Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:04 Hello, hello, hello, boys and girls, ladies, and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another
0:00:09 episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class
0:00:14 performers from all different domains, entertainment, military, sports, business,
0:00:19 investing. We’ve done 800 of these conversations, and every one is different.
0:00:24 Every one is intended to be tactical for you, the listener, to give you things that you can
0:00:30 take away and apply. And this episode is dense. We have a lot that you can apply. I just finished
0:00:36 a very short 10-minute workout. We might call it microdosing movement. That’s going to come up
0:00:44 in this episode designed by none other than today’s guest, and it is amazing. It is so fantastic. You
0:00:52 get so much from so little. And who is today’s guest? Ensima Iyong. That is Nigerian folks,
0:00:57 although he’s American, of course, but his background is Nigerian. And that is the spelling
0:01:02 that I will emphasize because you are going to want to check this guy out everywhere you can.
0:01:11 Ensima, N-S-I-M-A, and then last name I-N-Y-A-N-G. And Ensima is a strength athlete,
0:01:16 but he’s a lot more than that. He’s a movement coach and co-host of Mark Bell’s Power Project.
0:01:20 Hello, Mark Bell. Been a while. Lovely to hear your name and to see your name and to read your name.
0:01:25 And that has become one of the top fitness podcasts in the world for very good reasons.
0:01:32 Ensima himself is also one of the most freakishly athletic humans I have ever met in my life. And
0:01:39 that is saying a lot. I have met a lot of mutants, but what he’s done is incredible. And let me give
0:01:45 you an example. He’s a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He’s been to Masters World Championships
0:01:49 multiple time, won twice at Brown Belt, a professional natural bodybuilder. He plays
0:01:55 top five in the world, and an elite level power lifter, which includes things like 750 plus pound
0:02:02 deadlifts. But what really sets him apart is how he blends these things together, these different worlds
0:02:07 with unconventional training tools, including things like rope flow, which is actually how I was
0:02:15 introduced to him. And my goal with inviting him to this podcast was to help myself to be pain-free
0:02:23 and to also really regain my athletic footing. I’m not just interested in having big arms or a six-pack.
0:02:27 I don’t really care that much about those things. I want to be an athlete. I want to be able to move
0:02:30 not just now, but for decades and decades and decades.
0:02:36 And after 20 years or so of lifting and martial arts, Encima has developed a very unique approach
0:02:42 to helping people build muscle, move better, and stay pain-free for life. He is the founder of The
0:02:47 Stronger Human, a growing online community focused on strength, movement, and resilience. With hundreds
0:02:52 of thousands of people following his YouTube content, which I highly, highly recommend, his mission is
0:02:56 simple, help people feel powerful in their bodies again without relying solely on machines,
0:03:00 cookie-cutter workouts, or the fitness industry’s outdated rules.
0:03:05 And he does turn a lot upside down in this conversation, and there are a lot of recommendations.
0:03:08 We have links to everything, of course.
0:03:15 So you can find the Stronger Human community, which I am going to be a part of, at school.com.
0:03:18 That’s S-K-O-O-L dot com slash the Stronger Human.
0:03:22 You can find all of the various products and so on that we refer to in this conversation
0:03:28 at the Stronger Human dot store. And certainly on YouTube, Instagram, and so on. You can find
0:03:38 him at Encima E. Young, but that is spelled, once again, N-S-I-M-A-I-N-Y-A-N-G. And one last
0:03:44 thing, if you want visuals of all the exercises and so on that we discuss in this conversation,
0:03:51 you can find them as B-roll. It’s been added to this interview at YouTube.com slash Tim Ferriss.
0:03:56 Okay, that’s quite an intro. I’m going to leave it at that. This is very dense. I am using what
0:04:01 I learned. I am benefiting from what I learned from Encima. So just a few words from the people
0:04:06 who make this podcast possible, and then we’ll get right into the meat and potatoes. Please enjoy.
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0:07:38 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:07:40 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:07:43 Now would it seem an appropriate time?
0:07:44 What if I did the opposite?
0:07:48 I’m a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
0:07:52 The Tim Ferriss Show.
0:08:00 And Seema, nice to see you. Thanks for being here in Austin.
0:08:00 Yeah, thank you.
0:08:09 And I thought we would start with a little setting of the table, defining of terms. What on earth is
0:08:14 powerlifting? You are an elite level powerlifter. What does that mean? What is the sport of powerlifting
0:08:17 and what are your totals and what does that even mean?
0:08:23 So the sport of powerlifting is concentrated above the three big lifts, the squat, bench, and deadlift,
0:08:26 the holy grail of traditional lifts. In a meet, you have three attempts.
0:08:30 Three attempts at a squat, three attempts at a bench, three attempts at a deadlift in that order.
0:08:34 Ideally, you’re aiming for a nine out of nine. There’s geared powerlifting where you have suits,
0:08:38 but that’s not as popular nowadays. I did raw powerlifting. Mark Bell, who’s the host of the
0:08:42 Mark Bell’s Power Project, he was a big geared lifter. And then he did some raw at the end of
0:08:46 his career. For what I managed to get, I think I got eight out of nine at my last meet.
0:08:55 I got a 622 squat, a 396 bench. I wasn’t quite at 405 and I never got 405 and a 755 pound deadlift.
0:09:01 So my total was 1758. Not on record, but what I’ve, my gym lifts for powerlifting still never got the
0:09:07 405 bench, but I managed to squat 645 a little bit after that meet. I believe I deadlift 775 after that
0:09:09 All right. Yeah. So you lift.
0:09:16 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I lift. And I still like lifting contrary to popular belief in some of the
0:09:19 things that I’ve put out. People think I don’t think lifting is good for you when I don’t like
0:09:25 lifting. Lifting is good for you. You just, I was surprised how much jazzercise you do and how many
0:09:30 celery sticks you ate at lunch. I’m kidding. All right. So you have some bona fides and actually I was
0:09:36 joking earlier. It’s not so much joking, reminiscing that the first time I went to super training gym
0:09:41 with Mark Bell, who’s an old friend. I’ve known Mark for a long time. Amazing character.
0:09:49 Yes. In Sacramento, I saw you doing deadlift workout and I was just like, what the hell is
0:09:55 happening over there? For people who may have gone to a gym before, they maybe even have put on 45 pound
0:09:59 plates. Like what are we talking in terms of numbers of plates? What does it look like when you’re
0:10:05 deadlifting the, your current personal best? At that time, you know, I was probably deadlifting in the
0:10:14 700 type of realm. So working sets would be maybe five, six plates. So that’s 495, 585 above for sets of
0:10:20 triples, doubles, some singles here and there. It’s a lot of weight, right? Not weight I’m working with
0:10:23 right now, but it’s a lot of weight you’re working with when you’re focused on powerlifting. You’re
0:10:28 focused on like moving as much weight as possible on a barbell. So yeah, it’s some load.
0:10:38 Now, the way that I found you was through a video on YouTube. You have an excellent channel
0:10:46 and very thought provoking content. And that’s what grabbed me. So what was the headline of this
0:10:47 video?
0:10:49 The Lie of Traditional Training, Why I Moved On.
0:10:54 All right. Lie of Traditional Training, Why I Moved On. I was like, well, that guy looks pretty
0:11:01 jacked. I wish I had those abs and I wish I could tan as easily, but boy can dream. Let me at least
0:11:06 find out what the lies are. And click through. It was actually sent to me by my friend, Kevin Rose.
0:11:15 Yeah. And I certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for that. And maybe you can describe for listeners a
0:11:24 video that grabbed my attention and it was video of a man, I believe it was, with no arms and legs.
0:11:26 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What is this video?
0:11:30 So Serge Grakovetsky is the guy who wrote The Spinal Engine, which is a book that I referenced in that
0:11:35 video. It’s a video that he showed of a man that’s moving through space with no arms and no legs. And when
0:11:41 most people think about typical human locomotion, it’s thought that the arms and legs are the
0:11:45 driver’s locomotion. You swing your arms, you swing your legs forward, you move forward through space.
0:11:52 Well, this pretty much torso is rotating through space without arms and legs. And you can see the
0:11:57 rotation. And he’s sort of quote unquote walking, right? I mean, he’s moving forward in space.
0:12:03 Yes. Yes. But you see that natural figure eight rotation of the spine that’s moving him through space.
0:12:08 So in that book, The Spinal Engine and Serge’s theory of locomotion is that the spine is the
0:12:13 driver of movement and locomotion. The rotation of the spine helps swing the arms and swing the legs
0:12:18 through space. And for efficient human movement, you want to maintain access to that spinal engine.
0:12:24 And what I was getting at, at that video, wasn’t that we shouldn’t train with barbells or we shouldn’t
0:12:31 train in a neutral spine. But with the focus of traditional lifting being in the sagittal plane,
0:12:37 usually forward and backwards or within that one plane, we are always training the neutral spine
0:12:40 and maintaining that neutral spine through everything we do. So when you’re doing that all
0:12:44 the time in the gym, and there’s also a lack of breathing, which we’ll probably get into later,
0:12:50 but you train this system. When you want to potentially go and transfer it into something else,
0:12:56 you might not have as much access to that spinal engine as you used to. Over time,
0:13:01 that can potentially degrade if you actually, maybe you never really had that. And it gets worse
0:13:07 training in the gym. And the examples I gave in that video is examples from sports that you see this
0:13:11 type of training allotted. It’s powerlifting, bodybuilding, Olympic lifting.
0:13:13 You’re talking about the sagittal plane.
0:13:13 The sagittal plane.
0:13:20 Now, can you just help people visualize what that means? Sagittal, let’s just say you’re standing in
0:13:26 a very narrow hallway with walls on either side and you’re bending forward. You can extend backwards.
0:13:29 Divide your body in half here from the nose, right?
0:13:33 Okay. So you’ve got a line going from your forehead down your nose, splitting your body in half.
0:13:34 That is a sagittal plane.
0:13:34 Got it.
0:13:40 So when we think of a squat, when we think of a deadlift, when we think of a forward lunge is also
0:13:45 still in the sagittal plane, even though it’s a unilateral movement. These are all done in the
0:13:48 sagittal plane with a neutral spine. And these are most of the movements you think about doing a pull-up,
0:13:55 a push-up. The frontal plane divides the body in halves from front and back. So we would imagine
0:13:59 from the head to the toe on the side of the body. That would be something like a Cossack squat,
0:14:04 lodging to the side, a lateral lunge. Those would be the frontal plane. And the transverse plane of
0:14:10 movement would divide the body in half from our torso, our legs down, torso up. So that would have
0:14:16 this rotation of the spine. Those would be those three planes, but then we can get into other ideas
0:14:21 of rotation, which is the things you get into with rope, et cetera. But gym movements are primarily done
0:14:26 when people are training in the sagittal plane with a neutral spine. There isn’t much flexion
0:14:33 or rotation of the spine. You’re strengthening this neutral spine, which is good, but overdoing that
0:14:37 can degrade the ways that you want to be able to move as a human being.
0:14:41 And the way that can show up, I mean, this is very personal for me. And part of the reason it was
0:14:49 very attention-grabbing is, as we’ve discussed earlier today, if people want to get a good laugh,
0:14:55 if you can watch me trying rope flow and throwing around a pink kettlebell in a giant sombrero,
0:15:00 I wish they made a pink kettlebell another color. Cause I was like, man, like this doesn’t, yeah,
0:15:07 it was kind of perfect. It was kind of perfect. So if people want a good laugh, we’ll link to that
0:15:14 as well, our earlier movement practice. But the story that I shared with you is three years of
0:15:20 chronic back pain and a pretty localized to low back. Who knows? I’m sure there’s some referral
0:15:28 happening, but by and large lumbar, this sort of grand central station of musculature called the
0:15:35 quadratus lumborum, the QL and external obliques and all this stuff. I basically get locked and spasmed
0:15:40 in the low back and that can be triggered in any number of ways. Now, on top of that, when I watched
0:15:45 this video, it made me think back to when I was much younger and actually ran cross country
0:15:51 and you have that contralateral movement. If you walk, it’s like, okay, your left shoulder moves
0:15:57 forward as your sort of right leg. And I guess probably hip move forward at the same time,
0:16:04 that contralateral movement. And to emphasize that you had video footage in your video showing
0:16:10 what everyone has seen, which is someone who’s done a lot of lifting, who’s walking down the street and
0:16:15 they have no contralateral movement, or I shouldn’t say they have no contralateral movement, but it looks
0:16:21 like their upper bodies are frozen. It’s a block. It’s a block. And you could potentially say, well,
0:16:27 that person is muscle bound, but that’s not totally accurate in the sense that, correct me if I’m
0:16:33 oversimplifying this, but it seems like they are plane bound because their movement patterns are so
0:16:40 limited that of course, like what you train for, you’re going to get more of. So they have done one
0:16:44 piece that is maybe let’s call it necessary, but not sufficient if you want athletic movement.
0:16:54 And you talked about also resurrecting or improving your own running and just seeing the difference,
0:16:58 not having the expectation that I’m going to become a competitive cross country runner,
0:17:06 but for a very, very long time, and this goes back to even like 2004, 2005, when I was in Argentina doing
0:17:11 tango, trust me, there’s a tie in here. And a bunch of people would laugh at me and they would be like,
0:17:18 you have cintura de pollo, cintura de pollo, which would be like, you have the waist of a chicken,
0:17:22 which like, if you try to think of a chicken doesn’t rotate, doesn’t rotate. And in tango,
0:17:27 they want you to dissociate the upper and lower body. And I had a lot of trouble with that. So
0:17:32 they were like, you have the waist of a chicken. Now I would like to overcome this waist of a chicken
0:17:41 situation and watch the video. One of the exercises you have in that video is rope flow,
0:17:46 which I want you to talk about, but I’ll, I’ll give people just a teaser, which is saw the video.
0:17:51 I was like, logically, this makes a lot of sense to me. All right. Biomechanically makes a lot of
0:17:58 sense. It’s addressing a deficit that I have, but it’s a scary deficit because when I have tried to
0:18:04 really embrace rotation before and the sheer forces involved very often, I either overdo it even with
0:18:09 very low dosing. And in some cases, like the back spasms, I’ve had a commission for a week or two,
0:18:14 like, I really can’t sleep. And so I’ve really stayed away from it, but you showed this rope flow
0:18:20 And I was actually visiting Jake Muse, who’s been on this podcast. He’s the CEO of Maui
0:18:27 Nuve Edison. And we went to this outdoor gym in Hawaii that they’d put together for the team over
0:18:34 there. And there was a rope. I was like, huh, look at that. Okay. Let me try it. And I felt so good
0:18:40 after training. I mean, training is a bit of an exaggeration after playing around with the rope.
0:18:44 And I was like, okay, I want to pay attention to this because when I was really young,
0:18:48 it’s like, okay, let’s do like some metabolic conditioning. Like if I’m not puking into a
0:18:52 bucket, I didn’t train properly or hard enough. But then I started training with people like Jersey
0:18:57 Gregorick, who we spoke about amazing world record holder in Olympic weightlifting. At least he was
0:19:03 masters and other folks where you actually can feel better after the workout than you did beforehand.
0:19:10 So what is this rope flow as an example? And how does it demonstrate or develop the kind of stuff
0:19:12 that we’re alluding to?
0:19:18 I’m really happy that David Weck, he’s the guy who started, invented rope flow.
0:19:18 He has-
0:19:19 The progenitor.
0:19:20 The progenitor of rope flow.
0:19:24 That’s on air, David. Go ahead and clip that, David. He’s going to love that.
0:19:29 He’s the one who developed, popularized, got the moves going. I mean, he came onto our show and
0:19:36 that he showed these videos back in like these 2006, 2005 style videos, right? Him doing rope
0:19:42 flow on like a roof in, I don’t know, San Jose or something or San Diego. And he came and he showed
0:19:43 it to us maybe-
0:19:43 On a roof?
0:19:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:19:45 I’ll bookmark that for later.
0:19:49 I got to send it to you. David’s a character. He’s great. And I’ve learned so much of him,
0:19:54 by the way. I love that guy. Continuing to learn from him too. But back to rope flow.
0:19:58 He came and showed it to us maybe four years ago. And when he mentioned it initially,
0:20:02 I think sometimes when you have a certain amount of experience in training or whatever,
0:20:06 you hear something new and you’re like, okay, trendy or what’s swinging a rope through space
0:20:10 really going to do for you. But through having so many people and talking to and learning from
0:20:15 so many people that have changed the way I move and have affected me positively-
0:20:16 Can I pause for one second?
0:20:17 Yeah, yeah.
0:20:21 Don’t lose your train of thought. Because you do a lot outside of the gym, or I should say
0:20:26 outside of the weight training gym, right? I’m a very, very serious, dedicated jiu-jitsu
0:20:32 practitioner, which is not purely in the sagittal plan, right? It’s a lot more going on.
0:20:37 Jiu-jitsu for me was really fun to start. We can talk about that later. But that’s the
0:20:42 sport I started doing because I realized that all the lifting I was doing had me feeling very
0:20:48 stiff and unathletic. So I got into jiu-jitsu about nine or 10, almost 10 years back to try to
0:20:53 see if I could combat the way my body was feeling, which had its own issues. But rope flow, when
0:20:58 David told me about it initially, I was apprehensive. I got a rope. I started doing it, got frustrated,
0:21:02 dropped it. Kind of like the girl in the park that we met today. You get a rope, you do it
0:21:03 for a little bit, you don’t know what to do, you drop it.
0:21:06 How did he sell it to you? Do you remember kind of what the pitch was?
0:21:11 He talked about all the benefits and he showed it. He even showed me some in the gym, him and
0:21:17 his head coach, Chris Chamberlain. But it didn’t necessarily stick because I didn’t have kind of
0:21:23 like a structure to it. So what I ended up doing was I ended up just like looking at a bunch of people
0:21:27 that I could see on YouTube. I went through some of the videos that David sent me and I just tried to
0:21:32 practice it a little bit each day. Frustration would set in though, because the flow wasn’t happening.
0:21:36 You know, it’s called a rope flow because I think people ask, are there sets, reps, et cetera?
0:21:42 No, you just go, you rotate, you move, you put the rope away, you go do what you do.
0:21:44 It’s not like a workout. It’s a, it’s play.
0:21:45 Yeah. It’s closer to like slacklining.
0:21:51 Exactly. It’s play. It’s a flow practice. But once things started clicking, I started seeing how
0:21:57 it was like affecting my jujitsu. And in my jujitsu, it’s inherently an asymmetrical practice,
0:22:02 the martial art. You have a dominant side and a non-dominant side. So you’ll tend to do things,
0:22:06 whether it’s sweeps, whether it’s takedowns, et cetera, guard passing,
0:22:12 you go that one direction, you grease that dominant groove and your non-dominant side
0:22:16 ends up being just this goofy mess. Right. But I started realizing that.
0:22:20 Oh, that’s just your non-dominant side. No, I’m kidding. I’m saying that about myself.
0:22:25 I’m not going to spar you. No, no, no, no, but seriously. But, but what slowly started happening
0:22:29 was I started noticing like a scissor sweep I’d really do to my right side. I’m now, Ooh,
0:22:34 that left side rotation felt pretty powerful. Like I don’t usually drill that. What happened there?
0:22:39 Ashes to my left side started feeling better. And the reason that was happening was because
0:22:45 when doing rope flow, it’s a symmetrical practice. You learn to rotate using your spine on your
0:22:50 dominant side, but you get that rotation on your other side. And what happens is as you do this back
0:22:55 and forth, naturally you want to make your non-dominant side feel as good as your dominant.
0:23:01 So now your rotation with your spine to the left side of your body or your non-dominant side starts
0:23:06 to feel just as good as your dominant. And you’re moving with more symmetry through everything that
0:23:12 you do. Yeah. And let me add something just with kind of beginner’s eyes. Now that I have a PhD in
0:23:14 rope flow after I work at this point. Let’s go.
0:23:23 Well, I would just say that one of the benefits of something like rope flow from a development of
0:23:30 symmetrical abilities perspective is that you get a lot of reps because you could do something in the
0:23:35 gym that’s aimed at symmetry, but like how many reps and how many sets are you actually going to do
0:23:41 if you’re programming properly? And at what point is your technique going to degrade where you might be
0:23:45 doing more harm than good. Whereas with the rope flow, it’s like, if it doesn’t feel good, you’re
0:23:48 going to know, cause it’s going to be janky. You might whack yourself in the ankle, whack yourself
0:23:54 in the back of the head. Like I did. Whereas if it feels fluid, you’re going to know it feels fluid
0:24:01 and you get a lot of reps. So you have the benefit of volume on your side in developing that water fuel.
0:24:09 So there’s that benefit of volume, but at its most basic level, you learn to navigate that rope,
0:24:13 move it through space while using your spine as the main mover. You learn to do that. Initially,
0:24:17 it’s a very handsy thing as you’re using your hands a lot, but then you learn to follow the weight of the rope
0:24:23 and use your spine, both sides. You notice if you walk after, you now have this natural swagger that starts
0:24:27 to happen when you’re walking, you’re moving through space with that spinal engine.
0:24:30 Yeah. I’m going to try to just paint a visual for people when they’re imagining rope flow.
0:24:35 Cause some people I imagine are not going to really have a video in their mind as we’re talking.
0:24:41 This is going to age me, but I’ll, I’ll try it anyway. So if you imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger,
0:24:48 Conan, the barbarian iconic scene with the sword, with the sword swinging it on either side. Okay. You got it.
0:24:52 You got a sword in front. Now he’s swinging it to either side. Okay. Now imagine instead of the sword,
0:24:58 you have a rope that is whatever this is and I don’t know, inch, inch and a half, two inches thick,
0:25:02 something like that, like a heavy-ish rope. Right. And so now imagine you’re, you’re swinging this rope
0:25:08 around, but instead of just using your hands, let’s just say you bring your hands in closer to your
0:25:17 chest and now you’re creating that figure eight with your shoulders. And that is then swinging the
0:25:22 blade, AKA the rope. Right. So just imagine that kind of movement. Is that fair enough?
0:25:27 Yes. That’s fair. That’s fair. And along with that, it’s not just the spine, it’s the weight shift of
0:25:31 the feet because now you’re shifting from one side to the other, left foot, right foot, left foot,
0:25:36 right foot. Right. And the, one of the reasons why I believe it’s helped so much with my jujitsu
0:25:39 because jujitsu very, it’s a very rotational practice when you’re trying to leverage an opponent
0:25:44 from one side or the other is because my weight shift on both sides of my body has improved from
0:25:51 my feet. So this is one reason why when you start to like do more rope flow and you start to get more
0:25:56 of the underhand side of the underhand practice, you’ve hit a boxing bag before, right? You’ve done
0:26:02 that type of work. Go do that type of work again and do some uppercuts, do some hooks, but remember the
0:26:06 things that you’ve learned. You’re learning how to generate power and rotation from the ground through
0:26:12 your fists. There’s so many people that I’ve seen now that have literally said it’s improved my
0:26:16 punching or I actually know how to throw a punch because I’ve learned how to swing this through
0:26:21 space. Well, so like you were explaining and the underhand, like, okay, so guys, we’re talking about
0:26:25 the Conan and the barbarian thing. We won’t belabor this. We’ll obviously have some video linked if
0:26:31 you’re listening to audio, but imagine that you have the rope. It is behind you, right? You’re dragging a
0:26:36 rope. Let’s just say with two hands on one side, it’s thick rope. And then you pull it up.
0:26:42 And the rope is taking this sort of upward trajectory, like a diagonal. That would be sort
0:26:46 of, I know it’s not the best description, but that’d be like the underhand. Whereas if you’re
0:26:50 like bringing it over your shoulder, like a whip or something, that would be the overhand.
0:26:51 Went to the whip again, Tim.
0:26:51 What was that?
0:26:53 You went to the whip again, Tim.
0:27:00 You know, yeah, you know, this is why you don’t go to your BDSM dungeon the night before
0:27:06 your podcast. It just bleeds over guys. I’m sorry. All right. Guilty as charged. So what
0:27:10 appeals to me, and I mean, this is like my enthusiasm is outstripping my experience. That’s
0:27:15 probably the story of my life. But what the little that I’ve seen of say rope flow as one
0:27:21 tool in the toolkit, part of what appeals to me about it is that like my experience early
0:27:27 on with Pavel and kettlebells, there is this weird, like what the fuck transfer where people
0:27:31 who let’s say do a bunch of kettlebell work suddenly have better running times. And they’re
0:27:36 like, what, what do you mean? What the hell is going on? Right. Or because of the thicker
0:27:41 diameter after over time, they don’t even realize it. But suddenly the limiting factor, which
0:27:46 was their grip on the deadlift has been not entirely removed, but improved dramatically.
0:27:53 And when I looked at the rope flow and I’m like, okay, forget about the rope. It’s a tool
0:28:00 for engaging these other planes of movement. And if done in, we were talking about this earlier today
0:28:05 as well, not necessarily as an hour long workout where you’re just like dying inside, but rather
0:28:10 like flossing your teeth or getting up and taking a shower. It’s like, okay, you take a shower once a
0:28:15 day, like rope flow once a day. And over time, the adaptations that would take place. And one thing I
0:28:19 didn’t tell you because I did confess that this is very self-serving as a meeting because I was like,
0:28:24 I really want to dial in my programming, recognizing there are things I want to do in the future,
0:28:28 which are not breaking powerlifting records. Ain’t going to happen. It’s definitely not beating you
0:28:33 in jujitsu because I’ll get my, all of my appendages snapped off. Don’t need that. But I would never do
0:28:40 that to you unless dot, dot, dot. I appreciate that. It wouldn’t take very much, but there are things I
0:28:44 would really like to do. I would like to compete in more sports, even if it’s just in a club capacity,
0:28:49 I would love to get back on the tennis courts and get back to playing tennis. And this might
0:28:55 require some elbow surgery, but get back to rock climbing. And also one thing I didn’t mention,
0:29:02 but probably is the thing that I would tie most directly to the rope flow. I love working on pads
0:29:08 in Muay Thai and it is such a good workout. I’m not going to get yet another goddamn concussion. I don’t
0:29:17 need any more of those. And I would really like to get to the point again, where I can train on pads
0:29:24 hard for lots of rounds with a really, really skilled trainer. I just love that experience.
0:29:30 And I’m so bored of stationary biking for my endurance work. So bored. I mean, God bless these
0:29:36 tools, but still it’s, it’s pretty boring. So where should we go? There are lots of tools in the toolkit.
0:29:40 Let me ask you this for people who might be wondering, and guys, I’m not getting like an
0:29:47 affiliate commission on rope sales here. Like I have no dog in this fight, but it seems to be a very
0:29:54 versatile tool. And there are lots of versatile tools, but it is also a tool that is very hard
0:30:01 to injure yourself with. And for me, it’s like weightlifting and a lot of training. Number one,
0:30:06 unless it’s a sport, right? Is about injury minimization first and foremost. So if I add
0:30:10 in strength training, that increases the likelihood or endurance training increases the likelihood of
0:30:15 me getting injured, scratch it, it’s out. And then I’ll take my risks where I need and want to take my
0:30:19 risks like skiing, but I don’t want to take it in the weight room. How long does it take for people to see
0:30:26 some benefits from something like rope flow? And like, what have you seen in students and people
0:30:30 who try this and stick it with it for a couple of weeks?
0:30:36 Literally I’ve had people that are in the strong human community that literally after day one,
0:30:40 they’re finding that they have better balance walking up the steps. And these are people in
0:30:44 their fifties and sixties. They’re like, I’m walking upstairs and I feel more balanced. Why?
0:30:48 Because you’re shifting your weight from one side to the other in a more efficient manner
0:30:54 because the rope has taught you how to do that. You’ll feel better rather immediately. Now the
0:30:57 question is like, how deep do you want to take? How many of these movements do you want to learn?
0:31:01 I’ve seen Kelly Stratt start posting more about rope flow and he’s been talking about it in the form
0:31:07 as just being a warmup before you do any of your lifting movements as a good rotational warmup. And
0:31:12 that’s great. So it can just be used for that. But I think there is a power that comes with the
0:31:17 practice when like today we linked around four movements together, the overhand, the propeller
0:31:19 and the dragon and the underhand.
0:31:22 What was it called when I donkey punched myself in the back of the head with the rope? We should,
0:31:24 we should give that one a name. That’s the Ferris.
0:31:31 The one thing I want to mention about this too, is this, honestly, I look at rope flow as kind of like
0:31:37 its own internal martial art. Do you know that, you know, internal martial arts? So when it comes to
0:31:41 internal martial arts, like I think Tai Chi would be considered one. Bagua would be considered an
0:31:45 internal martial art. When it comes to these martial arts, they’re not necessarily like
0:31:52 extra martial arts, like jujitsu, boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai. That’s based on the output, based on the
0:31:57 damage you’re going to give to an opponent. It’s the focus is more so on breathing, mastering the
0:32:02 movement, linking the movements together. You’re more focused on what’s going on internally and what
0:32:07 your body is doing through space. Now there are forms of like aspects of Tai Chi that can be applied
0:32:11 to combat. But when you see a lot of older people doing Tai Chi, it’s this flowing movement practice
0:32:17 that gets the body feeling better afterwards than when it began. In a lot of ways, just having spent a
0:32:22 good amount of time in like early mornings in China and so on. It’s kind of like people are going to
0:32:28 crucify me for this, but it’s kind of like Chinese yoga in a sense. Like they are moving through all of
0:32:33 these different planes of movement. They’re doing it every day. Even the kind of rotational kidney
0:32:37 slapping stuff, there are some similarities. Absolutely. When you look at rope flow and then
0:32:40 you look at what these like 80, 90 year olds are doing in China in the park every morning.
0:32:45 And they’re 80 and 90, dude. That’s the thing that’s so amazing to me. Like you’re still moving
0:32:49 like that at 80 and 90. You’re independent. You know, like I would even assume that a lot of these
0:32:53 people probably feel minimal amounts of pain. They feel a level of freedom in their bodies at that age.
0:32:59 Yeah. That’s kind of how I look at rope flow when you learn to link things together. So we learned a few
0:33:03 movements today, but there are so many more movements that you learn. And the cool thing is that
0:33:08 you do some of this stuff this week, Tim, you’re going to wake up and it’s just going to be there. You
0:33:11 don’t have to think about the movement. Now you just go outside, you do it. It’s no thought. It turns
0:33:17 into a flow. It turns into a flow state practice. That’s where I think the strength is because that
0:33:22 feels like play. It no longer feels like, you know, a frustrating rope flow practice. Although when you
0:33:27 start learning new moves, there’s a level of frustration. I still hit myself that I hit you did today
0:33:31 where you knocked your eye. I do that all the time when I’m learning new shit, the rope will still do
0:33:38 that to me because the rope teaches you how to rotate. You learn how to follow its weight. It’ll
0:33:43 teach you how to rotate better by hitting you, by not rotating cleanly. When you clean that up,
0:33:47 then it rotates cleanly to the left and cleanly to the right. And then again, when you link all this
0:33:51 stuff together, it’s play. It’s a flow state play that always feels better afterwards.
0:33:58 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:35:24 Now for people listening and for me, oftentimes when I say for people listening,
0:35:29 it’s just because I want to ask a question for myself. I am the type of person, I know myself
0:35:37 well enough at this point. I am almost certainly not going to become the Muhammad Ali of rope flow
0:35:42 or the Fred Astaire of rope flow. It’s just not going to happen. What are like the bread and butter
0:35:49 minimum effective dose? Maybe people can find this. You can point them to where they can find these
0:35:52 things, but like, are there two or three movements where you’re like, okay, if you’re just going to
0:36:00 do five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day, maybe it’s two times five to like start your day and to end
0:36:05 your day. What are like the bread and butter moves where it’s like, if you only did this, there would
0:36:11 be a lot of upside. Yeah. What are those? That would be, first off, I have a full foundations
0:36:16 rope flow course that is free. It’s like 50 plus videos of it. It’s at school.com slash the stronger
0:36:23 human. Okay. It is free. Okay. Now overhand race and chase underhand race and chase propeller or
0:36:27 dragon, which is what we did today. Yeah. Right. I do race and chase. You did. Yeah. That’s what you
0:36:31 did. You’re the overhand race and chase. You did the underhand race and chase. Race and chase is
0:36:34 walking while you’re doing that. It’s not walking. You just, you can just stand there, but you added
0:36:39 walking into it. You added a gate pattern into it. Right. So overhand race and chase, underhand race and
0:36:43 chase propeller, link those three together. You have a flow from side to side. Right. And those are like,
0:36:47 that’s the basics, right? You learn to link those together. You’ll feel better. Yeah. Okay. But
0:36:52 again, I think that you mentioned, you’re not going to become the mom and I’ll leave rope floor or
0:36:57 whatever. But one thing that I think is good to understand is like, we got decades for this,
0:37:03 bro. You know what I mean? Like what is three to five or 10 minutes a day for a few years? How good
0:37:06 are you going to be at this a year from now, just for five minutes? Like you’re going to look pretty
0:37:10 fucking good. And then my mom’s probably listening. She didn’t want me to curse.
0:37:15 Sorry, mom. I’m going to forget and I’m going to curse myself. So you can blame it on my bad influence.
0:37:21 But five years from now doing it five minutes, you’ll probably do it longer because you’re going
0:37:25 to naturally just get better at it. You’re going to just be moving really well with this from this
0:37:31 minimal input. It can be a practice that beats you up, especially if, because you can get a workout
0:37:35 from it. It doesn’t have to be that. It doesn’t have to be something that beats you up. But if you want
0:37:40 to go intense with it, use a heavier rope, how much do ropes cost for people listening? Cause I
0:37:44 haven’t even asked that. I should have asked that. Yeah. How like to get something you can use for
0:37:48 this. Cause I do find a little bit of heft to be helpful, right? We started with a very lightweight,
0:37:55 light rope, which was almost like a lariat, like a lasso. I mean, it was very small in diameter.
0:38:03 How much does it cost to get the Magna XL? The Magnum, the Magnum. Yeah, exactly. How much does one of
0:38:08 those cost? I think the Magma XL is, Oh, it’s Magma. Magma, not Magnum. No, it’s Magma. Your
0:38:14 mind went to Magna. Oh, I know. I know. I know. But it’s a Magma. It’s red. Some people can’t be
0:38:21 saved. I got it. Magma. Okay. God, I screwed that up twice. Okay. Magma XL. And this probably,
0:38:25 we were kind of bouncing around. It’s probably the rope itself probably weighs like two pounds,
0:38:30 two, three pounds. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe less. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And how much does that cost?
0:38:36 That one’s like $80, I think. $80. This is the thing though. If you want to just get yourself a
0:38:40 rope from Home Depot and cut it and make a rope, that’s fine. You can work that. You can even work
0:38:45 with an exercise band you might have at home. You can mess with some of this using a belt if you don’t
0:38:50 want to get anything, if you just want to like do the bare bones stuff. But certain ropes like the
0:38:56 Magma XL, the RMT rope, which I think is like 40 or $45, there’s a feedback that you get from the rope
0:39:02 because it’s very smooth when you’re rotating it. Yeah. That kind of feels better than a Home Depot
0:39:06 rope. It doesn’t mean you can’t use a Home Depot rope or a rope from a boating store. Boating store
0:39:09 ropes are actually pretty good quality. Boating stores are really good quality ropes. So you could get
0:39:14 something from there, cut it up, make your rope, you’re good. Right? So that’s the thing. It’s like,
0:39:19 it’s a practice that if you don’t want to spend anything on it, you don’t have to. Or if you want to
0:39:26 spend nothing or very minimal amounts of money, you can do that. But then all you need is your rope,
0:39:31 some sunlight, or you can do it indoors if you want to. And you’re going to feel better.
0:39:35 One thing I want to stress is this. Do you know who Bill Maeda is out of Hawaii?
0:39:36 I have seen his videos.
0:39:37 I have seen his videos.
0:39:39 Yeah. Bill’s the man, man.
0:39:39 Yeah.
0:39:44 I love Bill. And we had him on a show a few years back. People have probably been saying this forever,
0:39:48 but when he told me and when he started speaking this way, it really resonated with me
0:39:53 where he calls his workout each day. He calls it a practice. It’s his practice.
0:39:56 For people who don’t know who this is, how would you describe Bill?
0:39:59 He’s a lifting samurai. That’s how I would personally describe him.
0:40:00 How old is Bill at this point?
0:40:01 55 or 56.
0:40:06 And that guy is unbelievably shredded and strong.
0:40:11 Strong, shredded. Bill has a level of also curiosity that I admire because Bill has had so
0:40:16 much fitness experience through the years. He’s done so much. He’s had a lot of positive
0:40:21 and negative experiences, but he’s also someone that as much as he knows, he’s continuously open
0:40:26 to learning more and refining his knowledge and what he teaches his clients, the people he works with.
0:40:30 And that’s one thing I really admire about him because he’s 50 something years old. He looks
0:40:36 amazing. He does well, but like he’s also a sponge. And that’s something that I want to ideally,
0:40:40 I hope when I’m 55 or 56, I want to remain a sponge. I don’t want to lose that.
0:40:45 But he calls his movement his workouts of practice because he changes it up each day. He does like
0:40:50 five, 10, 15 minutes of movement and that’s his daily practice. And that’s kind of the way I look
0:40:57 at my movement practice. There are like when I go into a gym, I have in my notes app, I have just
0:41:01 certain things that I might be doing during that day or I’ll know what I did last week. So I’ll be
0:41:07 okay. Let’s maybe add this in or do something else. But I keep things around so that I get a general
0:41:12 daily minimum amount of movement in no matter what. So I have like certain flow movement that
0:41:17 I’ll get in. I have a club by my desk. I have a sandbag by my workstation. I have a sandbag in
0:41:22 my garage. I have rings in my kitchen. I have things spent throughout the house and throughout
0:41:27 my space so that when I go by them, I’m encouraged to lift them. I’m encouraged to lift the bag. I’m
0:41:31 encouraged to swing the rope. I’m encouraged to swing the club. I do all these things on a daily
0:41:37 basis. That has my body feeling better and better as I continue to progress at the meat and potatoes
0:41:41 of what I’m really trying to push forward. So I have these daily minimums, which is just my practice.
0:41:44 These are just things I do. And I’ll have certain things that are might be the workout, whether it’s
0:41:49 the jujitsu or the thing I do in the gym or my garage, or maybe I go out to the field and I do some
0:41:55 stuff, some extra work. But I have those daily minimums that are just part of my practice that just
0:42:02 make sure that I’m always making progress so that the only time that I do something isn’t just in my
0:42:08 workout, right? I want my body to be able to do these things at any time.
0:42:13 And I mean, that underscores also some of the stuff that I saw and you explained in the video.
0:42:18 And you have a lot of videos. This just happens to be the one that initially caught my attention. But
0:42:23 if someone, let’s just say, is training the big three lifts or whatever they happen to do,
0:42:28 and they’re hitting them once a week or who knows, and then they’re not getting really any
0:42:33 movement practice between those, it’s like, of course, they’re going to be very constrained
0:42:41 to a certain plane of movement, certain types of movements. Well, let me bring this back to me.
0:42:47 I’ve been watching Conan O’Brien Must Go. If people haven’t seen that travel show, you should watch it
0:42:51 because that’s basically Conan’s move. So I’ll copy Conan here. We were talking about this back
0:42:59 issue that’s been plaguing me and how I am actually back to a point now as of just a few days ago where
0:43:05 I’m loading more in terms of, let’s just say back squat, which is like a very open question as to
0:43:12 whether to include it or not and other things, making a lot of progress ever since really surgically
0:43:18 trying to focus on glute exercises, which seems self-evident, but I could give people a long list
0:43:25 stories about why that’s been a challenge over the last three years, but I’ve made progress and want
0:43:35 to get back to, let’s just say, doing five rounds of heavy work on tie pads. And who knows, maybe even
0:43:42 doing some jujitsu, although I have a lot of PTSD from my joint injuries. So what are some of the things
0:43:48 you would potentially suggest? Like if you were getting me started with programming and I’m sure
0:43:52 you’d have to do an assessment and so on. There are some of the things we talked about over lunch. We
0:43:58 don’t have to talk about these, but like sandbag, box squat, recognizing that I’m very apprehensive about
0:44:04 the low back. If I have to sit, for instance, on like a hardwood bench for 30 minutes and I don’t have
0:44:10 any padding, my back could be seized up for a week, which means basically no sleep. So I’m scared of
0:44:17 having that experience. And I recognize that if I don’t load and work on my body, not just the low
0:44:23 back in isolation, it’s never going to be fixed or improve. So how would you think about training
0:44:25 with respect to this?
0:44:30 I’d have to rewind it. And we talked a little bit about this early, but I’d have to rewind things
0:44:35 back to first off the way someone breathes through the way that they move daily, every single day.
0:44:40 Because when you injure something initially, you injure a lower back, which has happened to me many a time
0:44:47 in the past. When something happens that aggravates the area, you tend to hold your breath. So when you
0:44:52 bend to grab something, you’ll, and then when you feel safe enough, you’ll exhale and start breathing
0:44:59 again. Some people do this without even realizing they’ll go down to tie their shoes and they have
0:45:03 breath holds without realizing that breath holds. It’s now, it’s just an ingrained movement pattern
0:45:07 that they bend, hold their breath, come up, boom, they get out of the car. They’re holding their breath.
0:45:13 Many people have instances through their day that the breath is being held. And the problem with that,
0:45:19 the reason why that’s a really big issue is because when you hold your breath, your tissues will
0:45:25 kind of seize up to keep everything in place. That’s the Valsal maneuver. When lifters lift
0:45:31 heavy loads and sometimes not heavy loads is meant to increase that intra-abdominal pressure so that
0:45:35 there is no movement of the spine when you’re dealing with the load. That’s what it’s meant to do.
0:45:41 But also there’s limited movement when you’re holding your breath. So the thing that I would want to get
0:45:52 is first to make sure that you learn how to breathe while doing everything. That doesn’t mean just like
0:45:55 breathe when you’re doing everything through the house, et cetera. Like even when you’re going to go
0:46:02 pick something up and you find, okay, I’m going to hold my breath when I do this. Can you slow that
0:46:08 movement down in a way that you can try to breathe while doing it so that you’re not ingraining that
0:46:14 pathway of hold breath and do the thing? How can we do the thing and breathe? Because when we’re
0:46:19 breathing, the body feels safe. Like when you, if you’re breathing and doing stretching, you’re
0:46:23 breathing or doing anything when it comes to movement, you move more freely. Once you hold your breath,
0:46:29 your body goes into this time to try to stay safe. Same thing in jujitsu. When a new person starts
0:46:36 jujitsu, the first thing that you have to tell them to do is breathe. You remember, right? You’re,
0:46:39 you’re on bottom side control or you’re in some type of position and immediately you’re like,
0:46:44 like you’re, you’re, you’re trying to produce force and you’re holding your breath while doing so
0:46:50 because you don’t feel safe enough to produce that force while breathing. What this is going to do is
0:46:56 it’s going to help us to kind of get those tissues moving in the way that they should. The body’s going
0:47:00 to feel safe. So those tissues are going to start moving well, and we won’t have excess tension
0:47:07 throughout the whole system. And this is why I would tell somebody with whatever lifting that
0:47:11 they’re doing right now. Yeah. Tell me. Yeah. Let’s lower the loads that we’re working with
0:47:18 and learn how to use the breath while lifting, pushing, pulling, hinging. Let’s learn to use the
0:47:24 breath while doing all of this. What this means is when we are in our concentric phase of the lift,
0:47:30 whether it’s a push when lifting, whether it’s a pull when pulling, whether it’s hinging or coming
0:47:35 up from a squat or exhaling. Let’s just use the squat as an example, rather than a bunch of things,
0:47:39 the squat. Inhale when you’re going down to the hole, exhale when you’re coming out of the hole.
0:47:44 Let’s learn how to do that. Because in life, if we’re going to squat down to the ground,
0:47:50 we shouldn’t hold our breath when going down to the ground, but many people do. We should just kind of
0:47:54 like, whether it’s inhale when getting down there and then breathe normally, we should be able to do
0:48:00 that. And what I want to try to help you do is I want you to make this a global phenomenon. You’re
0:48:05 having very minimal or no, unless they’re purposeful breath holds, you’re not holding your breath during
0:48:11 the day, right? There’s other benefits outside of this where you’re not going to feel as stressed
0:48:14 because a lot of people, when they are looking at their phone, where they start thinking of
0:48:18 something that brings a level of anxiety, inherently they start to hold their breath and
0:48:22 they don’t realize it. This is something that’s going to help you get rid of global tension outside
0:48:26 of what you’re doing in the gym, which is going to help you just feel better overall. And this isn’t
0:48:31 something you deal with in just a day. This is a habit change, right? If you want to change the way
0:48:35 you do this when you’re lifting, you must lower your loads. You don’t do this with maximal loads.
0:48:39 You don’t do this with heavy squats, heavy deadlifts. You don’t do this when lifting heavy sandbags
0:48:44 or even kettlebells, right? If you’re not used to this, you work on doing this with light load and just
0:48:49 like you’d progressed before with heavier loads, you progressively overload your ability to lift
0:48:52 while breathing over time. You can progressively work with heavier and heavier load.
0:49:00 So assuming I’m working on this, I’m working on the breathing. Tim, breathe. All right.
0:49:06 My garage is a gym. I may not have all the requisite tools at the moment. It’s got all the basics.
0:49:15 What are, whether it is me or others, but what are some of the non-negotiable exercises
0:49:21 that you might prescribe for someone in my position where it’s like, okay, I remember back in the day,
0:49:25 I like to consider myself pretty athletic. My enthusiasm outstrips my structural integrity
0:49:33 on some regular occasions. And I would like to train for the long game, but also like,
0:49:37 I would like to be very strong. I would like to be, for me, I would like to be very strong.
0:49:46 I still know I can develop that capacity. It’s just a matter of strengthening or catering to
0:49:50 the low back so that I’m not terrified every time I set foot in the gym of
0:49:55 having some spasm that costs me two weeks of sleep. So let me ask you a question. So
0:50:02 back squat or no back squat for you? Yeah. Or depends on the type of backs while we’re talking.
0:50:07 All right. Because like we had box squats come up and I had some questions and concerns around that.
0:50:14 Talked about sandbags. Like how would you think about lower body? I mean, I guess it could be full
0:50:20 body, but like lower body loading for someone like me, I would want you to focus a little bit more on
0:50:26 unilateral before we do more bilateral axial spine back squat loading. So something like
0:50:30 different forms of lunges, the ATG split squat is a really good money movement. Do you know what
0:50:35 the ATG split squat is? I do not know what that is. ATG split squat is something popularized by Ben
0:50:41 Patrick. Deep knee flexion of the front knee. The back foot has a large amount of a hip extension.
0:50:45 So you’re getting hip extension of the back leg, deep knee flexion of the front leg.
0:50:50 So you’re building a level of strength through long ranges of motion with that movement. So
0:50:57 those ATG split squats, different types of lunges, I would have you focus on that instead of the
0:51:03 traditional axial loaded back squat for a while. I’d also say that not that bilateral squatting is bad,
0:51:09 but if you do, maybe you start learning how to do that with a sandbag. So use a kettlebell or a
0:51:13 sandbag with that. First, you need to learn how to lift a sandbag because when you lift a sandbag,
0:51:18 the load is in front of you, your spine is going to be in a fairly neutral position, but you’re going to
0:51:24 have a little bit more slight, maybe flexion in that spine. And you’re going to learn how to breathe
0:51:29 against that load while squatting down with it in front of you. So that could be a 50, 100 pound
0:51:33 sandbag. You’ll probably start there and you’ll probably move forward with that over time. But the
0:51:38 thing is, is you’re not directly loading that spine right now as you’re doing, you’re not causing all of
0:51:44 that compression. Not that compression is bad, but it seems as if you’re a bit compression sensitive
0:51:50 when it comes to squatting patterns because of what’s going on with your back. Now, if you did
0:51:56 want to work on some bilateral squatting, which I don’t think is a horrible idea, I would probably say
0:52:01 if you wanted to work with the barbell, don’t squat to full deep knee flexion depth. Let’s stay away
0:52:07 from that for a while. So let’s do barbell back squats to a box, making sure you’re maintaining
0:52:11 tension as you go down to the box and coming up. So you’re not just plopping down to the box, sitting
0:52:16 back, losing that tension, then coming out, maintaining that tension while breathing. And you’re working
0:52:23 maybe 40, 50%, 50, maybe 60% of your one rep max, where it’s like you can actually master the movement
0:52:29 without stressing about the load. But over time you can inch that load up in a safe manner.
0:52:34 And is the reason for that just because this might help other people. So I injured myself
0:52:39 three years ago doing a workout that did not feel like an injury at the time. It was back squatting,
0:52:46 but I was basically going like ass to heels. And I suspect in retrospect that I was doing like a
0:52:52 little butt wink where I was starting to make it simple, just kind of like round the lower back
0:52:58 in the bottom ranges. And I think it was that kind of bending of the paper clip
0:53:01 that caused that initial acute problem.
0:53:02 But that was a real squat, bro.
0:53:03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:53:07 That’s how you’re supposed to, that’s a real squat, bro. Like you don’t squat, it has to grasp.
0:53:14 So the box would, let’s just say, would it be just above parallel, something like that?
0:53:15 It’d be above parallel or right at 90 degrees.
0:53:21 Yeah. Basically helps to mitigate the risk of that. Would you do something similar with the sandbag or
0:53:24 would you do that from the floor? Like what does the range of motion look like?
0:53:28 You could squat down to a box or you could squat all the way down with a light load if you feel
0:53:34 comfortable. I would suggest that your situation, you inch that down over time. Like what you could
0:53:37 do is if you have multiple sandbags, you could squat down to the other sandbag or you could squat
0:53:41 down to a box. And then over time, lower that height where you feel comfortable. Just make sure as
0:53:46 you’re squatting down, when you hit depth, you’re maintaining tension. When I say maintaining tension,
0:53:51 by the way, I mean, you’re not totally just sitting down in the box, limping out and then coming back up.
0:53:56 You’re inhaling as you go down to the box. You’re still maintaining that position and then you drive up.
0:54:01 You’re not losing that tension that you’ve created in your legs, your feet, especially as you go down,
0:54:05 you’re maintaining it. The reason why people do the Valsalva maneuver is so when they hold their breath,
0:54:09 they can maintain structural integrity of the spine, rib cage over hips, et cetera.
0:54:15 When you’re braced and you can’t move, what’s keeping that integrity is the air that you’ve stored
0:54:19 in your abdomen when you’re squatting down. When you’re breathing while doing this,
0:54:23 whether you’re inhaling while you’re going down and exhaling when coming up,
0:54:27 the structural integrity is you are maintaining it. Like you’re maintaining it while you’re breathing.
0:54:34 So when you’re breathing, you do have more room for that to happen, but you should be able to maintain
0:54:39 that structure without the breath. When I deadlifted 755, I didn’t use a belt. The main reason I didn’t
0:54:45 use a belt is I wanted to make sure that my structure could deadlift this weight without the need of
0:54:50 outside assistance. The weight belt, when you’re using it, is supposed to, when you push against it,
0:54:54 increase the amount of intra-abdominal pressure you’re able to create and help you maintain that.
0:54:59 But I, when I did that, the reason why I didn’t use a belt is because it didn’t make sense to me
0:55:04 to develop all this strength if I couldn’t do it on my own. So when now we’re breathing while doing
0:55:05 this.
0:55:07 Very Konstantinos.
0:55:08 You remember that guy?
0:55:09 I think, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:55:10 Back in the day.
0:55:14 A lot of Russians did that though. A lot of Russians would do that, you know? But I think
0:55:19 that there’s a knowledge there because like, you want to be able to do all of this stuff on your
0:55:25 own. Yes, it can add some, but like having to need to use a belt to do everything, to maintain your
0:55:30 structure, I don’t think it’s the best idea. Now, when we’re using the breath, we’re not getting that
0:55:35 extra pressure that it helps create, but we’re training ourselves to always be able to maintain the
0:55:40 right structure and maintain the right amount of tension while breathing when lifting weights.
0:55:44 And the reason why we’re doing that is because life wants us to do that. When we’re going through
0:55:49 life, when we’re fighting, we’re not holding our breath. And I know that some people will say,
0:55:53 well, this isn’t the gym. The gym is supposed to help you do this stuff better. The reason why I
0:55:58 started doing this is because I wanted to make sure that the strength I was building in the gym
0:56:00 would be something that would-
0:56:02 Yeah, transferable.
0:56:05 Transfer really well to the fighting that I was doing and the stuff that I was
0:56:11 trying to do. And in all of that, breath-holding is never part of it. Unless swimming, there’s
0:56:16 breath-holding. I think even for me now, when lifting something really heavy, it’s an exhale.
0:56:24 Like I will use, like when people see me using sandbags, this is an aside, but I was always
0:56:30 somebody who like, when I lifted, I purposefully wanted to stay quiet. I don’t like emoting. I don’t
0:56:35 like it. It’s not in my nature to be the person that else when doing stuff. But when you learn to
0:56:39 breathe while lifting, what ends up happening is when you’re creating that force, when you’re
0:56:45 lifting that sandbag off the ground, when you’re pushing, ha, that happens, right? You’re lifting,
0:56:51 ha, that happens. It’s not because I’m trying to sound hard or tough or whatever. It’s because-
0:56:53 It’s like the TIE fighter’s kicking. It’s the same thing.
0:56:57 It’s what my body needs to do to produce the force efficiently and I can stay safe through
0:57:01 it. As that started to happen, I started to feel stronger and it transfers. You know what
0:57:05 I mean? So that’s why something that actually I think would help people kind of understand
0:57:13 this, especially the exhaling to create tension is, let’s do this right now. I think you already
0:57:22 understand, but I think it’s served. Growl. Growl. Growl. I’ll do it first. Growl. What do
0:57:32 you feel? Do it? Just, just breathe. And then I feel, I mean, there’s a sort of shielding.
0:57:37 There’s like abdominal contraction. There’s a level of tension that’s created.
0:57:40 That’s the most noticeable thing. Yeah. But now when you’re exhaling, when you see a fighter,
0:57:48 that tension is created to keep this structure in place. So it’s safe when producing force. So this
0:57:54 is why when I’m lifting a heavy sandbag or when I’m coming out of the hole of a squat or when I’m
0:58:01 deadlifting, sometimes this will come out because it’s my breath helping me create a strong enough
0:58:07 structure. It’s not buckle under the load on lifting rather than me holding the breath. And not that
0:58:10 again, not that this is bad. If you’re a lifter and you’re doing this for your maximal lifts,
0:58:16 I’m not telling you to just desert the Valsal maneuver. But I do believe that if you learn to breathe
0:58:20 while lifting, this is one of the fundamental things that will keep you safe while lifting,
0:58:25 that will help you progress well, and will help you decrease the amount of stress that it has on
0:58:30 your body over time. Yeah. Okay, cool. And lastly, the biggest thing I think is it’ll help you
0:58:35 get rid of excess tension that you’re holding in your body when you don’t need to have that tension.
0:58:41 A lot of people deal with that. Let’s say I’m working on that. Let’s say I decide box squat
0:58:48 can give that a go. Maybe I have a safety squat yoke or something. Sandbag. All right. Probably do some
0:58:53 isolateral stuff. So ATG split squat for somebody who’s listening. Let’s say maybe they’re in a similar
0:58:58 boat or maybe their back is fine, but they want to get stronger using these movements.
0:59:06 What type of set rep programming do you give to someone who’s not an elite power lifter?
0:59:15 There’s no need to do anything under five or six reps. And then if that’s the case,
0:59:20 you don’t have to do that because over time, as you work with sets of five, six, eights, tens,
0:59:25 right over time, you’ll naturally be able to get stronger with those in those rep schemes,
0:59:30 with those loads. And I’m not saying that heavy lifting isn’t good. I do things that are three,
0:59:34 four or five reps when I’m working with heavy loads. I still do that. But the problem that
0:59:39 happens with a lot of people when they get into a program that’s focused on the load and the heaviness
0:59:45 of the load, they start doing things they shouldn’t do to lift that load. So if we’re trying to focus
0:59:48 on maintaining our breath, there’s going to come a point where you’re working with a load that you’re
0:59:52 going to find, you won’t be able to breathe well. You won’t be able to inhale and exhale at the
0:59:56 phases of the lift that you should be. But you are also, you manage to lift it and you’re like,
1:00:00 okay, I’m strong enough for this. So you’ll add on more. And then you’ll get to a place where you’re
1:00:04 holding your breath. And then you’ll get to the place where all the times that anything’s really
1:00:09 happened for me has been when I was creating a little bit too much tension. I was holding my breath
1:00:14 and something happens, right? Not when I was breathing with it. So that’s why I don’t
1:00:17 necessarily, if you’re not someone who’s powerlifting and if you’re in the gym, you’re just wanting to
1:00:22 lift and get stronger. I don’t want you to focus on the weight on the bar. I want you to focus on the
1:00:26 quality of the movement. Yeah. I’m by myself in my garage. So I definitely have no one to impress.
1:00:33 So what would you suggest then? Would it be two, three sets of blank with like X number of minutes in
1:00:38 between? Because like we were chatting a little bit and this is nothing obviously compared to what you do.
1:00:43 But when I was my strongest, like back in the day, which was like probably 96 when I was in China of
1:00:52 all places, I was doing sets of, let’s just call it six to 10, but closer to six in pretty much all
1:01:00 movements with like five to 10 minute rests, right? I was taking really long rest intervals and generally
1:01:07 hitting, it was split push pull legs. And I was hitting each of those workouts once a week, roughly.
1:01:17 What would you prescribe as a starting point? Like for me with sets and reps and rest intervals and
1:01:21 things like that. Any thoughts on how to approach? Two or three sets per movement. I like people doing
1:01:27 things for sets of, well not sets, reps, six, 10, 12. I would say doing that kind of rep scheme. So what I
1:01:33 would do is on certain days, if you’re doing two times a week in the gym, one of those days have your
1:01:39 movements doing maybe sets of six or so. And I would also split it up like this too. When I lift,
1:01:43 I kind of do upper and lower body. I don’t just break it up into like a push pull, whatever. I do
1:01:47 kind of full body stuff, right? Yeah. So if you’re doing upper and lower on a certain day, for one day
1:01:52 for your upper body movements, if you’re doing sets of six or so, do sets of 10 on your lower body,
1:01:58 eight to 10, higher rep. Okay. So this day, let’s just say it’s Monday. Yeah. Upper body would be six
1:02:04 rep sets. Six reps. Lower body would be 10. Higher rep, 10, 12 sets. Yeah. 12 reps per set.
1:02:10 On another day, if you’re doing a full body day again, I would say for the upper body, that would
1:02:15 now be higher repetitions and your lower body would be lower repetitions. If you’re doing two full body
1:02:21 days. Now, I think you said you’re doing push pull legs, right? And I’m not married to that. It’s just
1:02:27 easy for me to remember. There are so many ways to set things up, but for minimum effective dose,
1:02:34 if you can do each body part twice per week, which you can probably do in two to three training days,
1:02:39 it doesn’t have to be a five day split. Literally, you can do all this two or three days in the gym
1:02:44 for two days. That’s how I would split it up for three days. You get a little bit more leeway with
1:02:52 volume and three days is nice because if you, for example, on your first day, if you find that you do
1:02:57 better having slightly lower amounts of movements, then you can split that volume into three separate
1:03:00 days rather than having that volume in two days instead. Does that make sense?
1:03:01 Can you give me an example?
1:03:08 So if you did five upper body movements and five lower body movements on one day, and then day two,
1:03:14 you did five lower and five up. If you’re finding that you, that’s too much for you to do in a two day
1:03:15 period, you could take some of that for me.
1:03:21 I get for whatever reason handle volume very poorly instead of just totally taking down that
1:03:27 workload, split that workload into three days. So then you’re doing, what is it? You just mentioned
1:03:34 20 total sets, do six sets, six sets. And then on another day, it’s going to be eight sets of that
1:03:40 movement. You split that volumes three days. You’re good, but you can still do that rep scheme where you
1:03:45 hit each body part twice a week. You manage to do some slightly lower repetition, some slightly higher
1:03:47 repetition. You’re good.
1:03:50 And then what about rest between sets?
1:03:56 That’s variable because some people like to have actual rest between sets, but then you can also,
1:04:00 if you’re doing on a certain day, let’s say for your upper body movements that you do some push and
1:04:06 some pull, you could superset those because they’re antagonistic. So when I say antagonistic,
1:04:11 instead of resting, you would do a pushing movement. Then you could literally just, let’s say you do a
1:04:15 push and you do a row. You could do that back to back because the recovery of each movement doesn’t
1:04:19 necessarily get too much in the way of each other. There will be some stress from the weight you did
1:04:24 in that specific first set, but the muscles being worked when you’re doing that push movement do not
1:04:29 get as much in the way as the muscles you’re doing work in the pull movement. So you could rest if you
1:04:35 wanted to, but you could also superset it. And one thing that I think, a concept that I want people to
1:04:41 take from this, because I know how people love to have that specific program that they do, which is
1:04:49 good, but learn to add an element of play into this. Learn to have an element of freedom into this. So
1:04:54 if you feel like you want to rest like a minute or two in between the set, rest. If you feel like you
1:05:00 want a superset, superset. Because again, I think that you can get very specific with it, but when you
1:05:05 start making too many stringent rules within it, it can for some people become quite daunting and
1:05:10 monotonin. So something that I do is like, when I’m doing like a squat, I’ll sometimes do some rope
1:05:12 flow in between just to get some rotation.
1:05:15 Yeah, let me ask you this. Just to stand in for the audience here.
1:05:15 Yeah.
1:05:20 Do you think you could have gotten away with that earlier in your training, right? Have you laid
1:05:27 such an incredible foundation of strict, maybe monotonous training that now you’re like, okay,
1:05:35 this body’s not really going anywhere. So if I want to do some Sudoku in between my overhead presses
1:05:41 and do some rope flow over here, maybe a little pantomiming in between this set and that set that
1:05:47 you can get away with it in a way that might not serve a beginner or intermediate, or is that,
1:05:49 am I off base there?
1:05:53 So the reason, let me mention the reason why I do rope flow in between. It’s not because it’s part of
1:05:57 a workout. It’s because it helps me feel better. When I put so much compression on myself, there’s
1:06:05 level of like, for me, stiffness that I feel from that set. The reason why I do the rope flow is to
1:06:09 help me kind of undo that stiffness before my next set. That’s the reason why I do it. I don’t do it
1:06:13 because it’s like a super efficient part of the workout, but I do it because it helps me feel better
1:06:17 for the next set I’m about to do. When I do a lot like, and other people notice this too, but when you
1:06:22 do a lot of compressive things back to back, you start to kind of feel this lower back tension and
1:06:27 stiffness and this overall stiffness that you’re creating for the workout, the stiffness isn’t
1:06:30 necessarily a bad thing. If you have something, especially like you don’t have to do rope flow
1:06:34 in between sets too. You do that post-workout or later, that will be something that really will
1:06:41 help you feel better. But the thing is, is like, when you only do that, you then walk around with
1:06:46 that stiffness that you’ve created and you have nothing to undo it. This is one of the reasons why a
1:06:50 lot of people will work out. Then after their workout, they’ll do dead hangs because they feel like,
1:06:55 oh, I’m getting this decompression in my spine from everything. And that can feel better. But
1:06:59 the thing is, is like, you can get that same decompression from the rope. You could get the
1:07:04 same type of decompression from swimming. Swimming does the same thing. But the reason why I was saying
1:07:11 all this is like, have a structure to what you do, but allow yourself to kind of add things to it or
1:07:15 subtract things to it when you want. The only thing that’s going to help you get bigger and stronger
1:07:19 is progressive overload over a long period of time. Yeah.
1:07:23 It’s not going to be the magic set and ret scheme that you’re doing right now. It’s going to be what
1:07:26 you’re doing being progressed over years. Yeah.
1:07:32 And for people listening, because I think one criticism that I get a lot is like, you didn’t
1:07:37 get this big from rope flow. No, I didn’t get this big from rope flow. But at the same time,
1:07:41 I could have gotten this big while feeling better for years. Yeah.
1:07:47 If I had the other practices that I do, like the rope, the clubs, the kettlebells, if I’d had those
1:07:53 practices included, it’s not about getting big. It’s about gaining strength and muscle, but moving
1:07:56 well throughout the whole process. Yeah.
1:08:02 Not focusing on the way you look, but moving like a fridge and feeling like you’re old.
1:08:02 Yeah.
1:08:08 That’s not the goal, right? I mean, I don’t think anyone sets out to gain muscle and strength
1:08:13 with also the goal of feeling like they’re 80 years old. No one wants that, but that’s where
1:08:19 a lot of people are. And a lot of people, they’ll assume that that’s just part of the process.
1:08:19 Yeah.
1:08:21 And it doesn’t need to be.
1:08:23 It doesn’t really, it doesn’t need to be at all.
1:08:27 Yeah. You definitely need to hang out with Jersey. You’ll enjoy hanging out with Jersey and Anjala.
1:08:30 I’m excited. No, for what you told me about him, I’m going to like him.
1:08:34 Yeah. You guys, you guys will get a kick out of each other because for instance, like Jersey,
1:08:38 he also does decompression, but usually hanging upside down and like.
1:08:40 And like boots.
1:08:45 Boots, but he does some like really heavy weights. Like he’ll hold on to like a hundred pounds
1:08:49 in addition to hanging upside down. Anyway, he’s got his own like approach to things for very,
1:08:53 very short duration, like five to 10 seconds. But I think you’ll find a lot of his stuff,
1:08:59 thought provoking, but he is all about movement and he tracks everything meticulously with his
1:09:04 trainees, but he’ll also look at their gate. And he’s like, I want to get you to the point where
1:09:09 you walk like a dancer. He’s like, that’s definitely one of his explicit goals is to like watch
1:09:14 gate and movement in that way. And when I told him that I was doing, and I think there’s a place
1:09:18 for this, I’m going to continue to do it. But you know, I was doing biking for exercise and like,
1:09:24 what his thoughts were. And he was like, terrible. He’s like, he’s like, that’s stupid. So stupid.
1:09:27 And Jersey, I know I’m paraphrasing here, but he was like, if you want to ride a bike because it’s
1:09:32 fun to ride from point A to point B, he’s like, great. He’s like, if you want to ride for 50 miles
1:09:36 because you enjoy it. Great. He’s like, if you’re doing it though, is this like monotonous punishment
1:09:38 in training? He’s like, terrible. He’s like, don’t do that.
1:09:42 I think that, you know, I want to mention, don’t lose your train of thought, but I think that’s
1:09:47 what he’s mentioning there in terms of relation to gate. It’s a very smart way to try to think
1:09:52 about some of your training because when a lot of people think about the squat, when a lot of people
1:09:58 get their feet set, they usually have their feet out at an angle, slightly pointed out, right?
1:10:03 Slightly pointed out toes. You’re creating this force upward with that barbell. So you’re learning how to
1:10:09 have force coming from the ground through, but you’re just going straight up and down. Now the thing to
1:10:14 think about, and the reason why I mentioned this is when you do watch a lot of people that develop
1:10:20 those capacities and a lot of them walk through space, it’s almost like they’re walking in a squat
1:10:23 position with their feet. They’re walking with their feet out like this.
1:10:25 Yeah. They got a Charlie Chaplin.
1:10:31 Now, yeah. The thing is, is like, you’ll see some pro NBA players walking like this. You see a lot of
1:10:38 that. I’m not going to necessarily say that that’s bad. What I’m going to say is over time, I used to
1:10:42 kind of walk like that. But as I started thinking about what my feet were doing during everything I
1:10:47 was doing, and I started thinking about doing certain exercises that would potentially improve my gait
1:10:52 over time. Now my feet face forward when I walk, and I’m not intentionally doing this. It’s just
1:10:59 my directionality through space is now forward. I’m not fighting myself trying to navigate forward
1:11:03 with feet that are outwards. That’s not efficient. I’m not saying everybody needs to walk with their
1:11:08 toes forward, but I’m saying when you start thinking about ways to adjust your gait with your movement,
1:11:14 so this could be the bilateral movements like the ATG split squat. That could be using a sled.
1:11:19 I think sleds are super powerful. And the unfortunate thing is like, not everyone has access to a sled,
1:11:25 but that is literal forward and backward force production. When you’re pushing a sled, there’s
1:11:30 this force that you’re learning how to push forward, but you need to have your feet moving you forward
1:11:35 too. So you’re learning over time how to push a weight forward through space. I think they’re super
1:11:40 powerful, not just for developing structural strength, but also improving one’s gait over time.
1:11:45 The way you walk will change and the rope will help with that too. But that’s something to think
1:11:49 about. Like, I don’t think most people should be walking with their feet ducked out. And I used to
1:11:55 walk like that because sumo deadlifting, the feet are here. I’m producing force from a foot position like
1:12:01 this squatting. I’m producing four from a foot position like this. Now, when I go and do other things,
1:12:04 that’s the way I move through space. And that’s not efficient.
1:12:12 So just because I’m curious, and at least long ago found a lot of dividends from doing sumo deadlifts.
1:12:13 They’re not bad, by the way.
1:12:23 Recommendations for sumo deadlifts. Any thoughts on common mistakes, tips that you’ve sort of principles
1:12:30 that you’ve refined over time, where you’re like, okay, here’s some of my pre-flight checklist that
1:12:34 might be helpful to people. And could you just describe, well, so it’s called sumo deadlift because
1:12:40 it’s a deadlift. You’re pulling a barbell loaded with plates off the ground, but your legs are wide.
1:12:44 Your hands are in between your legs going down to grab the barbell. So you look like a Yokozuna,
1:12:48 like squatting down and getting ready to do the whole sumo thing. Hence the name.
1:12:53 What recommendations might you have for people who are hoping to improve their sumo deadlift?
1:12:58 There’s this funny thing within the powerlifting community where the powerlifters are like,
1:13:00 they look at the sumo deadlift and they say, that’s not a real deadlift.
1:13:01 Yeah.
1:13:02 That’s not a conventional deadlift.
1:13:05 Conventional deadlift would be like knees inside the arms.
1:13:12 Yeah. And it’s just so funny to me. We had an aside, Colton Engelbrecht. He has the highest total
1:13:17 ever in powerlifting of around, I think, I’m going to butcher this, but I think it’s like 2650.
1:13:23 At two, I think he was 275 when he did this. So he wasn’t even like at the heaviest weight class,
1:13:28 he was 275. At 22 years old. He’s been powerlifting for three years.
1:13:29 This is for the three lifts.
1:13:36 All right. So he squatted 470 kilograms, 260 kilogram bench, 470 kilogram deadlift on an eight or nine day.
1:13:41 That’s, so he squatted and deadlift at the thousand and 36 pounds in the same meet.
1:13:43 At 22.
1:13:45 At rifle at the age of 22 years old.
1:13:50 So Lord, the reason why I’m mentioning this is yet another reason you never start your street
1:13:56 fights people. I mean, I doubt you’d pick on this guy, but people are getting just never know
1:14:01 so much stronger, so much younger. It’s insane. But the reason why I’m mentioning Colton is because
1:14:05 Colton does the sumo deadlift and some people roast him for that. And they’re like, it’s not
1:14:08 conventional. It’s like, whatever. But when we had him on the show, I was like, Colton,
1:14:11 why do you sumo deadlift? And he was like, it feels more natural.
1:14:17 And I was like, yeah, it does. It feels weird to bend down and pick up a barbell implement
1:14:22 in the conventional way for, at least for my body type. Some people with very long arms,
1:14:26 certain like length of their femur. Some people feel better with conventional, but the sumo
1:14:33 for me is just made more sense because you’re getting down in this hip position. You’re driving
1:14:37 with your legs. It just makes more sense in my opinion. So nothing against conventional,
1:14:43 nothing against any other deadlift, but the sumo. Now, when doing the sumo deadlift, I think one thing
1:14:46 that people really need to focus on is like what their feet are doing. And I think this would be how
1:14:51 it should be with every single lift. But when doing the sumo especially, there’s a cue that people get,
1:14:55 and people get this cue in squatting too, where you’ll hear knees, push your knees outward. For the
1:14:59 squat, you push your knees out so you can have space to get in between your hips when you’re squatting.
1:15:04 Sometimes your knees are too far forward. Some people with their limb lengths don’t have the
1:15:09 ability to get down to depth. So when you push your knees out, you provide room. The sumo deadlift,
1:15:13 when people say, push your knees out, when you push your knees out, you provide room for the barbell
1:15:20 to ride up your body. But the other cue of rooting the feet into the ground, and I learned this cue from
1:15:24 Kelly Strat’s book, “Becoming a Supple Leopard” back in 2013. Have you met Kelly? Met Kelly, yeah.
1:15:29 We’ve had him on the show a few times. I always mention where I’ve learned these things,
1:15:35 because Kelly’s awesome. But I learned that from his book. I also learned, and the reason why I keep
1:15:39 my face relaxed when lifting and stuff, I also learned that from his book, “Supple Leopard,”
1:15:43 because when he talks about myofascial release, you shouldn’t have a pain face. If you relax,
1:15:47 it’s going to allow yourself to relax through these movements. But anyway, that’s an aside.
1:15:51 Rooting your feet into the ground will allow you to have external rotation of the hips.
1:15:55 I mean, we did a little bit of this earlier today, but just describe for people what that actually
1:16:02 means. You’re in a gym doing a sumo deadlift. You have shoes on, presumably. What are you doing with
1:16:02 your feet and legs?
1:16:08 I think something that can help somebody understand this is using the hands, putting your hand on the
1:16:14 table, and trying, you could actually do this with both hands, keep your fingers planted in the table,
1:16:21 and try to see if you can rip the table apart while keeping your fingers where they are. Rip the table
1:16:23 apart. Now, what do you feel when you do that?
1:16:28 So in this case, you’re sort of externally rotating your hands, even though they’re not moving.
1:16:32 Yeah. Ripping that table apart. But what do you feel when you do that with your hands? That’s actually…
1:16:33 What do you feel?
1:16:39 What do I feel? I mean, I feel a lot of tension in my arms. You feel a lot of tension in your arms. What do you feel in your shoulder?
1:16:44 Shoulders have gone down, and my lats are engaged. So, I mean, there’s a lot going on.
1:16:49 So, the shoulder can be compared to the hip, where the hip externally rotates as you’re grabbing the
1:16:55 ground. The shoulders will have this downward rotation. As I do this, I guess it depends on,
1:16:59 if we were doing like a push-up, it might even be better right now. Our arms are extended in front of
1:17:05 us. If we’re doing a push-up, what I would expect is that this eye of the elbow, the inside of the
1:17:10 elbow, let’s just call it the eye, kind of when you bend your arm, it would be in that crook,
1:17:15 would almost certainly rotate. I would imagine there would be some rotation in a push-up position.
1:17:15 Exactly.
1:17:18 Which would then mimic the, I guess, femur.
1:17:21 Exactly. So, the reason why I wanted you to do that with your hands is,
1:17:24 I think that could help some people understand what they should be doing with their feet.
1:17:28 You’ve got some meaty hands, my friend. I would not want to get slapped with those things. Jesus.
1:17:29 Tim, Tim.
1:17:30 I’m just saying.
1:17:36 Let me say this. You don’t know how happy that makes me feel. Do you know why? Because…
1:17:38 You’ve wanted to slap me and now it’s not allowed?
1:17:43 No, no, no, no, no. Over the past, jiu-jitsu, and we’re going to come back to the foot thing,
1:17:48 but jiu-jitsu is a martial art that has a lot to do with the hands, the grip. And I’ve noticed that
1:17:54 my hands have gotten bigger because I’ve purposely started doing more hand type of work this past year.
1:17:54 Like the rice bucket.
1:17:58 Like the rice bucket. I’ve been doing a lot of hand work because I started,
1:18:03 because of all the gripping and the martial art, I started to feel pain in my fingers. And one thing you
1:18:06 notice with a lot of high-level black belt grapplers is their fingers are kind of mangled
1:18:11 because of everything that happens over the years. So I started doing rice bucket work and a bunch of
1:18:14 other things, but my hands, I’m happy you say that because my hands didn’t used to be this meaty.
1:18:15 Yeah.
1:18:15 So thank you.
1:18:16 You’re welcome.
1:18:17 It’s working.
1:18:17 You’re welcome.
1:18:17 Okay.
1:18:18 Yeah.
1:18:23 If this jiu-jitsu or YouTube thing doesn’t work out, you could go into one of those Russian slapping
1:18:23 competitions.
1:18:27 I would never, I would never, not worth the TBI.
1:18:31 They would mess me up for sure. I’m not strong enough for that. But I, the reason why I wanted
1:18:34 people to do that on the table and feel that is because when a lot of people try to do this with
1:18:39 the feet, they just grab the ground like this. And like what you were doing in the park initially,
1:18:44 they kind of just curl their toes like pin. Yeah. Like pinch instead of pinching slightly and then
1:18:50 ripping apart to create a part, just to be clear is not straight out to the sides. It’s really like
1:18:52 a rotational.
1:18:52 Yes.
1:18:53 Right.
1:18:56 And that rotation is going to allow the knees to come out and for the sumo deadlift,
1:19:00 the knees will pull out because you’re getting external rotation of the hips,
1:19:02 which will allow you room to drive the hips forward.
1:19:07 Let me ask you this. With the sumo deadlift, when you place your feet, let’s just say straight ahead
1:19:14 is 12 o’clock and then your toes are getting pointed out. How externally rotated are your feet to begin
1:19:22 with? Are they as far out as you can get them and really close to the plates? Are they at 10 o’clock
1:19:29 and two o’clock and then you get that type of tearing apart external rotation?
1:19:34 Nowadays, my feet would probably be at 11 and one. Okay. All right.
1:19:38 The reason why they’re at 11 and one is because I have better mobility than I had. So when I do
1:19:44 create that torsion, I have more hip mobility to even to, to create when I’m moving out. Some people
1:19:49 who don’t have that hip mobility have to have their feet in a wider position so that they can create
1:19:55 enough width to have their knees not be in the way of our, right? So that’s, that’s totally dependent
1:19:59 on one’s hip mobility. But when you get more hip mobility, when you’re creating that torsion,
1:20:02 your, your feet angle will change slightly for how comfortable you are in the position.
1:20:07 So whatever position you have right now, there’s not like, there’s a golden position for the level
1:20:12 of mobility you currently have. And as that mobility improves and as your ability to create more force
1:20:16 improves, that position will adjust. How close to the plates are your toes?
1:20:17 My toes?
1:20:21 Oh no, no. Yeah. My toes aren’t like, how wide is your stance? Is it another way to put it?
1:20:27 It’s like 90 degrees. So, so when I say 90 degrees, I mean, my legs are out and my feet are like,
1:20:32 or my knees are right below my fingers. So I’m not like, I don’t have this. You see a lot of people
1:20:39 where they’re, they almost have like this triangle angle with their feet. I have like a box. That’s the
1:20:43 structure. In the bottom position. In the bottom position. Yeah. Yeah. In the bottom position,
1:20:49 it’s like, boom, boom. From knee to ankle is perpendicular. From knee to ankle is perpendicular.
1:20:53 Yeah. Interestingly enough, you notice like in Ed Cohn, he had this outward, like you’ll notice he kind
1:20:58 of like, his feet were closer together in his sumo deadlift. Yeah. And he was a crazy sumo deadlifter,
1:21:03 but that’s where he found he was able to create the most force. What was his crazy record setting
1:21:10 deadlift? Some insane number. What was it? Like nine, nine 70 to two 20 or something.
1:21:12 Yeah. That’s put on screen. Ed Cohn’s had a lot of records.
1:21:17 Yeah. He’s had a lot of records. Yeah. I remember getting this book. I’m blanking on the author’s name,
1:21:23 but it was like Ed Cohn, the man, the myth, the method, which was a great book. And there was a photo.
1:21:27 You want to talk about people who are well-built for their sport. Like you look at Michael Phelps,
1:21:30 you’re like, okay, I could swim my whole life. Like my body doesn’t look like that guy. Like
1:21:36 his ankles are funny and like, he’s just perfectly built for the sport. Right. And there was a photo.
1:21:41 I don’t know if it was Wolt Chamberlain or some NBA player who was like 10 foot 10. Right. And he’s
1:21:46 next to Ed Cohn, who’s not 10 foot 10. He’s like five foot five. And they put their hands together
1:21:53 and they were the same size. And I was like, man, oh man, you could not design from scratch a better
1:21:57 body for this exact lift. Have you ever met Ed Cohn?
1:22:04 I don’t think I have met Ed. We’ve had conversations before, but no, I don’t think I’ve met him in
1:22:12 person actually. Okay. Ed is a literal mutant to this day. The last time I saw him in person was a few
1:22:17 years ago. I mean, is it fair to say, I mean, one of the greatest powerlifters, if not the greatest of
1:22:20 all time, still the greatest powerlifter of all time. I would say he’s still the greatest powerlifter of all
1:22:24 time. I think he popularized the sport so much. He got so many people into powerlifting. He inspired
1:22:28 so many of the greatest minds in powerlifting to this day that like, I don’t think no matter what
1:22:34 anybody else does in powerlifting, I think Ed Cohn is probably still the greatest. And then from there,
1:22:38 it’s like, well, who has the highest total in that? Like, yeah, you know what I mean?
1:22:43 And going back to Ed’s structure, first off, his hands are huge. Like I shook his hand and his hand
1:22:50 engulfed my hand, right? Me being so much taller, it’s like he ate my hand with his and made me feel
1:22:55 so small. The second thing is the length of his arms. Ed has these-
1:22:56 His ape index must be off the charts.
1:23:01 He has these orangutan arms, bro, where it’s like, when you look at his sumo deadlift form,
1:23:04 it kind of makes some sense with like, how, how easy-
1:23:06 He doesn’t have to have the legs super wide.
1:23:10 He doesn’t. He doesn’t, right? So one of the things about the sumo and one of the things about
1:23:15 lifting in general is finding the best position for your anatomical leverages. Like some people,
1:23:19 like for example, a Kelly Sturette, a lot of the time he was squatting with his feet pointed
1:23:24 straight forward, creating that torsion. But you look at his limb lengths, he could be really good
1:23:29 for that. Some people, if they have a longer torso, sometimes that position doesn’t do well
1:23:32 for them because as they head down into the hole, their body folds. So they need,
1:23:35 some of them need to have a much wider stance so that when they head down into the hole,
1:23:40 they don’t have this massive folding of their torso. So it’s, what’s one of the cool things with lifting
1:23:46 where you’ll see someone like an Olympic lifter with beautiful mechanics, but then you also really
1:23:50 have to pay attention to the way this person is built and you have to find the best way to move
1:23:52 that way through space with your leverages.
1:23:57 Yeah, totally. Makes me think of one of my buddies, amazing striker, used to compete at a very high
1:24:03 level. And I mean, he is like gangly as fuck. And that was part of the problem because he would be
1:24:08 like a foot taller or he would have like eight inches of additional reach on people. So he would just
1:24:12 pummel the hell out of people in the same weight class, but there’s certain movements. Like you want
1:24:17 that guy to like do bench press, you’re going to come away with the misperception that he is weak.
1:24:22 Right. It’s like, no, maybe with that particular movement, sure. It’s not very well built for his
1:24:28 dimensions, but let him throw like a power jab at your face. Like, yeah, he’s well built for that.
1:24:28 Yeah.
1:24:30 You know, just different body types.
1:24:34 Let me add this in. Cause I think this is something that can maybe give
1:24:40 some people something to explore when it comes to their deadlift movement. When it comes to deadlifting,
1:24:44 the things that we think about is like the conventional deadlift, the sumo deadlift.
1:24:50 Well, you could also attempt doing like a staggered stance deadlift. So a staggered stance deadlift would
1:24:56 mean there’s one foot ahead, one foot behind. The foot behind has the heel elevated slightly,
1:24:59 like a kickstand. Kickstand, it could be called kickstand, staggered stance deadlift,
1:25:05 deadlift in that way. You could use either a straight bar, you could use a trap bar. The concepts
1:25:10 still hold true. But the reason why I have enjoyed progressing that staggered stance deadlift,
1:25:16 and I use a trap bar when I do that is just because for me, it feels as if it relates to
1:25:21 gate a little bit better than the standard deadlifts do. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the standard
1:25:27 sumo or conventional. But when I’m thinking about creating upward force, how would I jump off of the
1:25:32 ground? When I think about that, and then I think about, okay, transferring that to a barbell,
1:25:37 I wouldn’t necessarily jump off of the ground in the stance that I’m using in sumo or conventional.
1:25:42 I would do it in this kind of staggered kickstand stance and then pop off. If I were trying to
1:25:46 actually create force upwards, that’s how I would do it. And I think that that would be
1:25:52 worth one’s time to progress. You’re not going to lift as much weight initially, but over time,
1:25:56 you can build up some, I don’t even like saying this because I don’t want people to think of it in
1:26:00 terms of numbers. I want people to think about the movement, but you can get very strong doing that.
1:26:04 And then you’re also strong in this stance that can relate to how you’ll actually move
1:26:07 yourself through space. But now you’re creating force with it.
1:26:17 What are some exercises that you think, I know this is such a maybe trite question, but just really
1:26:23 incredible bang for the buck exercises. And for instance, for me, and I’m not saying I’m any
1:26:33 paragon of exercise expertise, but the two-handed kettlebell swing is just, it seems like you get so much
1:26:39 from that exercise performed consistently with progressive resistance, whether that’s in terms
1:26:44 of loading through higher volume or increasing the weight. I mean, it is just remarkable how much
1:26:50 I get out of that exercise, even once or twice a week. It’s just astonishing to me continually.
1:27:01 Anything else that you would throw into that type of category that come to mind with the condition that
1:27:07 you can get somebody to the point where they can perform them safely, reasonably quickly.
1:27:13 I think everyone should own a sandbag because picking up a sandbag off of the ground, starting
1:27:19 light. So you get yourself, let’s say you get a 75 pound bag, you fill it up to 50 pounds, you get
1:27:24 yourself to lifting that without any type of discomfort. And one of the reasons why I think that is so
1:27:32 beneficial and so useful is the way that one will bend down to pick up a sandbag. Because when you bend
1:27:37 down to pick up a barbell, it’s this implement that’s perfectly symmetrical, only way that the
1:27:42 hands are involved or when they’re gripping like this, you have to get yourself in this neutral
1:27:47 position and you hinge forward. It teaches you how to be a perfect hinge, a perfect lever. But whenever
1:27:55 you lift a sandbag, every sandbag lift has its own, it’s never the same because of the nature of the
1:28:00 implement. It’s this shapely thing that you have to, first off, you have this open palm grip,
1:28:06 you have to grip around it, and then you have to organize your body to lift it safely. Anybody can
1:28:11 lift a light sandbag safely while breathing. Over time, you increase the weight. But I think that if
1:28:16 people learn to lift sandbags well, that will be something that will actually prepare you to lift
1:28:22 well for life because your spine isn’t in this perfect neutral position as you’re doing it. There’s
1:28:28 slight curvature and you learn that it is safe to lift something with some slight rounding of the spine.
1:28:32 Of course, with a barbell, you don’t do that often unless you’re doing something like a Jefferson
1:28:36 curl, which I think they’re pretty solid, especially if you don’t load them to a crazy extent as you’re
1:28:40 progressing it because some people get focused on the load. By the way, what a Jefferson curl is,
1:28:47 is it’s a purposeful rounding of the spine to lift a barbell off the ground. It’s actually the antithesis of,
1:28:50 I think I’m using the word antithesis of the correct, but it’s the opposite of what you’re
1:28:54 taught to do when you deadlift to create a neutral spine. You’re literally rounding your back to lift
1:29:00 the barbell off the ground. It sounds like a joke, but it’s to ingrain in your body that my spine is
1:29:06 okay getting to this position, lifting something. But I think a sandbag would be money for people.
1:29:11 Just for clarity, are you picking it up and then dropping it and then picking it up and dropping it?
1:29:17 A base thing that you could do is literally pick it up, sit around your stomach, bring it back down to
1:29:21 the ground. You can either drop it or you can lower it back down to the ground. Then there are progressions
1:29:25 where now you pick it up, launch it up to your shoulder, bring it down to the back to the ground.
1:29:30 So you could drop it or you can bring it slowly back down to the ground. And then you could pick it up,
1:29:36 throw it over your shoulder, pick it up, throw it over the opposite shoulder. It’s inherently a rotational throw,
1:29:40 when you become adept with it. So there are progressions, but the base progression would be
1:29:45 literally just, the first thing you would do is you would just do a sandbag deadlift. Then you would
1:29:49 do a lift to the stomach. Then you would do a lift to the shoulder. Then you could do a throw. And then
1:29:53 there’s a bunch of things. You could do squats. You could do split squats. You could do caustic squats.
1:29:54 You could do lunges.
1:29:59 Caustic squats is another one. Typically I’ve just done that with like a kind of a goblet squat type
1:30:04 of hole on a kettlebell, but just remarkable how much you get out of that exercise as you slowly,
1:30:10 and you know, what was wild about it to me, what a funny name, number one, is I was using it as a
1:30:15 warmup for some acrobatic stuff that I was doing way back in the day. I was just using it as a warmup,
1:30:18 but I noticed I was getting stronger. And so I started adding a little bit of weight,
1:30:21 a little bit of weight. And I got to the point where I was doing caustic squats,
1:30:26 it’s not like this isn’t that ton of weight, but it’s like with a, I don’t know, 70 or 80 pound
1:30:32 kettlebell. And again, the transfer, I was just like, wow, I wasn’t even treating this as part of my
1:30:38 workout. But just over time, because I was doing the acrobatic stuff very regularly, so I was like
1:30:44 never doing it to exhaustion, just that greasing the groove. And I was like, what the hell is going on
1:30:49 here? It’s remarkable how much it transferred. It’s a money movement. So I mentioned all those
1:30:53 movements because these are all things that you could do throughout the day with the sandbag that
1:30:58 you keep by your desk. You could do squats. You could do some quick lunges. You could bring
1:31:01 it up to your shoulder. You could do some quick caustic squats. You could do a reverse lunge. You
1:31:03 could literally do all these movements with a single sandbag.
1:31:06 Are you just bear hugging the caustic when you’re doing the caustic?
1:31:10 Yeah. Yeah, you keep it right there. And then you go into a caustic squat position. Yes, absolutely.
1:31:16 And with the caustic squat specifically, it’s particularly powerful because most people,
1:31:22 when it comes to training the adductors, they mainly do that with like the machine in the gym.
1:31:28 Yeah. So adductors, guys, inside of your thighs. I mean, that’s very super. Like Suzanne Summers,
1:31:38 thigh master. That’s adductors, right? So if you’re trying to pop a ball between your knees using your
1:31:44 adductors. There’s a very shady side of the internet of women popping watermelons with their adductors.
1:31:45 Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s interesting.
1:31:46 I thought I’d seen it all.
1:31:47 You haven’t. Will you see that?
1:31:49 This is going to be the headline for your episode.
1:31:55 But if you want the straight to do that, right, caustic squats are going to be great. There are
1:31:58 more specific adductor movements like the Copenhagen plank.
1:32:03 You’re saying most people who train their adductors are only using one of those machines.
1:32:08 If they ever use that machine sparsely, they use that sparsely typically. And that ends up being a
1:32:09 very weak link.
1:32:13 just for people who might wonder, because those machines are very popular and they’re usually
1:32:19 monopolized by any, not to paint with a broad brush, but like a few women are just sitting on there for
1:32:24 like hours, it seems, working this stuff, right? Why is that a weak link compared to doing something
1:32:25 like a caustic squat or something else?
1:32:31 You do get some tension on those tissues when you’re doing a typical squat, but not an insane
1:32:36 amount. When you’re doing a sumo deadlift, you also get some tension on that area, but not as much
1:32:42 as when you’re isolating it in a bilateral fashion with a caustic squat. Along with that in the caustic
1:32:46 squat, you get more length of those tissues when you get to depth of the caustic squat than you would.
1:32:50 But I’ll give another bad visual for people. So people are like, what the hell are they talking
1:32:59 about caustic squat? So imagine the most stereotypical, like Russian dancer, arms folded, like kicking out
1:33:05 from side to side and then freeze frame on the, on the ground where like one leg is fully extended to
1:33:11 one side and he or she is basically squatting like ass to the other heel on the other side.
1:33:13 Okay. Caustic squat.
1:33:19 Yeah. Yeah. And one thing I find interesting about that is for a long time, I was really trying to get
1:33:23 good at caustic squats and it wasn’t until I was allowing myself to breathe when I got down to that
1:33:27 position that I actually got there safely and came out.
1:33:33 What have you found most effective for improving ankle mobility, right? Because for a lot of people,
1:33:36 if they try to do a caustic squat, well, do you have heel up or heel down?
1:33:36 Heel down.
1:33:37 Heel down.
1:33:38 I have heel down.
1:33:42 So for a lot of folks, if they try to do that, they’re going to fall backwards if they don’t
1:33:46 have the ankle mobility, right? If the knee can’t travel kind of over the toes.
1:33:46 Yeah.
1:33:49 Any thoughts on developing that?
1:33:53 I think that a great conversation for you would be Ben Patrick too.
1:33:54 Okay. All right.
1:34:00 Because, because what I’m going to tell you is this is why I find that I’ve been so lucky to
1:34:05 learn from so many people because the only reason why I’m able to first have the level of mobility
1:34:09 I do is because of a lot of things that I’ve learned from these different people. So for example,
1:34:12 the ankle mobility you’re talking about right there, some things that helped with that were
1:34:17 the ATG split squat that I was telling you about, which is a movement that again, he popularized,
1:34:21 but that front leg, I hope that when this podcast comes out, maybe there’s an image of an ATG split
1:34:27 squat that can be pulled up. So people can see that the front leg that’s doing the split squat over
1:34:31 time, there are regressions to that movement, by the way. So everything we’ve talked about,
1:34:35 if you find that you’re not getting there, regress the movement, regress the range of motion.
1:34:41 Tell me if I’m getting it roughly right. And also I have his ATG device that is like
1:34:48 plate loading for wrist work, extensor work, grip work, which is fantastic. What does ATG stand for?
1:34:54 ATG, his company stands for Athletic Truth Group. You think it stands for Astrographs.
1:34:59 Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I didn’t see it coming. Okay. Got it. Athletic Truth Group.
1:34:59 Athletic Truth Group.
1:35:00 All right. Got it.
1:35:06 Yeah. And Ben is a guy, one of the reasons why I appreciate Ben so much is because he’s a very
1:35:11 open-minded individual. Like you’ll run across so many people in these different fitness spaces,
1:35:17 and they’re so dogmatic, gung-ho about their system. And if you do this system,
1:35:20 this is what’s going to happen when you do this. It’s not good. And this is what’s going to happen
1:35:24 when you do this. It’s like everything is their system. But the people that I tend to really
1:35:30 appreciate are the people that they may have some things that they do, but they can also see the
1:35:34 strength in many other things. Right. And Ben is that type of person where he, he’s also someone who
1:35:39 continues to learn. You know, he, he has these, this is what he’s done, but Ben is continuously
1:35:43 learning and applying new things to the people that he works with and himself and finds benefit.
1:35:48 And it’s one of those things where he’s in the constant growth rather than finding the negatives
1:35:50 of everything that everyone’s doing. Right.
1:35:52 To protect his predefined fiefdom. Yeah.
1:35:58 Yeah. So let me, let me throw out something. Tell me how close this is. So there is an exercise
1:36:05 of all places. It was actually given to me by a physio in Sweden who I chanced upon. It was like,
1:36:10 because my back has been bothering me for so long and everybody to me, it’s like,
1:36:16 oh, you got to try my friend’s block. Right. Or this person can do this. Or you have to try
1:36:21 my friend, the acupuncturist. Like everybody’s got a suggestion. God bless them. But it ends up after
1:36:25 a while you become a little tone deaf to it. Cause I’m like, all right, look, I can talk to your tarot
1:36:29 car reader and I can talk to your Qigong person. I just not sure it’s going to do anything.
1:36:33 But this physio ended up working with a lot of professional fighters. That’s not me.
1:36:38 And professional soccer players. And he really knew his stuff. I just lucked out. Cause this drunk guy
1:36:41 at a party was like, you should meet my physio. I’m like, yeah, I’m sure I should meet your physio.
1:36:44 And then I just had a wide open day the next day. And I was like, fuck it. All right,
1:36:49 sure. I’ll meet your physio. And Sebastian’s his name ended up being excellent in Stockholm.
1:36:56 And he gave me some very basic exercises again, with the intention of remediating some of the back
1:37:02 pain and strengthening. And one of them was elevated front foot split squats, very lightly loaded,
1:37:10 going fully down to the bottom position where the front knee is way over the front foot toes.
1:37:16 And basically ass is on the heel, three second pause at the bottom back up and doing like sets of
1:37:19 six to eight. That’s the regression for the ATG split squat.
1:37:24 That’s a regression for the flat ground ATG split squat. And to go back to what you’re asking about
1:37:27 the ankles, why is that really good for the ankles? Do you know that the position that the
1:37:34 ankle gets into is this deep position that you can, when you own that position, you lower it to the
1:37:39 ground. And now when you own that position of the ankles, you apply that to a caussic squat,
1:37:43 you’re able to get to full depth of a caussic because of where the knee, the knee is over the
1:37:47 toe and you’re in deep ankle dorsiflexion. That’s how these things work. Yeah. Dorsiflexion,
1:37:53 just pull your toes towards your nose. Exactly. Toes towards your knees. That’s dorsiflexion.
1:37:56 The thing is, is like, when you find that you don’t have the mobility for a specific movement,
1:38:01 there are so many ways to regress it. With a caussic squat, you could do a caussic squat
1:38:07 with a wall behind you. So the wall can help guide you down. Unloaded wall behind caussic squat. You can
1:38:12 even angle the foot outwards a little bit to allow yourself a little bit more give with that knee.
1:38:17 You can also add some heel. You can also put it on a box if you need to, and then slowly regress it
1:38:23 down. And I want to mention, the concept of regression is what got me out of knee pain,
1:38:27 is what got me out of pretty much all pain. But specifically, I want to mention knees because
1:38:32 when I was in my early twenties, I had a meniscectomy. Partial meniscus removal, I can’t
1:38:36 remember which knee now. I think it was my left. It’s something that happened in jujitsu. I also,
1:38:41 when I was younger, I had Oscar Slaughter, and I was a soccer player. So when I got into my early
1:38:45 twenties, I couldn’t sprint. I felt like I was probably going to have trash knees for the rest
1:38:51 of my life. I couldn’t run without pain at all. So let alone run, absolutely couldn’t sprint,
1:38:55 couldn’t jump. I was doing squats and stuff, and there was some pain I was having, so I was using
1:39:01 knee sleeves. So I was pretty certain that at this point, I just need to make sure to keep them pretty
1:39:05 strong. But sprinting, et cetera, it’s not going to be part of the system for me. That’s when I came
1:39:11 across some of Ben’s stuff back in 2019 or 2018, I think. I came across some of his stuff on Instagram,
1:39:17 started regressing it, doing the simplest regression. So an ATG split’s going on a box.
1:39:22 There’s this pulse movement that you do where you just have this very small range of motion with the
1:39:26 knee where you’re just putting yourself in slight knee flexion coming out, pulsing it, driving a lot
1:39:32 of blood to the knee area. And I would progress these things over time. After four or so months,
1:39:36 I was able to get into full deep knee positions that I was never able to get into without pain
1:39:42 before. And then when I started doing things like running, I was able to run without pain,
1:39:46 and then I started sprinting without pain. But it started with regression.
1:39:48 Oh, yeah.
1:39:51 So the reason why I’m saying that is-
1:39:54 That’s a very princess-like sneeze, Mr. Large Man.
1:39:57 I didn’t want to let it out. If I let it out, it would be disgusting. So when you hold it in,
1:40:04 it turns into this mousy squeal. Let’s keep that in there. Let’s keep that in there. If I had to
1:40:07 sneeze again, I’ll show you what the big one looks like just so I can save myself. My gosh.
1:40:14 But I say this because regressions are the name of the game for all of this. If you have pain doing
1:40:18 something, there is a way to regress it, and you need to own the regression before you progress.
1:40:24 I just want to underline this because this chronic back pain has been one of the biggest challenges
1:40:30 in my life. Because I’ve always seen myself as athletic. I’ve always been able to take a kicking
1:40:39 and then get back on the horse and get back to athleticism. And this experience where this pain
1:40:46 at such a pivotal cornerstone piece of your body is tied into every movement when you sleep. There’s
1:40:54 no escaping it. Psychologically, physically, emotionally, it has been such a difficult
1:40:59 experience and given me so much sympathy for people in chronic pain. If you have not been in
1:41:04 serious chronic pain, it is impossible to understand what it’s like until you’re there.
1:41:12 I would say the one mantra of sorts that has allowed me to start digging out of that hole,
1:41:18 and I used a different term for myself. I don’t remember where I got it, but it was just like,
1:41:23 scale it down. And it’s the same idea. It’s just like, okay, let’s just say hypothetically,
1:41:28 okay, I might need this surgery in the elbow. Okay, great. I can’t do X number of pushups. Okay,
1:41:34 fine. Do one-tenth of X number of pushups. Okay, you can’t do whatever it might be. Well,
1:41:39 barbell puts too much twerk in the elbow. Okay, fine. Let’s use dumbbells. But the rule is like,
1:41:44 you can’t do nothing. You have to scale it down. And maybe you omit exercises, sure. But it’s like,
1:41:49 train around it, train around it, train around it. And it’s like, for instance, the box squat,
1:41:55 great example. Jersey is like the alt Jersey Gregor, who I keep mentioning is like the ultimate master of
1:42:00 regressions to use your word, because he’ll have someone like they’ll do a squat and like they’ll go
1:42:03 down eight inches. And he’s like, that’s it. And they’re like, no, but I do like below parallel in
1:42:08 the gym. And he’s like, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t. Exactly. And he’s just like, okay,
1:42:13 like your max depth is whatever I’m making this number, this number up, but it’s like 36 inches
1:42:17 off the ground. And they’re like, that’s joke. And he’s like, that’s your assignment. He’s really funny
1:42:22 too. Cause at one point I was like, so you’re suggesting. And he’s like, no, I’m not suggesting.
1:42:30 I am telling you. And it feels like a waste of time to start off in where he would start people.
1:42:39 But as they develop the right mechanics and then pain-free progress, and it takes like weeks,
1:42:43 maybe even months to get back to where they think they should be. And then lo and behold,
1:42:51 they’re so much stronger. They own the position. All these aches and pains go away. So you can’t do
1:42:55 nothing, but you can scale it down or like regress it. Right. And the other thing I’ll mention just
1:43:00 for people who may be in a similar position to myself where they have a lot of low back stuff,
1:43:08 the other reason that Sebastian prescribed the front foot elevated split squat was to avoid
1:43:15 hyper lordosis, right? Like overarching of the low back. Yeah. I have a lot of thoracic mobility
1:43:22 issues. So I tend to flare out and arch and he was like, okay, let’s mitigate that by elevating the
1:43:30 front foot. Yeah. All right, cool. Dig it. I want to mention I, Ben, he has an app and on that app,
1:43:35 he puts all his stuff there for monthly payment for people. So if you guys are in, Ben mentions that
1:43:39 people can do this. So I’m going to mention this too. You could go on there. You could screenshot the
1:43:45 movements. You could cancel literally. I have a program there too. And this martial arts section,
1:43:49 and you can literally go there and you can just take it all if you want to. But the reason why I
1:43:52 mentioned that is because all of the regressions are right there. If you’re looking for a way to
1:43:57 regress all these movements, that’s all there. There’s also in that school community, but
1:44:04 just take the regressions and be patient with those regressions. Cause one of the reasons that I was held
1:44:09 back for so long was because I thought I was better than I was. I’ve been playing soccer for
1:44:14 like 16 years. I’ve always seen myself as an athlete. So going to do some of these things and
1:44:20 these simple regressions, I was just like, no, I can move on to the last chapter. No, I should be able
1:44:25 to. And then I’d always find myself in pain. I’d always find myself moving backwards. And it wasn’t
1:44:31 until I just realized, Hey, be a beginner with this, start with the regressions, own those, and then
1:44:35 slowly progress upward. But then I was able to make all the progress to where I am now.
1:44:40 So it’s a big shift. And I think this is the last thing I’ll mention. I think one of the reasons why
1:44:45 this is hard for some people that lift or that have already been training for a bit is because
1:44:51 traditional lifting is kind of easy in the sense that if you get strong with the shoulder press,
1:44:56 you just increase that weight week by week, bicep curl, increase that weight a little bit. You get this
1:45:01 big payoff very, very quickly when you see that weight going up. But when it comes to holistic
1:45:07 movement in some of these ranges, you will realize that you have some weak links that you have to work
1:45:11 on with potentially no weight. And that’s not as fun as just doing the heavy shoulder press.
1:45:13 You know what I mean?
1:45:13 Getting the payoff.
1:45:19 Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I would also say it’s like, you can get away, at least I’ll personalize it. I
1:45:23 think this is true for a lot of people, but like, just because you can lift more weight than your
1:45:29 friends does not mean your form is good. I don’t think my form was the worst in the world,
1:45:33 but it’s like, we were talking about like 96 when I was probably my biggest and strongest and arguably
1:45:40 fattest, but wasn’t that fat, but I was doing like 400 pound ish back squats for like a set of 10.
1:45:48 Now in retrospect, should I have been doing that? Probably not. And when I mentioned earlier,
1:45:51 I was like, oh yeah, probably three, four years ago, whenever it wasn’t that back squat workout,
1:45:57 when I hurt myself, I was probably going too low and having that change in the spinal position with
1:46:01 like a butt wink. And I think that probably contributed to it. And I’m sure there are people
1:46:06 out there who are like, Tim Ferriss can’t even do a goddamn squat. I knew it. That guy’s an idiot.
1:46:16 What I would say is you could be right. Number one. Number two is get video of your technique and have
1:46:19 somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, like a very high level competitor, look at that
1:46:25 technique. And chances are, it’s not as good as you think it is. Do you know what I mean? And then
1:46:28 there comes a point where it’s like, all right, I’ve bent the paperclip so many times, boom, I have an
1:46:34 injury. And now it’s just a wake-up call. It’s like, all right, let’s start from scaling it back
1:46:42 from the fundamentals, swallow my pride, take my ego down a notch and like work it back up, which is very
1:46:46 hard to do psychologically. It’s really tough. And it’s like, there’s so many parallels that I see here.
1:46:53 It’s like with Jersey, it’s like, man, you have to check your ego at the door. Cause you might walk
1:46:57 in. He doesn’t care. Like he really does. He’s so salty. He just like, you could be world champion
1:47:00 in X, Y, and Z. And he’ll be like, okay, you’re going to start with 20 pound dumbbells. And you’re
1:47:07 like, what? And he’s like, yeah, it’s like 20 pound dumbbells. Cause yeah, you shouldn’t be doing this
1:47:12 with more than 20 pound dumbbells. And people are just like, what? Yeah. It doesn’t even compute.
1:47:18 But then with these micro progressions, as he would call them, it’s, it is incredible. Like I was saying
1:47:24 to you, uh, he had this Vietnam vet with a number of fused vertebra who had been walking around on body
1:47:28 brace, could not bend in any direction, got him to the point where he’s doing stiff leg deadlifts with
1:47:38 315 off an elevated platform and continued doing that for decades. I mean, it’s unreal. And similarly,
1:47:43 and I haven’t seen this because I haven’t really been doing this term, you know, and you’re in the
1:47:48 notes that I had for this conversation. It’s not my term, but I like the term, which is micro dosing
1:47:58 movement. I’ve only played with that with a few things like slacklining and it is incredible what your
1:48:05 body can end up doing with like three to five minutes a day of slackline. You do not need,
1:48:10 in fact, one could argue you shouldn’t do really long sessions. What are some other examples of
1:48:19 micro dosing movement? Because as I get older more and more, yes, you want to be strong. Yes. I agree
1:48:24 with Pavel, like strength is kind of the mother attribute in a lot of ways. Yes. You want to have
1:48:27 muscle mass because of sarcopenia and all this stuff as you get older. That’s all true.
1:48:35 And fundamentally we are evolved as bodies to move in space. Like our brains are evolved to manage
1:48:42 that interface. And I find myself hungering for more and more athletic movement. So what are some
1:48:48 other ways to, to micro dose movement that might kind of produce benefits? And you can take that
1:48:53 however you want to take it that are surprising to folks. I think one of the simplest things one can do
1:49:03 is start introducing different shapes of your spine, primarily a shape that I think many of us are
1:49:08 scared about, which is like spinal flexion, spinal flexion, reaching over, touching your toes with a
1:49:14 rounded back. Exactly. But let me actually just rewind real quick because I want to mention, you know,
1:49:19 Pavel talks about greasing the groove. I had got introduced to micro dosing by a friend of mine,
1:49:23 Corey Schlesinger. I think he’s like, just to be clear, micro dosing movement, micro dosing movement,
1:49:28 not, not micro, not micro dosing psilocybin, although that’s fun, but micro dosing movement.
1:49:33 Corey is, I don’t know if he’s working with the Phoenix Suns now, but he was like the director of
1:49:37 performance, I think for the Suns recently. So I know he’s working with an NBA team,
1:49:42 but he, when he talked to us about it, you know, he was having a lot of his NBA athletes.
1:49:46 He would have them do a little bit of movement before games, a little bit of movement after games,
1:49:50 and you’d figure out ways for them to have movement sprinkled into their day so that they always felt
1:49:55 good. Because what happens with some athletes is like, they have to have this extensive warmup routine
1:50:00 to get their bodies ready. And these are athletes, by the way. So if an athlete needs this extensive
1:50:05 warmup routine to get ready for game day, somebody who’s like sitting at a desk or just working or
1:50:11 whatever, like the amount of prep you might need to get ready to move is far too much.
1:50:16 The goal of micro dosing movement or greasing the group, as Pablo puts it, is to make it so
1:50:22 these different movements just become a part of who you are and what you do. You don’t need to prepare
1:50:26 to bend your spine down into a flex pattern and pick something off the ground because you’re just
1:50:31 healthy and safe. You feel healthy and safe doing it. Now, the thing I’ll also mention here is that
1:50:36 there are many really smart people who are against some of the things like Jefferson curls,
1:50:45 like Stu McGill doesn’t like it. Stu doesn’t like it. And I would agree to the sense of people who
1:50:50 haven’t regressed the movement enough. If you just rush into something like a Jefferson curl that we
1:50:56 were just talking about, where you had deep spinal flexion, you pick up a barbell or something off the
1:51:01 ground, that’s going to cause you some issue, especially if you don’t feel safe doing it. You’re going to hold your
1:51:04 breath, you’re going to force yourself into that position and then you’ll tweak something and then
1:51:08 you’ll say, this is a bad position or a bad movement. But when you learn to breathe through movement with
1:51:15 no weight, like I was talking about, let’s say you decide that I’m going to pick that ball off the
1:51:21 ground a few times a day, flexing my back and going down to the ground. I’m going to inhale when I go
1:51:26 down and exhale when I go up. I’m going to make myself own this movement. Doing that with no weight
1:51:31 initially for most people is going to feel fine. And then as you improve that, you’re like, okay,
1:51:37 can I do that with a six pound kettlebell? Can I do that with a 20 pound kettlebell? Can I do that
1:51:42 with a 30 pound kettlebell? Like, can I organize my body to lift this safely in this position? And then
1:51:47 you own that position because it’s no longer foreign to you. Now you’re no longer flexion intolerant.
1:51:52 But when you’re someone who has avoided these different ranges of motion with the spine,
1:51:57 whether it’s deflection, extension, et cetera, and then you go into a workout or you try doing
1:52:02 some weighted rotational movement, and then you tweak something, you think that these are bad
1:52:07 movements or bad ranges of motion. But the thing is that you just didn’t regress enough and you didn’t
1:52:12 spend time with the most basic forms of those movements. So when it comes to microdosing, one of
1:52:17 the ways to make microdosing easy for you is to make your environment serve you. This is why,
1:52:22 and people just, some people might just think I’m some fitness nut for this, but I keep equipment
1:52:29 around my area, around my desk. I have a kettlebell sitting there. I have a club sitting there. I have
1:52:35 a 100 pound sandbag by my desk, by my work desk. I also have a gripper on the table so that if I’m
1:52:40 doing something on my laptop to one side, I can hit that gripper up a little bit. I have these things
1:52:45 just sitting around to encourage me to touch them because if they’re not in front of me,
1:52:50 I am not going to do them. All this hand stuff, you give me that compliment on my hands, bro,
1:52:56 it’s because I have grip equipment everywhere. I have it in my car. I have it at my podcast desk.
1:53:01 I have it at my work desk. I have it in the kitchen. I have it everywhere.
1:53:06 I can’t wait for you to, I think you already saw the video, but to take another look at the
1:53:11 Abraham’s with Emil Abrahamson. Because then you could just have, I mean, you could do it off the
1:53:16 back of like a set of stairs. That’s what I do at home. But if you get like a hangboard and don’t
1:53:21 overdo the hangboard people, that is the perfect way to blow apart your tendons and ligaments.
1:53:27 Take it easy. But that’s something you can sprinkle in so easily. I sprinkle that in.
1:53:31 My rice bucket sits in front of my TV. So that’s the thing.
1:53:34 Just for people who are wondering what the hell we’re talking about with the rice bucket,
1:53:40 imagine like old, badly dubbed Chinese Kung Fu movies where they like shoot that,
1:53:43 like they make their hands into spears, like shoot it into a bucket of rice and like
1:53:47 turn their hands and do different movements to toughen up their hands and their grip and so on.
1:53:50 It would be a version of that. A lot of baseball players do that too, right?
1:53:51 They knew what they were talking about.
1:53:52 Yeah, exactly.
1:53:55 They knew what they were doing. A lot of this stuff isn’t new. I’m not making this stuff up.
1:53:58 People are doing this stuff for centuries because it works.
1:54:03 But would I do the rice bucket if I had to like pull out the bucket of rice from my garage every
1:54:04 single time?
1:54:04 No, of course not.
1:54:10 I’d have to keep it in the vicinity of something that I already do stuff so that when I go by it,
1:54:13 I’m like, I can do this for a quick minute as we’re watching something and then go back.
1:54:17 I have, for example, there’s this stool called a hunkering stool. By the way,
1:54:19 you don’t need a hunkering stool. You could just have a low seat.
1:54:20 Hunkering stool?
1:54:26 Hunkering stool. H-U-N-K-E-R-I-N stool. This guy’s name is Casey. He owns this company,
1:54:30 Hunkering Stool. It’s a low springy seat. People will see if they ever watch any of my videos,
1:54:32 you’ll see me sitting on a hunkering stool.
1:54:34 I saw one of those in your videos.
1:54:38 It’s a low springy seat. So now you sit down, you just sit down in a squat position. You sit down
1:54:43 in a low squat position, right? So I noticed you have these low mats here that like maybe people
1:54:48 might sit on for meditation, but you have these things that will encourage you to get lower to
1:54:53 the ground. So the sandbag, I also sit down on the sandbag as it’s low to the ground. And that
1:54:57 encourages me to get down in this low position, this low squat position to become comfortable there.
1:55:03 So now I’m not uncomfortable getting down to the ground, which is an essential thing that we need.
1:55:08 Some of us only get down to the ground when we’re doing martial arts. Some of us probably can’t
1:55:13 remember the last time we purposefully went down to the ground on our own volition. Maybe you fell,
1:55:17 but can you become comfortable going down and coming up? Because now if like, maybe you
1:55:22 do fall, it’s not as much of a struggle for you to figure out the puzzle of getting off the ground.
1:55:24 It’s actually not even a puzzle. You just can.
1:55:30 Well, Kelly, you mentioned Kelly Starrett, who he and I go way, way back. And we actually were
1:55:36 in Japan together at the same time and went on this amazing trip with a group of guys. But
1:55:43 on that trip, I mean, both of us, it’s kind of obvious when it’s pointed out, but in Japan,
1:55:51 if you’re going to traditional in spending time in those types of environments, you are getting up and
1:55:58 down all the time and you are sitting cross-legged and you are getting up and you’re basically doing
1:56:04 like Turkish get up light all the time. You are constantly getting from that sitting on the floor
1:56:10 position to fully standing. And every once in a while that these are harder and harder to find,
1:56:15 like you’ve got a squat toilet. And it’s like, that’s it. And I remember asking one of my friends
1:56:18 when I was 15, because I’d never seen a squat toilet. It was my first time out of the US. I’m
1:56:23 like, what the hell is this? And I went to like a baseball game and all they had was squat toilets.
1:56:29 And I remember asking my buddy, like 15 also, I’m like, what do your old people do? And he just
1:56:33 started laughing. He’s like, they’ve been doing it forever. They have no problem. And I was like,
1:56:38 wow, can you imagine what would happen? Like how many ER visits and ambulances you need if
1:56:42 suddenly that were put in like a US stadium? Like, forget about it. But the fact of that
1:56:46 greasing the groove, right? It’s not like these 80 year old Japanese people are doing
1:56:52 tons of Jefferson curls and Turkish get ups, but they are sitting down, getting up, sitting down,
1:56:55 getting up many, many times a day in a lot of cases.
1:56:59 And even just that aspect of sitting on the ground, think about the position that the back gets in,
1:57:03 the deep knee flexion that you’re getting. And many of these people can like just comfortably sit
1:57:07 in the SESA position without a problem. The position of the ankles, the position of the knees,
1:57:11 all these areas when getting up and down off the ground, how healthy that is for your joints and
1:57:16 your movement. That’s why it’s like, instead of thinking about all of this as like exercise,
1:57:22 how can we build our environment? The places where we go, even if you’re at a cubicle at work,
1:57:27 can you put certain things in there that can help you, encourage you to move a little bit more?
1:57:32 If you do that, that will make a lot of this stuff so much easier because it’s less about
1:57:38 how do we program this and more about let’s just touch this a few times a day. After you become
1:57:43 more comfortable sitting down in that low position a little bit more, picking up with that, with the
1:57:47 rounded back, just casually picking up that sandbag. You’re not doing these things while warming up.
1:57:54 You’re just doing them. They’re what you do. Then when you want to go progress it, it’s even easier
1:58:00 because this is just how you move. For me, it wasn’t until I truly set my environment up to
1:58:07 serve my movement ability that I started making bigger and just bigger leaps in my progress because
1:58:12 it became less of, again, a structured workout that I have to go to the gym and do all the time
1:58:18 to just, this is just what I do. I can just pick stuff up. I purposefully hung up gymnastics rings so I
1:58:22 can develop my skill of hanging once again. I have those just hanging. The TV’s right there,
1:58:26 so I’ll just do some quick pull-ups and hang on it. I set up this environment so it’s almost like
1:58:33 an environment of play. I have fun here. I think if more of us did that, it would aid in our movement
1:58:40 progression much faster than always having to go to a gym with four walls for less and get this workout
1:58:45 in. I’ll bring up another person you would have a blast with if you haven’t met him. I remember I
1:58:50 got so much shit. It was funny. I got so much shit. A lot of people were interested off the bat,
1:58:54 but I also got a lot of shit when I did an episode on gymnastic strength training with a
1:58:59 guy named Chris Sommer, coach Chris Sommer, former coach of the national men’s team.
1:59:01 I think I bought his program years back.
1:59:02 Yeah, GST.
1:59:09 And I remember there were a bunch of folks in various communities. I’m not going to name them,
1:59:14 but they’d be pretty obvious. Pretty belligerent online weightlifting communities. There’s a fair
1:59:21 number. And there’s like, bah, ha, ha, ha. Now Tim Ferriss is into Pilates. Good luck with that. Good luck
1:59:28 developing strength. And I’m like, let me see you do an iron cross. Let me see you do a planche
1:59:35 with your feet off the ground. And then tell me that those guys or gals aren’t strong. Let me see
1:59:42 you do that. But the point that I was just going to make is it doesn’t have to be with a bunch of
1:59:49 like ferns and chrome inside four walls. Like you can get so unbelievably strong. And this is going to
1:59:56 be old news to a lot of people, but with calisthenics and doing, if I mean, you want to try it here,
2:00:01 I’ll give people something. They’ll be like, oh, this is so stupid. I’m like, okay, try it. Do something
2:00:06 called pike pulses. So there are a lot of ways you can strengthen your core and abdominals and so on.
2:00:12 This one, sit down on the floor, legs out in front of you. You’re sitting up. That is a pike.
2:00:18 And so your feet are straight. Now what you’re going to do is put some strength into the toes,
2:00:24 point them. And now what you’re going to do is reach forward on either side of your legs,
2:00:27 not as far as you can go, but pretty far. You’re probably going to be on your fingertips on either
2:00:31 side of your legs. Now it’s very simple. All you need to do is lift your legs off the ground
2:00:37 and just pulse up, keeping your legs completely straight, quads locked, and just bring your legs
2:00:42 off the ground, bringing your kind of knees to your chest. Good luck with that. Do a couple of
2:00:46 sets of like 10 or 15 of those. And if it’s too easy on the first one, like bring your, your hands
2:00:51 forward, like four or five inches. If you can do it and do it again, most people will just be murdered
2:00:55 by that. And that is like, you do not need a lot of space. You could do that in the smallest
2:01:01 apartment right next to your bed. Oh, there’s so many good exercises. This is like really inspiring
2:01:08 me also to get back. I really feel like my new chapter, I have to be careful not to be too
2:01:12 enthusiastic and hurt myself, but it’s going to be like a couple of fundamentals. Like I will probably
2:01:19 continue to do sumo deadlift in the way that I described it. Kind of a la Barry Scott who trained
2:01:24 Allison Felix way back in the day that was in the four hour body stuff, but like the sumo deadlift
2:01:31 with no eccentric, I just find it just transfers to so much kettlebell swings for sure. And I was very
2:01:35 interested. People can probably find video of you doing this, but kind of pendulum.
2:01:39 Yeah. The pendulum swing with some kettlebell juggling. Yeah. Yeah. Haven’t gotten to the juggling
2:01:45 yet, but different types of swinging rope flow to get into some new planes of movement. And then I think
2:01:52 I’m going to re-explore some of the GST stuff because I recall doing some like basic, basic ring
2:01:58 stuff. It’s like, look, I’m not going to win any awards here. And then doing, this is all body weight
2:02:05 stuff. And I got so big. People thought they’re like, oh my God, like how much heavy lifting you’ve
2:02:12 been doing? And I was like, zero. Most of this is from also because my upper arms, like my biceps
2:02:16 are the biggest they’d been in probably a decade. And people were just like, bro, you on gear? Like
2:02:21 what’s going on? I was like, no, I’m just literally doing straight arm tension. Like I’m not even doing
2:02:29 any, any flexion. I’m not bending my arms. This is all ring work with fully locked arms. That’s it.
2:02:35 It’s great that you mentioned this because over the years, one thing that I try to do is I try to like
2:02:43 find stuff I’m interested in that I really suck at to improve at I’m 250 pounds. So for me,
2:02:47 you are a lot bigger in person than you are. I mean, you’re big on camera. And then I was just like,
2:02:53 I was like, how am I going to find this guy? And I was like, oh, he’s not hard to find those quads
2:02:55 of the size of my office. Jesus.
2:03:03 But yo man, like calisthenics was something that I, for me, I think is like a place that I’m not the
2:03:08 strong. It’s I’m not very, very strong at some of that can be attributed to my body weight. And I’ve
2:03:15 been so excited at just really nailing down all of these calisthenic basics to continue to improve so
2:03:19 that I can do more complex movements. Because, you know, one of the things that I think that frustrated
2:03:25 me with calisthenics years ago was like these muscle ups, like, oh, I was always making excuses
2:03:29 of my weight, but it’s just, I was not strong enough with my body weight to do these things.
2:03:36 So one of the things with calisthenics is also owning those basics, pushups, dips, pull-ups,
2:03:38 regressing the pull-ups if pull-ups are tough.
2:03:45 Also like regressing, like ring turnout, pushups. Incredible. Like I have all sorts of, I’ve had
2:03:50 shoulder surgeries and stuff. The degree to which that has helped my shoulders, just ring
2:03:51 turn out pushups.
2:03:56 The scapular pull-ups, like the strength of the scapula, I think is something that a lot of people
2:04:01 as they’re doing calisthenics, they don’t realize is so important. And there are ways to isolate the
2:04:07 scap and strengthen that with these movements, right? I realized how weak my scapula was compared
2:04:11 to a lot of other things. Like when I would be doing pull-ups, yes, the scapula is involved,
2:04:17 but like I wasn’t focusing on it, which is why a lot of progressions were elusive to me because my
2:04:23 scapula wasn’t as strong, right? So I’m very excited progressing calisthenics and I’m more so excited
2:04:30 for the next five years. I think that in five years, six years from now, I can be pretty elite at
2:04:36 calisthenics and it’s going to take me that long and I’m okay with that, but that’s a ways away. But I
2:04:41 know that chipping away at that skill is going to be one of those things that for me, when I’m 60,
2:04:48 70, 80, has those big, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, has those big dividends. Because one thing is when you see
2:04:53 people who are very adept with their body weight, they just have control of everything. They have
2:04:57 their very adept with their body weight strength. You can lift weights, but just because you’re strong
2:05:01 with a barbell or strong with weights does not mean you’re strong with body weight. I know many heavy
2:05:06 people that can deadlift hundreds of pounds that struggle doing 10 pull-ups because they don’t
2:05:10 have good control of their body weight. Yeah. Or just because you can lift a lot of weight in a few
2:05:15 movements does not mean that you’ve bulletproofed yourself against injury. Nope. Either, right?
2:05:23 Exactly. Exactly. And calisthenics is something that will show you those weak links with your control of
2:05:28 your body and will help you improve it out over time. And your practice of wanting to rock climbing
2:05:34 inherently adds the skill of calisthenics into it. So it’s a two for one. I would love to do rock
2:05:39 climbing. And the thing is just like, I do so much jujitsu right now that it’s like, I got to pick
2:05:43 between rock climbing and calisthenics. Like I’ll focus on the calisthenics bit and maybe do rock
2:05:47 climbing here and there. But that’s a very good practice to develop that level of strength because
2:05:52 rock climbers, man, elite ones and even non-elite rock climbers, just the way they can contort their
2:05:56 bodies and have the strength through their grip, through their whole body. My gosh, it’s another
2:06:00 amazing practice. That’s awesome for longevity that if you’re struggling to find something.
2:06:06 Well, that was part of side and knee injury this past ski season. I was super bummed and I was in a
2:06:11 great location, but you know, I’m up in the mountains and the climbers are world-class. So I started going to
2:06:17 go climbing gym with my ski instructor who was also a very good climber. Like he sets roots and he’s,
2:06:25 he’s very good, super technical. And in that gym, because we would go when I would typically want to
2:06:31 go skiing. So let’s just say in the morning, these are work days. So the gym was not empty because this
2:06:36 is a popular, like competitive gym. So like national team was there, silver medalist from the Olympics was
2:06:41 there when we would go train. So it’s amazing to watch those people, number one. But secondly,
2:06:48 what really motivated me was yes, sure. I just love rock climbing because it’s along with jujitsu,
2:06:54 it’s human chess. It really, like those two are actually very similar in a lot of ways.
2:07:02 But what I noticed in this gym in particular was these groups of mostly women, but not always,
2:07:08 mostly women who are like in their sixties and seventies who were doing stuff that I could not
2:07:17 conceive of doing. And they do this week in, week out. I saw a guy, my buddy was complaining that he
2:07:23 couldn’t go climbing because of a hip issue. And I saw this 70 year old guy with a leg brace on
2:07:29 climbing. And I took a photo. Yeah. Yeah. With a full leg brace could like twisted his name. He’s like,
2:07:36 I’ll just use one leg and two arms and like flag with one leg. And I sent a photo to my buddy who’s
2:07:42 younger than I am. Right. And I was like, uh, bro, I got some bad news for you. And I was so inspired
2:07:48 to see these people who are decades older than I am, who are doing things that I could not even
2:07:52 approach doing right now. And I was like, I was like, okay, this is a good sport. This is a really
2:07:59 good sport. Yeah. Jiu Jitsu too. Like if you play it smart, just like gymnastics, like if I can’t
2:08:05 recall, coach summer had a quote, it was something like they’re aggressive gymnasts and they’re old
2:08:10 gymnasts. There are no aggressive old gymnasts. It’s something like that. And it was just like,
2:08:18 yeah, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves because you know, the candle that burns twice as bright,
2:08:24 burns twice as fast kind of situation. What are the non-negotiable lifts? Like if we’re talking about
2:08:31 just for lack of a better modifier, like traditional lifts, the stuff that you could do that people could
2:08:37 do if they walk down to a good neighborhood gym, are there any things for you that you’re like,
2:08:42 all right, this is kind of, these are the, some of the ingredients in my multivitamin. It’s just like,
2:08:46 I take the multivitamin every week. That’s how it works. A couple of movements.
2:08:53 The first one would be a sled. The reason why I say sled is because it is something that grandma can do.
2:08:58 And it’s something that the NFL linebacker can do. And it can be progressed or regressed to either
2:09:04 level while causing probably most likely no issue to either. The reason why I mentioned the sled before
2:09:11 I mentioned something like a barbell back squat or a barbell deadlift is because some people, when it
2:09:17 comes to direct actual spinal compression, where the barbell is right here, they just can’t handle forms of
2:09:21 that compression when moving through space yet. I mean, I probably shouldn’t handle it, frankly,
2:09:24 right? Like I’ve been doing back squats, but there’s definitely part of me. It’s like,
2:09:29 homie, this is not a good idea. Yeah. This is the thing though. I think there are many forms of
2:09:33 squatting one can do. Like we talked about sandbag squats. That’s not actually loaded. That actually
2:09:38 feels really good, right? Cause the weights from front of you are holding it. They feel safe. They feel
2:09:45 good. They can be progressed. But the sled is something that you can load that thing up. And if it doesn’t
2:09:51 move, you just don’t have the ability to produce the force to push or pull it through space. I wish
2:09:57 everyone would be able to work with a sled because it’s just, it’s so safe and has such a huge ability
2:10:04 to be progressed or regressed to any level safely for literally everyone. That’s why I’m starting there.
2:10:08 Louie Simmons was someone who, and he was the owner of Westside Barbell. He passed legendary.
2:10:15 Louie is the one who got Mark and Mark introduced the sled to me. And it’s just like the sled is
2:10:22 powerful. So unfortunately it’s hard for some people to have that at home. I have a, I have a torque
2:10:29 sled at my house. It’s this tank sled that you can wheel around. So the torque sled is not on skids.
2:10:32 It’s on wheels with mechanical resistance. Yes. Yeah.
2:10:37 They came out with a new one that I have. I forgot that it’s model, but it’s one that you can literally
2:10:41 swivel around. So you’ve seen the tanks where you have to push it. Then you have to get to the other
2:10:47 side and push this one. You can push, swivel and turn and push. It looks like a little Batmobile.
2:10:49 It’s pretty cool. Does that allow you to pull as well or only push?
2:10:53 It allows you to pull as well. You can hook a cable to it and then you could also push and pull it.
2:10:57 It has magnetic resistance. So you can increase the resistance so that the harder you push,
2:11:02 the more resistance it gives you. So it can build to any level of resistance. I have my
2:11:06 mom who’s 67. I have her come to my place so that she can do the sled multiple times a week.
2:11:11 That’s why I have her come because it’s something she can do and progress without pain.
2:11:14 If people can just get themselves to a place that has a sled,
2:11:17 it’s a full body movement from the feet to the hands.
2:11:23 What does a sled workout look like? Or where does it integrate into a workout?
2:11:30 A sled can be a very meaty part of your workout if you learn to like it. The reason why I say
2:11:38 learn to like that exhale says so much. If you like swallowing broken glass, I have a piece of
2:11:43 equipment for you. This thing, this sled could be a good first two, three minutes to get the knees warm
2:11:49 when you’re moving forward and backwards, or it could be a very metabolically taxing strength
2:11:55 building workout that you can do for 20 minutes to get your heart rate up while also increasing your
2:12:00 ability to produce force. So that’s why I say like when you’re pushing a sled, your heart rate will
2:12:06 spike. Your whole body will go on fire because you’re starting from your feet to produce force
2:12:11 forward and pulling backwards. So it’ll spike the heart rate, but everything will start to get sore.
2:12:16 Your feet, your glutes, especially when you’re learning how to stack your body against that
2:12:21 weight. Like you’ll see it in people who are new on the sled. Some of them aren’t familiar with getting
2:12:25 their body in the right position to produce force forward. They’re too upright. The system’s very open,
2:12:30 like so upright you mentioned, right? So some people they’ll start pushing a sled. Their ribs will be in
2:12:34 this flared forward position. Their pelvis won’t be in a neutral position. It’ll be like tilted back and
2:12:39 they’ll try pushing. They can’t produce much force. Just to paint a picture for folks. If you imagine a
2:12:43 sled, all right, so it’s this, it’s a sled, like a toboggan with weights on top of it.
2:12:48 But what you’re holding onto, imagine you have like two subway poles in front of you that are like,
2:12:55 I don’t know, 18 inches apart, 24 inches apart. Those are vertical. You’re holding onto those,
2:12:58 one with your left hand, one with your right hand, and then you’re pushing that.
2:13:02 And so we’re talking about like the body position, because this is going to be one of my follow up
2:13:08 questions is like, what is your preferred position for pushing a sled? Like, are you bent 90 degrees
2:13:13 at the hips, staring at the ground with your head in line with your arms as if you were doing like an
2:13:19 overhead press? Is it, I don’t know, like 20 degrees off of parallel to the ground with the upper body?
2:13:23 Like, what does it look like? Because I’ve wondered about this because I, I got a sled based on,
2:13:29 actually, I think it’s Mark Bell, who I owe, thanks for this. A very early, early, early,
2:13:34 like Stone Age version of something like the Torque sled. Was it from Torque or was it another company?
2:13:36 I think it was another company. It was like
2:13:43 X-Pro, X-P-R-O or something like that. I can’t recall. Sorry, guys, that I’m butchering it.
2:13:51 The challenge with that for me always was, was like, God, I love this like hip extension and like
2:13:57 glute engagement. And if I’m not careful, I feel in my low back. So that’s what I need to account
2:14:01 for. Like, I would love to get back into sled, but I would love to hear your thoughts on just like
2:14:08 avoiding probably too much flaring and like pointing my titties at the ceiling. It’s an exaggeration.
2:14:14 You get the idea, guys, if you’re like kind of arching your back unnecessarily and it’s simplification.
2:14:16 So what would your prescription be?
2:14:19 Level one for the sled would be learning how to create a
2:14:23 neutral system when pushing the sled through space. So you’re inherently going to
2:14:26 come forward a little bit. You’re not going to be vertical when pushing. You’re going to be leaning
2:14:30 forward a little bit, but you need to make sure that your rib cage is over your hips.
2:14:35 So it’s like two bowls pouring into each other. When we were mentioning this open system flared,
2:14:37 I know some people aren’t watching the podcast.
2:14:42 Imagine if you had a foam roller, you put a foam roller right below your shoulder blades,
2:14:47 and then you basically bent your upper back to like bring your head closer to the ground.
2:14:47 Yes.
2:14:49 Like that would be flaring, right?
2:14:53 So you cannot produce a lot of force when you have this flared system.
2:14:57 It’s super common, by the way. People who think they don’t do this,
2:15:01 take videos of yourself doing very varied exercises. It is so common.
2:15:06 Yes. It’s extremely common. Another issue is maybe having, this is a little bit less common,
2:15:11 but too much flexion, right? So too much bending when trying to push, right? You want to be in a
2:15:15 neutral position, a strong neutral position where your rib cage is right above your hips.
2:15:19 So can you explain that to me? Because rib cage over my hips makes me think that I need to be upright.
2:15:23 All you want to think about is like, for example, the neutral position that we think about when
2:15:29 we’re squatting down, that rib position, let’s now angle the body forward while maintaining that
2:15:34 rib position and pushing the sled. That’s all it is. That’s going to be the position that allows us to
2:15:41 be able to produce the most force while moving forward. Let me also mention this. This is the
2:15:49 level one pushing and pulling position that we want our rib cage in. Because for me, when I want people
2:15:55 to progress what they do with the sled, it’s a very powerful tool to allow you to push and pull in
2:16:00 different spinal positions. So you start off by pushing and pulling the sled with a neutral spine.
2:16:08 Then you can start to push and pull the sled laterally. So like sled is here, you’re here,
2:16:13 you’re pushing the sled laterally, you’re pulling the sled laterally while maintaining a fairly neutral
2:16:19 spine. But then over time, the strength that you can get the sled is that when you push the sled,
2:16:25 you can push with more spinal flexion when you become more comfortable. So you can learn to produce
2:16:30 force with spinal flexion. And then you can learn to when you’re pulling the sled, you can learn to
2:16:37 almost Jefferson curl, pull the sled in deep spinal flexion. You don’t start here, but when you become
2:16:42 comfortable and you’ve been doing this with very lightweight initially, you can be comfortable pulling
2:16:48 this load with deep spinal flexion. That’s later on. And that’s for me where the sled has become
2:16:55 super powerful because what my goal is for myself and what I’ve done is I became very strong pushing
2:17:02 and pulling a sled with unusual spine. Then I pushed and pulled with spinal extension, purposefully putting
2:17:08 myself in this position while pulling and pushing. I pushed and pulled in deep spinal flexion,
2:17:14 right? So that I could become very strong in this spinal position. I push and pull in deep lateral
2:17:18 flexion. So I’ll literally push the sled here with lateral flexion of the spine.
2:17:20 That’s so scary for me to watch.
2:17:25 I’ll pull the sled here with deep lateral flexion on the other side so that I can strengthen all of
2:17:32 the positions of my spine with this implement. This isn’t something you’re able to do with the barbell.
2:17:37 You could do spinal flexion, Jefferson curl stuff. You could do some lateral stuff, but the sled allows
2:17:43 you to produce force on an object forward, backward, and to the side with that intent of movement.
2:17:47 When you are pulling, how are you pulling? I know that sounds dumb, but do you have
2:17:51 ropes attached to the sled like with the torque sled?
2:17:52 Yeah.
2:17:53 How are you pulling it?
2:17:57 So the torque sled, there’s two ways that I’m pulling. When I want to get into deep flexion,
2:18:02 I have this thing. It’s something that Mark made. It’s called a shake strap. So it’s this strap that
2:18:07 you’re able to, it’s kind of like a cable attachment that you can put on a machine, but you can also put
2:18:13 the sled. I loop my hands through it, right? So my hands are here and then I’ll let my back bend
2:18:19 and then I’ll start walking backwards in deep spinal flexion with that pulling me. There’s a video of
2:18:22 this. I can imagine like you reach through a hole and then grab it and it’s sort of
2:18:24 Yeah, it’s right there.
2:18:26 Wrapped around the wrist.
2:18:30 And literally when I’m going backwards, I’m in this position while moving backwards.
2:18:30 Yeah.
2:18:32 I’m in this deep spinal flexion position.
2:18:36 What about like off the rack white belt version, right?
2:18:38 Neutral spine.
2:18:39 That’s what I said. Right. But are you using the…
2:18:44 You can use either the sled attachment, that whatever sledge you’re using, or you can,
2:18:49 you, most sleds have something that you can hook onto and then you can place that attachment and
2:18:51 you can still push and pull with a neutral spine.
2:18:52 I got it.
2:18:53 What is that? What does Mark call that?
2:18:55 It’s called a shake strap.
2:18:55 Shake strap.
2:18:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:18:57 It’s called a shake strap.
2:18:58 And he sells those somewhere.
2:18:59 Yeah.
2:18:59 Presumably.
2:19:05 Yeah. Everything that I’ve talked about, I put it all in a place called the strongerhuman.store.
2:19:10 It’s a website. So all this equipment is there, but you can also find this at his website,
2:19:15 which I believe is markbellslingshot.com. So for the sandbags and everything I’ve mentioned ropes,
2:19:17 it’s at the strongerhuman.store.
2:19:22 I was in the middle of nowhere, Italy, and I went to this gym, this tiny gym,
2:19:25 and there was a slingshot there. And I took a photo and I sent it to Mark.
2:19:31 Those things are everywhere. They’re everywhere. That’s one of the cool things about that. You’ll
2:19:36 see them in the most random gyms. But when it comes to that, the basic version of the sled
2:19:41 that mom and dad can do, older people, younger people, everyone can do, push and pull with a
2:19:46 neutral spine and learn how to produce force. Slowly increase the load. When you feel comfortable,
2:19:50 start introducing a little bit of play in your spine. But when you introduce this play in your
2:19:54 spine, don’t move the spine out of that position when pushing and pulling.
2:19:56 Yeah. And probably drop the load.
2:20:01 And drop the load. Absolutely drop the load. It needs to be light. But let’s say, for example,
2:20:05 you start exploring with a little bit of spinal flexion when pulling the sled. You get into that
2:20:10 spinal flexion. The sled is really light. You start pulling backwards. You’re breathing. You’re not
2:20:15 holding your breath. Your body learns, “Hey, this is actually a good position for us to produce a
2:20:20 little bit of force in.” We’re strong here, right? Versus when most people get in that position,
2:20:25 there’s a breath hold. It feels unsafe. Something gets pulled. So for me now, the only reason I was
2:20:30 able to progress this was because I worked on those regressions. And when a lot of trainers maybe see
2:20:36 some of this, they’re like, “That’s unsafe. You can’t just wait a few years. You’re going to blow your
2:20:41 back out.” Like, “No, I’m not going to hurt myself because my body knows that this is a good,
2:20:44 resilient position to be in. I’m not afraid of this position.”
2:20:50 So that is definitely key to keep in mind. If you’ve slowly conditioned yourself to be
2:20:55 safe in those positions, there’s also just a lot of dogmatic, like never do this
2:21:01 nonsense that has no backing. It’s like the number of classes I’ve been in where they’re like,
2:21:06 “Don’t lock your knees. Don’t lock your arms.” There are these posters that Coach Chris
2:21:14 Summer pointed me to. It’s a photo of this Chinese gymnast’s beast in a Maltese cross. If you want
2:21:18 to know what that is, go check that out. And it just says underneath, “Lock your elbows.”
2:21:27 And it’s like, yeah, if you’re not dumb about it, like our body, we have this full range of movement
2:21:30 for a reason. And look, if you’re hypermobile and this and that, take it into account.
2:21:36 But also it’s like, you’re allowed to ask questions about the rules. Make sure you understand why the
2:21:41 rules exist. And if the person can’t explain it, like, hmm, interesting. Well, at least I cross-examine
2:21:48 it. One topic that you wanted to make sure we touched upon is soft tissue work. This is a topic
2:21:51 near and dear to my heart. So take it away. Where should we start?
2:21:56 So again, so many things. I’ve met Kelly Sturette maybe three times. You know what I mean? I think
2:22:00 he’s been on the show twice. And can I set the stage for people who have no idea who this is?
2:22:08 Set the stage for Mr. Sturette. All right. So Kelly Sturette, famous for becoming the supple leopard,
2:22:12 which by the way, I’m not sure if he’s ever shown this photo. There’s a photograph of him
2:22:18 in the gym that he started with his wife, which is him in a leopard print bathrobe,
2:22:24 pulling a Zoolander. Not sure if that relates to the title of the book, but the point is high
2:22:29 level PT performance coach works with the highest levels of military highest levels of athletics.
2:22:38 And also this is important to me, at least is a practitioner. He walks the walk. I think for his,
2:22:44 I think I’m getting this right for his 40th birthday. And this is a large man. He’s a big
2:22:51 boy. He’s got to be 230, 240, 250, who knows? In that range. Thighs as big around as this table.
2:22:55 Like he’s going crazy. If he’s listening to you say this right now, by the way.
2:22:59 Oh yeah. No, I’m just going to keep laying it on thick. Like his legs are ridiculously large.
2:23:04 He is a very strong man. And for his 40th though, because you would look at him, you’d be like,
2:23:07 okay, that’s a meat cube. I’m sure he’s very strong in a couple of lifts.
2:23:15 However, for his 40th, I think it was, he wanted to power clean some ungodly number
2:23:21 and he can’t really use one of his wrists. So he catches the barbell in this like half salute
2:23:27 with one arm when he catches it on the shoulders. So there’s that. So on his birthday, he wanted to
2:23:32 do that. He wanted to, I believe it was run an ultra marathon and not just any ultra, but the quad
2:23:37 Dipsy, which is a killer, like a widow maker, you guys can look it up. It’s in Northern California
2:23:42 and do a standing backflip. So it’s like, you would look at him. You wouldn’t assume all of these things
2:23:48 are possible. And yet there you have Kelly Starrett. So that is a, and the backflip.
2:24:01 Yeah. And also formerly incredibly high level world-class kayaker. So this is an athlete who now
2:24:07 helps other athletes and, and many more non athletes in addition to that. So I took us on a bit of a
2:24:09 sidebar, but you were saying Kelly,
2:24:14 I think everyone should own his book. I’m becoming a supple leopard because there’s so many concepts.
2:24:21 I bought that book in 2013 and so many concepts are things that I’ve continued to like build my
2:24:27 knowledge base on that have helped so much for one thing from that book that was just a small mention,
2:24:32 but went a very long way for me was keeping a relaxed face when doing myofascial release or soft
2:24:38 tissue work. And when you’re doing soft tissue work, and we can just use an example. If you’re
2:24:42 on top of a foam roller, or you’re using a hard med ball, Kelly has his harder products,
2:24:48 like his supernova product, it’s very hard. And you roll on top of it. It can hurt because you’re
2:24:54 now rolling your tissues on top of this hard piece of equipment. The instinctual thing to do was like,
2:24:58 Grimace and make faces. And what happens? Like, even when I did that instinctively,
2:25:04 I tightened up right here. And those tissues, they bind up to try to keep you safe. You hold your breath,
2:25:07 you tighten your face. You’re not able to get as deep into the tissues that
2:25:10 you’re trying to work and help become more supple. So Kelly’s advice is like,
2:25:17 get rid of your pain face. Stop, right? Because inherently, if you just try to get this loose,
2:25:22 get this relaxed, you’ll start to probably breathe. You’ll start to get deeper in those tissues. The
2:25:25 soft tissue work will work better. That’s the goal of that.
2:25:29 Why is the soft tissue work important? The soft tissue work is important because
2:25:35 what I’ve found is that when you have certain tissues that are too tense, earlier in our conversation,
2:25:40 we were talking about not holding the breath so that you’re not holding on to too much tension.
2:25:44 But what tends to happen for many of us is we have different areas of our body that hold more
2:25:51 tension than others. And what soft tissue or self-myofascial release does is it helps you search for
2:25:55 areas like you’re tacking down certain tissues. That feels good. That feels good. Ooh, that feels
2:26:00 gummy. You’re doing work on that, whether it’s with a med ball or a body lever, which is the leverage
2:26:05 tool I showed you. And when you’re able to breathe and work through those areas, what you’ll find is
2:26:11 when you, again, work through that and it’s not as painful, you go and you move again, you might have
2:26:16 extra range of motion. You might have less joint pain and a joint that’s lower or high of the area
2:26:24 that you were just working. And a goal of this is to have that tissue state that you create after
2:26:28 doing soft tissue work, have that be your default. That’s the goal.
2:26:33 Yeah. Let me mention just a few things here too. One is going to sound super bougie, but I’ll say it
2:26:41 anyway. Even when I was driving around in my POS hand-me-down minivan and making next to nothing out of
2:26:47 college, body work. And again, scale it down. If I had to go drive into the most dangerous part of
2:26:55 San Jose to the most sketchiest massage place just to pay for a 30-minute massage, I couldn’t afford
2:27:00 anything, I would do that. So body work and soft tissue work is something that has just been a
2:27:08 non-negotiable for me forever. And it doesn’t fix everything. It’s not a panacea. But just to get into
2:27:14 the microdosing movement, you can also microdose massage in terms of self-soft tissue treatment.
2:27:20 So before bed, pretty much whenever I’m at home, certainly before bed, I always roll.
2:27:29 And that is not just to work on the tissues. It’s also to down-regulate. And I’m not sure if there’s
2:27:34 any signs to back this, but it feels like it helps me shift into more parasympathetic state,
2:27:42 helps with sleep. And literally, it’s five minutes, I would say, probably no more. Typically lower body,
2:27:49 not a lot of upper body stuff. But as a result of that tiny, tiny continual dosing, it’s like,
2:27:56 when I do get body work, it’s very common. They’re like, wow, your muscles are very easy to work with.
2:28:00 Like, what is the story here? And it’s like, yeah, it’s just flossing, right? It’s the daily
2:28:06 practice of doing that soft tissue work. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m excited to use,
2:28:09 you know, the person who owns this product. So they should maybe in quotation marks just call
2:28:12 it the nutcracker. Because I think of a nutcracker. What is it called? The body lever.
2:28:16 The body lever. The body lever. It looks like a giant nutcracker that you can like,
2:28:23 with your arms use to compress your leg or your abdomen, or you could brace it against a leg and use
2:28:30 it to like benevolently crush your arm to do forearm stuff. I mean, it looks very, very flexible. Rock
2:28:34 climbers have used something. I think they probably have rebranded it now called the arm aid, just
2:28:36 specifically for the forearm stuff.
2:28:41 I think there’s a company, there’s a maybe Rogue that had this thing that you could open up and clamp
2:28:45 down on like your legs and arms. Like these, yeah, yeah.
2:28:49 Very, very similar idea. So I’m looking forward to using that. I remember I saw you, maybe it was in
2:28:58 the same video, but you were in a sauna with a proper Banya hat on with the nutcracker on your leg.
2:29:02 And I was like, ooh, I want one of those. And I actually took a screenshot and sent it,
2:29:07 small world to Kelly Starrett. And I was like, Starrett, where do I get one of these nutcrackers?
2:29:10 And lo and behold, full circle. And now I shall have my nutcracker.
2:29:12 It’s here today.
2:29:13 Oh yeah.
2:29:13 Yeah.
2:29:20 All right. Look at this. Christmas comes early. What other types of, because when people think
2:29:25 soft tissue, like there are right and wrong ways to do this, right? Not everything delivers the kind
2:29:31 of benefits one might hope. So for me, I mean, this is very 101, but it’s like,
2:29:36 if I find an area as I’m rolling out my IT band or like my vastest lateralis on the outside of the
2:29:42 quad tends to get very, very tight. And if I find that like gummy, painful spot, it’s like, okay,
2:29:48 you don’t just gloss over that. Like, let’s sit on that for a while. Also using vibration,
2:29:53 like even like now they have theraguns and stuff. I used to use a Hitachi magic wand for this.
2:29:54 Funny enough.
2:29:54 Wait, what?
2:29:57 People know. Popular lesbians.
2:30:05 Okay. I could see that working.
2:30:13 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So multipurpose, you know, but using percussion devices for sure.
2:30:19 Also on when I’ve located through foam rolling, like that painful spot going to it with a theragun
2:30:24 or something like it, a million different devices you can choose from any other particular types of
2:30:27 soft tissue work that you like to do.
2:30:32 Let’s just start like with probably some of the easiest that you can manage people like
2:30:35 gua sha. You can get yourself a gua sha tool. You could pull out a butter knife,
2:30:40 right? You can pull out a butter knife, lotion up an area that you want to work. Like, let’s say that
2:30:46 you do a lot of gripping and your forearms are tight. Pull that out, get the area lotioned up,
2:30:51 and then start to work those areas. Concepts when doing soft tissue work with any implement is number
2:30:56 one, you have to breathe. The thing that people, I think makes it hard for people, makes them not want
2:31:03 to do it, is they do it, they feel tension in a certain area, they hold their breath, they tense up,
2:31:08 it doesn’t loosen up because they’re too tense and it’s a bad experience so they don’t come back and do it.
2:31:13 Yeah. So just like we were talking about how when you’re doing exercise, you need to regress it to
2:31:18 your pain-free level. Just gonna say the same thing. Right? It’s not that you regress your soft tissue
2:31:25 work to a pain-free level, but you regress it to a level that you can breathe and try to relax while
2:31:29 dealing with the pressure you’re putting on yourself. So if you’re putting so much pressure
2:31:33 that you just have to go like that, you would decrease the pressure. You’re not ready, dog.
2:31:37 Which is also true with manual therapy if you have somebody working on you, right? Like if you’re
2:31:43 bracing or holding your breath or making a pain face, it’s too much pressure. Absolutely way too much
2:31:47 pressure. So that’s something that can help you actually make progress with the practice because
2:31:55 if you can keep that as your north star, try to relax my face, make sure I’m breathing and put in as much
2:31:59 pressure I can manage. If I’m keeping these two things in line, you can progressively overload the
2:32:04 amount of pressure you place on your tissues. Yeah. I mean, just to pull something out. This is from,
2:32:09 I can’t remember who told me this, but it’s from Thai massage. I mean, who knows if this is originally
2:32:14 from classic Thai massage, but a very, very, very good Thai massage therapist, which is an incredible
2:32:20 art form. Incredible. Said to me, like, there’s no such thing as too deep, only too fast.
2:32:27 You can get really deep with a lot of pressure. You just can’t get there too quickly. And you can
2:32:32 apply that to self massage. Also, like there’s a guy, Jason Niemer, co-creator of something called
2:32:38 Acro Yoga, amazing Thai massage therapist also. And he’ll just use his forearm and his elbow on his own,
2:32:45 like arms on his own legs. You don’t necessarily need a whole magician’s kit full of tools. You can
2:32:50 also just use your forearms. Exactly. Tennis ball at home. I think some tissues that people really
2:32:54 leave out of the mix are their feet, especially the bottoms of his feet.
2:32:59 You know, I was just going to say this, like a little, looks like a tennis ball called rubs,
2:33:02 R-U-B-Z, but it’s got little, little nubs on it.
2:33:04 Super hard or is it sock-ish?
2:33:04 It’s pretty hard.
2:33:05 Super hard?
2:33:05 Okay.
2:33:10 Yeah, it’s pretty hard, but just, I will travel with it. And it’s like the amount of relief
2:33:14 you get systemically from rolling out your feet. And I think I, you know, I picked that up
2:33:17 from his head cone actually.
2:33:18 Okay. Okay.
2:33:21 Yeah. Yeah. He talked about like decompression, a certain type of hanging. He has a very particular
2:33:25 device. And then I’m pretty sure he talked about rubbing out the feet because he said it helped
2:33:27 with his knee pain. I was like, huh, I think I’m going to try that.
2:33:32 I’m really happy you mentioned that about Ed, because when it comes to soft tissue, there are
2:33:40 many people within the sphere of fitness, especially on the evidence-based side of fitness, that when
2:33:45 people talk about soft tissue work, the only thing, the only rebuttal they have is like, well,
2:33:49 there’s really no research to back that up. And it’s probably placebo and it feels good. Go ahead and
2:33:54 do it, but there’s nothing to really prove it works. And the frustrating thing about not just that,
2:34:01 but many aspects of evidence-based fitness is that there’s a waiting game to wait for a paper
2:34:08 to tell you something works. That’s probably been done for centuries in many different cultures for
2:34:15 a long time. Massage and soft tissue work has been a panacea for so many different groups of people
2:34:20 around the globe. But we have people in exercise science that want to discount it because they don’t
2:34:24 have a paper that proves this efficacy. So that’s why like, I don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying
2:34:34 evidence-based work isn’t helpful, but don’t allow evidence-based studies to block you off from trying
2:34:37 something that might just be really beneficial for you. That’s all.
2:34:40 Yeah. Let me add something to that because this is definitely a nerve for me as well. It’s like,
2:34:46 all right, look, science is amazing. Okay. The scientific method is a structured way of
2:34:53 not fooling ourselves. Incredible tool for humankind. I mean, indispensable. And Western
2:34:56 medicine, I’m going to say, and this is going to be controversial, like the most effective healing
2:35:01 system ever devised on the planet period, full stop. Like if you look at like infant mortality
2:35:08 and reductions in infant mortality, the advent of antibiotics, I mean, this is an incredible system
2:35:17 of healing as are many others. All of that said, as someone who has been involved with supporting early
2:35:23 stage science now for more than a decade, science is fucking expensive and it’s really slow.
2:35:32 And what that means is also right within the realm of exercise science, it’s like you don’t want to fool
2:35:37 yourself. So you should be scientifically literate. Yes. You should pay attention to the literature if
2:35:41 you can. Yes. By the way, that takes some training to get to the point where you can actually read
2:35:47 something like that properly. However, there are so many incentives that will prevent most studies
2:35:53 from ever getting done that you could be waiting forever. And especially in the realm of exercise
2:36:00 science where it’s like, you’re not experimenting with a speculative type of invasive brain surgery
2:36:07 in some far flung third world country. It’s like, no, try some soft tissue work. Who cares? Like the
2:36:13 downside risk is so minimal. See how you feel, like learn to trust your body again, which is another reason
2:36:22 why I more and more so, and it’s not valuing it more so, but increasingly value movement because it
2:36:31 teaches you to get reacquainted with the subtleties of feeling your body, which autopilot linear movements
2:36:37 in the gym do not automatically do. And then you can become a better gauge. And look, this isn’t to
2:36:40 like pat myself on the back, but like, as you do more of that, it’s like when we were doing the rope
2:36:44 stuff this morning and I was like, oh, I feel like I’m flaring. I feel like I got a little too high on that
2:36:49 right foot. And it’s like, you develop these sensitivities. And then when you have, and look, I’m not,
2:36:55 again, I’m not Bershnikov or I’m not a surgeon with the most delicate hands in the world. Can’t read
2:37:02 Braille. But as you develop that, you can then trust your body. It’s like, all right, you’ll begin to
2:37:08 pick up patterns. And also, I’m like, I think I had too many exogenous ketones, but lots of
2:37:13 personality. I’ll keep going for a second. The other thing, and this came up through my archery in the
2:37:19 last like six months. So I was training with amazing guy, Jake Kaminsky, two-time silver medalist, one of
2:37:26 the most successful archers the US has produced in the last 30, maybe 50 years. And he, like me,
2:37:32 takes meticulous training notes, including soft tissue. So that if he had a problem, he’s like,
2:37:37 hmm, this rib is slightly out, which is a really common issue with archery. He could be like, no,
2:37:42 it’s not the last workout. He’s like, he identified through patterning because he shot a million plus
2:37:46 arrows easily. He would be like, he would look back and he’s like, it’s usually five or six workouts
2:37:52 back. And I could identify either what helped me or what the problem was. And similarly, it’s like,
2:38:01 just experiment, take good notes, try not to fool yourself and keep what works, right? Ditch what
2:38:08 doesn’t. But man, the soft tissue stuff, it’s so incredibly helpful. And I wanted to add also,
2:38:14 just because I mentioned the pre-bed, not to totally hijack this, but so it goes. You mentioned
2:38:22 rope flow prior to bed. If I’m not misremembering, that was not on Mike, but do you do rope before
2:38:27 bed? Yeah. I’ll do like some nights, it’s maybe three or five minutes. Some nights it’ll be just
2:38:32 like flowing for 20 minutes outside my house. And that is relaxing. And you were saying that also,
2:38:38 helps to alleviate the morning stiffness the next day. Yeah. You know, okay. I’ll come back to the
2:38:43 soft tissue thing in a second, but Mark and I were having a conversation early last year and we were
2:38:48 like, man, what can help us just like get rid of waking up in the morning, just feeling that morning
2:38:53 stiffness, not morning, you know, wood morning, just body stiff. Don’t fix that. I don’t want to fix
2:38:58 that. You want that. That’s a good sign of hormonal health, but the general morning stiffness where you
2:39:02 just kind of like get your body, you know, you got to wring out your body a little bit.
2:39:07 So we thought, I thought about that for a while. And then I just started doing rope flow before bed.
2:39:11 And the first night I did rope flow before bed, which wasn’t something I usually did. I usually just
2:39:16 like, you know, I’d come home, work, maybe take a walk, go to bed, wake up, do rope flow, feel
2:39:21 amazing. Did rope flow before bed, woke up the next morning. It was just like, ah, like really,
2:39:28 I just felt like I didn’t need to, my body was already lubricated. That’s what I felt like.
2:39:34 And I was like, okay, maybe this is just a one night thing. But I then noticed that the nights
2:39:40 that I didn’t do some rope and all it is, is rotating before bed. Let’s just call it that.
2:39:44 Like if you have something that you can get some natural rotation in before bed, cool. If you have
2:39:49 the rope practice, cool. But getting that natural spinal rotation in before bed will help you feel
2:39:55 better when you wake up in the morning and you won’t feel your back will not feel as stiff. It’s huge.
2:40:00 So the reason why I know it works is because I have nights where I don’t do it. And I’ve also told
2:40:04 many people in the stronger human community to try that and get, let me know what they feel.
2:40:09 And everyone that does it wakes up feeling better in the morning. So like, I know that it’s one of
2:40:14 those practices that like, if you have a practice where you do some soft tissue work, don’t stop the
2:40:19 practices you do. Just add in like three minutes, do two to five minutes before you go to bed,
2:40:23 two to five minutes. Yeah. Scale it down. Right. If you’re like, I don’t have 10 minutes. It’s like,
2:40:28 oh, you do one minute. Everything is like, oh, I can’t do one minute. It’s fine. Like do three
2:40:33 passes on the IT bed on each leg on a foam roller. Like, come on. And it’s like, there will be a point
2:40:40 at which you have no excuse. And I’ll add one more thing, which I guess I accidentally omitted from my
2:40:45 mind a soft tissue work, but it’s definitely soft tissue work. And this is something that has stuck for me
2:40:51 big time. And I’ve passed on to a lot of friends also to give credit where credit is due. So my
2:40:56 mid back was bothering me. It’s I, I had this really old injury and my mid back was really spasmed and I
2:41:04 was doing hand balancing practices a hundred years ago with a guy named Andrew Bondarenko. And I didn’t
2:41:10 train with him much. I mean, the guy is a phenom. He is a, or at least at the time was a top Cirque de
2:41:16 Soleil performer famous for one armed hand balancing, like one arm handstands. He’s not
2:41:23 a big guy, right? Who knows? He probably weighs 130 pounds, maybe 140. Maybe these of people I’ve met
2:41:29 personally, the most incredible combination of strength and mobility that I’ve ever seen.
2:41:32 And what’s his name? Well, I’ll get his name after I need to write that.
2:41:39 Andre, A N D R I I Bondarenko. And I think his, his Instagram is just Andre Bondarenko.
2:41:46 Excellent teacher. And we did some hand balancing stuff and I was explaining my back issues and he’s
2:41:52 like, Oh, you need to get one of these mats. And the mat was, I ended up getting the Nayoya
2:41:58 acupressure mat. And is this over to Shakti? I might be the same thing. There are a bunch of
2:42:03 imitators too. There’s one called bed and nails. The basic idea is it’s like a thick towel with
2:42:10 plastic golf cleats covering it. And then there’s one for the neck and it fucking hurts. And even to
2:42:14 this day, I’ve done it hundreds of times. Like if you’re a little sensitive, especially if the tissue
2:42:20 is inflamed, it hurts. If you stick with it past like three or four minutes, then your body chills out.
2:42:26 And I typically stay on 10 minutes. The reason Andre introduced it to me is his coach when he used
2:42:33 to do team acrobatic competitions, which is a big thing in like Eastern Europe and other parts of
2:42:40 the world where you have, it’s almost like if you could imagine like cheerleading plus, plus, plus,
2:42:44 plus, plus, plus, where you’d also have like male only teams, female only teams, where you’d have like
2:42:48 a flyer, someone who’s doing crazy acrobatics. That would be Andre who would get shot into the air
2:42:52 with guys who would make like a kind of, they call it a basket with the hands. People can look
2:42:57 this up. All of those guys would just be beaten to hell. And the coach would make all of them lay
2:43:02 on one of these 45 for 45 minutes after every practice. And I started using it and I was like,
2:43:11 okay, I have no idea how this works. All I know is man, does this work. And before bed, especially
2:43:16 with a lot of my back issues, that is non-negotiable. And I’ll give one trick for folks. Also, if you have
2:43:22 low back issues specifically traveling with the whole kit and caboodle, it’s kind of a pain in the
2:43:28 ass, just take the neck attachment, travel with that. That’ll fit easily in the most suitcases.
2:43:34 And then you can like lay on that for your low back on like carpet in the hotel or whatever,
2:43:40 10 minutes before you go to bed resolves like 50% of my low back issues for sleep. It’s incredible.
2:43:46 So the cool thing about this is like, it’s really simple as to why this all works. Blood flow. You
2:43:51 bring pressure to an area, you drive blood and nutrients to that area after pressure is relieved.
2:43:55 So when you have that on your back or you have that on your whole back, because I actually have the same
2:43:58 thing at home. I have it in a box. I need to bring it back out because I did it for a while. And I was
2:44:01 like, oh, that’s cool. I like it. It helps me relax, but I didn’t keep it. So I’m going to bring that
2:44:06 back now that you mentioned it. But all these things, they’re driving a bunch of blood to that area,
2:44:10 which now when you get up, you feel relief in those areas that you brought a level of
2:44:16 pressure too. And that’s why it’s so good for healing of specific areas. And that’s why when
2:44:20 it comes to soft tissue, I don’t just do the hot areas that most people would think about,
2:44:26 like maybe the quads or the forearms, et cetera. I hit my whole body throughout the week. So I’ll do
2:44:30 tissue work on my head. I have like a tool that I’ll use. And while I’m in the sauna,
2:44:34 I’ll get on my temple. I’ll get on my head. I’ll get on the back of my neck. I’ll get here.
2:44:37 Must make people comfortable. This is not like a public sauna.
2:44:42 But when I do go out to the public sauna, I do take a gua sha tool and a body lever with me,
2:44:46 and I will hit that stuff in there. And usually people are like, what are you doing? That looks
2:44:49 like it feels so good. So I’ll give them the gua. Yeah. You know what? That’s not so bad. That’s not
2:44:56 so bad. I mean, I’ve been to some of the OG Russian Turkish bouts in New York city. And there are these
2:45:02 old guys, oh, from the old country who are like shaving their chests in the sauna. And I’m just
2:45:07 like, bro, you can, that’s not, you shouldn’t be. That’s not okay. It’s not okay. I’ve seen it on
2:45:13 multiple occasions. So point I’m making nutcracker. Fine. I’m okay with it. Absolutely. Yeah. But,
2:45:17 but that’s the thing you’re, you’re bringing blood flow to all these areas. And if you can,
2:45:21 going back to the, what you were mentioning about learning how to heal yourself,
2:45:27 that’s what this is. Body workers are essential. They’re great. I have no issue with them,
2:45:33 but I think that if you’re someone who you go to a body worker and you, it’s usually maybe a two time
2:45:36 a month thing, cause that’s what most people can afford. Like usually it’s like once or twice a
2:45:41 month. Now you can go to a body worker multiple times a week because you are your own body worker.
2:45:47 You learn to find the areas that first off you learn, like when you put pressure in a certain area,
2:45:50 you get released somewhere else. So you take a mental note. And at this point for me,
2:45:54 I know that when I’m feeling a little something in this upper part of my glute,
2:45:58 I know what to hit. If I’m feeling something in my wrist, I know what to hit my forearm. Like
2:46:03 I have these reference points of how to heal myself because I’ve become familiar with pressurizing my
2:46:07 body. And you can, you learn these things, you know what I mean? So, and anyone can learn this.
2:46:13 You don’t have to have a degree with a bunch of schooling on this. You just have to touch yourself.
2:46:18 Yeah. That’s it. You just have to, yeah. You just have to experiment another one.
2:46:28 And actually, Oh, Dustin Moskovitz, the thank you for this co-founder of Facebook. Now Asana has the
2:46:32 worst branding, which is why I always forget the product name. It’s like the back buddy.
2:46:40 It basically looks like a very tricked out, like pimp my theracane. So like theracane would be like a
2:46:47 plastic candy can that you allows you to get to points on your back that at least I am completely
2:46:53 unable to touch. Right. And then there’s one that looks more like an S that I’m pretty sure it’s called
2:46:58 back buddy. People can look this up. If you just search Dustin Moskovitz back buddy, I’m sure the right
2:47:05 name will come up. And I have one of these like everywhere I go as well. Cause there’s no way
2:47:10 like in terms of soft tissue work, like me doing good work on my back is going to be a little tough
2:47:16 for getting like very focused attention. All right. Anything else to add on the soft tissue side of
2:47:22 things in terms of equipment, get your Amazon has med balls. So you can get yourself a med ball on Amazon.
2:47:26 That’s a med ball, meaning medicine ball, medicine ball. Yeah. Cause like that can allow you to like,
2:47:30 and they’re, they’re inexpensive. So you can roll on top of it, on top of your hamstrings,
2:47:36 your quads, your, you can do some torso work, but it’s like, it’s a good inexpensive tool for you to
2:47:42 get yourself some soft tissue work. And just for clarity, you are rolling on top of it or you’re
2:47:48 rolling the medicine ball on top of your leg. As an example, you’re on top of it. Yeah. You are on top
2:47:53 of it using your, the pressure from your body to put into that ball. So I would look at these as like
2:47:57 different, these are different types of pressure. The med ball allows you to put your own pressure
2:48:02 into that implement. So there’s that, I think there’s this woman called Jill Miller. She has on
2:48:07 Amazon tune up fitness balls is what they’re called. I like those specifically because they’re not
2:48:12 extremely hard. They have a tad bit of give they’re hard, but they have a bit of give. So you can really
2:48:17 sink yourself into it with that pressure. So I would suggest instead of like, cause most people,
2:48:21 they want to get the hardest balls. But the thing is, is like hard, hard instruments,
2:48:28 especially when you’re pushing or pressurizing into them, they can almost make most people back
2:48:33 away from that resistance. Most people need to use a slightly softer implement to ease themselves into
2:48:38 this soft tissue work before moving towards like the Kelly Sturette supernova or his peanut or any of
2:48:44 these harder implements. So that would be a, some type of pressure. The body lever allows for a leverage
2:48:48 type of pressure where now you are pressing two things into each other and you’re finding that type of
2:48:54 pressure. And then it also allows you to kind of need, like you would like at a massage with a
2:48:59 masseuse, you now can use that pressure to need. And then as far as other implements, there are gua sha
2:49:04 tools that you can get from different companies, Amazon or whatever, where again, it’s this rubbing
2:49:08 pressure. You want to have these implements that provide you different types of pressure so you can
2:49:11 do whatever it calls for on any given day.
2:49:19 Let me ask, just because I have to ask, or my OCD will not allow me to proceed or at least not land
2:49:28 the plan on this conversation. Nordic curls. What are Nordic curls and what does your resume look like with
2:49:33 respect to Nordic curls? The Nordic hamstring curl is something that I started doing again,
2:49:38 after I met my buddy, Ben Patrick, I wasn’t able to do a Nordic curl when I first met him.
2:49:40 Okay. So explain what a Nordic curl is.
2:49:48 A Nordic hamstring curl is also something you should not just run out and try without supervision.
2:49:52 Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Regress it. If you try Nordic curl, most people will pull their hamstring.
2:49:57 There’s a way that you could do a Nordic curl would be like, let’s say there’s a flat bench.
2:50:04 Let’s imagine that you are, you have your knees on the bench. You could strap your ankles into the
2:50:09 bench. And the goal is to lean your torso down, almost kind of like, just like you’re leaning
2:50:15 your torso down all the way down and then come up with the strength of your hamstrings. So you’re not
2:50:20 slamming down. You’re not just falling. You’re going down slowly and your hamstrings are going to be
2:50:24 the hamstring strength is going to be the limiting factor if you are able to control yourself down or
2:50:30 bring yourself up. Yeah, exactly. So just, I mean, it is hard the way you describe it and it is even
2:50:35 harder. I have a Cerronex machine for Nordic hamstring. Yeah, I have a machine at home too. Yeah.
2:50:41 I haven’t touched it in a long time. It’s a little dusty at this point, but imagine, I’ll give another
2:50:49 visual for folks. So imagine that you had like a nice thick, like memory foam at the edge of a pool.
2:50:55 So you could put your knees down without your knees hurting. And then a really fat friend came behind
2:51:04 you and just sat on your ankles. So now you can get to like your max height on your knees. Your knees are
2:51:08 in line with your hips, which are in line with your shoulders. And your fat friend is sitting on your
2:51:14 ankles, but you’re like comfortable in the memory foam. And then without breaking at the hip, keeping
2:51:21 the knees, hips, and shoulders in line, you put your hands behind your back and then go all the way down.
2:51:28 So your nose touches the water and then come all the way back up. It is so fucking hard. Okay. And then
2:51:34 how does this fit? Why the hell am I asking you about Nordic girls? There must be some historical reason.
2:51:40 So I saw that, um, a few years ago, I saw that like Tyreek Hill did a certain amount of Nordic
2:51:44 curls. All right. Who is this person? Tyreek Hill is an NFL player. I, I, I don’t watch much football,
2:51:49 so I forget the team he plays for, but he’s like, people see him as like, uh, he’s one of the fastest,
2:51:55 not the fastest player in the NFL. And one thing, and a trend you notice amongst a lot of guys who are
2:52:02 very fast is that they also have the ability to do a few, if not many Nordic curls.
2:52:06 One thing about the Nordic hamstring curl, there has been some research to back this up,
2:52:10 but it’s not, doesn’t mean you have to do Nordic curls if you want to build resiliency and sprinting,
2:52:16 but they progress Nordic curls on athletes that sprinted. And these athletes all have
2:52:20 less occurrence of pulling their hamstrings because of the amount of strength that you build in your
2:52:25 hamstring at length. Because you notice at the end range of a Nordic curl, your hamstring is at
2:52:29 this length and position with stress on the hamstring, which is why if you’re new to movement,
2:52:33 you need to regress it because you could pull your hamstring in that position. It, it feels.
2:52:38 Yeah. Pull a hamstring, by the way, it’s not like, ouch, that hurt. Let me sleep on it. Now I’m okay
2:52:41 the next day. Yeah. Typically it’s not one of those. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not nice.
2:52:50 So when Ben talked to us and told me about the Nordic curls, tried one, couldn’t get it. And I was like,
2:52:58 what did this NFL guy do? Oh, I forgot how many, I think Tyreek did maybe 12 or 13, 12 or 13.
2:53:02 So what I wanted to do is I wanted to progress Nordic curls. And when I saw Tyreek’s video,
2:53:06 I was like, I want to do more than Tyreek. So for me to progress Nordic curls, man,
2:53:12 I started at the basic regressions. Like I started first off having a bench higher and going with limited
2:53:16 range of motion. So not going all the way down, finding where my body would not be able to handle the
2:53:23 pressure and going to that range, repping that out, slowly lowering down. Took me a few months to lower
2:53:28 down to a flat bench. And I was able to finally do one Nordic curl. Then I would do a curl where I would
2:53:35 go down and push myself up and give myself assistance. And over time that built. And then I think, correct
2:53:41 me if I’m wrong, but I think in the video, I managed to do 18 Nordic curls. I’m not sure if I did 17 or 18
2:53:48 Nordic curls, something like that. I mean, I’m, I’m relying on, uh, I’m relying on some deep research
2:53:55 here. Yeah. So let me take a look here. I, I, I mean, I think we should pull up the tape. We’ll
2:53:59 have the video here. We’ll have some footage here. Like deep research says that, that the previous
2:54:07 record Tyreek was 10 and you did 15. There we go. Yeah. But the point is like the differential
2:54:13 was substantial, right? Yeah. From a percentage standpoint. Yeah. Right. You did not just like
2:54:18 eek out barely beating the record, beat the record substantially. Yeah. And this isn’t like a world
2:54:24 record. I think there’s a guy who he’s much lighter, but I think he managed to do like 25 Nordic curls or
2:54:29 something like that. So it’s like, I’m not the guy in the world who’s done the most Nordic curls, but
2:54:34 I wanted to beat Tyreek. Yeah. If I’m going to beat Tyreek in one thing, because I’m not faster than
2:54:40 Tyreek, it’s going to be doing more Nordic curls. But you know, it’s one thing like a strength coach
2:54:44 who I respect so much. And he’s taught me a lot through the show and through what I’m able to see
2:54:50 him do with athletes, Ian Danny. He’s someone who I love his work because he’s someone who takes
2:54:55 everything that we’ve managed to talk about here. And he applies it to different athletes he works with.
2:54:59 So he’ll have certain athletes that he progresses like a lot of Nordic curls with. He’ll have athletes
2:55:03 that he does different soft tissue work with. He has athletes that he purposefully has them do
2:55:07 certain types of static stretching, which certain people are like static stretching isn’t good for
2:55:12 you. But Ian knows when and where to apply these different modalities rather than saying,
2:55:17 that’s just bad. We shouldn’t do it. Ian is someone who understands how to use all of these things
2:55:23 holistically to make progress. That’s something that I really think most of us should try to do when it
2:55:30 comes to our personal physical practice. All right. So bone density. I have lifted most of my life
2:55:36 and in certain segments of my body, I was shocked to find, I think partially due to
2:55:43 the back injury and reducing certain types of loading, but I have below average bone density
2:55:50 in a few segments of my body. Not all. It’s like the average is fine, but averages can be super
2:55:54 misleading. All right. You got to be careful with averages. So the average on DEXA, great,
2:55:59 but in certain segments, way below average. So I was like, hmm, I’ve been thinking about bone density
2:56:07 a lot for longevity and health span. You want sufficient bone density. And there are different
2:56:16 ways to catalyze the adaptation, right? Of increased bone density, compression, lifting in parentheses,
2:56:24 tension in parentheses, isometrics, impact, jumping, right? And then rotation, which is certainly for
2:56:30 me. And I think for a lot of people, whether they consider themselves athletes or not, that is an
2:56:35 obvious omission a lot of the time, right? And that could be mace, kettlebell juggling, rope.
2:56:41 Yeah. And that’s more so, um, pulling at the bones. So that, that rotation, like it’s, it is rotation,
2:56:48 but it’s also pulling these segments. So, okay. So you need, you need more tension. So rope may not be
2:56:53 actually a great example, but the kettlebell would be since it’s at like the end of a kinetic chain
2:57:00 that’s getting elongated or at least stretched in that sense. Okay. Got it. All right. Aging insurance.
2:57:04 Certainly. This is something I think about a lot with aging parents as well. And really trying to
2:57:10 like, I was talking to a doctor I know really well. And he’s like, yeah, I call my parents trainer.
2:57:15 And I just say, when I see, he’s like, I just say, make them cry. You have to make my parents cry
2:57:20 because they need the bonus. Like you have to load. It can’t be comfortable or at least overly
2:57:26 comfortable. Anything else that you’d like to just add on bone density? Oh, also another one,
2:57:30 just because the one place I’m happy to spend a lot of money is on very,
2:57:34 very, very good doctors. And I’m fortunate to have really good doctors. You have to ensure you have
2:57:42 adequate calcium absorption and that you are not taking things that could over time interfere with
2:57:49 calcium absorption. So in addition to the stressors, you got to pay attention to what you’re able to
2:57:54 absorb. On my YouTube channel, I have a video that I made. It’s like 40 something minutes on bone
2:57:59 density that goes into everything. It goes into all of this. So like, if you guys want to spend some
2:58:03 time and go and watch that video, that’s, it’s going to be worth it for you. But one thing I want to
2:58:10 mention, I’m happy you mentioned the jumping thing because jumping is a something that we just literally
2:58:15 stopped doing some people. It’s something that I stopped. I was a soccer player for years. And when
2:58:21 I got into a certain form of like practice, there was a point where I didn’t jump for years,
2:58:24 unless like, maybe I was just doing a random box jump here and there, which I ended up being
2:58:29 really crap at because jumping is something I stopped doing. And what happens to many people
2:58:34 is like, because they slowly stopped getting off the ground, there comes a point where they never
2:58:38 jump again. And then they’re 40, 50, 60, they jump, they pull something. And then they’re like,
2:58:43 I can’t do this because they can’t first off. They don’t have the strength to propel themselves off the
2:58:49 ground, but they also don’t have the elasticity to be able to land and handle the force from the ground.
2:58:53 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s not the jumping necessarily. It’s the problem. It’s the landing.
2:58:53 It’s the landing.
2:58:54 Yeah.
2:58:59 So I think something that can be a great investment for many people, including those that are older,
2:59:03 is a rebounder. You know what a rebounder is like a mini trampoline.
2:59:04 Yeah. You can have a little trampoline.
2:59:08 There’s many brands. Bellicon is like the Rolls Royce of rebounders, but there’s also
2:59:10 Bellicon sounds like the Rolls Royce.
2:59:16 Yeah. There’s also like lesser expensive brands, but I love the rebounder. I have a rebounder. And the reason
2:59:20 why I like it is because it’s something that I can just keep in the backyard. And when I go outside,
2:59:25 I can just hop on it real quick. It feels pretty meditative, but there have been quite a few studies
2:59:30 to show, especially in older adults, that rebounding helped them build bone density because of the low
2:59:32 intensity jumping that it causes for them.
2:59:39 I can guess that the answer here, but why is that better than say jumping rope or just jumping?
2:59:45 It’s a regression. It’s the regression. You know what I mean? Because many people, they try jumping
2:59:51 rope. Many people, their feet will get beat up a lot. It’s something that you absolutely can and
2:59:58 should build the capacity to do. I look at jumping rope as like rebounder, light hopping,
3:00:04 30 seconds to a minute to two minutes of jumping rope each day or every other day. Then over time,
3:00:07 you’re going to get to a point where you can jump rope for five, 10, 15, 20 minutes.
3:00:15 But the thing is, is the ability to jump rope without certain muscles and areas getting taxed more than
3:00:21 others is a full body build of elasticity from the feet all the way up to the neck because everything
3:00:26 needs to have the right amount of tension, but not too much tension. So what a lot of people notice when
3:00:31 they start jumping rope is that they’re like, oh, my calves got super sore, right? And experienced people
3:00:35 who jump rope, it’s not their calves that get super sore. It’s like everything just kind of starts
3:00:40 getting tired out because their whole system is just popping them off the ground very lightly.
3:00:45 Whereas when you’re new to it, that impact and even your feet are too weak to handle that impact
3:00:50 on the ground. You don’t pop off. So that’s why a rebounder is going to be super good. Then regress
3:00:56 jumping. So you can have your hands on something and start jumping. Then just literally by hands on
3:01:02 something, put your hands on a table, hop, use that to help you have a softer landing. Initially,
3:01:06 you might have a lot of weight in your hands so that you, cause like maybe you can’t handle that landing,
3:01:11 but over time you’re going to be able to put less weight in the hands. And then this is where I got
3:01:11 my mom.
3:01:16 So hopping, AKA basically emulating what you do kind of jump roping.
3:01:21 Yeah, you could do that lightly. You can also kind of transfer from leg to leg, light hops.
3:01:27 But the goal is to, again, do not be embarrassed with how low you have to regress to feel comfortable
3:01:33 with this. Don’t just try starting to jump with a jump rope immediately, because if you do that too
3:01:36 soon and your body’s telling you signals that you’re not ready for it, whether you’re getting
3:01:40 a lot of impact in your lower back, your knees, your feet are feeling really beat up, you need to
3:01:46 listen to those signals and regress the hopping. I’m telling you, if you can regress hopping,
3:01:50 do it a little bit. It doesn’t have to be every day. It could be every other day, just a little bit.
3:01:52 You will get to a point where you can start jumping rope.
3:01:57 If you want to see an example of what not to do, people can search for the Tim Ferriss experiment
3:02:03 parkour episode, where I went from no jumping to let me try to learn parkour in a week.
3:02:03 Yeah.
3:02:04 Don’t do that.
3:02:04 Yeah.
3:02:11 Yeah. Do not do that. Yeah. Basically just blew apart my entire body like Forrest Gump’s braces.
3:02:12 Uh-huh.
3:02:13 Not a good idea.
3:02:13 Yeah.
3:02:14 So yeah, regress.
3:02:18 But the reason why I think that that’s so important, it’s great for bone density,
3:02:24 like what we’re saying here. But I think it’s like, it allows you to bring back that skill
3:02:28 and never lose it. Because once you’re able to start hopping and it’s now an effortless thing,
3:02:32 just a little bit will allow you to hold onto it for the rest of your life. And if you have it right
3:02:38 now, do the low intensity jump rope. You don’t even need a jump rope. Just do some hopping each day
3:02:44 so that you maintain that ability to just propel and land. That goes very far. And a majority of the
3:02:48 population can’t do it anymore just because one day they stopped and they never did it again.
3:02:52 Yeah. I can’t remember who told me this. I’m inclined to say Kelly Starrett,
3:02:55 because I get a lot of these from Kelly. So Kelly, I’ll give you credit for this,
3:03:02 even if it’s not you, but I think it is Kelly who is quoting a famous Russian sports scientist,
3:03:07 as I recall it, who said, once you stop jumping, you start dying.
3:03:16 I love that. I yes, dude, that’s true. There was this video. Maybe I’ll be able to find it by the
3:03:22 time this comes out, but it literally showed this young man and it showed all of his relatives that
3:03:27 were over 40. He had something up there and he was trying to have everyone jump. No one, even actually,
3:03:30 there was a few people in their thirties. Everyone tried jumping and they couldn’t,
3:03:34 they could barely get off the ground. It’s such an awkward thing. And he’s someone who trains jumping.
3:03:41 So he was able to go super high, but it just shows that once you stop, it can go very quickly.
3:03:45 But I want people to understand this doesn’t mean you can’t get it back. It just means that you got
3:03:49 to treat yourself like a kid that’s learning to walk again. You got to start with the basics,
3:03:55 be okay with that taking a while. Your feet have to adapt to the stress. Your body has to adapt to
3:03:58 handle that force. It could be a year, it could be two, it could be whatever.
3:04:01 So what does a rebounder session look like? How long would you bounce on it?
3:04:04 Literally, you could bounce on it. Like again, just kind of like with the rope,
3:04:08 you could do a minute, you could do 10. A rebounder takes away a lot of the impact that
3:04:13 you’re going to have from like the ground because it allows you to go in and then you’re able to use
3:04:17 that energy to pop back up. So when you become like, there are rebounders like the Bellicon,
3:04:22 I think other rebounders also, they have these handles that you can use if you find it difficult.
3:04:26 I’ve seen this. Yeah. They’re all tricked out. They’re like the Batmobile sled.
3:04:31 Yeah. There’s a whole fitness trend of like people on YouTube that do rebounder exercises,
3:04:37 like it’s a workout for them. And I think this is a great thing. Some of them are heavier. That’s
3:04:43 powerful. Somebody who is, let’s say they’re 100 pounds overweight, 150 pounds overweight,
3:04:48 but they can actually start jumping again and they can start bouncing again. But then over time,
3:04:52 they can transfer that to flat ground. Yeah.
3:04:57 Right. So that’s why I think it’s super powerful for everyone. If you find that jumping, you can do
3:05:01 jumping. Rebounding is great. Now, I also like rebounding too, because it’s something that I feel
3:05:06 kind of decompresses my system a little bit. I like it because when I get into the air, there’s just like
3:05:12 this, I can’t replicate this floaty thing that happens in the air where I’m just like,
3:05:16 it’s just like you’re weightless. And when you become experienced, you can really go down into
3:05:21 the rebounder and just get super high. And you’re just literally going down and floating. When I come
3:05:27 off the rebounder, my body feels similar to when I finish a swim. I feel this global decompression
3:05:33 everywhere. So it’s one of those practices that I look at that makes the body feel better afterwards
3:05:37 than before. It can be a workout if you want it to be. I don’t look at my rebounding as a workout.
3:05:42 I look at the rebounding as a recovery practice that feeds my body and allows me to do more hard
3:05:48 work later. I look at the rope as that too. It feeds my body and allows me to do more later. It’s healthy
3:05:57 for me. And it’s just fun. I think a big thing here, all this stuff for me is fun, man. It feels like
3:06:06 play. So that’s very important for me playing the long game. It’s too boring or too punishing.
3:06:15 Ultimately, it’s got to be sustainable. I’m excited to try a lot of what we’ve talked about.
3:06:20 So where can people find all things in SEMA?
3:06:26 Me and my producer, Owen Carr, we make videos on the YouTube channel, which is just my name and
3:06:30 SEMA Eang. So if you want to find the bone entity video, the traditional strength training video,
3:06:34 that’s at my YouTube channel, which is just my name, SEMA Eang.
3:06:42 No. Just to note for people, there’s a silent N in there. N-S-I-M-A-I-N-Y-A-N-G.
3:06:46 Yeah. If you say my name wrong, trust me, I ain’t going to get mad at you. Don’t worry. Okay. So
3:06:51 don’t be scared. Over at my website, thestrongerhuman.store, there’s ropes, sandbags,
3:06:56 kettlebells, the body lever, pretty much everything that I use, it’s over there at the Stronger Human
3:07:02 store. And then if you want to learn rope flow for free, I have a rope flow foundations course that
3:07:08 has like 55 modules and like over 50 videos that go in depth, taking you from being someone who can
3:07:13 be basic with rope flow to someone who can now flow with many different movements. That’s in the
3:07:18 Stronger Human community, which is on school.com slash thestrongerhuman. And I also have stuff there
3:07:22 where you can learn kettlebell flow, how to do soft tissue work. Pretty much.
3:07:24 School.com is spelled like normal school?
3:07:28 S-K-O-O-L. S-K-O-O-L.com slash thestrongerhuman. Thanks for that correction.
3:07:34 My goal for that place is, first off, there’s a great community there of over 12,000 people right
3:07:37 now. I love how these people bring in their different expertise with what they’re doing.
3:07:41 Not everyone is doing all the exact same things that I do. So it’s cool that I get to learn from
3:07:47 them too. But it’s just a great community of people that are all just trying to become stronger and
3:07:52 build their own personal physical practices. And my goal for myself there is just to put everything
3:07:57 that I’ve learned there. I want to mention this, Tim. Your podcast is a podcast that my,
3:08:01 me and my best friend, his name’s Brian Belaya. We were listening to your show back when I was 18
3:08:07 years old. Like we were listening to your stuff back. Actually, no, I think I was, I think I was 20.
3:08:11 The 19 and 20 is when we were listening to the show. Cause we would, uh, we would literally go on
3:08:15 calls and be like, okay, dude, what’d you learn from this? We’d get the books that were referenced in
3:08:18 the show. I think we read the way of the superior man because of something you mentioned on one of
3:08:26 your shows. Somehow it came up. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s what like got me on the path of like self
3:08:31 development and learning, constant learning. And Brian would say the same thing. Like me and him are
3:08:36 going to go crazy. Cause like, Oh shit, we just went on Tim Ferriss. So it’s like, it’s cool. So I want to
3:08:42 say thank you because honestly, dude, I’ve listened to so much of your show, so much of your show. And it’s
3:08:47 taught me so much through the years that for me being here right now, it’s literally insane to
3:08:52 me. I’m just happy that I was able to stay kind of chill during this show because this has been
3:08:56 really cool. So I want to say thank you because you like you literally, man, your stuff has changed my
3:09:02 life. Seriously. Amazing. Yeah. Makes my day. Thank you. Thank you. So glad we got to spend time together
3:09:10 and I’m very excited to see what you do in the coming years. How old are you? 32. I turned 33 this year.
3:09:16 You got some runway. I cannot wait to see the fact that you’re doing masters. I just,
3:09:21 I got it. I got to talk some shit. I also compete in adult. I don’t only compete in masters.
3:09:28 Because masters starts at 30, right? And I remember this past winter, someone’s like,
3:09:34 yeah, you should do some masters competitions and skiing. And I was like, what’s the lowest age
3:09:40 that one can be masters. They’re like 30. And I was like, oh, I see. So people who just
3:09:46 stopped competing at the highest levels. I know I’m not going to be like a mop for those guys.
3:09:51 But there’s like ranges of masters. It was like masters one, which is what I did. Right. So I
3:09:55 compete in adult and master. So I’m on my way. But there’s also masters two and three. So like
3:10:01 they do it from like 30 to 33, then 34. Yeah. So it’s not like I’m competing against some 60 year
3:10:08 old. Just sandbagging. You’re like, take this guillotine bitch. No, they’re all around my,
3:10:11 they’re all around the same age. How’s that arthritis? I’m going to cover your arm off.
3:10:17 Oh, yeah. Don’t look at me that way. But I also compete in adult. Take your walker and get out
3:10:27 of here. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. So, oh, man. Well, the very, very, very fun and super,
3:10:35 super informative to spend time together and very inspiring because as you’re talking about these
3:10:40 things, and I’m sure I’m not the only person, I’m sure people listening, you do a very good job
3:10:50 of making it seem, which it is. Right. Not just tangible, but achievable. Scale it down. Right.
3:10:56 You’re not going to walk in and do 600, 700 pound, 800 pound deadlifts tomorrow. If you haven’t been
3:11:01 deadlifting, you don’t need to do that. You shouldn’t even attempt to do that. You shouldn’t even attempt
3:11:09 your one rep max. And the payoff that you can get from layering these things in, learning to feel your
3:11:14 body and learning to then trust your body, becoming familiar with the map that is your body and how it
3:11:21 changes over time. The payoff with this type of micro dosing of movement, the micro dosing of soft
3:11:28 tissue treatment, it does not need to be and turn your life upside down, change everything transformation
3:11:34 overnight. And it shouldn’t be because that’s going to fail. And from experience, I can tell you whether it
3:11:40 was with training with Jersey back in the day or training with coach summer back in the day,
3:11:48 it’s like these little things done consistently. If you are consistent and you add some progressive
3:11:54 overload, doesn’t mean a lot. Doesn’t mean slapping on 20 pounds. Every time you go to the gym with extra
3:12:00 weight, micro progressions that are sustainable. So you’re not getting injured ideally, right? Those
3:12:06 things will happen. Little Nixon bruises along the way. What that can add up to when I look back at some
3:12:16 of those experiences, it’s just unbelievably impressive and more important, fulfilling. And you can actually
3:12:24 fully inhabit this body that by the way, like mind body, there’s no separation. It’s just one integrated
3:12:29 unit. And like, we are evolved to move our bodies through space. That’s why I like the idea of a brain
3:12:34 in a jar doesn’t really work. Like uploading consciousness. No, like it’s all integrated into
3:12:41 the movement of the body. And I think you are an incredible ambassador for it. So thank you for that.
3:12:47 And you’re a very, very, very good educator. And that is hard to do. That is hard to do in a very
3:12:55 crowded media landscape. And I saw that video and I was like, huh, interesting. And then Mark’s name
3:13:02 popped up and I was like, I think I recognize that fucking mutant. Hold on a second. And I texted Mark
3:13:09 and here we are. So I’m glad it happened. And we will link to everything in the show notes,
3:13:18 folks. We’re going to go get some food, which I’m very excited about. And show notes as per usual,
3:13:24 tim.blog slash podcast. We’ll link to everything. And I can guarantee you, if you search for this
3:13:31 episode in SEMA, N-S-I-M-A, there will be one and only. It’s hard for me to imagine getting a
3:13:38 collection of those. And as always, folks, until next time, be it just a bit kinder than is necessary
3:13:45 to others and also to yourself. Very important. Compassion that doesn’t include you is incomplete,
3:13:50 as Jack Kornfield would say. And thanks for tuning in. Until next time.
3:13:57 Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet
3:14:01 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
3:14:06 before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
3:14:12 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is
3:14:18 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered
3:14:23 or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things. It often
3:14:29 includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech
3:14:36 tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange
3:14:43 esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds
3:14:48 fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.
3:14:53 Something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that
3:14:58 into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
3:15:00 Thanks for listening.
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