Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Iron Culture. It is me, Eric Trexler, the only Eric

today. Eric Helms essentially refused to be part of this podcast interview. Mark, something you

should know is that Eric Helms and I co-host Iron Culture, and at every possible opportunity, he tries to come in and give all sorts of sporting updates about a powerlifting program on this side of the world, a powerlifting competition on this side of the world, an Olympic weightlifting competition over here.

So he's all about detailed rundowns of the results of these true iron sports.

And I try to take every opportunity to work in American football. That is my first love as a guy from Ohio. So every time I start talking about football, he glazes over. Sometimes I feel like one of these days he's just going to leave.

So he's actually traveling right now, but I figured while he's gone, I'm going to take advantage.

And we're going to talk a little bit of football. So that brings me to our guest for tonight.

The esteemed Dr. Mark Lewis, he's the director of Applied Sports Science for the Houston Texans. That's an NFL team here in the U.S. for our international listeners. And so Houston's not your first stop. You've been doing sports science and strength and conditioning stuff all over the place, Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, Penn State, and now, of course, in the NFL with the Houston Texans.

And according to your bio, this job involves overseeing the collection management and

analysis of data to inform decision-making to maximize player performance and availability.

So, Mark, first and foremost, thank you so much for joining us.

It's a pleasure to be here, Eric.

Really excited.

Yeah, so I'm really excited to have you on because I talk more than I should about data and statistics.

You know, so in the universe of evidence-based fitness content, there's going to be some people who talk a lot of

physiology, some people who talk a lot of, you know, in the trenches, training type stuff. I spend

more time than anyone would advise talking about data and statistics because it's what excites me.

So I like to kind of take that approach. And man, if I knew about the field of sport science when I was

growing up, there's about a 99.9% chance I would have been on that trajectory from day one.

Like just for a little insight, I always felt like I wanted to be a strength coach. And in my mind,

my idea of a strength coach was a man who quietly walks around with a

clipboard and takes meticulous notes and basically studies the athletes as if they are research

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