When I worked for the Lakers, our general manager came down to my office one morning with an instruction.

We were going to do the butterfly stretch. All of us. In a circle. That morning.

This was a significant departure from everything we had been doing all season. He is the boss, so I said okay. But I asked why.

"Because back in the 80s, when we were winning championships with Magic Johnson and Pat Riley, this is how we did it."

That story has stayed with me for a long time. Not because of the stretch. Because of what it represents.

Fitness, exercise, and health are what I call a sacred cow. A sacred cow is something you do not question. You do not think you know it. You know it. And it does not even matter whether what you know is actually true. The questioning simply does not occur to you.

Walk into any gym and look around. The vast majority of people are going at it alone. A very small percentage have hired someone to take them through the process. The rest already know what fitness is.

The problem is that most of them are wrong.

When you work at the professional level, your job is to extract every last ounce of performance potential from the human body. To do that, you have to understand the body at a level of depth and detail that most people never encounter. You also have to have a much more honest relationship with what peak performance actually is.

That was the work of my first decade.

When I left professional sports and entered the general public, the gap between those two worlds was profound. What I was watching people do in gyms bore almost no resemblance to what I had spent years doing with professional athletes.

That gap is where my philosophy was born.

Chronic pain does not exist inside of a body at peak performance.

The good news is that you do not need to train like a professional athlete to be out of pain. You do not need to go anywhere near that end of the spectrum. You simply need to meet the minimum requirements of what a healthy, functioning body actually is.

For the people who come through our doors with pain that nobody has been able to explain, it is not a mystery here. What we see is a massive gap between what the body is capable of and the way it is currently performing. Our job is to close that gap. Identify the weak points. Identify the systems that are contributing most significantly to the breakdown. All of that is done inside the genMAX assessment.

And then we show up every day and do the work.

That is the whole thing. Find the gap. Close the gap. The body does the rest.

If you want to know where your gap is, your genMAX score will show you exactly that. You can get yours for free at SaintBartholomew.com/score.

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