SBD Mythbusting: Common Misconceptions about Squat, Bench and Deadlift with Tristan Jacobs

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In this podcast episode, Siobhan Milner and Tristan Jacobs go through some of the most common myths about the three Powerlifting exercises: Squats, bench press, and deadlifts.

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About Tristan Jacobs:

Tristan Jacobs: Pain To Performance

Tristan Jacobs is the athlete’s choice when it comes to all things pain and performance.

Tristan works with high level athletes globally to coach them through pain, injury or performance goals. Tristan notably supported the 2025 Sheffield Champion Kjell Bakkelund through injuries to a 770kg world record, where he achieved 106,2% of the current world record at the time.

Tristan competes in powerlifting at a high level, and he knows how much it means to be able to do the things you love without the pain or set backs.

Featured on the show:

Where to find Tristan:

Instagram: @TJPainFree

Tristan’s website: www.paintoperformance.ie

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Automated Transcript for SBD Mythbusting: Common Misconceptions about Squat, Bench and Deadlift with Tristan Jacobs

Siobhan Milner: [00:00:00] welcome, TJ.

Tristan Jacobs: Thank you.

Siobhan Milner: How you doing?

Tristan Jacobs: Not too bad now. Not too bad. Thank God.

Siobhan Milner: I have a first question for you. That is like an icebreaker question. I think it came from someone, on my Instagram story and she asked, who is your idol lifter?

Tristan Jacobs: Oh, Hmm. That’s an interesting one. Actually, probably, I suppose my. The client I’m working with at the moment with, you know, goes by the name of Kjell Bakkelund, he’s a Norwegian lifter that is competing at, I don’t know if you know of Sheffield.

Siobhan Milner: I’m a huge Sheffield fan and I’m gutted that I missed out on tickets actually. last year it took such a long time to sell out. So I waited, which was dumb. Anyway.

Tristan Jacobs: I think this time, I’d say it’s the quickest selling out one ever. Um, so far, but, um, Shell is, is, is kind of favored to win it this year.

he’s an under 74 kg lifter. Who’s dropping down to under 66, and at 74, he was already, I suppose, already lean already like at the [00:01:00] pinnacle. So to drop that amount of weight and still be as competitive as he’s hoping to be is just mind blowing, really. So I’d say him at the moment, a lot, a lot, because it was determination that he’s still going to do it and in a lower weight class, which is not something people tend to do.

I think it’s determination attitude and everything is, and obviously I’ve worked with him. So I’ve, I’ve kind of learned his mindset. So yeah, that’s probably him at the moment.

Siobhan Milner: We’re going to talk today about the myths surrounding some of these main lifts, these squat bench deadlift, your power lifting lifts.

, and I know you asked some people some questions too, so maybe we’ll go on some tangents, but. Let’s start with the squat. And one of the, one of the myths that I think is still pervasive is that when we squat, we should be pushing our knees outward and making sure that our knees follow directly in line with our toes.

So there’s none of this knee cave, the knee coming inward. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Tristan Jacobs: Yeah, so I think I don’t, I still don’t even know where [00:02:00] the, the idea came from that, that sort of any medial knee travel or inward knee travel is, is a risk of injury because it just isn’t. I mean, even if you took, if you took powerlifting aside for a second, if you looked at I mean, things like basketball players when they land, if you look when they land on the landing foot, you will see the knee travels inwards because that’s how it absorbs the force and how it conducts the force in in powerlifting when we squat.

I mean, the, I still believe the worst cue that still exists is shouting knees out. To an athlete when they’re squatting because you make it sound like it’s a complete voluntary control that they have when it’s not really because it’s a response to load and force and effort. So when the what people forget is that you have your adductors, which I suppose.

Go by their name, their primary involvement in the body is adducting the hip or adducting the femur, meaning bringing it from outside towards the inside of the body. That tissue joins from your knee to your hip. It also aids in [00:03:00] extension. So when you go down in a squat, you’re very seldom see someone’s knee come in on the way down.

It’s generally on the return on the way up. And that’s because the adductor is trying to help you get out of the bottom of the squat from a flex position to extend the hip. And What happens when you contract a muscle, it brings two joints close together. So to bring your knee close to your hip, it comes inwards where the attachments are.

So it’s not a, it’s not a bad thing. , for a lot of people, it’s just the way that’s most efficient for their structure, their build and, and, and how they move. And. We have to remember that the knee travel is relevant to your ankles ability to dorsiflex. So, for some people, going over the middle of the foot , is perfect.

For some people, it might need to go a little bit over, say, towards the big toe or even slightly inwards. And for some people, it might be over the baby toe and outwards. There’s no right or wrong. And that is where a lot of people start looking at lifting like aesthetics. It’s like, oh, it has to look this way.

It’s like, well, not really because. [00:04:00] If, if knee travel was a primary cause of injury, there would be a shitload more people injured. I mean, we wouldn’t have the highest level of athletes that have that knee movement. So it’s something that in some cases, yes, it can be extreme and maybe a slight change in stance.

will reduce that. But you’re not, what you’re doing by changing your stance is you’re shifting load onto different tissue. So you’re changing the leverages of that, of that movement. You’re not, you’re not getting rid of getting rid of knee cave in inverted commas. You’re just changing the tissue that’s taking load through that movement.

And that’s how our body moves. When you produce, when it produces force on the load, The response is contraction of tissue and joints will move depending on which tissue is contracting. There is almost no evidence to suggest that it’s any risk of injury. There used to be a myth, I think, that it was related to ACL tears.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, I think this is that primary idea.

Tristan Jacobs: Yeah, and [00:05:00] that just isn’t the case. The ACL isn’t even really relative in that position, to some extent, and not in that up downwards movement. There’s no sudden forces, it’s not like your feet’s leaving the ground and you’re loading it in that position. It’s a constant, increasing curve of force as you, as you eccentrically load it and concentrically load it.

Siobhan Milner: I think there’s two things that I want to kind of pick out of that, and especially because some people listening won’t know some of these terms around, anatomy and how it moves, so. The first thing that I wanted to talk about, as you were talking about that knee cave is going to be a function or related to how much dorsiflexion someone has.

So that’s when the feet are able to pull up in a sense towards the shin. So this is what often people are saying when they say they can’t get depth in a squat as well. They say, Oh, my, my ankles aren’t flexible enough. That’s often what they’re talking to.

Tristan Jacobs: Yeah, they blame, they blame their, they blame their ankle mobility [00:06:00] for.

not hitting depth, where I’ve, I can’t tell you at this point how many hundreds of powerlifters I’ve treated. And not once have I found ankle mobility to be a reason for not hitting depth, you can squat to depth of the vertical shin, meaning you don’t have to have any dorsiflexion at all. So, I mean, if you have a couple extra degrees, you have absolutely no reason not to.

That then comes down to things like the width of your stance, the angle at which your feet are turned out or straight, the load position of the bar. So do you need to drop the bar lower down your back so you can extend your, you can flex your hip more. There’s this, these are the things that change that not necessarily, it’s not the anatomy per se.

It’s your own setup and where the force and the load is on your body.

Siobhan Milner: I once saw, a strength coach who will remain unnamed, but is a very, very big name, share on social media that, a lot of people, this is quotations. A lot of people don’t know that you have to squat with your feet [00:07:00] parallel and your toes pointing forward.

And I was like, yeah, This is just a total disregard for the fact that everyone’s femoral version, the way their, their big thigh bones sit in their hips is different. And I think, yeah, this is a big thing, you know,, I think when we’re working with athletes, we’re usually, we’re trying to find a technique that’s consistent and works for them, but it doesn’t have to look like everyone else, like you’re saying.

Tristan Jacobs: And that, unfortunately, I think whoever you’re talking about, they’re getting that from another very well known accounts that, talks about the squat a lot where we say, and what we need to remember is for your, for you to achieve. a deep squat to some extent, your foot has to pronate, your tibia, which is your shin bone, basically has to internally rotate.

And so does your femur. These three things happen together without one, you’re going to struggle to achieve the others. So for some people that can still pronate with a, with a directly straight foot, but for a lot of people, if you turn their foot out, [00:08:00] They find pronation happens a lot more naturally, um, and therefore the rest of the movement starts happening more naturally next minute.

Oh, crap. I can get an extra couple inches of depth. And all I’ve done is rotate my foot out a couple degrees, but that goes against then whatever, what some of these other people are telling you. It’s like, well, if it works for you, it’s fine. Movement doesn’t matter what it looks like, provided it’s comfortable, ideally, not going to say pain free, because you’re going to experience pain at some point if you’re in any way pushing your training, but if it’s comfortable for the most part, you can manage the volume, and you can progress over time, your body would let you know if it didn’t like it.

Our body is a lot smarter than we think. If your body doesn’t like something, it will give you feedback. Whether that be pain, discomfort, whatever it is, it will tell you. And if it’s not, if everything feels perfectly fine. The odds are your body’s perfectly happy the way you’re doing it.

Siobhan Milner: It’s funny, because as we’re talking, I’m realizing how many more myths there are attached to these

because even as you said, you know, we turn out and then we’re able to pronate [00:09:00] more.

So we’re able to, let the foot essentially move on the ground. This is one of those things that again, you hear people say, Oh, you know, if, if your foot’s rolling in or caving in, that’s dangerous. It’s wrong as well. When really it’s

Tristan Jacobs: collapsing your arch and all these lovely terminologies, you know?

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, exactly.

, So I’m going to have to be really careful not to go down, down a rabbit hole of just the squat as well, because I want to cover energy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Siobhan Milner: But the one, one other thing that you said, and this is not so much. Well, it is a bit of myth, but I think it’s, it’s worth pointing out for athletes and coaches, because especially when you work with, you know, athletes who have some experience in training some training age, obviously I’m not working with power lifters.

You’re working with power lifters, but when I’m working with the kind of sports based athletes, I’ll get requests like, oh, we don’t have any. We don’t have any specific adductor work in this session. Can we add something in and they? There’s this [00:10:00] belief that certain exercises are only targeting one muscle or one muscle group.

So as you, because you just mentioned, you know, the adductors play a role in extension as well. And, and it’s really interesting. And this happens, I work with a lot of dancers too, and dancers get told things like, for example, the Iliopsoas was really trendy in dance for a while, and dancers were like, contract your Iliopsoas.

And they have this idea that when they move, they’re using one muscle to use it. And really there’s, there’s always a whole lot of integration going on. And

Tristan Jacobs: powerlifting the, in powerlifting the piriformis is, is, is the,

gets

a lot of blame and a lot of hate and a lot of, you know, needs this and needs that.

And then they go to someone who releases, in inverted commas big time here, releases their psoas, or their piriformis, and, I mean, if you know anything about the anatomy, for me to release your piriformis, I have to go inside you. Like, I mean, that is, that would be the reality of it. So I’m not doing it externally.

And I mean, you know, but again, people [00:11:00] go to, to people that they’re, they’re believing are experts and you’re trusting their word. And, I’m sure you’ve heard as well, even from the S&C side of things, the amount of stuff you hear that is just like, I feel so sorry these people believed it because it is so far from the truth.

It’s ridiculous. It’s like they almost just manufactured it, you know,

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, and I, I’m always, you know, I have a sister who’s a, a midwife, we’re sometimes talking about these people that we see working with our clients who, I don’t think they can all be swindlers, you know, I think they really believe they’re helping people, but it’s just, especially one of the things that I get really big on is, you know, Exercise of any form, and now we’re kind of thinking general population, but exercise of any form is one of the best healthcare interventions there is.

So when we’re creating all of these barriers to movement and doing it right, it’s, it pains [00:12:00] me.

Tristan Jacobs: Yeah.

Siobhan Milner: Okay. Next squat question. Um, and this is an interesting one for me because, I’m working with short track speed skaters as well. And we’re often trying to make sure that they’re really strong and quite deep angles.

Especially because I work with them from they’re quite young, I’m usually trying to get them to have a really nice full range of motion squat, but we often have heard in the past or some athletes will come with the question about whether or not it’s safe to squat below 90 degrees and whether or not there should be a maximum depth with the squat.

Tristan Jacobs: So, you see, the thing with the depth of squat, it only ever became apparent when powerlifting became a sport, because they have a measurement where depth is classed as when the top of your hip crease is below the top of your knee at the bottom point. so that’s where depth became something that’s measured or something that has a, a, a value, but in reality, squatting.

As deep as you can has no negative [00:13:00] effect in the sense that you’re bringing a joint through a full range of motion. There is no negative to that. Okay. The thing we have when people start going like squashing right to like where their bum is basically touching their ankle, you’re going to naturally be a lot weaker in that position.

And people don’t take this into account with load management. So they used to squatting to maybe parallel and, and loading, call it a random number, a hundred kilograms, that hundred kilograms When you get right down where you’re almost relaxing in the bottom, which is another issue that happens and you didn’t allow for that compensation of hang on I’m not as strong in this.

I’m not conditioned to this movement pattern or this this extra range and your ego or your just or just a bit of ignorance. No disrespect. Um, leads you to that position, right?

I’m not saying it’s dangerous, but you, that’s something you almost, it’s a skill you have to practice. so there is no danger in how deep you squat, unless you compete in powerlifting, there is no rule as [00:14:00] to how deep you should squat. Okay. However, I do believe that a fuller range of motion of a joint will always be more beneficial than a lesser one.

So if you are someone that wants to explore that range, do it lightly first, get comfortable, see what it feels like, because for other people, they’re going to struggle to get to a certain point because their body’s never been there before. And when your body hasn’t been in a position before, and you try to put it there, it takes a while for it to accept it.

It takes a while for it to just kind of suss itself out for one bit of phrase, because I believe that all movements have like a map, what we call it. You don’t consciously think of every muscle that’s being worked throughout the movement. Your body does that itself. And that happens with repetition over time.

And that’s why when you give someone an exercise for the first time they’ve ever done it, they might look a bit unsteady, a bit wobbly, but as the reps go on, they all of a sudden start getting better and better at it because the body’s getting used to it. It’s like, okay, this is how this works. Now I know, now I feel comfortable and now I’ll accept more load.

And that’s the thing with all [00:15:00] these movements. It’s about just assessing the comfort of it as you go along and then start adding load as you feel better. willing to and ready to, but there is no, as far as I’m concerned, there was no movement and no range of anything that is dangerous when load management is taken into account.

Siobhan Milner: It’s going to be an interesting one for us to come back to with the bench as well, I think. I think it’s interesting because when you say it actually may be beneficial to go through full range of motion as well. I’ve seen, and of course, you know, it’s anecdote, but I’ve seen with a lot of athletes, there’s times where maybe when we’re in season, say with the jumping athletes I’m working with, we might be working on some more partial range of motion things or things like a really high pin squat, just so that they’re producing force extremely fast.

I actually had one athlete last year who, she never had knee problems. And then just in one block, she was saying, you know, my knees are just feeling a bit cranky. And I looked and I realized we weren’t doing anything. You know, oversight on my part, we weren’t doing anything full range of motion in terms of the squatting pattern in that block.

And [00:16:00] we added it back in and these were happy right away.

Tristan Jacobs: It’s I believe, like, I believe range of motion is. Use it or lose it. So your body is only comfortable going where it’s gone. So if you keep exploring a range, that range becomes comfortable, becomes normal, and doesn’t become forced , and when we start forcing range of motion on the load, that’s when people seem to get symptoms.

And it’s because you’re pushing the body into a position it’s not comfortable in. You haven’t given it time to accept it, adapt to it, condition to it. And that’s where people start blaming. Oh, it was, it was squatting too deep. That caused my problem. It’s okay. Yeah. But it’s probably the first time you squat to the depth and you added load to it.

So that’s not really the squats problem. That’s yours. Like, you know, people have to take onus on just not. Being a bit more responsible when they go exploring new things or new movements. Um, whenever it comes to things like the biggest thing is always leave the ego at the door. No one actually cares what you’re doing.

Um, [00:17:00] and you, you will always, you will find, and I, I, I’m sure people listen to this might actually see this in time. Grandparents that you see them coming to sit down and they get to a point and they almost drop them into the chair. Okay, I can, I would almost guarantee that the way we’ve gone nowadays where sports are becoming so much more popular, strength sports, gym, it’s all becoming a lot more frequent and stuff.

I would almost guarantee that in years to come, grandparents are now, now children or parents and become grandparents. I guarantee you’ll be sitting, seeing them sitting into a chair with no restriction because they use their range of motion. There is no age limit to training. You should, as far as I’m concerned, you should be doing all strength training until you physically can’t.

There’s no other, there’s no other reason why you shouldn’t. It’s all load management. As you get older, if you’re feeling a bit weaker or your recovery takes a bit of a hit, you just reduce volume intensity. You don’t stop. You know, it’s all adaption. And the longer you can do it, the health benefits are like, [00:18:00] they’re invaluable.

You know, it’s, it’s people that stop doing something deteriorate.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, this is huge. My background is actually in clinical exercise physiology, so I worked with clinical populations for a long time, so I worked with, patients. I was in a breast cancer clinic for a while, and I worked with patients, you know, in their 80s who would double their bench, you know, and of course their starting point’s different, but, but they get stronger, and, and I think this, Like you’re saying, this is the hard thing is, when you tell someone, I have some family members, for example, who, you know, I try and nudge in the direction of strength training, , they see what I’m doing.

And I think I’m telling them to do that. And I, you know, I would never tell you to put the same weight on my back on your back as I have on my back. If you’re not doing anything, you know, it’s, it’s, we all start small and we progress slow. Right.

Tristan Jacobs: It’s even like, it’s even now, I just, I just finished competing two weeks ago, and my father in law, he’d be 70, and he saw my videos, he’s like, that’s, Jesus, like, that [00:19:00] can’t be good for you.

That’s, that’s going to end badly for you, you know, and I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Siobhan Milner: That comment always drives me nuts.

Tristan Jacobs: It’s nuts, like, that’s not a point I’m even gonna argue or get into, I’m just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, and just leave it, because it’s, you, you’re talking to a different generation with different beliefs, different understandings.

You’re not going to change their mind. In a conversation like that, so it’s a conversation I just tend to avoid, to be honest, and this time, well, we’ll challenge someone’s belief, like, and talk about someone that if I’m taking on a client for, whether it be personal training or rehab, and they’re squatting massively high, and I’m like, you could probably benefit from going a bit more, but then.

The then they explain why they don’t and then this potential fear that they have was a potential thing that they read or learned or followed and that’s their issue. So then it comes to trying to challenge their beliefs and make them sort of not be afraid of those things and that it isn’t as bad as you were once told and it can be hard because, you know, they might not know me very well for very long.

So they don’t know My experience of what I do [00:20:00] and I’m telling them literal opposite of what they’ve been told. So like for someone that can be quite kind of obviously challenging to accept.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, I think this is why as well sometimes working with rehab patients, it can be the long game because it’s just it’s earning trust in the beginning as well.

Yeah, I keep the things that we’re talking about actually keep taking me in the direction of deadlift, but I feel like I want to do SBD. I feel like I want to go in order. So we’re going to, we’re going to go to bench and actually maybe just cause we talked a little bit about it before the call, cause someone asked about this.

I’ve had an example of some athletes receiving some feedback from someone that I had to kind of diffuse. There, in general, in movement, has been this idea that, neutral spine is the only way to be and live and move. And so, of course, in bench press, we usually see varying degrees of arch in people’s backs.

Tristan Jacobs: Can you talk a little bit about why that arch might differ from person to person? And [00:21:00] also, if someone believes they shouldn’t arch at all, what would you say to that?

I suppose there’s two ways to look at this, right? Arching only again, similar to the, to the squatting depth, arching only really became something in powerlifting because it’s allowed and it reduces the range of motion of the exercise.

Tristan Jacobs: And therefore, when you reduce range of motion, in theory, you can handle more load because it has to travel for a lesser time. So that’s where the archer that became this thing. There is no real danger in it because what we need to remember, especially in the bench press, the only part of the anatomy that is moving much is the arms and the shoulder.

Right. Your back, your legs, that is all static. So once it’s, as you call stacked, even though it’s bent, there is still, it’s all support. It’s all, it’s a fully supported structure. And if we look at arches in general from construction, they’re a pretty sturdy design. Okay. So it’s just this fear of the back again, this, this whole thing that our back is [00:22:00] fragile.

And in your mind, the way people talk, you’d swear your back was just these dangling bones and nerves with absolutely nothing around them. And like, they’re just, waiting to be damaged. And I would nearly say your spine is probably one of the most covered structures of tissue. And if we actually look around now, the funny thing is people think, Oh, I can feel my back.

If I touch it, I can feel the bone. It’s like, yeah, but there’s still tissue there. And like the actual, the amount of tissue on your back and around your core is Is this most of your body really? So it is a protected structure. It’s not this fragile thing. We have to be so mindful of an exercise and under load and things like that.

The, the bench press is someone explained to me once. The idea of bench press is you’re a tree. Your feet. are your roots. Your body is the trunk and your arms are the branches. And without a stable root, a tree is not stable. Without deep planted roots, a tree is likely to fall [00:23:00] over or be blown by the wind.

So if you can apply that pressure through your feet and the entire body contracts or holds tension, it’s pretty damn safe. Like, there is no, I don’t know of any notable injuries, especially to the spine that people had benching. Any injury from a bench press is generally things like chest, shoulder, because that’s what’s carrying the load.

And it’s the moving, those are the tissues that are moving and the joints that are moving. So the arch is, if you don’t want to arch, don’t arch, like you don’t have to. If people argue you can bench press more, but my issue with that statement is we start pushing towards ego. And it doesn’t matter about arch or anything else.

Ego will make you lose every time. So to me, you know, there is this bodybuilding kind of old school method that arching is cheating. Nowadays has become a thing because some people’s range of motion, the bench is literally two or three inches. They’re saying it’s cheating. It’s like, well, you might think so.

But in the rule [00:24:00] book of the sport that the athlete participates in, it’s within the rules. If you’re doing something with rules, it’s not cheating. Yes, you might disagree with it, and you’re perfectly entitled to that, but you can’t call someone cheating when they’re within the rulebook. So what the IPF have done since recently is brought in an elbow depth rule , to, I still don’t understand the logic behind it.

No one really does. I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve out of it. The issue we have then is, that People have to re restructure their setup on bench because they now can’t get their the bar down enough that the elbow drops to the level that they’re looking for. And there’s a lot of inconsistency and the judging to it because you’re now looking at a brief moment in time.

of a pinpoint of an of your elbow relative to a point on your shoulder. And the funny thing is that two of the referees judging this are actually below your arm. They’re actually at the sides of your legs looking at your armpits, basically. So you can’t even accurately judge where the top of the person’s shoulder is when you’re [00:25:00] looking from underneath it.

So it’s a bit of a stupid rule. I don’t really believe that it holds any merit at all. But it was social media that brought that across. It was the comments under all the videos of, oh, that’s ridiculous range of motion. That’s cheating. That’s not a real bench press. All this negativity from people that probably can’t do it.

Maybe can’t lift as much or just don’t do the sport at all. So they have no actual value to add, but yet we had this massive organization take all that negativity on board from nobody’s. Instead of talking to the athletes that actually fund the sport and take part and brought in this rule that I, I don’t know of anyone that actually fully agrees with.

So the arch itself is not, it’s not a negative in the sense that it’s not unsafe. You maybe can bench more, maybe you can’t, it’s down to individual as always, but the arch is perfectly safe. And in the sense, again, when I say perfectly safe, I’m always assuming you’re taking load management into account.

And all the other stuff around your training, then the movement itself is perfectly fine. [00:26:00] And that position is perfectly fine because again, nothing moves bar your arm.

Siobhan Milner: Maybe we should actually explain load management as well, because again, I think it’s something that we know and understand and think about all the time.

But if you’re, an athlete or a coach, you don’t necessarily understand that. So how would you explain that really briefly?

Tristan Jacobs: The load management is. the amount of load or weight you can tolerate for reps and sets and fully recover from. So if you are, if your load management is off, what can happen is you are loading too much.

So you’re, you’re the level of intensity that you’re training to is high, which can be fine for many people. If your recovery can match that, if you can’t recover sufficiently from the intensity you’re training That’s when stuff goes wrong in general. And that, that just comes, it comes over time for some, again, we’re all individual.

For someone, they might be able to run 10 weeks of high intensity and poor recovery, poor sleep, poor everything, and still get away with [00:27:00] it. And for someone, it could be two weeks and they’re in bits.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, and I think that key thing is, like you say, if your recovery can match it, and what people forget sometimes when it comes to managing their training is it’s not just the training.

So, like you say, it’s sleep, it’s stress, it’s what’s going on at work. All of those things can impact our ability to recover. And I think often athletes don’t Believe it until they get a really, really obvious example of it happening for themselves. That actually everything is affecting how we recover.

Tristan Jacobs: I kind of say to people, I know some people might disagree with this, but I say, I don’t believe you can overtrain.

I only believe you can under recover.

Siobhan Milner: One of the things I often think about, cause I’m in ultra running, right? So often for, for example, stress fractures, that one of the highest risk factors is being under fueled so not getting enough calories in, and I often, often one of the things I say is just, well, are you eating enough?

That’s often one of the first things.

Tristan Jacobs: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you can, there’s people that can train seven [00:28:00] days a week, but the difference is their recovery matches that. And there’s some people that can only manage three because, as you say, life could have family, stress, work could be a highly stressful job, they might have to travel for work, they don’t look after nutrition, they’re not hydrated, they don’t get their electrolytes, all these kind of, all these little bits add up together, recovery isn’t one thing, it’s a multi, it’s a, it’s a factor of a few things put together, and stress on top of stress on top of stress, Is is not normally a negative outcome.

Siobhan Milner: So you were talking as well now about this elbow rule, and this is something that I want to go into just from the myth side. So not so much the the hitting the elbow depth for the rules, but over the years, For example, you see it sometimes when athletes return to training after a shoulder injury, they’ll be given something like a floor press where it’s purposefully limiting the range of motion.

So the elbow can’t go below the shoulder. And I think we know that often when we’re [00:29:00] managing pain, it might be something like changing the range of motion or limiting the range of motion for a while is a good way to modify. But I think a lot of people have run with that. That and gone. Oh, I shouldn’t ever take my elbow below the shoulder because that’s dangerous.

So what are your thoughts on that?

Tristan Jacobs: I suppose my thoughts on anything like that is that end range motion. In theory, we’re always gonna be weakest at. Okay. So it’s, it’s about getting used to that position and loading it over time and conditioning it, the shoulder can, I mean, People can reach behind their back, right?

If they’re sitting down at a chair, you’ll see people reaching right behind them. Okay. And like that is far more of an extended range than you are in the bench press. It’s this connotation with an exercise and hearing that that exercise is responsible for X, Y, and Z injury or pain. Bench press doesn’t cause shoulder pain.

Tristan Jacobs: What [00:30:00] causes shoulder pain in bench press is ego. For the most part, as far as I’m concerned, because it’s how heavy can we go and how much can we keep going. And as I say, recovery and not even recovery, it’s just, it’s just too much load for your tolerance, because most, most pain, in my opinion, anyway, is when you’ve exceeded the tolerance of that tissue.

In that moment in time, and there could be a myriad of factors to what caused that, but that is generally for the most part, the outcome and bench press gets such hate for shoulder pain or shoulder injuries. And maybe the way you bench press just doesn’t suit your anatomy. Maybe you need a wider grip or a narrow grip.

But you didn’t give yourself time to, to explore that and see what felt better. And what did you, what felt easier or more comfortable, more natural? You know, it’s the same thing that there is no in parallel thing. We have a rule as to how wide you can go. There’s a ring on the bar and the flap of skin between your index finger and your thumb has to cover that ring.

And that’s the maximum grip, [00:31:00] but there’s no real minimum grip within reason. So we have this. range of like, I would say, geez, must be 25, 30 centimeters for each hand to move from one extreme to the next. That’s a huge amount of shift in tissue being loaded when you move the hand that far out, you know, going from shoulder to more chest or more tricep.

So for some people, they just might have explored what worked and they just found the grab the bar the first time they ever did it, and they just saw it. Loading as heavy as they can. And the body just said not happening. Doesn’t like it. You know, the, we, people talk about the rotator cuff and how that’s affected by bench.

And it’s like, well, everyone thinks rotator cuff, they just think of rotation for some reason. It’s just this, this thing that, that, that happens. But I mean, I don’t prescribe any athletes. outside of a direct, pathology to the rotator cuff. So direct tear of it. And even then it’s not that often I prescribe anything directly for rotator work.

If you load the [00:32:00] shoulder in the actions it does and the planes of motion it’s involved in, your rotator cuff gets worked. It can’t not. That’s just how it works. It’s not the primary muscle. load the primary muscle and your secondaries will get the benefits. That’s just how it works. It helps. I hate the phrase stabilize, but the rotator cuff does provide a bit of support to the structure, not more than your delts or your lats, you know, or your traps and things like that to the shoulder.

So We need to, like, just, I play down the rotator cuff a lot, I don’t talk about it too much, because I think, like, in bench, I’ve been told certain people how there was a client recently that came to me that had shoulder pain at bench, and the physio, whoever they went to see, told them that if they kept going, they would literally tear their rotator cuff off, was the phrase they were told, and I’m like, that just isn’t how it works, you know, and of course, you tell someone that, They’re going to be scared for I don’t know how long going through that range of motion, you know, and I mean this individual I had to bring them back from someone that was benching [00:33:00] roughly 60 kilograms to doing four kg dumbbell presses because of the fear, not because they couldn’t do it because of the fear factor.

I had to show them they can do it and we can just over time, increase the load again. As the, as and when they’re comfortable and that’s when the long road happens is this. Is this poor wording about that exercise or that movement causing this absolute catastrophic injury?

Siobhan Milner: I think what also happens here is people see, for example, with the rotator cuff, these images and anatomy books of it looking all kind of separate.

In a way, but when you actually look at the rotator cuff, it’s like this whole sleeve with everything embedded into it, you know, it’s, it’s more, I’ve heard some people describe it like a sock. So when you get a tear, it’s sometimes just like a little hole in the surface. It’s not that the whole thing has ripped apart and there’s so much feeding into it and really connected together that it is quite hard to, you know, get [00:34:00] a full, full, full tear as well.

Tristan Jacobs: Yep. And some of the tears and dry coughs, you will see them on MRIs for years. They’ll, they’ll never grow back. They’re there forever. And that doesn’t mean they’re a cause of pain. They did a study many years ago on baseball players in America where they, they did an MRI on their shoulders. And it was something ridiculous.

Like 55 percent of the pictures. had tears on the MRI of their rotator cuffs, but no shoulder pain. And we know already that pain doesn’t equal damage and damage doesn’t equal pain. But to show that these people had physical tears and no pain shows you that just because you have shoulder pain and you’ve gone to an MRI and you’ve seen a minor tear, do you know that that tear hasn’t been there for five years?

Siobhan Milner: And I’ve heard even some people also purposefully sometimes, and it depends on what country you’re in as well, if you can do this, ordering scans of both sides, because if it’s like actually they both have the same damage, quote unquote, on both sides, but this one’s painful, we can’t blame the damage for what’s, what’s happening there.

Tristan Jacobs: It’s the same as bulging discs. It’s where a takeoff is second to bulging discs in terms of having [00:35:00] pathologies with no, with no symptoms.

Siobhan Milner: I think the other thing, just one other thing, because I think this is also partially what gets people confused with benchpress, is about, you know, you hear some people saying, oh, in certain positions , it’s, there’s less space, like, it’s, it’s compressing in the suburb chromium space, but I think, yes, yes, exactly, but again, it’s , when you actually look at how have.

The arm moves and how the shoulder moves. It’s translating often in a different way to what you’d expect. Like people think it’s just going to do this, but it actually kind of moves opposite in a way to how you’d expect. So often the things that people are saying, they say, Oh, we do this because it gives us more space.

It actually does the complete opposite, but it’s still comfortable.

Tristan Jacobs: I just hate that phrase because it’s like, Oh, If we do exercise, we’ll create space. No, that’s not how the body works. There is no space in the body. Like, everything has, has its role, its place. There’s no empty space in the [00:36:00] body. You don’t create space because if you did, something would fill it.

It’s not, you know, it isn’t how it works. And the thing is what people don’t realize is so many positions of the shoulder theoretically are impingement because you’re at the end range. It’s not, it doesn’t hurt. Like if people realize what, what it looked like in, in especially the hip and the shoulder, when you were actually an extreme end range, it literally is impingement.

There are exercises that will make you in a position of impingement, but there’s no pain because impingement isn’t a problem. It’s just this phrase that gets thrown around so easily. It’s like, Oh, You’re an end range. It hurts. It must be impingement.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah. And I know we’ve talked about this before because it drives me nuts because of course, I’m working in volleyball.

So there’s a lot of still talk about impingement over the years, but there’s been these position statements coming out saying it’s not a term we should use. It’s not a real diagnosis.

Tristan Jacobs: No, because if it did, it’d be all it’d be in so many exercises you’d be experiencing.

Siobhan Milner: Okay, I’m gonna I’m gonna head into deadlift.

I’m going to veer off that direction. So another question that [00:37:00] someone and my answer was related to load management, but I really want to hear what you would say about this was, so an athlete, she actually said, thankfully, this isn’t my experience, but I want to know why do some people quote unquote always hurt their back when they do deadlifts.

Tristan Jacobs: This is where I kind of, I don’t believe technique is the cause of pain and hear me out. If you start doing something for the first time and you start progressively overloading over time, your body adapts. Okay. I believe technique is the cause of pain. Adaption of load over time, because when you start doing something the first time and you look at yourself doing that same thing in 3 years time, it’s probably very different, but you actively, you didn’t actively or consciously change anything your body did as it found ways to improve its leverages and its ability to produce force and tolerate load in that position.

So the thing with deadlift is. There’s a lot of it is just, it can be [00:38:00] positional. They haven’t learned things like how to drive their legs through the floor. They just stand there and pull the weight up. And it’s not that this is dangerous or bad. It’s inefficient. And for most people, like the lower back doesn’t really have a whole lot going on and we just find it can be quite sensitive at times, right?

And people can get lower back pump on deadlifts and it’s not a bad thing, you know? But A lot of people, when they come to deadlift, they don’t, they might not seek advice. So what’s a good way to start? What’s a good way to, to learn what’s efficient for that person’s body? Do they need to widen their stance?

They need to grip the bar differently. Where is the bar In over their foot relative to the rest of their body, because in the ideal world, when you deadlift, the bar just comes straight up. If you look from the side, the bar wouldn’t deviate. Your body would change a little bit, but the bar would generally go straight up.

So for some people, that might require more of the need to be over the bar. [00:39:00] Some people, their body might need to be more over the bar or behind the bar. When you have longer legs, you’re going to deadlift some different, some of the shorter legs, right? And that’s why we then have conventional and sumo.

Some people sumo deadlift when, for those that don’t know, is when you have a much wider stance and you grip the, your hands are on the inside of your legs, pulling the bar up. And it suits some people much better. And they, they, they can be much stronger at it. Some people conventional for whatever reason, just might not suit them.

And it’s okay if an exercise just doesn’t suit you when there’s another option. For some people, it’s like, well, no matter what I do, no matter how light the load is, no matter how many positions I try, conventional deadlift just hurts my back. Cool. Have you tried sumo? No, let’s try sumo. There’s no difference in doing conventional and to sumo if you just want to learn to deadlift.

They’re both going to make you strong as hell. They’re both going to give you a massive amount of stimulus across so many tissues in the body. Which one suits you better? Which one feels [00:40:00] more natural, more comfortable? Which one do you enjoy the most? That’s all that matters. Don’t spend months and years trying to make one of them perfect when there’s another option.

It’s I mean, if you’re talking about injury, like Deadlifts are one of the number one prescribed exercises for lower back injuries. So why would you prescribe something that causes it?

Siobhan Milner: If there is an exercise that I see with the most fear around it for athletes, it tends to be deadlift.

There’s been a lot of fear around it.

Tristan Jacobs: Oh, absolutely. For anyone. Athletes, general pop, everyone.

Siobhan Milner: I think this will get you a little passionate. The, the term that gets thrown around a lot on social media is the risk to reward ratio as well regarding, regarding deadlifts and yeah,

Tristan Jacobs: If someone says that, do you know what, someone says that deadlifts have a high risk to reward.

I tend to find that as someone that can’t do it, isn’t very good at it. And just hasn’t found a way to [00:41:00] actually get it done properly. And they gave up and decided that the exercise was the demon and it wasn’t their ability to learn or ability to reduce load. Because for some people, like, if you’re competing in powerlifting, obviously the idea is to lift as heavy as you can for a single repetition on the platform, but you don’t do that in training.

Training you train sub maximally for the most part. So in other words, you’re training to less than a maximal load. You’re training for a load that just gives you a stimulus that you can recover from and all is good and people tend to, deadlifts can, again, similar to bench press can be bit of an ego thing as well.

And again, like when you’re in a gym, believe it or not, no one’s probably looking at you. No one cares what you’re loading on the bar. The only person you’re trying to impress is yourself. And that never ends well. So if deadlift is the cause of, or the, the, you get symptoms when doing deadlift, so we say a lower back pain, film, reach out to someone who knows what, what, how to do it, [00:42:00] send a video.

Maybe it’s something simple. Your position just could be off, you know, and it’s not that it’s dangerous as bad. You’re just not loading the tissue efficiently. That would probably make it a bit easier for you, you know? And it’s like, we talk about pain and people talk about injury and it’s like, Pain and injury are two different things.

You can experience pain in something but not be injured, right? Injury to me is when you physically, it’s not even about reducing load, you physically cannot do that thing because of, generally an injury is actually when something’s broken or torn. I mean, to me, if it’s just painful doing it, you’re not injured.

I think it’s a term that’s just thrown around way too loosely. It’s lost its meaning altogether. You’re experiencing pain and that’s really as simple as that. To degrees to the varying degrees of how intense that pain is. But if you can still do the thing when you reduce the load, which is a little bit of pain, you’re not injured.

and deadlifts having a bit of pain and deadlifts isn’t always a bad thing. Obviously I’m not saying if it’s every session all the time, but like, if you go into the gym and you have a session where Oh, my back was a bit sore after those deadlifts. [00:43:00] Maybe you just weren’t ready for that session. You were a bit fatigued, a bit tired, long day, your body was just tired.

Those are things that are more likely to be the cause of it than the deadlift itself. The deadlift was like the cherry on the top, the extra stressor, albeit the good one in general, on top of the stress you came in under already.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, I think the other thing that some people are not prepared for is, you know, you were talking about the lower back pump, it’s getting some, just some muscle pain in the lower back, because, you know, when they do say a heavy upper body workout, and they’ve got sore chest, biceps, triceps the next day, They have quite a positive feeling associated with it, but they do, you know, some deadlifts, and then the next day they’ve got a sore lower back, and they panic.

And part of it is, it’s not just a single person’s fault, it’s this way that we’ve, as a society, talked about the back as fragile for years, so people perceive any pain there as quite threatening.

Tristan Jacobs: Yeah, and it’s just like, you know, a bit of stiffness in the lower back is no different to having, you know, stiff [00:44:00] hamstrings after, after a lower body session, walking up and down stairs and going, geez, that’s, that’s tough.

But as you say, there’s this fear around the back and it’s like, oh my God, like, this could be. Bad, you know, and the other thing we forget is that the back is involved in almost every movement you do. So when you have pain in it or stiffness in it or whatever feeling you have, you’re probably going to feel a lot more than if it was just your bicep or sore.

Because. Getting up, getting down, turning, picking things up, sleeping, your back is involved in almost every movement you do. So if it is tender, it’s likely to be symptomatic a lot more frequently throughout the day than a sore arm. You can use your other arm, do you know what I mean? But the back is involved in everything.

So it’s this thing that when it hurts, it affects so many things and you can’t get away from it. So there’s a phrase I use, like what you focus on will expand. And if you sit all day thinking about how sore your back is. It’s definitely not going to feel better by the end of the day, if you can just think of it all the time.

Siobhan Milner: That’s always a tricky one as well, when it’s like, [00:45:00] don’t think of a pink elephant, you know, but you do. And that’s the thing, you can say to people,

Tristan Jacobs: don’t, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s different to actually do it. But the idea is if you just. Become too zoned in on it. Try and distract yourself for a while, you know, and you might all of a sudden realize the pain is not as bad as you thought it was.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, we had a short tracker a couple of years ago who had a really symptomatic. herniated disc. And we talked about these sorts of things distracting because she was getting quite uh, frustrated by it understandably. But we were talking about, you know, do you have the pain all the time?

And she said, well, we actually know when I watch Netflix, I don’t feel it because yeah, she’s not thinking about it at all. And and this is also, I think where the. Getting people moving plays a really big part because it’s building confidence that, oh, I can still move even if I’m in pain, but it’s also just, it’s a distraction because you’re thinking about the activity that you’re doing.

Tristan Jacobs: Yeah, if you know, like, what I say to people is like, sometimes like, oh, my God, the exercise you gave me was so good in my head. I’m like, no, it’s not. What worked was [00:46:00] I gave you permission to move. Like, that’s all that worked. I won’t lie. I’ve given people a program of exercises that have absolutely nothing to do with their issue, but all I knew they needed to do was feel like they were doing something and be told it’s okay to move.

You’re not going to break. You’re not going to die. You’re going to be just fine. And that in itself. Can reduce people’s symptoms. Notably. So people, there’s people that have worked with me in the past that know after a while they were told once this is like years down the line that told them that stuff I gave you had no impact at all.

I know that it was purely to make you believe you would do something positive. And I gave you the permission to exercise.

Siobhan Milner: For Deadlifts, are there any other myths that you would like to bust?

Tristan Jacobs: I think deadlifts, it’s always going to be a back thing. And it’s always going to be that you have to have a straight back, right?

If you look at any top level sumo lifter, provided they aren’t one of these extremists where their upper body is so upright, because they have unbelievably, [00:47:00] good, mechanics or good mobility or flexibility, whatever phrase you want to use, you need to make yourself have long arms, in a deadlift.

That’s the idea is that you can be as high up as you can. So again, the range of motion is lessened to whatever degree thoracic flexion is a cheat code for sumo deadlifters to rounding the thoracic part of the spine to get your shoulders down lower to the bar. Having a rounded back in the deadlift isn’t necessarily a bad thing, right?

What they talk about the, the, the, I don’t like the word danger, but the, the risk or the, the badness, as they say, comes from when you start in a certain amount of flexion and that flexion increases massively as you stand up. So as you stand up, your back just bends more and more and more and more the entire time.

If you start in a position of X amount of flexion and that position maintains throughout, your risks are very limited. , it’s the, it’s the gradual increase in flexion as you stand up [00:48:00] from that deadlift that people talk about the, the potential risk of, pain experienced or potential sheer forces on the, on the discs.

But again, it’s not guaranteed. There’s people that have been deadlifting for years and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with their spine or imaging. Again, it’s trying to find that because you know someone that this happened to. You’re gonna blame that thing, but you don’t know anything around that. Like, we know that, as we mentioned about the shoulder and the rotator cuff, we know that I’d say at this stage, probably nearly 70 percent of people, if all were scanned with MRI, would show some sort of either a bulging disc or herniation of some extent, some sort of spinal degeneration, some sort of arthritic visions, but are completely asymptomatic.

So, we find that, I find that people come to me, they’ve been to a physio or been to a GP, gone through an MRI, come back to me and it’s like, oh, I’m told my pain is because of the disc, and I’m like, yeah, but that disc isn’t touching anything. Like, look at the image, it’s so far [00:49:00] away from the nerve, it’s not even within any reason, like, so, don’t believe that that’s probably your problem at all.

So when you start explaining to people that like a bulging disc doesn’t mean anything, the time when it’s a big problem for people is when it’s actually on, as you can see on the image, it’s actually pushing into the nerve. And that is causing a lot of, obviously, nerve symptoms, but outside of that, bulging discs are common, and in fact, they heal themselves over time, and sometimes, what the evidence shows us is the more severe the herniation, the better the healing, which sounds bizarre, but it’s obviously the body’s own way of trying to stop there.

trying to cause reparation and get itself back to homeostasis. But small bulges can stay there for forever. You know, I have two compression fractures in my spine for, jeez, 20, 22 years now. And I was told that I couldn’t, I would never be able to lift heavy. I’d never be able to take part in contact sports. I had to wear a, it was like a, corset with two rods in the back [00:50:00] of it to stop me bending forward.

Like that’s how I was treated. And I would wear that for six months. from a jet ski accident. So two of my vertebra have lost about 25 percent of the height from landing, sitting down on my coccyx on a fiberglass handle and the sheer compression of that happening. And since I was told that I’ve played rugby, I’ve done mixed martial arts, I’ve done boxing, and I’ve been powerlifting for now six years, and I have absolutely no back issues.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, I think this is the thing, the body is so adaptable. Like you say, people think of the back as kind of this dangling structure, not realizing how many layers of muscle around it, how much connective tissue there is as well.

Tristan Jacobs: People forget the muscles move the body, the spine doesn’t move itself, it’s moved by muscle.

And that’s we keep forgetting our joints are only moved by muscle. So let’s start looking at that muscles might be more of a maybe cause of your symptom than. A piece of bone, you know,

Siobhan Milner: I’ve worked with a lot of dancers, uh, there’s this, I think it’s getting better, but there [00:51:00] was this pervasive belief for a long time that, dancers believed that there was such a thing as skeletal versus muscular movements.

And so they would say, yes, skeletal movements are bad. And what they meant really. It’s just, it’s just the way they talk about it, but it becomes dogma. For example, you know, if you’re just kind of moving your arm and you’re not thinking about it, they thought of that as skeletal. Whereas if you like purposefully contract,

yeah.

Siobhan Milner: And I’m like, the muscles are always moving the bone. Like the skeleton can’t move. Like it is’ muscle pulling on bone. So it’s, it’s funny, these things that, um, In the beginning, I just kind of was like, okay, whatever. This is just something they say. And then you, when you realize that it, yeah, it feeds into a lot of their beliefs about, oh, this is why my knees hurt because I did it skeletally.

And I’m like, no, you didn’t. You cause you can’t move if you’re not using muscles, you know?

Tristan Jacobs: Yeah. Yeah. And then that’s kind of the. Like, I have my [00:52:00] own opinion on chiropractics, but that’s part of my, one of my issues is where I have clients that constantly have been going to a chiropractor who’s, you know, people can’t see my air quotes, but realign their joints or put their vertebra back in or all these weird and wonderful, completely impossible tasks.

And my question to the client is, he realigned your, your hip or put your hip back in or whatever he told you. Yeah. How do you think that happened? If the, if it was, if it could happen, surely the only way that could have happened outside of an absolute sheer force was muscle had to move it. So he’s gone in again, air quotes, put your hip back in.

Did he tell you how to stop that happening again? No. He said, come back next week. It’s like, okay, I rest my case. You know, because muscle, muscle moves bone, that’s bone doesn’t move without muscle. So if, if, if in theory, if it could, and it can’t, if you could, um, on the line, certain [00:53:00] joints in your body, then surely it’s muscle that caused that, not the bone, you know?

and that’s what we need to realize that you can’t, the only way you can on the line and joints by dislocating it basically.

Siobhan Milner: TJ, I really enjoyed this and I, like I say, we could have gone, I could have gone down so many more rabbit holes even for just one lift. Is there any sort of, take home message or any point in particular you’d really want to drive home to people listening?

Tristan Jacobs: No movement is bad for you. If anything, I’d say all movement is good for you. Don’t be afraid to explore range of motion. You didn’t think were safe. Even with just your body, you don’t have to use load. If you train to any sort of intensity and try to excel at any sport. You will experience pain at some point.

That’s just part of life. It’s not a bad thing. It will happen. It doesn’t mean you’re injured. It just means you have a bit of pain. And when you do experience pain, obviously a session now and again, really isn’t an issue, but if you have an ongoing issue where you’re [00:54:00] experiencing pain, a certain body part or joint, whatever, you will experience And it’s going on for a couple weeks and you’ve done things like reduce the amount of weight you’re using in the exercise or the frequency at which you’re doing it.

Those are the things you have the power to control first. Intensity, in other words, go lighter, a bit lighter in the exercise, reduce the frequency with it. If you’re doing something like I bench press four times a week, if I’m going to experience a lot of pain, I might drop it to three and see, see, is that all just just to aid extra recovery.

Okay. If you are someone that experienced niggles all over the body all the time. The gym isn’t your problem. It’s your lifestyle for the most part. And what I mean by that is your sleep, your stress, your recovery, all these things that were within your control. So what I say to people is if you are controlling your controllable measures, like your, your sleep, hydration, nutrition, things like that, all of those are roughly in the green, roughly.

They don’t have to be perfect, but roughly in the green. And your load management falls under that, your ability to, to recover from your training. Then anything else that happens is [00:55:00] more than likely just one of those things. You probably couldn’t have prevented it. It just happened. Don’t go looking for reasons.

You controlled what you control, whatever happened, therefore was out of your control. So don’t get caught up on it. Just deal with it. Move on.

Siobhan Milner: Thank you. Where can people find you if they want to follow you or if they’re interested in working with you?

Tristan Jacobs: Um, so Instagram is my main, my main social media. So it’s @TJPainFree, or it’s https://www.paintoperformance.ie

is my website. And you can book calls. I always encourage you to book a call with me. The calls are obviously free, no matter where in the world, and we chat about the stuff because I can’t help everyone. So I always do a free call first to go through the things and I’ll see if it’s something that I believe I can’t help with or not.

So that nobody wastes money or time.

Siobhan Milner: Awesome. Thank you very much for your time.

Tristan Jacobs: No problem at all. Thanks for having me.