Jerzy Gregorek (@TheHappyBody) is a 4x World Weightlifting Champion, co-founder of UCLA’s weightlifting team, and co-creator, with his wife Aniela, of the Happy Body program.
To fill out the form on Cerebral Palsy Research Project, visit tim.blog/cp.
To watch Prisoner No More for free, click here.
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Tim Ferriss: Jerzy, nice to see you, as always.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, pleasure.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to talk —
Jerzy Gregorek: Good to be here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I always love spending time with you and I have wanted to have this conversation for — doing the math — more than 10 years because you told me of this transformation that we’re going to be discussing in detail a long time ago. And it blew my mind to the extent that you may not remember this. I wanted to try to figure out a way to hire a long-form journalist to write —
Jerzy Gregorek: I remember.
Tim Ferriss: — an entire long-form magazine piece on this. And it turned out that a much better format is film. And certainly in this conversation we’ll talk about it, but not to bury the lede.
For people who don’t have any context, Jerzy and I have known each other quite a long time. And Jerzy’s appeared on the podcast before alongside Naval Ravikant, who also has worked with Jerzy. And Jerzy’s a four-time world weightlifting champion, co-founder of UCLA’s weightlifting team, co-creator with his wife, Aniela, the lovely Aniela of the Happy Body program. There’s a lot more to his story. We get into it in depth in the first conversation.
This time around, we’re going to talk about a very, very specific transformation that people might not associate with weightlifting when they envision lifting weights in the gym. And that is just how far-reaching coaching transformation can be. And I’m going to read a definition, first, of cerebral palsy. CP. This is from the AI answer on Google, but you’ll see some version of this in most places, so:
“Cerebral palsy is a group of permanent disorders affecting movement, posture, and muscle tone caused by abnormal brain development or damage to the developing brain, usually before birth, sometimes it’s during birth. It is the most common motor disability in children resulting in non-progressive limitations.”
I’m just highlighting a few words here.
“Permanent non-progressive limitations, meaning the brain injury does not change over time on muscle coordination and balance.”
All right. Now, I’m going to compare that with a lead into the doc, which I’m making available for free on YouTube, which is called Prisoner, No More. We’ll have more to say about that. It is quite short, easy to watch, about 30 minutes to my memory. And here’s the description.
“What happens when a doctor’s prognosis becomes a life sentence and one person refuses to serve it? Prisoner, No More follows Tae Jin Park, and I recognize that is not probably the perfect pronunciation for Korean, but Tae Jin Park, a young man diagnosed with cerebral palsy who dismantled every physical limitation medical science predicted for him through elite athletic training under Olympic strength coach Jerzy Gregorek and an uncompromising commitment to identity transformation Tae Jin’s story redefines what the human, body and mind are capable of.”
And that’s directed by Jeff Wolfe and we will come back to that as well.
But let’s hop into an actual conversation here and begin with Jerzy, if you wouldn’t mind, just some before and afters, right? And then we’ll go into the entire chronology of it and everything else, but maybe we could just touch on a few, like, bench press, what he could do before — Tae Jin — and what he could do after. Math, language, where would you like to start?
Jerzy Gregorek: Let’s start from bench press, I guess.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Jerzy Gregorek: So the first day I loaded the bar 15 pounds and he couldn’t lift. He couldn’t take it off the rack.
Tim Ferriss: He couldn’t unrack it.
Jerzy Gregorek: Just only 15 pounds. So I have this wooden bar, Olympic wooden bar that I used to coach children, four-year-olds, five. I remember my daughter was doing snatches when she was three years old. It’s three pounds. But I put the three pounds on and he lifted three pounds.
And so I thought, “Okay, he could lift three, so let’s see if he can lift eight.” So I added five pounds and he did. It surprised me, the difference. And then I loaded another five on, it was 13 and he did, came back to 15 pounds, he barely lifted, but he did.
So that gave me the insight right away that he is going to progress fast. So I asked for his father to come to the gym. And I tell him, “You have to be here and you have to watch every session with him because something is going to happen here.” I already get the feelings that something good is going to happen.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t want to spoil the story. We’re going to get into micro-progressions and certainly the importance of the bench press, which you identified really early on. What did he get to as his maximum working weight in the bench press?
Jerzy Gregorek: He got to 170.
Tim Ferriss: What body weight?
Jerzy Gregorek: I think around 140. So he passed his body weight. He became stronger than his father, and his father couldn’t believe. But as the father was watching it for years, at one point, he said, “I’m really getting what the micro-progression is. It’s an amazing thing.” So that was really something.
Tim Ferriss: So another layer to this story that makes it all the more amazing and inspirational and mind-boggling is that Tae Jin also is autistic, if I’m correct, right?
Jerzy Gregorek: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So while you’re helping him to build confidence and competence physically, you are also working on a lot of other things, and I’m sure we’ll get into many of them. But could you just tell us a bit more about his conversational ability before and after?
Jerzy Gregorek: What the father told me that he was — the conversation only with Tae Jin was “Time to go to bed,” or “Time to eat.” And there were some, probably, more because he could count to one to 10, but he wouldn’t know what is three minus two. So the math, what I noticed that he needs to work on the math, because I asked him to do five squats and he did six or four, sometimes five.
So I said, “Tae Jin, I wanted five.” And he said, “That was five,” and it was six. So he was missing, and that gave me the idea that he needs to work on his math. So I started asking him simple questions, “What is three plus two?” “Three plus five?” And up to 10, he was okay. But after 10, didn’t know what is the five plus seven. The subtraction didn’t know at all.
So that was the beginning of the math. When it came to English and then a conversation, he couldn’t have any conversation. So the father, after about probably a year, he said, “We had a first conversation.”
Tim Ferriss: After a year of training?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yes. We actually talk about something. That’s what was amazing. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Then after how long did you train with Tae Jin?
Jerzy Gregorek: Almost five years.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So at the end of five years, with math, where was he? Okay. So at the end of five years, with math, where was he at the end of five years?
Jerzy Gregorek: Well, he’s in community college. He passed 57 units, so he’s waiting for another three units to finish 60 and go to San Jose State. So you can imagine what his math is and English. He writes essays and —
Tim Ferriss: It’s just — let that sink in, people. It is so wild. And you’ll see this in the video. So to not just converse about concrete objects — the mug in front of us or something to the left of us, the dog on the floor — but you had him memorize poetry so you could discuss things like emotional tone, metaphor, right? Getting into much more complicated terrain.
And it’s, honestly, the more I learn about this and the more I revisit it, because this is not the first time we’ve talked about this, and I just rewatched the documentary earlier today, which I did the voiceover for. And I got really emotional watching it, to be honest.
And so I want to talk about the how to, because there’s so many pieces to this, but maybe what we should talk about is why previous approaches hadn’t worked, right? How are people with cerebral palsy generally treated by society? Why do they have these deficiencies? The lazy explanation is, well, they had this brain damage or abnormal brain development. And that’s that, right?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a sentence. And then Tae Jin had worked with physical therapists before meeting you. So why didn’t he make progress? I mean, those are two different questions, but I’ll let you start with maybe how you view the environment and society as implicated in the development for people with cerebral palsy.
And this applies to many other places, by the way. It’s not limited to cerebral palsy, but for instance, we were talking about community college and Tae Jin when he decided to go back to school, which didn’t start with college, of course. And there were a lot of pressures to put him into a special program. And you were like, “No, no special program. He has to be around normal kids.” And so I’m leading into it a little bit, but would you like to say a bit more about that?
Jerzy Gregorek: Well, I come from Olympic weightlifting, as you know. So athletics focus always on progress and reaching records, breaking records, and that’s what the athletes are about. But when you think about physical therapists, chiropractors, doctors, we call them really, in weightlifting, recoverers.
So helping us to recover, acupuncture, massage, and all of this is when we do the training, we need recovery. So the recovery is that system that helps us to recover the body for the next day and do the next day something a little bit more than before and create the progress. When a physical therapist approach, let’s say somebody that is after surgery or has problems, the mission is to return the person to where the person was before. And the same with doctors, make them healthy again.
But with Tae Jin, that’s not the case, or cerebral palsy people, because they are already there and they cannot return anywhere. So they have to progress the same way as athletes, forward more, either stronger, faster, what is five plus seven, or right align, memorize the poem. So all of it and belief system that you talk before a little bit and triggers here too, because he hated the son, the son, and he hated police and he hated mother, he hated father. And that came out during our process of coaching.
So that I had to address too. So all the philosophy was also the part of it. It was poetry, philosophy, there was math, and it was English. But coming back to what you said about the whole community that works with cerebral palsy, I think that the focus is not athletic focus. The focus is to comfort them. So not really improve them, not to improve them so they are improving, just to comfort them so they have the safety life and they are okay, I guess. That’s probably the difference here.
Tim Ferriss: And just to reiterate something for people who are listening, we’re talking about, in some respects, two things that will get intermingled as we talk, which does not mean that we’re equating them. But you have, on one hand, the mood affect and some of the communication challenges and other components of autism spectrum disorder. And then you have the motor challenges and much more, of course, related to cerebral palsy.
So we’re talking about both. And let’s revisit the prior physical therapist, right? Because I believe, based on some of the notes that you sent to me, that his approach was to put Tae Jin on a treadmill. Is that right?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: In other words, it was —
Jerzy Gregorek: And he hated that.
Tim Ferriss: — he threw him into a plan, but it wasn’t a progression. I don’t know if that’s fair to say. I mean, maybe there was some —
Jerzy Gregorek: Some, maybe.
Tim Ferriss: — minimal progression to it.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, maybe some progression of a treadmill, but treadmill after a while creates exhaustion, tiredness, and the brain actually becomes depleted instead of getting the power, getting the strength, getting more energy.
We’re talking about resting energy. And when that resting energy can be improved, the resting energy can keep the person awake. He was very lethargic at the beginning.
Tim Ferriss: He would sleep in the car, he would sleep —
Jerzy Gregorek: Sleeping in the car.
Tim Ferriss: — whenever he had the opportunities.
Jerzy Gregorek: And never was awakened in the car. When he was in the room, he would usually sleep because he was not engaged with people, so he was sleeping.
Tim Ferriss: And so the bench press seems like it was one of the kind of key components to increasing resting energy.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yes, bench press, squats.
Tim Ferriss: What type of squats?
Jerzy Gregorek: Back squat.
Tim Ferriss: Back squat.
Jerzy Gregorek: Back squat. And then eventually the back squat was a big challenge because he couldn’t sit down. He was very stiff. Because he was stiff, he would fall on a daily basis. He was bruised all over the body, and he walked awkwardly. Usually, [the] father held his hands and when they were walking and he was just walking very to the left, to the back, awkwardly. So that created a challenge. So the challenge for the squatting was that he was not able to squat down. He was able to bend.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Which is why his parents also took him to the bathroom. They took care of everything.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. He was looking for the box or the chair. You remember the box?
Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah.
Jerzy Gregorek: So he was not able to sit on a 20-inch box because he was bending forward and looking for the box. So that was about, I guess at the beginning, about 20 inch, 23 inches. When it came to 16 inches, I noticed that he’s nicely squatting down and also was able to turn. At the beginning, he was not able to turn. So when I noticed that, I told the dad, “He’s ready to go to the restroom on his own and ready for the other things in the restroom.” And that was the beginning of the first, really, independence for Tae Jin. He was able to dress himself.
The other thing was to tie the shoelaces. So at a certain point I saw that he has this shoes and his shoelaces were untied and the father ran to tie his shoes. I said, “No, no, no, he can do that.” And he said, “Okay.” So father sat. We were outside of near our lunges in our house. And so he bent and he tried to tie and the father was looking, piercing. I said, “Relax, he’s going to be okay. ” And I created this atmosphere facilitated for Tae Jin so he could relax and he could actually make it happen.
It was about 20 minutes before he actually made it, but it was a torture for the father. So I started really seeing how the parents are with him, that I had to teach the father, the mother to be patient, to wait until he does something, not to do for him. So that was also an element of that was needed to be fixed.
Tim Ferriss: It’s also, in looking at it through a very sympathetic lens, I can understand how all three of them have been struggling and working hard to do the best they can over — how old was Tae Jin when you met him?
Jerzy Gregorek: 25.
Tim Ferriss: 25.
Jerzy Gregorek: They were intense here.
Tim Ferriss: So 25 years of conditioning and habits.
Jerzy Gregorek: 25.
Tim Ferriss: So it takes time for everybody involved to change those habits.
Jerzy Gregorek: They were a ticking bomb.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jerzy Gregorek: They were so intense with him and he was, I would say, so fast to respond. And his, also, walk was that way. He tried to walk fast because he believed that walking fast, he will be normal. But I slowed down everything. I taught him how to walk and it was the torture for him, but said, “Heel and toe and heel.” After about two, three years, he started walking normally, heel and toe. And I know I have videos. I sent you videos of it. It just was just amazing to watch, Tae Jin, to walk with soft arms because his arms were really up and —
Tim Ferriss: Contracted and controlled.
Jerzy Gregorek: And really contracted. Yeah. And control, extremely controlled. And then everything started being more soft and relaxed. And he started walking like a normal person, what the father wanted. Came to one of my birthdays and it was just amazing to see him out there about four years. People were just puzzled and [were] just like, “Is it the same person, really? What happened to Tae Jin?” It was just amazing.
Tim Ferriss: So I’d love to highlight a few of the ingredients that were critical for the recipe that led to that because a friend of mine, I’ll name him because it’s funny, he’ll get a good laugh out of it. I remember I introduced my friend, Mike, to you. And Mike has a multitude of issues with his hips. He has one titanium hip. And I remember I introduced the two of you. He came over and you guys trained, you laid out a program for him and he was unable to squat properly to a certain depth. So you meet people where they are, right? Everybody can improve, but it’s about knowing the starting point. You’re famous for saying this.
And so you gave him a certain depth. And I remember he did that for maybe a week and then he was feeling good. So we decided to do it five inches deeper or something like that. And he came back and met with you and your response was, “You are wasting both of our time.” Because the micro-progressions are a key component to progressing without injury. And also, I know that you feel like the “no pain, no gain” approach to training is a myth, right, or that belief undergirding training.
So I want to mention just a few other things and they are, of course, all in line with your most famous mantra of “Hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life.” Hard doesn’t necessarily mean painful, right? But it does mean hard or difficult, but I want to mention a few of them here because it’s so comprehensive.
We’ll come back to this, but car spotting, right? So Tae Jin was so lethargic, as we already noted, that he was typically sleeping, but after six months or so, you asked his father if he noticed anything new and he remarked that Tae Jin had noticed a car on the way over.
So you started to give him assignments to remember the cars that he spotted, the color, the make, whether the driver was male or female. And you got an inkling of his potential for math because he started memorizing the license place, which is just incredible. Then negativity, this negative affect, you already mentioned him hating the sun, hating the police, hating this, that, or the other thing. At certain points, hating the workout, which maybe we’ll come back to because I thought it was very clever how you responded to that with, “Well, once you’re an adult, you can decide if you want to quit the training.”
Jerzy Gregorek: And that was a trick.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it was a trick.
Jerzy Gregorek: It worked.
Tim Ferriss: And you had hurdles for hitting that. You also gave him assignments though to come back to the negativity, having dialogues and asking him questions to see the world more objectively. So assignments to have him write in English and explain why the sun and the police might be important for our existence.
The use of celebrations, so I might ask you about this, but having certain milestones for him where you would give him a certificate, and then I think it was later on going to restaurants with his family and giving it to him in front of him, but also because his life, I suppose, seemed so perhaps to him uneventful up to that point, like nothing was happening. Maybe you could speak a little bit to that and then I’ll jump into some of these others.
Jerzy Gregorek: Well, his brain was virgin, so nothing was there. So he didn’t have history, so he couldn’t really talk about whatever he was doing. He was not doing anything. So I —
Tim Ferriss: Right. There was no content.
Jerzy Gregorek: I wanted to create history in his mind, create something, memory, about something. So one of the things was to give him certificates for the breaking records. So whenever he broke the record, then we printed a diploma. And I asked father to set up a dinner celebration and every time the record was broken in the squat or bench press, we went for a dinner. During this dinner, we gave him a diploma and some other people came and it was this celebration.
And Tae Jin started liking this, was like a star. And after about a year, I saw him, he started talking about this celebration. He talked about math, he talked about poems. And so all of it started becoming his memory, his history, and it was very important. And he also started liking breaking records. He got crazy on jumping up the box, but that came because he wanted to be an adult.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So we’re going to get to the adulthood that might come up immediately. I also just want to give credit where credit is due to the parents. And I don’t know to what extent it was both parents or the father, but driving twice a week. How long was the commute each way?
Jerzy Gregorek: So they were coming twice a week, about one hour and a half driving one way. So they had to have at least four hours to come. Father was devoted, very kind, devoted, and stoic. He was there all the time and you couldn’t really see any irritation in him at all. Loved his son. That was very clear. So he was coming every time. When he couldn’t come, so his mother brought him in. But it was, for them, four hours drive.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a real commitment.
Jerzy Gregorek: So I discussed that with Tae Jin and I told Tae Jin how devoted was his father. Eventually when we started having conversation, a philosophical conversation, appreciative conversation. So I tried to pass on him the appreciation of his father and launch the imagination about his father. If the father was not committed to that for five years to bring his son twice a week and every time spend four hours and the money, then I told Tae Jin, “You wouldn’t be who you are today. He helped you to become what you are.”
Tae Jin, it was interesting. He was just, sometimes, “Look!” and you could see that he was thinking about something. Sometimes he like it, the most joy that I saw in him, he was breaking the records and some videos are there. It was just like —
Tim Ferriss: It’s in the doc.
Jerzy Gregorek: — he was so joyous. That is like when you see children sometimes, very joyous that in that moment, that nothing else happens. And it was ecstatic. It was just so pleasurable to see.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. More like an athlete winning gold at the Olympics on the platform.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk, as promised, about responsibility in adulthood, which was a crafty strategy on your part. Could you speak to that?
Jerzy Gregorek: He didn’t want to play piano at first.
Tim Ferriss: Because he had been required to take piano lessons.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. Yeah. So father told him to play piano. And said he didn’t like to come to the workout and training. He didn’t like the training.
Tim Ferriss: So he didn’t like the piano and he didn’t like the training.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. And then he said, “I want to stop the piano.” And I said, “Well, you’re not an adult. You cannot do it. Somebody needs to decide for you. But when you become an adult, you can stop the piano. You don’t have to come here for the training.” I said, “Well, then what is the adult?” So we started discussing it. I said, “What do you think?” And he started discussing what is really an adult.
So I said, “Well, adult is independent.” What does it mean, independent? So working, making money, living somewhere separately and so on and so on. But then I said, “But there’s other thing that we can consider you an adult. If you jump on an 18-inch box,” right? So he was jumping, at that time, around 11, 12 box.
Tim Ferriss: 11, 12 inches?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. He got so excited and he thought that he can conquer it very quickly. And he was on a mission with this box, I tell you. He was like the energy that was generated in him, well, it’s the same energy like in me when I wanted to go to Olympics, right?
Tim Ferriss: He was motivated.
Jerzy Gregorek: I would run to the forest at 2:00 a.m., whatever was needed to do, I would do. And I would do with lots of energy and with just commitment. And so he was committed. He wanted to jump. But I knew that six inches, it will take two years because micro-progression is there. He was not going to do it easily, but we were on and we were on and on. And then he came to, I think about like 17-something inches. He was so excited. And then we ended up with some problems and he had to heal his back because it’s not so simple to just jump on the 18. It was a huge challenge for him.
Tim Ferriss: When people watch the documentary, and I would have mentioned this in the introduction, but I made a short link, doesn’t sound short, but easy to remember link that’ll point you straight to it on YouTube. If you just go to tim.blog/hardchoices, if you go to tim.blog/hardchoices, it’ll take you straight to the doc. But when you watch the doc and you look at Tae Jin’s before, what his motion, motor control, walking looked like before and imagine him jumping onto a 17-inch box. It is unimaginable when you look at the starting point. Really just incredible.
Now I want to hear you explain another development that I think is just so compelling and that is related to math, right? So he starts memorizing license plate numbers. You’re also working with him on repetitions and building up some of that arithmetic muscle. How did he go from that to doing math five to six hours a day and having that fire lit with him?
Jerzy Gregorek: Well, it was progressive.
Tim Ferriss: It was progressive, but that’s why I’m asking. How did he get there?
Jerzy Gregorek: So first I started really working on the counting. So he had to count from until 20 or 30.
Tim Ferriss: I just want to pause to just let people have that sink in for a second. Math five to six hours a day, which again, we’re going to talk about the journey.
Jerzy Gregorek: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Most people on 20 cups of coffee a day could not do five to six hours of math a day.
Jerzy Gregorek: So I asked him about the counting. First was the counting, that he couldn’t count to 20. So I said, “Okay, let’s count to 15. Can you count to 15?” So we counted to 15. When he got to 15, I said, “You go home and you start learning to count to 20.” So he came back and I tested him. “Did you count to 20?” “Yeah.” “So, okay, count.” So he counted.
So then I add the addition, “How much is five plus seven?” He wouldn’t know. So homework, going homework, you learn how much is five by six, seven, eight, nine, all the calculation up to 24, the adding, then subtraction, division, multiplication, all of it until the number 10 or 20. Then counting to 30, 40, 50, 100. And when we got there, I told that he needs a tutor. We need a tutor, math tutor, and English tutor. He needs both.
And so they hired people to help. And then, so I was testing, of course, but he had these tutors. So I think that it was an amazing addition to work on his brain. And I noticed the same story with other cerebral palsy people that have difficulties with math. And some of them that I saw that they had good English, but math looks like difficulties.
So eventually when he progressed with energy, with bench press, he came to the certain point within a year that he could press about 100 pounds. And that gave him enough energy that he could go to his computer and spend hours on the computer to study his elementary school. He started, actually, elementary school. And because he was not in elementary school, so he was 25 years old when he’s sick. So he joined this program, elementary school program, and he started working through it on his own.
And after two years, he passed the whole elementary school. Then he started high school, another two years, and he passed. Normal high school, I know a normal, the same program as other people. And father said,” Tae Jin is on fire. It’s 2:00 a.m. and he’s still on his computer and he started 8:00 p.m. And at 2:00 a.m. he’s on his computer and he doesn’t want to stop.” For something in him awakened and [it was] powerful.
And at the same time, he started noticing that who he was as a person, that actually he was a person and he [had] cerebral palsy. And that generated a lot of negativity in him, a lot of resentment to his father and mother. And then he started really talking that he hates his mother and then he did everything at that time.
Tim Ferriss: That was before.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Before, yeah. And just to flash forward, right? I mean, his father’s reported that he’s living in independent existence, taking care of his own needs, planning his own days, orders Uber, rides to get to his classes, manages his own paperwork. So that’s the after.
What did you notice in terms of, and how did you cultivate this if you did? I don’t know if you did this deliberately or if it was a byproduct of everything else, but emotional range or facial expressions. Did any of that change over the course of the training?
Jerzy Gregorek: Emotionally, he was blank, the same, so for a long time.
Tim Ferriss: You mean in whatever circumstances?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. But at a certain point, he started being negative and expressing his negativity. And then he made these moves and I couldn’t see where he was. I was looking for where he was, but I addressed negativity as something that needed to be fixed. So whenever he said that he hated something, I challenged it, challenged it in a way, “Why is it good?”
So he was negative, but then why police is good? Why the sun is good? Why the father is good? Why the mother is good? So expanding and expanding imagination for him so he could facilitate this, so he could find in his mind, actually, acceptance that actually is a good thing. It’s a huge shift in his psyche believing and liking people, right? He never liked me. It’s just like, “I don’t like you.” And he says, “I don’t like you.”
Tim Ferriss: How long did he say that for?
Jerzy Gregorek: All the time. He’s never liked me.
Tim Ferriss: So he’ll celebrate and give you a high-five for your training, but still.
Jerzy Gregorek: I don’t know even today if he likes me, probably not. I created a lot of hard choices for him. So he went out, eventually he will come to this point that he will maybe like what I had done maybe, but not really me.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. That’s amazing. Well, you know what? As long as you don’t care about the credit, you’re doing good work in the world.
Jerzy Gregorek: Well, it’s not really, I was not there to shine.
Tim Ferriss: Of course, of course. Could you talk about helping him or asking him to identify heroes a bit? That also stuck out to me. Could you provide a little bit of context to people on that piece of the puzzle?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. So he was already in elementary school and he was writing an essay about a hero.
Tim Ferriss: That was an assignment?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yes. And he wrote it.
Tim Ferriss: From school, not from you?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, from school because he already had a tutor, English tutor. So he was always proud that when he did something, he was bringing something and reading me. So he read it. And so he wrote about Genghis Khan and I said, “Okay, so is Genghis Khan a hero?” “Yeah.” Okay. So I said, “Well, why he is a hero?” He talked a little bit. And I said, “So who is a hero?”
Well, that created a philosophical approach. So we ended up that the hero is really risking their own life for others to save others, but that’s not Genghis Khan. I said, “Genghis Khan was not that. He was a conqueror, but he was not a hero.” And then at the same time, I watched this movie about admiral, actually Korean admiral, about 300 Japanese ships were coming to Korea to conquer them. And he, with one ship and 12, and he stood up to them. And actually the 12 ships, the people didn’t want to fight, wanted to surrender.
He said, “No.” And he fought and he fought and these other 12 ships joined him eventually and the whole armada, Japanese armada turned back. And I said, “That is a hero.” And I said, “That is your hero from Korea and you are going to rewrite this essay.” “But it’s too late.” I said, “It’s not too late. You’re going to go to your teacher, you tell the teacher why Genghis Khan was not a hero and you want to write the essay.” “Okay.” I said, “Okay, you go and do it.” And he did and he wrote the essay, the teacher agreed.
Tim Ferriss: I can see why he might not like you.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s pretty fair.
Jerzy Gregorek: It was very quick. Think about it, I was coaching him —
Tim Ferriss: I understand the purpose.
Jerzy Gregorek: He was jumping, he was lifting, and at the same time we did poetry, math, English, write all of it together. And it was quick, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Hard teachers in his life.
Jerzy Gregorek: Why he wouldn’t like me. I don’t know why? Just there are many reasons. But one day he wanted to step on the six-inch box, I remember, and he tries to step and he would not step.
Tim Ferriss: And this is the one foot up.
Jerzy Gregorek: Stepping one foot and like on a stair, right?
Tim Ferriss: And then stepping up.
Jerzy Gregorek: He was, “I couldn’t make it.”So I grabbed his shirt and pull him —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen the video.
Jerzy Gregorek: — in a knot. And after about two times, I left him and he was jumping on this box like one of another stepping one, one, one, and so fast. It’s just amazing what the brain is. You get a little bit help and suddenly the door opens up and it’s the progression is huge and fast. It’s amazing. I tell you, what I was watching, what I learned during this process, wow.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Even to this day, I know that modern science has come to a greater appreciation of brain plasticity and the malleability and adaptability. And of course, just as the, let’s call it broadly speaking, this is simplification, but the control center for the entire body, right? The brain’s job is to keep the body alive. So they’re dance partners.
There is just so much room for improvement. And a lot of the science that I’ve supported has been related to this, but this was the first time I’d ever seen such an amazing transformation in someone with a cerebral palsy that was so clearly and well documented also, right? And I want to talk about next steps in a little bit to try to expand this into a study. But before we get there, can you speak to training logic? So I think that was after about two years of already training with him, but working on his thought process using poetry. Why did you do that?
Jerzy Gregorek: He couldn’t really read the lines of poetry and understand the feelings, emotions behind. So then I started really doing the math and seeing whether he can think logically, right? So I tested him if A is B and B is C. So he’s A, he’s also C and playing these games.
And slowly he started not only being logical in — I asked him about writing something about what is logic and give me the example. And so he would bring me, “Was there logic or not?” So we tested that and then added the math, but the most difficult for him was to read a line of poetry and know the metaphor, not really what really happened, but what was the meaning of the line?
Tim Ferriss: Behind the words, not just the words.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. And every line. So when I asked him to remember and recite the poem, he would recite the poem. And then we analyzed the poem every line of the line after line. And what is the meaning? What is the feeling of the line? And that was an amazing possibility for him to learn the language and the feelings behind the language, the emotions. At the beginning, he didn’t have any clue about the feelings, what the actually written words express when it comes to feelings.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. When I think about your entire coaching experience with Tae Jin, I’m struck by how many different levers you were able to help him pull, right? But one that meta lesson that pops out to me, and I’d love for you to correct this if I’m not thinking about it the right way, is that he didn’t respond to people in conversation, right? Didn’t have much of a response in part, and I’m projecting here, because he didn’t have the belief that he could. He had no history to support the belief that he could, right?
And then with physical movement, similar, right? And you gave the example, I mean, this is a very fast example, but of grabbing the shirt and forcing him to do it. And then within a few repetitions, you let go and he’s doing it on his own. And of course, there’s the progression over time, but even with the poetry and how you gave him assignments to practice public speaking, right, without that, he wouldn’t have had the confidence to then speak, say, within the more complicated context of school with classmates and things like that.
I have to imagine, right? But I sometimes have listeners or readers ask me, “What can I read to develop more confidence?” And I’m like, “Well, you can try to read to develop more confidence, but really, you’re not going to fool yourself. You need to do things to develop the history of doing things so that you have confidence.” But does that resonate or would you add or reframe that somehow?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, of course, what you say, it’s a certain perspective, but I would like to tell you about my perspective.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s what I’m asking.
Jerzy Gregorek: So I saw the mind, the brain as something that needs to find the way forward and find the way around those patches that were dead. And I saw it everywhere. I saw it in math when you cannot know what is two plus two that is four, and you struggle. For me, the child struggles to find out what is two plus two.
Eventually, the child knows, and so there are certain connections already. And then two plus three and so on. So development of math, I saw crucial here, very important, that when I am not there, he can practice actually the math. And by practicing the math, we overcome this many steps, steps of progression, the micro-progression. And also that challenge has this plasticity of the brain, that plasticity is not — I thought, okay, I make him strong doesn’t mean that something else is going to happen, or maybe I will not make him strong because the math is not developed.
So I saw the connection between the squat, the bench, the numbers, the words, and the beliefs, and philosophy. I saw connections everywhere, and I created the challenges, the hard choices every time, everywhere. For me, bench pressing, going from 100 pounds to 102 was not different than to know what is 15 plus 17.
It is if I know what is 15 plus 17 is another thing that when it happens, something happened in the brain that was not there before. And I started facilitating all this development of the brain that would be challenged, developed from different perspective. And I think that eventually the research needs to be done. I try to understand what I’ve done because I’ve never really worked with a person like that. So I try to understand too, what happened there, how did it happen. And whether there is possibility even to replicate this and help so many people. Tae Jin’s progress is amazing, crazy, amazing, magical. And if that could be replicable, wow, we could help a lot of people.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about it because before we started recording, I was trying to get an idea of the rough number of cerebral palsy diagnoses in the US. And you’re based in Northern California, so I wanted to get an idea in California. These are real back of the napkin, rough internet responses, but it seems like, let’s call it roughly one million diagnoses in the US potentially. And then that could be occurrence in that diagnoses, but somewhere between 100 and 120,000 in California alone. So this is a non-trivial condition. It’s very prevalent.
And if you could develop a method through doing research, develop a method that you mentioned could be replicated, could be taught to physical therapists, then this could have a tremendous impact on a wide scale. And maybe we could talk about what some of your thoughts are. And I’m going to create a web form for people who want to potentially indicate interest in certain facets of this, but what might the program look like?
How many patients would you have? What would it look like in practice to do a research project to determine if you can formulate a method that would be replicable or a template maybe with a little bit of tweaking here and there that physical therapists could use or others?
Jerzy Gregorek: Meantime, I had some experience with other cerebral palsy people. And my approach is one, that I believe that everybody can improve. So it really doesn’t matter for me is it cerebral palsy or not. If it’s chronic fatigue, it can happen. If it’s fibromyalgia, the progress can happen.
So with cerebral palsy, when we think about cerebral palsy people, they have different conditions, different beginnings. The most important is to find where is beginning, where to start is one of the major thing, because usually I think that we want too much, it’s not going to happen. So we need to find this very tiny thing.
You remember Jewel in Hawaii, you helped me to go and coach her. And she was 18 at that time, and she couldn’t control her head and arms and legs. So her mother would hold her, and I would try to find out where is the beginning with her. And she has, hands like this and it was moving. And I found out that I pointed to one place. I took a ball very close to her, about an inch from her arm and then fingers and asked her to touch it. And she struggle and struggle. And we found a way where actually she could touch it and she was so happy when she touched. Oh, I have to send you these videos.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please.
Jerzy Gregorek: It’s just you can cry when you can see things like this. And her joy when she was doing it. So also the math. I found out that her mind was very good with stories. She could talk about some things and she loved the stories to listen to stories, but her math was not really different than Tae Jin’s.
She could only count from one to 10. And then adding two plus five she would. And then we would start with that. So I see the math is major part of that method. The physical is of course the beginning. The beginning is how strong they are and how flexible they are. Flexibility is the main point here because the awkwardness comes from both. One thing that the brain, the mind cannot control those places, but those places also the parts of the body became that way. So that’s why awkwardness is coming in.
So the physical and the physical improvement of the physical becomes challenging because they can injure themselves. They can be in pain. And those two who will facilitate, they will need to know how to start, how to use the micro-progression, how to write everything down.
Tae Jin knew all his numbers. He knew how to measure the time of five or 10 jumps. And he would write all the jumps and brought me to the gym what he did. His homework was numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. Not only the numbers of counting, but also the numbers of measure.
Tim Ferriss: So just to hop in for a second, because I would love to help, of course, that’s part of the reason we’re doing this conversation is to help facilitate trying to create some type of template that can be applied to a lot of people with cerebral palsy. Not to bury the lead, the short link will just be tim.blog/CP and we’ll have a web form for people who may want to help from an academic perspective, ideally in Northern California, somewhere within near driving distance since you would want to be there. I think the thought is maybe twice a week with these different folks, something like that.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, I see that about maybe five cerebral palsy people and meeting them twice a week, let’s say Tuesday and Friday, and for one year and then add another five, so now it’s 10, another five. And do it for five years.
Tim Ferriss: Five years in total?
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. Record everything, see how it works, bring therapists or others that could actually watch, observe, and learn. And I believe that this replicability is possible. We need to test it, right? We need to explore how is it really possible? What can we actually do when we have this 25 people?
It could be that it was because I was there, but I don’t want to say that it was because of me everything happened. It could be that perfect storm happened because I was a math teacher, I’m a poet, I’m a weightlifter. So all of it happened that I was this one person facilitating that. But when we do research, we don’t have to have one person. We can have math people, English, and philosophers, and we can have trainers. We can create a center. And in that center, we can think about how we can progress, how we can improve and document everything in details the same way as I was doing. Micro-progression is an amazing power.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it strikes me also that with the right people involved and with the right consistency, right? And I mean, you might need a faculty member to agree to spearhead it. And then there would be fundraising, which is pretty straightforward to figure out. And then they would have postdocs or people underneath them would help with recruitment, although I don’t think that’ll be a problem after this podcast, patient recruitment, and then making the trains run on time.
But I could see a path, as I’m sure you’ve thought about this much more than I have, but where you could end up with something like a core curriculum of principles that you’re teaching. And maybe you’re recording video modules to explain these things to practitioners where it’s like micro-progressions, finding a place to start. What are different ways to find a place to start?
And then perhaps there are certain things that won’t apply to everyone. So for instance, we didn’t talk about, we don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but Tae Jin was kind of crumpled to the right side, right? So you had a ball hanging from the ceiling that you would have him reach up to touch to help correct that.
Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. With the posture.
Tim Ferriss: There might be core curriculum and principles and then ancillary principles and techniques that can be applied on a case by case basis, but then you end up with this core curriculum that people can learn remotely or something like that. I mean, it’s really exciting to think about.
Jerzy Gregorek: I think that at this point, I see that we can assess these people from five perspectives. I think the physical perspective, where they are physically, where is the flexibility, where is the strength, math perspective, language perspective, philosophy perspective, beliefs perspective, where they are. So easily we can take the psychology and then psychologists and develop certain ways of assessing them where our beliefs, right?
In math, it’s very clear, right? In the language, probably English teachers and they will create very quickly curriculum to find out where is the level of that. And then once we have assess, okay, we have a physical problem that is 80 percent, math is only three percent. The person is really good at math in English as well. But we can have also that math is not there at all and walking is good. So there are all possibilities how we can assess from this five perspective, these people, but we need to also explore and experience them, right? There’s not only one person, Tae Jin, because it’s just only one person. Now we need to see, can we actually do with five? Can we actually deliver what we delivered?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, this is the scientific method, right? And you have such a fantastic starting point, right? It’s an N of one, although you’ve worked with more than one person with cerebral palsy at this point, but let me just give the URL again. So for people who might be interested, this is, if you are at Stanford or UCSF or San Jose State or someplace that might be able to help with this type of research, if you are in a financial position and would like to support this type of research, go to tim.blog/cp or if you have other resources you want to bring to bear on this in some way. Tim.blog/cp, standing for cerebral palsy. So tim.blog/cp and just fill out the web form. I’m incredibly excited about this.
We covered a lot in our first conversation. We’ve covered a lot in this conversation. Is there anything else that you’d like to mention or cover that we haven’t gotten to already today?
Jerzy Gregorek: What a question.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jerzy Gregorek: Well, yeah, we covered a lot, but I think one of the most important thing is that people can get help and if we have the right approach, we can facilitate, create it. And of course, they change, right? We didn’t change them. So we have to remember that we are facilitators. We are not really cultures that created the powerful human being, that actually powerful human being created themselves. And we have to create a place where it’s athletically aligned with athleticism and not care only.
We know, I see that as soon as we care or we exercise without mission or purpose or goals, then we can exercise for 10 years and never change. So I saw these people, thousands of these people, right? So it doesn’t apply only to cerebral palsy people because it applies everywhere else. But with cerebral palsy, because it’s very interesting because they have this situation in the mind, in the brain that actually we could work with, that these are the patches in the brain that we can create the peripheral nervous system that actually goes around. We can create that mind, that plasticity of the mind we can create.
I think I have a strong feeling that this is possible. I always believe that it can be done. I just created challenges, constant challenges with Tae Jin that could deliver the results, the change, the why wanted. It has to be always the, where are you going with it? So for me, he had to walk straight, he had to walk soft. And for me, I would not sleep until I would get it.
So we need devoted people. We need people that are devoted to these people to help them, not just physical therapists that want us to make money and go home. This is a huge challenge.
These people are extremely challenging and we need to also challenge them. And by the creating this challenge, we can create amazing things actually. So it is not something that somebody has cancer and it will get worse. That’s not the situation here. It’s a unique situation with cerebral palsy people that we have the situation that somebody is and somebody doesn’t change for worse.
Somebody is like that. Can’t change for worse too because life happens, but because people are like that, we have very clear slate to begin with and we are not dealing with ill people, sick people. We’re just dealing with people who mechanically something happened to their brain. And that can create for us a really great beginning. And it could be that with almost any cerebral palsy, something like this return to, I wouldn’t say they cannot return because many of them, they are just that way. So they cannot return anywhere, but they can improve and become like Tae Jin become Tae Jin that is going to college from the person that was only waiting for food and sleep and couldn’t go to toilet and was lethargic all the time.
The life was like that for him and that life would be like that, right? If nothing happened, what actually we did. He would be that person. And the parent, here’s the parents. The parents, I saw happy parents, but after three, four years, they actually, they were like a ticking bomb, you said about intensity between these three people, right? But about three, four years, I saw them happy first time,
Happy. And that is enough to fight for, right? To give everything, whatever you have, to create the happiness in this three people who were worrying all the time what will happen if they die, what will happen if something happened to them. Now they don’t have to worry anymore.
Tae Jin is completely independent. He’s in college for Christ’s sake. Just imagine that. And a lot of that, I believe, 100 percent that can happen with everyone.
Tim Ferriss: The Happy Body micro-progressions, your philosophies and philosophy, might scare people off. Your principles can be applied to so many different things that you and Aniela have developed over the years. Really want to make this research project happen.
So folks, if you’re interested in any way helping with that, in whatever capacity, you go to tim.blog/CP and then also want to mention just like the way that you and Aniela coach can be applied almost certainly to many different conditions, many different circumstances, all circumstances in some sense. I want to give a shout-out to Jeff Wolfe, the director of Prisoner, No More.
I always ask everybody before I talk to them or do anything with them, what would make it truly a home run? And he just mentioned the bigger opportunity is to position Prisoner, No More, not just as a standalone short, but as a proof of concept for a larger series. The vision is a slate under the same umbrella. So you could have Prisoner, No More for alcoholism, Prisoner, No More for fill in the blank, right? Which I think is also very exciting.
So I really, really hope people, you’ve got to watch it. You’ve got to see what we’re talking about visually. It’ll just — a lot of you are going to cry. I’m going to tell you in advance, but it’s good cry. So check it out, tim.blog/hardchoices in honor of —
Jerzy Gregorek: Choices.
Tim Ferriss: Hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life. So tim.blog/hardchoices, check it out. You can find The Happy Body and more on Jerzy and Aniela’s training at thehappybody.com. And I’ll link to everything in the show notes as usual at tim.blog/podcast. So if you’re like, that’s a lot to remember, don’t worry about it. Just go to tim.blog/podcast and search Jerzy, not spelled like New Jersey, but spelled J-E-R-Z-Y. And trust me, there’s only one Jerzy on my website. It’s Jerzy Gregorek. Jerzy, thank you so much for the time. It’s always great to see you.
Jerzy Gregorek: Thank you, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: And everybody, thanks for listening. We’ll grab a bite to eat tonight with the whole gang. And everybody who has tuned in as always, I appreciate you. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. But not just comfort. Don’t just make yourself feel better.
Don’t just eat that cheeseburger and watch reality TV on Netflix. Challenge yourself. Wherever you happen to be, you can make progress. You can make amazing progress. You just need to find the right starting point. And for that reason, check out the happybody.com. Listen to my first conversation with Jerzy on the podcast as well. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
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