TRANSCRIPT

[Voiceover] Recorded from the Oklahoma State University's Stillwater campus, this is the Inside OSU Podcast. Here are your hosts, Megan Robinson and first Cowboy Darren Shrum.

Meghan Robinson: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Inside OSU Podcast from our brand new studio on campus. So excited to have the Rick and Gail Moncrief executive director of the Human Performance and Nutrition Research Institute at Oklahoma State, Lance Walker, with us here today. Thank you so much for being here. This is great, great digs here. This is beautiful. Thank you. You are the first person to sit in this seat and be interviewed on this set for an Inside OSU Podcast. No pressure at all. Let's do this. As we said, Rick and Gail Moncrief executive director of HPNRI. For those who don't know what this initiative is at Oklahoma State, can you explain HPNRI?

Lance Walker: So a lot of words, that's the first thing you hear, you know, HPNRI. You got to have to go to the acronym to talk about it. Words matter, and those words matter because of what we're dealing with here in the state of Oklahoma. We're dealing with some real challenges, health challenges. And so if you build backwards from health challenges, you begin to look at what can we do better, what can we do different? If we're going to be number one in obesity by 2030 here in the state of Oklahoma, number one—that's not the right number one, that's the wrong number one. Metabolic syndrome, diabetes Type 2, these things are just a massive challenge here for the state of Oklahoma. And if you set that aside for a minute, then you look at performance. We've got amazing performers here at the state in Oklahoma State, some from the state of Oklahoma, but we've got amazing development coaches as well that do amazing work with those athletes here. So there's these two extremes, right? Extreme ultimate performance and then horrible disease process that's happening here. HPNRI really seeks to fuse that on a continuum now where we can leverage the performance into the continuum to speak into the disease side of the continuum. And so looking at disease and constantly looking at the problems, that's important work and we're some amazing study going on in that space. Our approach is going to be different. Our approach is, okay, look, how do we get upstream from those things? Maybe in a way that hasn't been done before or through a different lens. What's going on downstream is important, but getting upstream maybe help people not get in the river in the first place and not spend so much time at the end of the river trying to figure out how to pull them out of that spot. So HPNRI words: Human. That's you, that's me, that's the quarterback of the football team and that's my uncle Wes in Freedom, Oklahoma, who's building fans. Human Performance. What is performance? That's what's important to you, right? You're performing right now, you're performing in your job. My uncle Wes is performing his job today. We look forward to the quarterback performing his job tonight. These things are performance related, not health. Health is what's needed to do those things, but the reason they do what they do is about performance. So why do I eat what I'm supposed to eat? So that I can perform. The byproduct of that is health. So performance and nutrition. We try to deviate those two things for years, maybe eat your way out of some bad training or bad preparation or maybe just prepare, prepare, prepare and eat whatever you want, right? No, that works, right? We've tried to do that. So the word "and" performance and nutrition is critical. Human Performance and Nutrition Research Institute. The research, the search for truth. A lot of noise in that space, right? A lot of depends on what's on your Instagram feed as to what your health education is going to be in the state. Is that what we're facing now? I think it's over 70 percent of medical practitioners when they go to get their nutrition advice, their nutrition intel, they're going to Google. So there again, there's an opportunity there for us to speak into some of the truth and we've got this amazing research acumen here on this campus, amazing system of researchers from the basic to the applied that are looking forward to working together to attack some of these truths. An Institute. Institute, not just us on this campus, but other campuses, other nationalities, companies, industries and partnerships. So a long, long big title, lots of words. Each of those words matter, and ultimately that creates our ability to realize the vision, which is to transform health through performance science.

Darren: So how did you get involved with HPNRI?

Lance: I got a call from a guy named Rob Glass. It would have been March of last year, and I've known Rob for many, many years.

Darren: Seems like a lot longer, doesn't it?

Lance: Yes, it does. I've known Rob. I've never worked with Rob before, but he's—I call him he's one of the pillars of our profession. He's on the Mount Rushmore of strength conditioning, and for those of you that are listening in, probably the best in the business at what he does, and he is amazing. And he's, when he calls, you pick up the phone. And he said, "Look, I've got this, I've got this president basically"—is not his words—"but I've got this present that's got this vision, this vision of an Institute that has the ideas of leveraging performance science to speak into health outcomes in the state, basically to eradicate disease as well as help us win championships." Let's—we can—these are synonymous things. And he's telling me about it, and I'm thinking, "Well, this is going to be a really interesting project for somebody to do. It's a great idea for somebody." But I hung up thinking, "No way. No way at Oklahoma State. Too big, too big. That's a Harvard. That's a Mayo Clinic. That's a Stanford. Great idea, call me back." I remember looking at my wife saying, "These people are crazy. They're dreamers, right?" And I, you know, it's dream big. It's dream big. But I was brutally honest. But he calls me back and he said, "Hey, this is going to happen. I think you should come up and meet our president." So I came up. I don't remember when that was. It may have been in the summertime and spent some time with Dr. Shrum, and within 10 minutes, I could tell that not only was it, this was this was a little bit more than just some dream. This was going to happen. And I began to sort of look at myself in the mirror and say, "I think I'm purpose built for this. It's almost like it's my job. I need to do this." All the things that we need to be able to do to pull this off, I've got the expertise, I've got the experience, I've got the calluses and the failures to show for it. I drove back thinking, "Gosh, shame on me if I don't jump on this." And within a matter of hours, I was on the phone to my wife saying, "Hey, we're going to have to make this happen. This is going to happen. I get to come home to the state of Oklahoma where I was born, where she was born, bring my kids back to Oklahoma and attack what is the biggest challenge in my life. Let's go."

Darren: How does HPNRI, how does that separate Oklahoma State from other universities?

Lance: Well, if you think of it sort of in a either/or situation, there's a lot of universities that are studying disease, studying health, studying kinesiology. A lot of great work there. There's also a lot of athletics departments that are doing sports science. That's become sort of the standard issue. Everybody's doing sports science, you know, trying to win more games, keep athletes healthier. This leveraging of each expertise to help the common good and finding those spaces in between that are common. I'm calling them common enemies of the state, things like something as simple as inflammation or sleep. These are those are commonalities to us as an athletics department in the sports science world. It's the same things that we're trying to crack on the health side of the continuum, right? So it's this shared space that we can play in. Nobody to my knowledge has got a collaboration and an alliance around those shared spaces working collectively for the common good together. Nobody's seen that together. The ability to study optimized performance in an athletic based population of 600 or so that we've got here on campus and learn and understand and figure out how to make this optimum Glass program as an example even better. Well, that should scare everybody. The best in the business is pressing into that space, that he wants to get better, he wants to understand why his process is working like it is and how to make it even better. That's not common in this world, I'll tell you for sure. But not only that, he sees this as this nice shared space with the researchers at Vet Med and in nutrition sciences and in other colleges or even the health sciences centers. They want to push into that space like no other place really that I've ever seen before because they see this collective genius that we can have together and then we elevate that middle space that's a shared benefit to both sides. So very, very unique approach. People have talked about it, right, but nobody has shown the aptitude to jump in and really operationalize it.

Darren: I get sent links all the time at this fancy new thing at Georgia, this fancy new thing in Alabama, or just some of the major colleges out there. And what I see is they're nice weight rooms or they're a nice nutrition area. There's certain things that are nice and they're really beautiful to look at, but I don't think any of them bring this together what this is going to do.

Lance: Something that's really unique is how do we extend what Coach Glass does, what the athletic trainers do, what we do in our nutrition areas, how do we extend that and turn it back out to the state of Oklahoma? We're thinking about that every day with this project. Other projects, maybe not. Maybe it's just about having a great place to send recruits and see a nice weight room or have a great place to develop their athletes. That's very important. But every day that we're operationalizing this is how do we take that and help the state of Oklahoma? How do we use this as an inspiration for the entire state? How do we seek to understand some of the techniques and tools that are going on here every day, turn that and translate that and make it sticky for the 16-year-old in Poteau to leverage or the surgeon in Sallisaw to be able to leverage some of that information in a way that reaches the patients? And so that's probably the biggest difference is with the HPNRI sort of plugged into that ecosystem, that's our primary mission is to make sure that we're able to deliver this back into our state.

Darren: Just one more question about HPNRI, and then we'll move on. But so I understand you guys may be already getting a little traction with some of the and throughout the counties of the state already with already what you're doing even though we don't have a facility yet. The brain trust is obviously there and the knowledge is there, and so is that the case?

Lance: Yeah, it's been really interesting. One of the things that I got from my visit with Dr. Shrum was this importance of the land grant mission, and I was reminded of that in that meeting and immediately remembered my childhood in Northwest Oklahoma. I know what extension is. Extension is agriculture. We leverage the agriculture extension as a farming family all the years that I grew up, and so it's a gold standard if that's where you get your information, right? But there's another piece of extension, right, and maybe a lesser known piece, but it's health extension. And now that becomes the real opportunity for us to magnify and amplify and maybe even help this reimagination of extension, health extension. And one way of doing that is to take what we we're already doing, take the experts that are here on campus that are already working together for the betterment of us here on campus, collect that together and turn that outward and beam that excellence and support mechanisms back out to the state of Oklahoma. So we started that very early on leveraging existing technologies and existing tools, one of which Project Echo, which is a project that's been around for a while now, reimagining the use of that to elevate some of the professions that support our folks here in the state of Oklahoma. And one of those professions is athletic trainers. So look, we need to help health outcomes in the state of Oklahoma. We need to get upstream. You're instantly thinking about kids, right? Well, 80 percent of kids play sports. 80 percent of kids in the state of Oklahoma are likely involved in a sport up until about age 14. And guess what happens at 14? They either stop or they're out. A lot of that is because of not having fun, not spending time with friends. Some of it could be injuries. But that experience that they have in sport needs to be a positive one to keep them active even if they're not going to play college sports or professional sports, keeping them active throughout high school is an important benefit to linking that to active behaviors as adults. Well, one of the ways that we can do that is let's elevate that experience for those kids in those schools. Most of the schools or a lot of the schools anyway here in the state don't have access to an athletic trainer at all. Those that are there, you can imagine the sheer number and volume of athletes that they're getting to deal with every day, which is fantastic. But they don't have a sports nutritionist on their staff. They don't have a sports psychologist on their staff or an emergency medical expert right there in the office next to them to bounce ideas off, a physical therapist. We do right here, we use it every day. Well, why don't we take that arrangement and surround our athletic trainers here in the state with that same expertise that we have here? So leveraging Project Echo, we kicked that off, I believe it's been about seven weeks now, eight weeks ago, and it's just spiked like this. The number of attendance has been amazing. People are saying things like, "This is the most amazing continuing education I've ever had," because it's practical, right? And now I feel like I'm surrounded with this team of experts that I can bring a case to, and we can support an elevation of my practice and it elevates everybody in and around that I deal with. So that's just one example of that health extension that's already gained a tremendous amount of traction.
We're also kicking into research already. So one of my first jobs, I felt like not a very happy person. No, I get excited about this, right? No, this is important, but this is important stuff because I felt like there's expertise here that we can leverage maybe in new ways by putting people together. So I started knocking on doors, and I find an expert over here that's an expert in first responder fitness, and I see an expert over here that's amazing in the nutritional sciences side working with diabetes. You begin to knock on doors and you begin to find that, man, if these folks worked together on some projects, think about the amplification of the expertise, the collective genius that you get. And so over the course of several months, we started forming up teams, and we've come out the gate now, we're actually starting with some initial research here around a first responder community here in the state of Oklahoma. How do we surround the first responders, the people that protect us, how do we protect and serve them better with the expertise in the acumen from Oklahoma State University? So some of that is research, some of that is applied. Let's try these things with these folks and really surround them with this expert team to elevate their performance and health. So I'm as excited as ever because these things are already coming out the gate, and as you said, we don't have a wrestling, we don't have a microscope. We're working already as a team here at Oklahoma State to elevate that vision. So it's exciting.

Darren: You keep using the words expert, people with expertise. You said this was a perfect fit for you when you were initial talks about joining the HPNRI team. What is your background? Why do you have such a great grasp on what we're trying to do here at Oklahoma State?

Lance: Gosh, well, I at one point in my life, I wanted to be a jack of all trades. I wanted to—if I didn't know something, I wanted to know all about it, and so I would go really, really deep. That started out as a college kid. I was a believe it or not, I was a college athlete at one point. I used that word very loosely with me. I was probably the worst wide receiver in the history of the Big Eight conference to ever play in games. Well, yeah, I played at Kansas State. I was in Coach Bill Snyder's first recruiting class, worst program in Division One at the time. That's the only way I got to play, I promise you. There wasn't enough to go around, and I became famous, I think, for being the only Big Eight receiver to ever have more knee surgeries than receptions that actually got to play in games. And so I learned a lot about failure and I learned a lot about medicine in the practice of this rehab. So I learned about physical therapy and what an interesting space that was. So decided to go into physical therapy school and become a physical therapist. I also started understanding the concepts of strength conditioning and how strength conditioning can help me get back from this, but it can also make me a better performer. I need to learn about that. So became a researcher and did some research in strength conditioning, human performance. So I got a graduate degree in that space, again, trying to solve this whole puzzle now. Physical Therapy, research, strength conditioning was always interesting to me, so let's push into that space and understand how to leverage this all this stuff to make people the best versions of themselves. So fast forward then from college into graduate school, became a GA in the weight room at the other Oklahoma school for a while. Learned how to begin to leverage research and some of that physical therapy acumen, took it on the road and opened some businesses up. One of the businesses that was opened was the sports performance business. So Michael Johnson is somebody that everybody knows about, high performer, right? When he reaches out to you and says, "Hey, we're going to start a business here in Texas. I think you should leave the Dallas Cowboys operation and come work for us, and we're going to leverage all that stuff, research, sports medicine, strength conditioning to help people realize their fullest potential," you take that opportunity, right? And so you have this instant sort of credibility that you jump into that space with a guy like Michael that's a high performer that has done that in his life, and you begin to leverage that for kids, for elite athletes, the ones that are healthy, ones that are injured. You've worked the full continuum of this over 15 years. Did that and learned a lot, and mainly learned that we're never done. You can never be finished. There's no finished product. There's it's always better. There's always the next thing, the next iteration. And what that sets me up for, I think, is this background to appreciate where everybody comes from from all these different angles. I have a multi-disciplinary view on everything and a whole bunch of calluses and bruises to show for it from the business world as well as from academia as well as the NCAA athletics world. That experience is probably not as common probably because I'm just too stupid to do it any other way. I just I beat my head against a bunch of walls, but what I'm seeing every day here is the ability for me to leverage all that experience, and that's why I know it's just the perfect fit.

Meghan: You worked for Michael Johnson at the Michael Johnson Performance Center. He is an Olympic legend, absolutely world-class athlete. You've trained world-class athletes. How do you get them to trust you?

Lance: Gosh, yeah, it's a real challenge. To develop that trust is one thing, and then to keep it, I think to keep it is you've got to show them a result, right? They'll like you for a while as a nice person, but ultimately it's what are you giving them? Because they're there to get a benefit from the work with you, whether that's looking for a tenth of a second on the track or getting back from a season-ending knee injury. They need that trust is going to be huge. Part of that is knowing your stuff, and I learned really quickly that I need to surround myself with experts. And so that's the great thing. You plop down here and there's expertise all around us. Huge amount of confidence for me. I don't have to be the smartest guy in the room anymore. I can now leverage all these experts. And so that's one is that humility and knowing that I don't have all the answers, but we're going to find those answers. Setting in motion then things that provide outputs. That it's performance, right? It's not effort. Effort is a given. You know, try hard. They don't want to hear about try hard. It's about outcomes. It's about performance. And so when they see that you're genuinely interested in their performance and that performance is the output, you get a great rapport started with them. And then you begin to show them, "Hey, this is there's that tenth of a second we went after. You got that. All right, good. Let's go after some more". And we're doing this because we want you to put the medal around your neck at the end of the day, and we ain't the one standing on the podium with you. And they see that early on in a good relationship that they're not going to be up on that podium with me. They don't want to be on that podium. They only win, you win. And that's what benefited me the most being around Michael was look, I don't need to run out of the tunnel. I don't need to be on the podium. This is for you. And I get the benefit of seeing you on the podium with that medal around your neck that you wouldn't have gotten had we not gone after that point one seconds or not gotten that extra five degrees of flexion back in your knee. That's what gives me juice. I'm getting goosebumps just talking about it. But it's me looking out from the stands or watching on TV and knowing all the work that went into the back end of that. That's the benefit that I get. And when they know that about you, man, it's phenomenal, as long as you produce a result.

Meghan: I mean, I'm ready to go train right now. Let's go. Let's get my running shoes on. Let's go. Let's get my 40 time down.

Darren: It's so important now. So we're going for the 40 time, right? I pull a hammy just right out of this about five yards.

Lance: We don't need that. We don't need that.

Meghan: What are some of the tips that you can give people to help them perform their best?

Lance: Gosh, wide question, right? Perform is number one. I think that's going to be helpful is identify in your life what is it that's important to you? What does performance mean for you? Does that mean being able to run a 40-yard dash really fast to be able to get yourself in a draft position in the NFL? That was a great business for ours for many, many years. That was their performance. My uncle Wes might be to pick up his grandkids and be able to put the star on top of the Christmas tree. That may be performance for Uncle Wes. So building backwards from that, not do this so that you can avoid the disease that keeps you from doing that. It's less of an avoidance thing, and it's more of a pick out what's important to you. Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years, right? For me, I want to be able to get in my kayak and go fishing. Well, that involves I got to get the kayak in my truck. I got to haul it down to the creek, right? I got to be able to load it into the creek, and those creeks here in Oklahoma, you can imagine, and there's some mud and there's some grit. But I want to be able to stand up in that kayak and go fishing, and I want to do that the rest of my life. A lot of the motivation that I get to exercise today is so I can keep doing those things that are important to my what I would call performance. And so that would be point one is performance. Number two is, and this is what's great here at Oklahoma State, you don't have to be sick to get better. A guy by the name of Trevor Moawad said that, is a mental conditioning coach. This isn't about you have a problem that we need to fix. This is just constantly about optimization. It's you version 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, constantly considering that. It's just about optimization. It's an improvement. It's not in you're sick and you need to get healthy thing. You're getting better. And I think those two things, focusing on performance, it's daily improvement, knowing that you're not going to make a daily improvement every day, having some resilience to be able to bounce back from those things, and knowing that it's holistic. It's not just physical and it's not just mental and it's not just nutritional. It's this entire sort of holistic space that you can play in and lever to optimize your performance. That should excite you. And if it doesn't excite you, maybe you're not linking it to the performance thing enough. So going back to that, "Hey, what's important to you? How do we optimize all these bits to bring your best performance out, to optimize your realization of your performance potential?" I think that gets you in the wheelhouse, right?

Meghan: So you've worked with a lot of world-class athletes, a lot of cool places, Dallas Cowboys, Michael Johnson worldwide. What's your favorite success story with a single athlete?

Lance: Well, I was telling somebody at that dinner we were in last night, they said, "Oh, you must have worked with all these amazing athletes," and I have. I've seen I think five of the 10 fastest athletes that walked the planet today. I think we've worked with at some point. Got to work at the Dallas Cowboys with some amazing people. Larry Allen, famous Dallas Cowboy lineman that was, you know, could bench press amazing weights and run. And it was an amazing experience to work with those folks. But there was a kid in McKinney, Texas, that we worked with. It was about 12 years old, and I don't even remember what sport he played, but he came into us to train, to get better, to be a better version of himself. And he was horrible. I mean, I'll be honest with you, he was horrible. He no god-given ability, zero, right? And so he was on the bench on the C team, sure. And we as coaches, you think, "Gosh, that's kind of a grind to have to work with somebody that's," but in six weeks time, we saw this improvement start to happen, and then he re-ups for another six weeks, and then another six weeks. And pretty soon, he's worked with us for a year, and at this point, he's not elite now. He's not out there running sub 10 second hundreds, but he's gotten better and he was horrible. He sucked, but he sucked less after a year, right? And what we started to see was he keeps coming back. He keeps coming back. He keeps coming back. And I finally asked the question. I said, "Why do you keep coming back?" And he just grinned and he said, "I love getting better. I love improving". I went to the mom. I said, "Why do you keep paying for this kid to come back here?" She said, "I don't know what he's doing physically. I don't care. Looking in the eye when he talks to me, he's smiling, he's engaging socially with friends. He's got this renewed confidence about him". She says, "I don't care what you do at this point physically, but whatever's going on here is elevating this young man as a human, as a person, is bringing out his it's realizing this potential that we know he's had for forever. It's just it's coming out now through this process of performance training". That to me, and there's I can tell you that story and I could probably tell you a hundred more similar to that. Those are the stories that I'm most proud of, more proud than the sprinters than the gold medals, the world champions, the world record holders that we've worked with. It's those onesie-twosie stories that really make me feel fulfilled.

Darren: I've always thought about, you know, athletics, we've always tried to train the body, right? But I felt like the area we've always lacked in was training the mind, right? And that kind of relates to that. And so can you talk just a little bit about that? I know we're kind of running short on time here, but talk a little bit about the cognitive respect and because to me, you know, emotion a lot of times determines the outcomes, whatever you're doing, right? Your passion, your commitment, your determination. So talk a little bit about that aspect of all this training.

Lance: Well, you can't separate out the mental from the physical. You can try, but it's not going to work out very well for you, and those two things are very interestingly linked where improvements in one can feed the other. It's really interesting. One of the folks that I look up to a lot in this space talks about it all the time that psychology beats physiology every day, right? It really does. And so without talking in training, if you're not talking on the mental side of things, you're probably dead in the water. You mentioned cognitive. You think about mental, there's this cognitive space, the ability for your brain to operate and to run your GPS system, to identify targets and to react and respond. Eye-hand coordination, there's some of that the wiring, right? That's cognitive space, processing speed, think of it like that, like a machine. And then there's that whole social emotional psychology things. It's how you feel, your goal setting, your resiliency, those sort of things. So it's a space that is really wide open for us to attack really from both ends of that continuum, right? Not just the wiring that connects you to your body and to your environment, but also how do you interact with that those experiences? How resilient are you as a human? How do you handle those social interactions and social emotional interactions? So it's not something that you can shock your way into. You can just train the cognitive systems alone either. Those two things begin to harmonize, right? So again, it becomes part of the training process, almost in some of the ways that you wouldn't imagine. It's already embedded in some of the training. You'll see some of that psychological training happening during the physical training, sure, and some of the physical training that links with the psychological and mental side of the training. So it's a fascinating space that now we can with technology, we can measure it and monitor it in ways that we haven't been able to before. What's happening in this space when we're faced with adversity? What's happening in that space when we're trying to react and respond to our environment, to declutter our minds so that we can have better focus? The technology now is allowing us to measure that in ways that now lets us to sort of refine our approach to optimize those outcomes instead of just shooting in the dark. We're really able to measure, monitor and manage that process like never before. Exciting stuff.

Meghan: Lance, as you're talking, I just keep going back to this football coach who would tell his players and recruits to change your best. And that's such a powerful thought. It's not anyone else's best, it's your best, and whether that's kicking a 40-yard field goal to kicking a 50-yard field goal. And I feel like that's exactly what you're doing through HPNRI. So we are so excited to see how it grows.

Lance: Very well said. Very well said. It's you versus you, right? And in a good way, right? Just comparing yourself to yourself, I think that's a very, very healthy way of thinking about it. But thank you, guys. It's going to be exciting.

Meghan: Well, Lance, we can't wait to have you back in the future when we're more along in the HPNRI process, see where things have gone with the Institute. So excited to see everything you're doing for Oklahoma State. Thank you for joining us today. And thank you for watching another episode of the Inside OSU Podcast. Of course, Go Pokes.