32: Build Your Entourage with Ari Gronich

Final Audio-1

[00:00:00] Jase Kraft: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. Everybody. I'm your host, Jace Kraft. And today I'm interviewing Ari Gronich. He's the performance therapist, and one of the most sought after therapists and trainers for elite athletes, corporate culture and wellness, and an international keynote speaker. He is the founder and CEO of achieve health USA and the performance therapy academy and can be found interviewing world changers on his podcast, create a new tomorrow on the podcast today, we are talking about longevity and sport. Ari has worked with many athletes trying to go from the amateur level to the professionalism level, and we're going to explore the reasons why some make it and some don't.

You're listening to the science of sports recovery podcast. Each week. We explore how to recover more efficiently from training so you can work out harder [00:01:00] and realize your full potential. This is the science of sports recovery podcast.

Welcome to the show. 

Ari Gronich: [00:01:20] I thank you for having me. I appreciate it. 

Jase Kraft: [00:01:22] Awesome. We always start with the history of the sport history of our guests. So I'm curious to know what age was your first sport and what was it? 

Ari Gronich: [00:01:33] Yeah, so I was three years old and I started playing tennis doing gymnastics and and martial arts.

And riding bikes. 

So I, my dad owned a bike shop, so I did long distance cycling and gymnastics was just kinda, my brother was amazing at gymnastics. So I went in and then also you know, baseball and I played a lot of [00:02:00] sports growing up. I was always doing something.

Jase Kraft: [00:02:03] What's like your earliest regulation of like being excited to go to sport. Cause that I'm assuming at three years old, there's memory is foggy at that point. But do you remember the first time going to gymnastics? 

Ari Gronich: [00:02:22] Probably not the first time going, but I remember the feeling of the rug. I remember the bounce of the mat. I remember the smell of the chalk. You know what I mean? As you would clap your hands and the chocolate come on, all over. I remember the rip outs that your hands get when you're going on that bar, like those are the things that stick out. 

Yeah. 

Jase Kraft: [00:02:48] So how long was it into your career then with the first injury or first like setback as an athlete?

Ari Gronich: [00:02:57] I injured all the time. [00:03:00] Crazy. I went all out all the time. I had a 80 mile an hour fastball in little league. Wow. I could line drive from catcher to second base from my knees oh man. I just, I went all out and that meant that I finished a lot. My first chiropractor appointment was when I was five.

Jase Kraft: [00:03:26] Oh, wow. Wow. How did you kind know what was going on? I know you're inquisitive person, in fact. So tell us how that, like, how that may have impacted what you do now. 

Ari Gronich: [00:03:42] Yeah. I mean, it impacted everything in what I do now, because I had been going to him for basically since I'm five, until I was about 18.

And he had, he had been treating my dad and I ended up asking a lot of questions. How are you doing this? Why are you doing this? [00:04:00] What is it that you're doing? What's the purpose of what you're doing? I would like, what's the minutia, what's what's this nerve do right there. That's that vertebrae do.

And so I was just always asking questions and the instructor or the chiropractor was absolutely willing. To share and to help. And he would put my hands on, under his hands on 

my dad's back and said, okay, now feel this as he's going down the spine or, he's like, 

just feel the muscle tissue you'd feel that scar. You could feel that on even, so it was interesting. I learned a lot. 

Jase Kraft: [00:04:40] You like that in all parts of your life? Or was it just the health and performance? 

Ari Gronich: [00:04:47] Most parts of my life. I think, was a very  active kid. You're pretty young. So I probably have been doing this since, before you were born.

But back in [00:05:00] the day, when you were, we all had to be outside, there was no 

telephones, there was three channels, maybe on the TV. You know, there, there just wasn't anything to do, but be active and go outside 

and live a life. And yeah, I think that was quite a difference in upbringing.

So it just, everything I was curious about cause we were always exploring outside. Yeah. 

Jase Kraft: [00:05:31] So going back to your earliest sport career event, did you ever have aspirations for. You know, professional sport or anything like that, or where did you gravitate as you got older in 

sports? 

Ari Gronich: [00:05:49] As I got older, I got more and more injured. I also found out that I was having some medical 

issues and 

we found out much later what [00:06:00] it was, but it was a brain tumor. 

And so it was messing up my hormones. 

I kept getting large. I was like, 340 pounds and a full on a athlete. I would, 

I would do everything I was doing when I was smaller.

Just it would take me longer. So I realized that I'm not about to get into 

being the athlete right now because nobody could figure out my health. I was a medical mystery. 

And so instead of doing that, 

what do you do? Like, oh, why don't we help. People who are doing right? Why 

don't we try to figure out how to get healthy?

I was 18. I just graduated high school. We were, we went whitewater rafting. I was taking a homeopathic remedy of snake venom, which you're not supposed to mix with caffeine. And so if you could imagine whitewater rafting, heat stroke, sunstroke allergies, [00:07:00] snake venom mixing. It's like perfect storm of what happened.

I went into anaphylaxis shock and I 

ended up dead for 26 minutes. So by the time the doctors 

got me back, it was about 26 

minutes later. I didn't wake up really 

until a few days later. And I sat up in the hospital bed and I said, I think I need to be a 

healer. 

And that's where it started for the journey towards training 

and and doing therapy.

I started out in the SaaS school by my third month I was running the clinic. Because I was running the clinic and my school backed up to the campuses of Intel, Nike and 

Tektronix and be rich and Oregon, I said, Hey, let's start some corporate wellness programs. They don't 

exist. Let's do it. Yeah. So I ended up doing that.

And by my fifth six month in school, I ended up at a health fair where I ended up working [00:08:00] on Richard Simmons, Victoria Jackson and a couple professional sports players. And a year later, I had been interning with 

that team going into surgeries, 

literally working with their trainers, their doctors there, I mean, I work with everybody and I just absorbed 

and learned and stuck in the marrow of what they were teaching.

So that's how that started. Yeah. 

Jase Kraft: [00:08:29] That's cool. I don't want to like, just skip over this brain tumor, a whitewater rafting, dead story here. We're definitely going to get into the, working with elite athletes and what you learn there. But so going back. You said it was a brain tumor that was causing all of this is did they not find that out until that whitewater rafting incident or [00:09:00] was that prior to that?

Ari Gronich: [00:09:03] They found that out when I was 24. So is when they actually found diagnosed, saw it on the MRI. 

They had been mistreating misdiagnosing and et cetera, since I was 12. 

So I had to be injected into puberty. I had breast reduction surgery when I was 14.

Cause estrogen was out of control. Like hormone imbalances are a real thing. And especially in this 

day and age, like I probably was an early adopter of having hormone disruption nowadays 

with what's in our food, water air, et cetera. The hormone disruptors are amazing. 

The amazingly bad, nobody knew what it was. They just kept treating me. And it wasn't a that wasn't what. It was until they found the tumor like, oh, okay, 

You're basically producing a hormone. That's disrupting all the other hormones in your system. 

[00:10:00] Jase Kraft: [00:10:00] Gotcha. So they knew something was wrong at 12. They figured it out 24 18 is when you had this whitewater rafting pronounced dead for 26 minutes.

What did they, they just not, they didn't figure it was a brain tumor at that point. What did they say at that point? Oh, this is it?

Yeah, that was just the perfect storm of caffeine. Snake venom eat stroke. Sunstroke it was just like everything all at once. Raj, I went into shock and stopped breathing 

wow.

Okay. And then you're coming out of that. And I would assume for the first, six months a year that they're just assuming anything else that's wrong with you has to do with, what happened from that event? Or was it like, Hey, there's still something wrong.

Ari Gronich: [00:10:57] There's I still have the brain tumor.

It's not [00:11:00] gone. It's just a managed a little differently. 

But no, they, they had no idea. 

What they were doing, 

which is why I said, I think I need to be a healer as I was like, I've been going to doctors since I was seven or symptoms. 

So seven, I was getting migraines and hot flashes, basically going through symptoms of menopause and then and then, 

1824.

So they would have been treating mistreating, 

diagnosing misdiagnosing. So afterwards I went and did a study at Oregon health and science university. And when I was at Oregon health and science university, 

they tested for Cushings. They did all kinds of tests. I was there for a week. They were taking blood every half hour and Eventually 

the guy came back and said, I don't know.

I [00:12:00] think I need to take your studies to 

this symposium in Chicago. And so he went to the symposium in Chicago, he came back. He still had no idea what was going on. And you know, it's funny. They 

people, idolized doctors in the medical staff, it's just a practice. 

It's not a, this is fact it's a practice. And so we get to learn as we are injured and sick, we get to learn that they don't know really what they're doing, they're practicing what they were taught 

and hopefully what they were taught works, 

Jase Kraft: [00:12:40] Yeah. And I think that's a good point that I think there might be some ego sometimes in the health industry, whether it be your physical therapist or athletic trainer or doctor that there's this expectation from society that they have to know what their, [00:13:00] Noah is and know what they're doing and know every, Case that comes to them.

But the reality is we are so unique that you know,  misdiagnosis and mistreatment happens all the time. Even, especially in the athletic world I nothing to the extent of, misdiagnosing a brain tumor, but I that, you something was wrong. We couldn't figure it out, send it over 12 months.

And then finally we got something that worked. And that's a really frustrating time for an athlete for a person. Like when you finally got the diagnosis of, Hey, this is a brain tumor. Like I would imagine, obviously that's not a good news, 

but yeah, because you actually can name it then.

Ari Gronich: [00:13:56] This is great news because it was like, 

[00:14:00] See, it is all in my head, not on my head. I was like, see, I'm not just faking it, cause when you're a kid and you're thinks you're faking to get out of school to whatever, you're a bad kid. And so yeah, there, there a lot of trauma around you're a bad kid because you're faking something wrong with 

you. And and that, it was like, how do you get over that person, 

you to go to your question about athletes, right?

As an athlete to be injured, especially when the dream of your future is on the line.

That's where it takes the entourage. What I call an athlete's entourage, the entourage. [00:15:00] So every professional athlete has an entourage trainers, therapists, people, nutritionist, people who are in the background that you never will see. That are guiding that person's body physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, hopefully all of them towards their goal.

There's an entourage that every athlete has. 

That's a professional, even if you're not a very good professional athlete, you still have a it's just might be smaller. So if you're a kid. Who's an athlete and you're being scouted these days in junior high school. 

And you don't have an entourage, you're going to get injured.

You're going to get hurt. You're going to be sub optimal [00:16:00] comparatively to how you could perform, right? 

Yeah. 

And an entourage, lets an athlete, know what they're doing? Good. What they're doing 

sub optimally, 

And the entourage, if you don't have that, it's going to take you forever. Yeah 

to get ahead.

Jase Kraft: [00:16:29] So who should be included in that? What are kind some key points of an entourage when you're building that, you'd be like, okay, I need my mental, emotional. 

Ari Gronich: [00:16:39] Exactly. 

Just think of those four things, mental, emotional, 

spiritual, and physical. So 

if you're minding right, your body will never listen to you.

Okay. Yeah. If your emotions are not right. You will never [00:17:00] do the best that you can do because you're 

emotionally attached. That's positive or negative. I'm not judging emotion. I'm not judging any of that. It's just 

the facts. So you need to have that mental coach, the mental, the hypnotherapist, whatever, whichever modality of mentalism that they are.

Their job is to get you into the zone. So often that the zone becomes automatic on. Maybe it just is like flipping a switch on off. You don't have to practice 

getting into a zone. 

So if you're a team, let's say, and you don't have this one thing, where's your focus. You got girls, 

you got 

schoolwork, you got friends, you got [00:18:00] family, you got whatever job you've got to do.

And then you got whatever sport you got to do and right. Where, who's focusing on your mental awareness. So that you're clear. So when you're doing the action, you're not going to get hurt because you're clear, you're focused, you're aware, right? So you need that mental side, emotional side again, I'll just go to, let's go to a junior high school athlete this time going through the first time she's going through her period, going through the first time he's getting an erection and right.

He's focused on that. He's emotional. His hormones are raging. Her hormones are raging. You don't have somebody who knows how to calm and meditate, your system. You're not going to ever be the best you can be at that. Yeah. So these are all ways [00:19:00] physically, right? I always tell my both of my athletes and people I'm re who recovering from serious injuries.

They, the slower you go, the faster you'll get there. A 

big thing, 

Jase Kraft: [00:19:17] Expand on that a little bit?

Ari Gronich: [00:19:19] Lower you go 

the faster you'll get there. And what I mean by that is most people 

Willy nilly, their training, 

they train in the sport that they're playing. They don't train their body to get ready for the sport that they're playing.

They don't, they get out on a court and 

they don't stretch because like, I'll give you an example. I was coaching an adult with bat baseball league. 

We had. Jose can Seiko was in 

the league. That is all that time, but he was in that league 

and every single time we go out, I see people warming up their arm.

I see people throwing. I see people nobody's stretching. [00:20:00] Nobody is prepared. Nobody's drinking a bottle of water before they go out eating at all right. They're not preparing themselves for the physical activity that they're about to undertake. If you're about to go out into some sun and you're going to exercise your body hard and you better have had at least two, three glasses of water before you even start, you better have your body relaxed and loose. Not tight before you start. Yeah. If you don't, if you don't start slow, you'll injure yourself and you'll never get where you're going. If you go slow. You'll get there faster because you're preparing your body, you're airing the foundation of your body or the activity that you're about to do.

Now. This is the most boring part of training for most people. That's why they never do it,

[00:21:00] but watch the injuries. 

Just watch the injuries you want to get injured or don't you, you want to get it. You want to be having fun, but you want to have fun for a long period of time, or do you want to have fun for a short period of time and then have to scream and cry and whine because you pour something, you rip something you got injured, right?

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Yeah, so the faster we'll get there, just like the cumulative. To like in my experience, being a college athlete or was a college athlete, you [00:23:00] see it all the time freshmen come in and they're like, Yeah, they can handle anything and they can just start the workouts fresh and go, and then they get burned out and towards the end of the year, cause they went way too hard in the beginning, but then you see like your fifth year seniors that like.

They have a slower up, they, it takes them a little to get going. They're all like crusty and not flexible because they've gone through this, pretty intense program for the last four years without, stretching  before after. And like you said, starting slow before the workout. So I liked that.

And then so we've got the mental, emotional, physical, and you talked about spiritual to king fan on that a little bit. 

Ari Gronich: [00:23:48] Yeah. So the spiritual side is where your purpose comes from 

of why you're doing what you're doing. 

And so [00:24:00] if you're an athlete and you have no why, 

other than I enjoy 

it, you're probably not going to get as far as you could get.

If you had a, why, 

a reason to get 

1. You're going to do everything in your power to be the best you can be. So that spiritual side is your why, it's your purpose? It's what is the thing that's driving you forward to do this thing that you're attempting to do, right? You want to be the best in the world?

Why, what about it? And so when you can analyze why your spirit goes, oh, I'm alive for that. That's what I'm alive for. That's what I'm wanting to do. That's what my body is aching for. So I'm going to do everything in my power to own that position of, I am an athlete and I am going to work like an athlete would work, [00:25:00] right?

It's a job. Treat it like a job. It's not a hobby to be a professional athlete, even to be an amateur athlete, Olympic, Paralympic, whatever it is. Those guys and girls are freaking professional athletes. They may not get paid, but they are professional and they are amazing. But they need that entourage. 

No, I'll give you a couple examples.

Like 

people used to tell him why don't you just go be part of a team or why don't you just write, why don't you just go be a part of the team? So I had so many clients that would come to me. Because the team wasn't taking care of them the way they needed to be taken care of. And so they had to seek out others.

And so that happened with the Braves that happened with you know, a lot of athletes would go and find [00:26:00] outside trainers outside therapists. Because if they're elite, they know what they need and if they're not getting what they need, they seek it out. So that's the other part of it is if you're not getting what you need, if you're not getting the results that you want, there is a question to be asked and a solution to be found.

And that's it. You have, you ask a question, you get a solution. You ask a question that you got to ask questions. That drives solution answers. So it's not like, why me? 

Why did this write me? It's 

what was I doing that caused this? Yeah. What did I not do before? That I, that could have helped me prevent it.

Jase Kraft: [00:26:43] Yeah. It's the curiosity questions rather than the like hopeless questions. So out of, out of those four in the entourage, what do you see is [00:27:00] missing the most usually for those that don't make it to professional level or at least very high level?

Ari Gronich: [00:27:09] Most athletes have the physical side. The mental side is where a lot of injuries come from the spiritual side and the emotional side are the areas where the drive, where the focus, where the the willingness to go above and beyond comes from. And so you could be a natural physical specimen. And never make a golden medal.

But you might have never been a physical specimen, but you knew what you wanted. You knew how to ask the right questions and you knew how to solve those. And you acted on the solutions when they came and then you [00:28:00] assess and reassess, you act, make a plan, have a goal. You make a plan, you act on it, you assess you reassess again. So that's the difference. I think that most make and most need is that they need that spiritual and emotional side to come along with the mental and physical. 

Jase Kraft: [00:28:25] Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It always boils down to. You know, that deeper calling to when it's raining out and you don't want to go run and you go run anyways, because it's the long-term goal that is driving you, not short time the stuff.

And I'm curious to know You've worked with a lot of elite athletes and you gotten to know them and their why and what drives them. You know, what are some of the ones that stick out to you [00:29:00] as maybe the most impactful to athletes? Like what wise are more powerful than otherwise? If 

you know what I'm saying?

Ari Gronich: [00:29:10] Yeah. 

There is no specific why that is more or less powerful. Everybody's why. Has to be self-driven. Sure. So I'll give you an example that one of my athletes that I did a podcast with, so Dominic Arnold, 

he was 110 meter hurdler fastest man in the world. At one point 

in that he broke the world record about that far behind the guy who owned it.

Yeah, but it was also the oldest oldest athlete to break. I think it was a, he did a 12, seven 

something you know, 110 meter hurdle. Wow. About 12 seven. 

And he, I asked him on my podcast 

what his, why was so the audience could hear it. 

Yeah. And, [00:30:00] he grew up in long beach, not a very safe or or lovely 

kind of place to grow up.

And unless you're right on 

the beach, but even 

so it's a dangerous place, long beach people didn't know 

that they think long beach, there's an aquarium there, but so he used to say Iran over fences. Route people's backyards, to get where we needed to get. Because every time that we need to go anywhere, we had to walk or run.

We didn't have cars. Our parents, we didn't want to get on a bus. We had to walk or run somewhere. So he was always running somewhere and taking shortcuts, jumping over 

fences, jumping off things, played football 

for a while. So he had. Like the athlete in him was a must for survival.

[00:31:00] And for just the fact that long beach, I think had 20 plus athletes that have come out in different sports. They are one of the 

top schools in areas for athletic 

and endeavors and. You know, he was in that mode. My buddy could Divis. He now is a coach at Ohio state. For track and field was an 800 meter.

He didn't grow up in a good area. He now does coaching and motivational speaking internationally. He has a child athlete organization that gives all over the world to help kids get, get through life through sports. But. His life 

was 

dangerous and in Texas, he grew up in a place 

that also other side of the 

street.

So his was, I got to do this, so I don't live that life, but I'm watching all my [00:32:00] friends die and I'm watching all my people right now. Now some people it's just like 

I played because 

I loved it. And then I found 

I was really good at it and I liked to do it. So I like to do things I'm good at right.

Mindset. 

Exactly. So motivation can really be from anywhere and it's really, self-driven what it is. That's going to motivate you. Some people are motivated by money. Some people are motivated by fame. Some people are motivated by just the sheer will that it takes. To do the accomplishment 

that they're 

doing.

And so I find that on the top levels, they, at some level we're running away from something towards 

something else, there's 

always some little piece of torture and trauma and 

thing 

that is driving. The extent of what [00:33:00] they do, like you could have an issue and you just go running every day and you never become an elite athlete, right?

Yeah. In your, why is big enough when your motivation and your physicality is big enough, and you have the drive to go for. I want to be the best at this. That's a very different person. Yeah. That's somebody who believes in minutia who believes in 

I can move my fingers, like that, or I could go like that.

Jase Kraft: [00:33:33] Yeah. 

Ari Gronich: [00:33:35] And I can stop anywhere in between. And that's minutia. And I'll tell you, I worked on somebody's feet once for 10 minutes, we took, he goes four tenths of a second office time in under 10 minutes working on the minutia in his feet. 

Crazy what, what

Jase Kraft: [00:33:53] yeah. 

Ari Gronich: [00:33:54] Possible. 

Jase Kraft: [00:33:55] So a lot of people start out with that motivation [00:34:00] and stuff, but then easily get either complacent or comfortable at a certain level.

What is it that those people were actually running from something that kind of help them? Or is it something that they do to remind themselves? Of that emotional tie to their 

goals.

Ari Gronich: [00:34:25] Yeah. So 

motivation doesn't mean anything. Nothing. 

Jase Kraft: [00:34:29] Yeah. 

Ari Gronich: [00:34:29] Ever action means a lot. So here's the difference I'm motivated to do this doesn't mean I'm going to just motivated because I heard somebody speak and that motivated me.

Jase Kraft: [00:34:41] Yeah. 

Ari Gronich: [00:34:43] It's not, that is not action. So motivation doesn't mean much of anything. What means something is committed and when you have a commitment to something, you embody all the things that it takes to fulfill that [00:35:00] commitment. So I'll give you an example, like examples, right? So trashcan, I, my job in the house is to take the trash out, 

So I could take the trash rote in the street it's out. Is that owning the job? No. Okay. So I could throw it out, put it into the trash bin and I could leave it on the side of 

my house forever in the trash bin, and then let it 

overflow. That is that owning the commitment of your job, of the thing that you said you wanted to do?

No, I could put the bag, another bag back into the trash can that I just took out. And I can leave it in the middle of the room. I can. I mean, I could go on, I could not clean the trash can before I put in the bag, I could just leave it all fly written. What, when you own what your commitment is, you have to become [00:36:00] all the things necessary in order to fulfill that commitment.

If you want to be the CEO of a company, you have to learn to lead, you have to learn to be organized. You have to, these are all things that you're committed to doing. And then you create that action plan. So it's not motivation. It's commitment, action plan, assess reassess, do more, right? Yeah. Same thing in sports, same thing in life.

Same thing. Everywhere. Motivation means hardly a thing. Commitment means everything. Cause once you, you could commit to a habit or you could commit to an addiction, right? Yeah. The way you're committed. 

Jase Kraft: [00:36:44] I totally agree with you. I, I think motivation is fleeting and it's not a good indicator because there's some days that you're highly motivated and some days that like you're motivated as a rock but it brings up [00:37:00] a point where commitment you can only make so many commitments because commitments take time.

And I see this commitments. Yeah. And I see this a lot, especially in college athletes that they make a lot of commitments. Sometimes without realizing, they're making commitments, but sometimes just because they want to fit in. But I find the more commitments you make, the less successful.

Those commitments are in, maybe not in total, if you'd add them all up as a lump sum, but like each individually you're not going to get as far. You know, for example, you could go to you know, I went to college and I ran a four 19 mile and high school went to college. That was my focus.

That was my commitment is to running and I didn't really get involved in anything else in college besides. Running and, I ran a four, 10 mile and then I had some [00:38:00] issues that caused me not to get any faster, but there was athletes that come in faster than me, or at least as fast as me. It would never get back down to a four 19 mile and think about well, why.

They're in choir, they're in drama. They're in, school council or they're going out with their friends because they're committed to this friend group or whatever. Yeah, so I think there's something there to, to limit commitments. 

Ari Gronich: [00:38:31] Well that, 

and with stuff like that in college, 

I find that it's a lot of ignorance, 

both in the coaching staff, 

even at D one schools, like I had a client.

Who was a pitcher, 

had a 94 mile, an hour, fast ball. He was recruited and a and junior, no, he was recruited his soccer, his 

freshman year of high school to a D one school went to the D one school 

I had been treating [00:39:00] him for a few years, goes to the D one school 

and immediately gets a Tommy John injury.

Right. Yeah. He lost his career. Not only did he lose his career from that, 

but he 

went 

to Eastern Florida state, which local community college and played there for a little bit until COVID happened. And he couldn't play his senior year. So he lost an entire life time because he had been training since he was five years old, to be a professional baseball player. And. Going back to our early conversations about injury, right? His coach didn't know how to train him. And he did not know how as a high school or a college athlete to say no 

to his coach to say no to the trainer. Who's telling him to do things that he shouldn't be doing totally.

So [00:40:00] that's the other side of it is the entourage. The selected entourage, not the one that comes with the team. So to speak. The selected entourage has to be willing to be wrong, willing to say, oh, what is that? That you're telling me. Okay. Okay, I got it. Your arm is hurting. I probably shouldn't be telling you to lift 500 pounds.

Yeah. There's certain parts of common sense that get lost in translation because how coaches, teachers, people not athletes themselves, or they just simply are using old school. Methods that have been outdated for awhile and they're not up to date because 

Jase Kraft: [00:40:49] anybody in medicine. 

Exactly. What you just  said there embodies like why I do this podcast because you know, we [00:41:00] explore topics and on icing and stretching and tart cherry  juice and the mental side of stuff, like what, what is actually working?

What does the science say? To sign to recovery because it's not always what your trainers are telling you. It's not because like we said, in the beginning that medicine is a practice. It's not necessarily always a fact. And some of the things that, you're diagnosed with aren't facts, they're just guesses and some of the, treatment.

Options that they're giving you their guesses and see what works and what doesn't. So that's why we're here is to keep. Athletes in the game in sport, long-term and stuff. So I I'm loving our conversation. I wish I could go on and on forever. However we don't want to have, like a four hour [00:42:00] episode for our audience here 

we're we're gonna wrap up.

Ari Gronich: [00:42:08] My longest is two and a half hours. 

Jase Kraft: [00:42:10] Yeah, I think the listeners here are used to that 50 to 60 minute kind of range here. I, I want to just wrap up with a couple of things. One we'll get to where people can find out more about you if they want to work with you those kinds of things.

And then just like on your. Closing thoughts when it comes to recovery, like the mindset around recovery, how should people think of that when coming from an amateur level to professional level? 

Ari Gronich: [00:42:48] Yeah. So whether it's amateur to professional or just 

professional, who's lost it, it doesn't really matter.

Yeah. Here. Here's the problem. And here's [00:43:00] the solution. The problem is that your coaches, your players, everybody's going to tell you that you'll never be as good 

as you were, and that's fucked up bullshit 

to be really honest. Okay. I'll give you an example. Mitch Kupchak, 

Gary V right over there, the Lakers Kobe 

gets injured, injures his knee.

I, I look in the newspaper and it says. From Gary V says we'll never be as good as he was about 70% of where he was in the past. But we're used to that it's normal. This is the fucking head trainer for the Lakers 

for 20 something years. He passed me off if he couldn't tell, because he could have been 150% of what he was.

Before he retired and died, right? Yeah. And so [00:44:00] I lived like 10 minutes from their training facility. Yeah. So I went down there and I talked to Mitch Kupchak 

and I said, this is, this is horrible. Like you're telling a professional athlete whose livelihood is like required to be on that court.

That he'll never be as good as he was. How many other people have you done that? And you extrapolate that out to amateur athletes. So I worked the Paralympics in Greece. I love the Paralympics. Cause people come in and they'll take off a leg or take 

off a limb, it's like, it's just cool. And you watch all of them in one place.

And it's just cool. But. These guys are damaged goods. They've been told their entire life that they'll never be able to do anything. And in some of the countries that they're from, they literally are ostracized [00:45:00] out of the community. They're not allowed to be in the public eye because of it's not special Olympics.

It's just Paralympics. These guys  are blind, paralyzed. So I was working on this power lifter 

from my rack. 

And he had completely paralyzed from his legs. His waist down only upper body strength. And he had a bullet hole that was shot through his spine during the war. He says to me, he says, American 

citizen, good citizen, Iraqi citizen, good citizen serial killer.

This is their first Gulf war, but 

point being that 

or the, after nine 11, but point being that he was injured, he never got told that he was only going to be a piece of himself. He [00:46:00] fought to be the best he could be with what he had. And I don't think most people. Push themselves because you cannot push yourself.

As far as you're capable of going to have somebody else pushing you. We are not an island. There's always room to push further. And so that's where the entourage comes in. That's where the injury rehabilitation comes in. That's where the mindset comes in. And that's where you get taught and told that you could always.

Be better than you once were, and you can always heal from an injury and you can always get better. I've seen 50, 60, 70 year olds with ungodly bodies doing ungodly things that most 20 year olds wish they dreamed of doing and they had been injured, but they got to that place [00:47:00] as an adult, as a wise adult, usually where they stopped the emotional tie to the pain.

The mental tie to the I can't and they said how do I want the rest of my life to be the next 40 years? The next 30 years, the next 20 years? Do I want to do this? Or, like hobble or do I want to play tennis and move and right. It's all that motivation is what takes you from the injury? Not the motivation.

Sorry, the mentality. The mindset takes you from that injury to, I can do fricking any. And this injury is only great, not bad because it's teaching me that and now I could take this injury and turn it into my biggest strength. And that's where I think the context of your show should go is the context 

is [00:48:00] I'm injured.

Awesome. Got that over with now I could get stronger and stop that stuff from happening again, by training properly, by thinking in a way that's positive. And by doing things that increase performance and 

optimization, and it all starts with the questions we ask. 

Jase Kraft: [00:48:20] Awesome. Thanks so much Ari for beyond the show and sharing your wisdom.

If somebody is listening and they're like, I need more Ari in my life where can they connect with you and find you? 

Ari Gronich: [00:48:33] Yeah. So you could listen to create a new tomorrow, the podcast. You could go to achieve health usa.com as well. It's my, you corporate wellness and training company. I also have I don't have the website up for this, but performance therapy academy.

It's a certification course that I wrote that literally teaches trainers and therapists to 

deal with athletes. [00:49:00] Without getting them injured and it translates over to any kind of patient, but I go through literally every 

process there is including teaching some of my tips tricks and my proprietary training technique that I developed called multi-directional resistance stretching, 

Jase Kraft: [00:49:19] Awesome. 

Ari Gronich: [00:49:20] Yeah.

Jase Kraft: [00:49:20] Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much, Ari, for being a part of the science of sports recovery, it was a pleasure having you on. 

Ari Gronich: [00:49:27] Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it greatly. 

Jase Kraft: [00:49:30] All right, episodes over. If you found value in this episode, please consider giving us a review on 

iTunes. And if you haven't already yet subscribe, do so now.

So you don't miss any important topics in the coming week. And if you have any questions or suggestions for the show, please send them my way. I am most responsive on Instagram. That's at Jase,cheese like the food or email me directly at [00:50:00] Jase@scienceofsportsrecovery.com. Talk soon.