. We have a lot of resident interns that come through our clinic that will learn from us. So we're constantly teaching the next generation how we think best practice looks. And so we do it pretty daily in here, and I think because we practice it so much, it's not as daunting.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Great, great, okay. Well, if you just like to stick around uh after you finish the podcast, that it would be great. But I just wanted to say it's

New Runner Advice And Where To Follow

SPEAKER_01 24:52

been a privilege to have you on the podcast, Ben. And uh thank you so much for agreeing to come on. And uh uh and I've I've really enjoyed it. But um, I'd like to say goodbye from Ben, and I'd like to say goodbye from me, Brian Patterson, and uh I hope you've enjoyed listening to this episode. Goodbye.