AI transcript
0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Wow, that was quite the ejaculation. Sorry for the
0:00:09 volume, folks. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Ben Patrick.
0:00:15 Ben Patrick is better known as Knee Over Toes Guy, and you can find him on Instagram and everywhere
0:00:22 else as Knees Over Toes Guy. He is the founder of Athletic Truth Group, ATG, an online and brick
0:00:27 and mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of
0:00:31 debilitating knee and shin pain, including multiple surgeries, he rebuilt his body from the
0:00:38 ground up and his performance going from sub 20-inch vertical to a documented 42-inch leap. He is the
0:00:43 author of Knee Ability Zero and other books on fitness and recovery. He’s become a phenomenon
0:00:51 online. And I should note, there is a companion video for this episode where Ben and I walk through
0:00:56 all of the exercises we discuss together. So if you want to see me with beginner’s eyes
0:01:02 going through this, asking questions with him, then you can check it out. And you can find that on
0:01:11 youtube.com slash timferriss, T-I-M-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. You can also find a video pinned on Ben’s Instagram,
0:01:19 that’s Knees Over Toes Guy. And that runs through a more comprehensive version of what we did in person.
0:01:26 But if you want the minimum effective dose, go to the youtube.com slash timferriss and you’ll see
0:01:31 what we did, especially making some adjustments for my current back pain. And if you want to see the
0:01:37 more comprehensive stuff, you can check out his Instagram. We also get into a lot more than just
0:01:44 exercise. Ben asked me some questions about how to navigate different decisions and integrity and so on
0:01:49 in podcasting, business, et cetera. And we actually spent a good amount of time on that towards the
0:01:54 end of this conversation, if that’s of interest. And that is it. Without further ado, please enjoy
0:01:59 a wide-ranging conversation with Ben Patrick. And don’t forget about the companion videos at
0:02:07 youtube.com slash timferriss, as well as at Knees Over Toes Guy pinned post on Instagram. Thanks for listening.
0:02:37 Ben, nice to see you, brother. Thank you. Nice to finally spend time together.
0:02:42 We did a bit of a workout overview, recorded some video, so people will be able to find that.
0:02:48 And we’ll put links in the show notes. We’ll talk more also about things you might pin for people
0:02:56 who want a visual reference here. But let’s go back in time. Nicknames. We were chatting a bit
0:03:01 before recording. What was the nickname that we were discussing and who gave it to you?
0:03:07 I had a high school basketball coach who started calling me old man. I was so stiff.
0:03:12 Stiff. It’d take me so long to warm up compared to other players. I knew I wasn’t built well for
0:03:18 basketball. I thought I could work my way. I was just doing crazy workouts from the time I was maybe
0:03:25 9 years old. So by 12, chronic knee pain. So even by high school, I couldn’t get low in my legs.
0:03:31 So I think during all that puberty time, things weren’t forming right because I was so stiff. I
0:03:43 started calling me old man. So we’ve got old man Patrick in high school. Flash forward. Now you’re known as
0:03:47 knees over toes guy. So something happened in between those two.
0:03:54 What were the… And we can approach this any number of ways. You could explain why the name,
0:04:02 or you could talk about maybe catalyzing moments or findings that set you on the path that led you to
0:04:04 become knees over toes guy.
0:04:13 Absolutely. As you alluded to on my Instagram, YouTube, it’s pinned where this kind of stuff
0:04:17 we’re talking about. Someone just can just go look at it and see it visually, like almost
0:04:26 in order. So the chronic pains and stiffness, doctors did think around 14, probably something
0:04:31 happened. I should have had surgery on. Didn’t have surgery. Different things started stacking up.
0:04:37 By 18, I then did have surgery. Partial kneecap replacement, like part of my kneecap was just
0:04:46 floating there. Quad tendon reattached and then had a meniscus transplant. And then it took about
0:04:54 a year and a half because I was so extreme, so stiff. I was immobilized and really couldn’t even run
0:04:58 for like a year and a half. That kind of set off a chain of things. By then, my right knee was hurting
0:05:02 worse than my left knee ever had. Yeah. I mean, that happened when I had my left shoulder
0:05:08 surgically reconstructed. After the year, year and a half it took to finally rehab the left,
0:05:14 the right was screaming. So I was in a pretty dark place because considering my right knee hurt worse
0:05:21 than my left knee ever had, I’m like, I probably need surgery on the right knee now. And I had gotten
0:05:27 from the surgeries and I had stayed on painkillers and parents didn’t know. My girlfriend didn’t know.
0:05:32 It was my wife now. Staying on the painkillers. Yeah. Right. I was just like popping them. And then
0:05:40 I stumbled on some stuff from Charles Poliquin, who you had on your podcast.
0:05:42 Yeah. Spent a lot of time with Charles back in the day.
0:05:52 And he had various information that was very clear that it was like, no, no, no. What we’ve
0:05:59 in the fitness world had all been taught of don’t let your knee over your toes. He had stuff saying,
0:06:06 no, this is actually the athletes. He helps them prevent injury and rehab with training that position.
0:06:13 And just for people who are trying to imagine what this means. So if you were to say be in a squat
0:06:20 position, keeping your shins vertical where your knees are aligned over your ankles, that would be
0:06:29 the, let’s just call it pre-exposure to Poliquin sacred cow, at least in some of the, a lot of the
0:06:35 sort of exercise science worlds. Do not let your knees travel over your toes. Yeah. Right. Keep your
0:06:41 shins vertical. Yeah. So Charles is saying quite the opposite. Yeah. And good point there. It was
0:06:49 totally understandable why that occurred. 1970s exercise science is becoming a thing in school.
0:06:54 And they found that when the knee goes over the toe, then there’s more pressure on the knee.
0:07:00 So what, what into textbooks was showing when you exercise, don’t let your knee over your toes.
0:07:08 Now for someone to compare, think about stepping down the stairs and stop. You take a step downstairs,
0:07:15 stop. You’re loading your knee over your toes. Every single step you take downstairs. So when I
0:07:22 started studying Charles Poliquin, because of what I had been through for me instantly,
0:07:28 I knew there was something here because I had tried all the mainstream methods of no knees over toes.
0:07:36 So the first thing then that I could tell that allowed me to get off the painkillers was dragging
0:07:44 a sled backwards. So every step I take, my knee is over my toes. It’s almost like if someone walked
0:07:50 backward up a hill to rehab rather than going down the hill. And that’s actually the progression of the
0:07:58 rehab is walking backwards, trying to add resistance to walking backwards, which is gentler to then I use
0:08:03 a slant board, but someone could really, you could roll up a towel to elevate your heel. You could start
0:08:07 with your heel flat. Like you don’t have to even elevate the heel to start where you actually work
0:08:12 on stepping down. So you’re actually controlling the motion at your pain-free level of stepping down.
0:08:16 Even if you can’t, I couldn’t do a six inch step. I could maybe control a couple inches and you’re
0:08:21 using high repetitions as if you were a gymnast. When you say you can only do a couple of inches,
0:08:26 can you just paint a picture for what that means? Let’s say you’re walking down the stairs. Each
0:08:32 stair is probably six inches. I couldn’t control that motion without pain. I had to sort of clunk my
0:08:40 way down the stairs, ease up pressure with the upper body. I couldn’t control step by step without my
0:08:49 knee hurting. But someone could do less than a six inch stair. So the walking backward as a warm up, you’re
0:08:58 getting circulation. We’re talking maybe stacking up 100, 200 yards backward, which was didn’t hurt, and then
0:09:03 was getting circulation, getting some strength. So that was what I felt like, okay, I can get off the painkillers
0:09:10 now because I have this way of naturally reducing the pain and getting some strength going in a knee
0:09:17 pressure position. And let me just sidebar quickly for folks. I have only in the last handful of years,
0:09:23 I’d use sleds a lot, but I was always pushing. It’s only in the last handful of years. And you have met
0:09:33 these guys as well, but Nseema Young and Mark Bell. And of course, Mark Bell used to train with, he was at
0:09:39 Westside Barbell, Louis Simmons. You mentioned his name when we were recording earlier. I have come to
0:09:47 appreciate just how incredibly therapeutic this pulling of the sled is, which you could do with
0:09:52 a band around, a harness around the waist. You could do it with a vest. You could simply hold on
0:09:57 to, that’s typically how I’ve seen Mark do it, for instance, where you’re effectively just holding
0:10:05 on to handles with a strap that attaches you to the sled. For rehabilitation, for prehab, for building in
0:10:13 some insurance policy for the knees, it is just incredibly effective, but also so elegant. It’s so
0:10:18 simple and hard to hurt yourself. Now, of course, talk to your doctor. I don’t pretend to be one on
0:10:24 the internet, but that’s all I wanted to say was personally, I can also vouch for this. Did you come
0:10:30 across that through Poliquin? Charles Poliquin, he was interviewed for this article where he helped an
0:10:35 Olympic athlete who wasn’t going to be able to compete in the Olympics. And they started going backward
0:10:41 with the sled often because they could recover fast. And he was able to get back and actually win a
0:10:49 medal at the Olympics. So I’m not advising someone to rush, but that was a unique case where this might be the
0:10:54 guy’s only chance. You have a constraint. Ever. Yeah. So that kind of sold me on it. And then once I was
0:10:59 experiencing it, I was like, okay, I can see there’s something here. It’s not like that solved all my problems.
0:11:06 That was enough for me in my state to be willing to get off the painkillers and then start exploring further
0:11:11 stuff. How long did it take you to get off of the painkillers after you started doing the sled work?
0:11:22 Well, I remember after the first week of doing this, I then intentionally got off. That didn’t mean all
0:11:28 my pain was gone, but it was like, I wanted to experience this route and not try to shield the
0:11:33 pain anymore. So within a week I knew, okay, there’s something different here of progressing the
0:11:37 knee over the toes rather than avoiding the knee over the toes. I didn’t really want to think about
0:11:43 any further progressions, but that gave me something I could do. Didn’t hurt. And to give someone an idea
0:11:49 on the safety, we can’t say anything is a hundred percent safe, but real numbers at the gym, I eventually
0:11:56 made coached thousands of group training sessions. So it wound up being, I counted like over a hundred
0:12:02 thousand times that I coached people on the sled. No one was ever hurt doing the sled. It could happen
0:12:07 to give you a visual that we actually did that, which was, I feel like the best visual to explain
0:12:16 people. My mom is 71. We put a thousand pounds on the sled and had her try to drag it backwards.
0:12:19 She couldn’t budget, but she was fine.
0:12:22 People are going to be wondering why you would do that to your mom.
0:12:28 More people are like, oh, now I get why it’s safe because the thousand pounds that she’s trying to
0:12:33 drag is not bearing down on her. So when you’re trying to drag a weight, it probably has less
0:12:40 potential to body build and create that breakdown that turns into new muscle tissue and stuff.
0:12:48 but it has more potential for getting into something with safety without pain. That was my stepping
0:12:58 stone. Charles Poliquin was, this was before social media. So I didn’t actually see any videos of any of
0:13:04 the stuff. I had to really decipher articles. I had to self-teach based on information he had put out.
0:13:12 And through my just self-experimenting, I was able to get to where I could play basketball really hard
0:13:18 without my knees hurting. What other ingredients were added to the cocktail outside of the backwards
0:13:23 sled pulls? So you got the backwards sled pulls. Then it was really clear that he was getting people
0:13:29 into a full range of motion squat. And that was also something that growing up my whole life in
0:13:36 basketball is like, don’t do any deep squats. Your knee goes over your toes. So it was sort of don’t
0:13:42 go below 90 degrees and don’t let your knee over your toes were the two prevailing things. And I went to
0:13:48 six, eight, 10 trainers. Maybe that was bad luck that none of those trainers knew differently. It does seem
0:13:53 like it was the prevailing way. And having been on basketball teams now, having coached, I could safely
0:13:58 estimate that 99% of basketball teams don’t squat with a full range of motion.
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0:16:36 I’ll throw out a polyquinism. He had quite a few of these. At some point, I’ll tell you the origin
0:16:41 story, how I connected with Charles, which is pretty funny. But this is one of his lines, and this is,
0:16:46 I’ll give credit where credit’s due. This is from outside online. But strength is gained in the range
0:16:54 it is trained. Very Seussian, as they put it. And you just see this over and over again. And I’ve
0:16:59 interviewed, for instance, coach Christopher Sommer, who used to be the men’s national
0:17:09 gymnastics coach. And you look at a lot of, say, cases of what people might consider inflexibility,
0:17:15 and it’s just the body being very smart to guard itself against injury where it is weak
0:17:20 at the extent of your range of motion, right? And when you start to develop strength at the
0:17:26 end range, all of a sudden, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, your quote-unquote flexibility improves,
0:17:31 right? Because the body is very, very intelligent. And it’s guarding you against injury. I just wanted
0:17:37 to mention the polyquinism, because I think it puts a fine point on some of what you’re saying,
0:17:43 right? It’s like if you’re never getting into a full squat position, if you ever engage in anything
0:17:49 that puts you into those positions, your foot slips while you’re playing intramural soccer,
0:17:52 who knows, right? You’re going to be potentially in a world of hurt.
0:17:58 No, I appreciate that. And I think to make it an effective podcast for people, please keep chiming
0:18:06 in. Even for our body, this is the mindset, the efficiency, the 80% of the results from 20%.
0:18:16 This is the stuff that helps me make my system. So it’s hugely inspired by that. And outside of my
0:18:23 videos, I don’t have a ton to say here. So please keep it coming. Make it interesting for people to say.
0:18:31 Well, on the deep squat, what I have to offer is lots of experience trying to help people who
0:18:37 can’t figure out how to apply this stuff. Deep squats hurting is super common. People feeling
0:18:43 like they don’t have the mobility to get into a deep squat. Elevating your heels a bit can help people
0:18:49 get lower on a squat and holding a weight out in front of you reduces the pressure on the knee.
0:18:57 Do you recommend people do what people would envision as a normal squat? So both feet on the ground,
0:19:05 same plane, or one exercise that you’re very well known for, the ATG split squat or front foot
0:19:14 elevated split squat. Would you have them start with that in place of the prototypical squat? How do you
0:19:14 think about that?
0:19:22 I see it in relation to age, almost like a reverse system, meaning my kids are three and five. Their
0:19:30 squats are incredible. I’m not like, wait until you program. So it’s almost like in youth, my whole system
0:19:36 for the knees is if I can have you comfortable and able to be getting stronger, controlling a full
0:19:41 range of motion squat where you feel like you don’t have to stop before you get all the way down, but
0:19:44 also where you feel like you don’t have to bounce to get out of it, like where you’re able to own it.
0:19:50 You can control it all the way down, pause, and then explode up without pain, able to get stronger.
0:19:58 Kids naturally have that. And so when I’m coaching, I volunteer at a school. I’ve had to coach 50 kids at a
0:20:04 time. I set up 10 slant boards. Some kids need to elevate the heel. Some don’t. They’re able to
0:20:11 back their heels up, whatever they want. Everyone can get down into a deep squat without pain. Some
0:20:15 need to hold some weight out in front of them to get down there, but the younger they are,
0:20:19 a hundred percent can do it. Like all little toddlers can deep squat.
0:20:27 Why does the weight in front of you help someone to get into a squatted position, whether the heels are
0:20:34 elevated or not? It’s simply a counterbalance. So when you go to squat down and you think about that
0:20:38 for someone with knee pain, you think about that pressure holding the weight on the front, you
0:20:44 actually lean back a bit, not have to go, your knee doesn’t have to go as far over your toes.
0:20:50 So I’m trying to help people get better at knees over toes, not work through pain in the process,
0:20:55 gradually coax that ability. Or if they’ve already got it, we can fortify it super easily.
0:21:00 So a progression using common weights, because it’s mostly going to be adults listening to this.
0:21:06 Let’s say you roll up a towel on the floor and you lift your heels up onto it to simulate some more of
0:21:12 that mobility, get low, and you hold a 25 pound plate out in front of you. You get where you can
0:21:17 lower down pain-free in a squat. Let’s say five reps controlling down. Okay. Now let’s say you hold a
0:21:23 45 pound plate, not all the way out in front of you, just in front of your knees. Get to where that’s
0:21:31 pain-free five reps, let’s say. Okay. Now you hold a 45 or more pound kettlebell, not far out in front
0:21:37 of you, but kind of above your thighs. Closer to your center of gravity. Yeah. And then depending on
0:21:44 a person’s goals, what would be even closer than that would be a bar on front. So depending on sports
0:21:50 goals, I find with all students, I want them to be able to hold a kettlebell and get down in a deep
0:21:55 squat without pain. That’s a pretty good, I have to get down and pick up one kid, two kids. I got a
0:22:01 third kid on the way. I have to squat down. If you got to pick up two toddlers, you can’t just bend
0:22:06 your back over. You can for one. Think about trying to pick up two little bodies. You got a deep squat.
0:22:13 So I got a deep squat with some load. Saying everyone has to barbell squat, that’s just not true.
0:22:20 But I do think it’d be a common sense goal for everyone to be able to hold a kettlebell and squat
0:22:26 all the way down without pain. I want you to fact check me if I’m off base here, but I would like to
0:22:32 come back to the split squat for a second, particularly with that front foot elevated.
0:22:39 So imagine that you had someplace in your house, I’m making this up, where there’s one step up. Maybe it’s from
0:22:45 living room to the kitchen or vice versa. Could just as easily as we did earlier be like two thick
0:22:51 45-pound plates if they’re kind of like the bumper plate style. So whatever that might be. Six to eight
0:22:58 inches, whatever the height happens to be. You’ve got one foot on that. Then you have your other leg as far
0:23:07 back as is pain-free and you go down into a squat to the extent that you can be pain-free in that range
0:23:13 of motion. And your knee, if you build up to it, maybe you’ll get there naturally quickly. Your front
0:23:18 knee is going to project way over your toes. And the reason that I wanted to come back to this is A,
0:23:28 because I’ve derived so much value from this and so much pain reduction in the back. And the third
0:23:38 is from a form perspective, I wouldn’t want people who have never explored really deep squatting to jump
0:23:46 into doing squatting where they’re rounding the low back at the bottom most portion of the squat.
0:23:50 So just to paint a picture for folks, maybe they’ve heard these terms, but if you imagine
0:23:59 your hips, your pelvis, like a glass of wine, if you’re pouring wine out the front, that’s anterior
0:24:04 pelvic tilt. If you’re pouring wine out the back, that’s the posterior pelvic tilt. If you go into the
0:24:08 bottom of the squat, especially if you’re loading yourself up with a barbell or something, and you
0:24:14 have a lot of posterior pelvic tilt, some people call that the butt wink at the bottom, you can really
0:24:23 hurt yourself. And I was guilty of that at one point. And I like the safety profile, and I don’t want to
0:24:29 make anything sound risk-free, of course, but of all the exercises that I’ve seen, especially under
0:24:38 control, slow cadence, the front foot elevated split squat, it seems harder to commit cardinal sins where
0:24:40 you’re going to injure yourself. Is that a fair statement?
0:24:48 I think so. And that was, for someone listening who is confused on what we’re talking about, now you
0:24:55 understand where I was when I was 19, trying to figure this out without seeing visuals. So I have by far
0:25:02 made the most step-by-step free videos on how to do that. Yep. And how to use, I mean, a stairwell
0:25:10 is a near perfect device. You have balance to hold on, to reduce the load, you have scalable steps to use.
0:25:15 Which is what I did in the beginning. I had my front foot two steps up, holding onto a railing with one
0:25:23 hand, and then just worked the way down. That’s how my mom has mostly done them. She’s 71. If you see her
0:25:26 sprint, it’s like, I’m going to need to see a birth certificate.
0:25:29 That’s wild. 71, your mom can sprint.
0:25:34 My mom is more impressive. Like, I try, I can’t get, my mom can get more views than I can when I talk
0:25:35 about her.
0:25:40 So just to give voice, certainly this pops into my mind. I’m like, wait a second. All right. So do you
0:25:47 just come from thoroughbred genetic stock? I mean, this sounds kind of outrageous. I mean,
0:25:51 has your mom been sprinting her whole life? Did she have a period where she couldn’t do it?
0:25:57 I started training her because her hips were deteriorating. She then had a fall,
0:26:04 sort of chronic hip issue began. And so I’ve been training my mom for going on eight years.
0:26:09 And I wound up at my gym. I had a whole women’s class, people of all ages, grandmas,
0:26:17 young moms, everything in between. And then my dad is more like me, Mr. Fragile. The broken bones,
0:26:21 the knees, the knee tears. I think that’ll be my new podcast name, the Mr. Fragile show.
0:26:25 Yeah. When I was a kid, I went to a speed class to try to get faster. And he signed up with me.
0:26:31 And this is a youth speed class. So there was no warmup structure. It was just, okay,
0:26:32 here’s the first run.
0:26:33 Oh boy.
0:26:38 And he didn’t get to his second step and pulled his hamstring. And so I come more from his fragile
0:26:44 side. My mom’s been working from a desk for 50 years. So we don’t really know what she ran when
0:26:51 she was a young girl, probably pretty athletic, but didn’t like keep doing sports or anything.
0:26:57 And generally ate well, stuff like that. But now the hip is deteriorating. I remember going to visit
0:27:02 her after she had a fall and I’m like, I was getting worried. I had her start coming to the gym.
0:27:09 So she fell in love with the sled. Eight years. She’s been sledding regularly. She’s very gentle
0:27:16 with her program. She spends maybe 10, 15 minutes a day. And similarly, I work out only twice a week.
0:27:21 It’s a bit different for me because I’m raising toddlers running a business. So it’s like, I know
0:27:27 I can carve out my time to exercise twice a week. Me and my mom, we do all the same exercises basically
0:27:34 just at different levels. But that split squat, she credits with fixing her hip problems. She’s got
0:27:40 great mobility with the grandkids. She slowly coaxed my dad along. So my dad does different pieces of the
0:27:46 programming to fix up old pains and stuff. So there’s some mixture of good genetics. Definitely not like
0:27:51 my dad never was able to grab the rim or anything like that. And I was the same. Like I in basketball,
0:27:57 I went through my high school career, unable to grab the rim and now not that much proof, but okay,
0:28:03 I’m 34. I’ve been dunking for over a decade without having a knee problem. I was your, your video guy
0:28:10 filming Duncan out on that concrete court. And for me, it’s the fact that I can go play. And that’s what
0:28:14 I trained for. We don’t really know genetically. Do I have good genetics, bad genetics somewhere?
0:28:19 Yeah, I’m not trying to. I just, it was more like my 71 year old mom is sprinting. I’m like,
0:28:24 wait a minute, hold the press. I just wanted to unpack that. So thank you for that. If I were to
0:28:33 ask your mom, all right, you can only pick three or four exercises. That’s it that you get to continue
0:28:39 with. You’ve had eight years to trial and error and try a bunch of stuff. What do you think she would
0:28:45 respond with of the like three or four? I know she would do the sled forward and backward.
0:28:52 That became way of life at our gym and she’s kept it up ever since. I know she would do that
0:28:58 full range of motion, which varies based on the person, what that means, but where you’re
0:29:02 not stopping short, you’re embracing your flexibility, full range of motion, split squat.
0:29:06 I know those would be her top two. And then I know she would throw something in for the posterior.
0:29:12 I’ll have to ask her what is her favorite. Today in the video, I showed the three main different
0:29:13 posterior exercises.
0:29:15 I think you just had to hazard a guess. What do you think she might choose?
0:29:20 I think she would choose the way that we use that back extension machine because she works from a desk.
0:29:26 And so particularly when you put that full split squat, which stretches the front of the hip
0:29:34 with then where you’re getting to squeeze those glutes, that sets that pelvis that it’s almost like
0:29:39 whether someone has posterior or anterior, it seems to benefit everyone because you’re getting both
0:29:41 sides of that equation. I think she would do that one.
0:29:47 All right. And again, just a reminder for folks, we’re going to link to everything and you’re going
0:29:54 to have videos pinned and just search knees over toes guy for all the platforms and you’ll find those.
0:30:00 What else did you pick up from Poliquin? If anything comes to mind, let’s start there and then I’ll trade
0:30:00 with you.
0:30:06 So many gems. That’s a tough question.
0:30:12 It is. Sadly, Charles is no longer with us. Got the phone call about it pretty much immediately
0:30:20 after he died, which was very sad, very tragic, way too early. But anything else come to mind?
0:30:23 Okay. I can buy some time if you want.
0:30:31 He was trying to master everything from, he was helping bodybuilders, athletes. The thing he told
0:30:39 me, so only one time when I finally had the money and freedom to go see, he came to America, did seminar
0:30:47 and he said, this was towards the end. And he said, only regret was not getting into flexibility sooner.
0:30:54 And you know, he was a wealth of strength knowledge, a lot of that strength relating to range of motion.
0:31:00 That definitely left an impact on me that he wished he had gotten into that sooner. And the conclusions
0:31:05 that I’ve come to is you can see my style of training. The way I stretch wouldn’t be how someone would
0:31:11 normally think of stretching, but just the idea of your strength and your flexibility, really getting
0:31:16 those into harmony to where the positions that you’re flexible and you feel strong in those positions.
0:31:23 And so I’ve really explored that deeply now compared to, let’s say, look, people are going to have way
0:31:29 more experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, strong, these kinds of things. And Charles had way more
0:31:34 experience there than me. So I think that was, if someone goes to my pages and sees the style that I
0:31:40 train, I feel like that was the gem that was just what I needed that gave me now like the systems
0:31:41 that I love.
0:31:47 And also getting strength and flexibility or mobility and harmony can sometimes mean that you’re
0:31:54 training both at the same time. Often can mean that. And we were recording earlier and not that I’m
0:31:57 going to win any gold medals in the split squat, but like my range of motion is pretty good,
0:32:06 all things considered. And I credit that to doing the movement. And also I gave him a shout out when
0:32:12 we were recording Jersey Gregor at some credit where credit is due, who holds multiple world records or
0:32:19 did in masters Olympic weightlifting. He is, he’s got to be close to 70, if not 70. Now he can still do,
0:32:26 he can stand on a balance board, like an endo board, the fully loaded barbell and do an ass to heels
0:32:32 Olympic snatch at his age. It is unbelievable. His wife also holds a few world records. She can do the
0:32:42 same thing. Their sustained athleticism is just beyond incredible. And for ankle mobility, he had me doing
0:32:50 basically one or two reps on the minute overhead squats. So I’m holding a barbell overhead, but
0:32:56 we’re talking bar, maybe plus five pounds on either side, very lightweight. Just doing one rep on the
0:33:04 minute for like 10 to 20 minutes. That’s it. And by greasing the groove in that way, I went from
0:33:10 basically zero ankle mobility, lots of injuries, still a lot of lateral instability to being able
0:33:17 to do what we did earlier, which is frankly, years after I did that training, it’s been really durable,
0:33:24 which is wild. One of the points that I hear you making that I see reflected in a lot of what you do
0:33:29 is that you don’t necessarily have to do, you absolutely don’t have to do for most things like
0:33:37 an hour of strength training every other day, plus an hour of stretching every day or every other day.
0:33:42 You just do not, that is not necessary for most people at all. Like the surface area for injury
0:33:47 goes up also when you’re throwing everything in the kitchen sink with lots and lots of hours.
0:33:52 And certainly, I mean, I had conversations with Charles back in the day where we would talk about
0:33:59 some of these professional athletes, let’s just say NFL players, who have five, six percent body fat.
0:34:04 You know, they destroyed the combine. They’re these absolute phenoms. And I would ask him,
0:34:09 what do they eat for their diet? And he’d be like, oh, Wendy’s for breakfast, Burger King for lunch,
0:34:15 McDonald’s for dinner. I mean, you have to be very careful that you’re not modeling your training on
0:34:21 mutants. So I’ll just pull out a couple of things from Charles. So I first met Charles because he reached
0:34:27 out to me after reading The 4-Hour Workweek, my first book. And he had applied a lot of it to his
0:34:35 business and his productivity. And I think at the time, he didn’t realize this, but I had been exposed
0:34:41 to tons of his stuff just as you had through magazines way back in the day. And he reached out
0:34:44 and he’s like, you don’t know who I am. And I was like, well, actually, that’s funny because I do know
0:34:53 who you are. And then we connected and Charles ended up in the 4-Hour Body. He introduced me to
0:35:00 myofascial release and active release technique. And there’s some before and after photos with internal
0:35:07 rotation on the shoulder in the 4-Hour Body that are unbelievable. They look like they were staged
0:35:13 because the gains in range of motion are so significant. He was right about so many things,
0:35:19 wasn’t right about everything, but there’s so many things that Charles did that ended up being proven
0:35:26 out through studies and data collection later and exercise science and other fields. It’s pretty
0:35:32 remarkable. I mean, he got a lot of things right. He was so dedicated. I forget the exact number,
0:35:38 but he learned a bunch of different languages just so that he could read essentially everything
0:35:45 that had been written about exercise. Yeah. In the source language. Right. What a maniac. Also,
0:35:55 cantankerous as fuck. Oh my God. He was so salty. And part of his charm, one of a kind. Who else has
0:36:06 influenced your thinking on exercise and movement? Just broadly speaking, your way of training?
0:36:10 Charles was really cool about crediting where he learned different things. And so that’s something
0:36:16 I’ve kept in. And it also gave me the idea that like, okay, there might be real gems in quite a few
0:36:23 areas. So I know you’ve talked about gymnastic rings. Okay. Doing rows and pull-ups with gymnastics
0:36:29 rings. I do one set to burn out of each per week. That saves me so much time and gives me a pretty
0:36:34 balanced upper back for my goals. So like there’s a gem that Paul Aquin didn’t teach me, but his general
0:36:39 mindset of learning. I’m just going to pause to ask you to repeat something you told me earlier. Where
0:36:45 did Charles figure out the backwards sled pulling? Oh man, it’s such a cool story. If you want to talk
0:36:52 about pulling from unusual places. Yeah. So Charles went to the source, Westside Barbell in Ohio,
0:37:01 led by Louis Simmons, who was creating the strongest powerlifters in the world. And Louis was jealous of
0:37:08 these, uh, Finland powerlifters of their squats. And they said that their secret weapon was their day
0:37:16 job was dragging trees. So Louis invented the idea of dragging weight as a form of exercise. And then that
0:37:24 became a way of life at Westside Barbell. One of Louis Simmons disciples, Dave Tate, who made the,
0:37:29 if you’ve heard of elite FTS, they made the prowler style sled, all kinds of amazing stuff.
0:37:34 I’m going to see Dave in two weeks actually for the first time. Dave has a quote that’s like,
0:37:39 we didn’t have warmups. It was Louis Simmons just telling him, Hey, before you train,
0:37:44 go out to the parking lot and drag the sled. He’s like, we didn’t have shit called warmups. It was
0:37:50 called the stuff you do before you train. And people are like, how long, how many sets and refs at? I
0:37:53 don’t know. It was X amount of times down the parking lot. Oh, how long was the parking lot?
0:37:58 Don’t know. So it was cool. The history there, but it’s cool how Charles Poliquin would just go to the
0:38:02 source. He’d go to the source in Europe or Ohio or wherever it was, he would go to the source.
0:38:07 And then it was like, I told you, it was this article of where he used the backward sled for
0:38:11 knee rehab for this Olympic athlete that kind of gave me a stepping stone to all this stuff.
0:38:19 Yeah. If people also want to look up Louis Simmons and his writing online, a lot of amazing tidbits
0:38:24 to be found to this day. And a lot of his writing and Westside barbell for a period of time, it was
0:38:31 just one of those factories for mutants that, and of course there’s some selection bias. If people are
0:38:35 traveling to the Mecca to station themselves there to train, there’s a little bit of selection bias,
0:38:45 but the results were just so incredible. And the number of world records broken and the number of
0:38:52 innovations, whether that’s say chains to provide more resistance as you get into stronger ranges of
0:38:58 motion with whether it’s deadlift or anything else, I mean, bands and so on. I mean, a lot of what you
0:39:07 see that is propagated throughout the gym universe started there, or at least was codified and sort
0:39:15 of formalized in some way there. So that was a great one. One that I think would be inaccurate if
0:39:22 we missed. There was a bodybuilder named Bob Guida. G-A-J-D-A. Bob Guida.
0:39:22 Don’t know that name.
0:39:30 Okay. He was Mr. Universe, like right before bodybuilding really blew up. And now these are
0:39:35 his words. He worked at the Chicago YMCA. His passion was helping get kids off the streets,
0:39:41 off drugs, doing bodybuilding. He’s Mr. Universe. He goes into the lockers one day and sees people
0:39:46 shooting up drugs, steroids. Like this was the beginning of steroids. And when I say this,
0:39:50 people are like, oh no, Bob was on steroids too. Look, this is Bob’s story. Bob’s story,
0:39:57 what you can look up is he was Mr. Olympia when he quit. Not a lot of people are going to quit
0:40:03 right when, guess what he was getting offered? The first protein shake deals. So there wasn’t
0:40:10 money in what he was doing. All of a sudden there was money in bodybuilding and guys were doing steroids
0:40:16 and he quit. When someone turns down money, I feel like there’s a little, you know, I believe what he’s
0:40:24 saying. And he wound up then getting into sort of like my passion of helping people enjoy life without
0:40:32 breaking down. And he invented this device that he called a DARD. D-A-R-D. I think it was dynamic
0:40:39 axial resistance device. Okay. Rolls off the tongue. It didn’t catch on. It didn’t, uh, by the time I was
0:40:45 studying this, you couldn’t even buy it anywhere. Didn’t turn into a business that worked out, but it
0:40:49 allowed you to do the opposite of a calf raise and strengthen the front chin muscles.
0:40:55 Oh, got it. Tibialis interior. Yeah. So one of the things I do that’s really unusual and Charles
0:41:01 Poliquin did calf training, did tibialis training. Lots of coaches have done this. Bob was the creator
0:41:08 and really had a big impact on me. And in my workout style, which I hadn’t seen anyone doing,
0:41:15 I go from the resistance forward and backward with the sled to then working my lower leg muscles.
0:41:19 So with the sledding, you’re pushing through your feet in various ways. I mean,
0:41:23 you’re working all kinds of stuff. My mindset was like, okay, move the body forward and backward,
0:41:29 then start addressing the body from the ground up. Let’s get some extra built. Like before we even get
0:41:36 into the knees, I found extra desensitization before getting into the knee work by doing the
0:41:41 lower leg work after the sled work. Maybe it was just because the sled burns your legs and you get a
0:41:47 little break, but we can’t say it’s a bad thing to have some extra ability in the front and back of our
0:41:53 shins. And so an equipment company reached out, said like, this is when the knees over toes guy was
0:41:56 starting to catch on on social media. Like, is there anything that doesn’t exist that you think
0:42:02 should exist? I’m like, yeah, like there should be these dart bars, but I told him to call it a
0:42:08 tib bar to make it simple for people. Cause it’s the anterior front tibialis. Tibia is your shin bar.
0:42:14 I’m just calling something a dart also. I’m going to hell, but I mean, it’s a hard one to sell.
0:42:19 Yeah. So with the knees over toes guy stuff, I could see, okay, I’ve got a pretty good skill here at
0:42:27 helping people understand stuff. I think tib bar and, and now it’s a pretty common device. Like you can
0:42:34 even go on Amazon by tib bars. I mean, there’s like 10 sellers. Now I have the, by far the lowest price
0:42:39 for an American made tib bar. I don’t sell the most tib bars. Pretty much anything that I make
0:42:43 in America, someone’s going to make more money copying in China. And that’s actually at first
0:42:48 it seemed annoying, but now I’m like, it’s actually pretty cool. Like everyone wins. I can make a nice
0:42:54 living pursuing American made on everything I do. And like people are going to copy it because the price
0:42:59 is going to be higher. American made. All right. Everyone went, you can get it cheaper from someone
0:43:03 making it in China. And that doesn’t mean all my stuff is made in America. I’m pursuing all my stuff
0:43:08 made in America and anything on my website. I don’t play games with people. It says ATG USA. Then you
0:43:13 know, if it says that it’s made in America. So this was a really cool device, particularly for rehab.
0:43:17 But even for me, like what I showed you in my video, you can put a butt against the wall
0:43:25 with no equipment whatsoever, raise your toes and do that for a while and burn out and get a reverse
0:43:29 calf race, a tibialis race. Yeah. If you basically, I’ll just paint a picture for folks. So if you have
0:43:37 your, you’re standing facing away from a wall, maybe your heels are a foot away from the wall, your heels.
0:43:43 One to two feet. Yeah. One to two feet. Then you lean back against the wall. Now take your upper back
0:43:48 off of the wall. So it’s just kind of your hips and low back against the wall. So you’re not cheating.
0:43:55 Your legs are locked, right? Your knees are locked and then you’re lifting your toes to the greatest
0:43:59 extent that you can. And the next point that you added to that, I was like, oh, that’s actually
0:44:07 very smart. And it’s particularly, I would say helpful for someone like me, who’s basically torn
0:44:14 everything in both ankles. Too many heel hooks and nonsense way back in the day. That basically
0:44:19 lifting the foot as much as possible, then going down on the pinky side, then coming up and going
0:44:25 down on the big toe side and alternating back and forth like that. I could see helping also with some
0:44:27 of the lateral stability issues that I have.
0:44:33 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:45:42 So we were chatting a bit before recording about some of your different pieces of equipment. And I told you
0:45:51 that I really liked your wrist bar. So the wrist bar is imagine a baton like you would hand off to
0:45:58 someone in a relay race, but at one end, half of it is thick enough. I don’t know what the exact diameter
0:46:03 is. Let’s call it two, two and a half inches that you can plate load. You can put an Olympic plate
0:46:09 on that and then secure it, which makes it very interesting because you can work with progressive
0:46:14 resistance. Right. And for me, that was important and will be important. I’m six weeks after elbow
0:46:20 surgery. So I’m not quite there yet, but for sort of supination and pronation, whether I’m doing
0:46:29 isometrics or otherwise. And it’s very small, very portable. And one of the advantages, I, you know,
0:46:33 we were chatting to, well, why don’t you just tell the story and then I can add some color if need be.
0:46:38 I put this bar in five bullet Friday, which is my newsletter that goes out to 2 million plus
0:46:44 subscribers. There’s a few moments. I look back at just like sheer luck. Like when you won something
0:46:50 at the fair that you thought you went and done it. One of those highlight, just lucky moments is we’re
0:46:56 just seeing the wrist bar sales just going nuts. So my staff like, what the heck is going on? Like,
0:47:01 why are we selling so many wrist bar? And we quickly traced down that it was because of you.
0:47:05 That’s like an old time business moment. And that’s made in America. So we were able to
0:47:08 basically just make them to order and just quickly service anyone.
0:47:12 Right. So that last part is important, right? Because I think you mentioned it was like
0:47:20 more units than like the history of the bar up to that point or something. And I try to give people
0:47:25 a heads up if something is going to land in the newsletter because what can end up happening as one
0:47:30 of my fans termed it, the hug of death. So the hug of death can take a number of different forms.
0:47:36 It could be a website crashing, but it could also be where someone has a long lead time on ordering
0:47:41 inventory. Let’s just say they’re getting it from China. Not that that’s intrinsically bad. I’m not
0:47:47 saying that that is, but let’s just say for them to get an order, they have certain minimums and so on.
0:47:52 And they believe that the sales from the newsletter are going to continue at that velocity.
0:47:57 And they only had a hundred in stock. Now they order 2000 because they expect to be able to move
0:48:04 those and they don’t. The hug of death is, oh, I’m not going to make this money back. And companies,
0:48:09 small companies in particular can go under if they misgauge stuff like that. So you had the advantage
0:48:14 where you’re making them, I mean, from a global perspective, right around the corner.
0:48:19 So you could do just in time inventory. Yeah. We didn’t even have to order a batch. We were just
0:48:25 able to fulfill the orders. Awesome family in Minnesota who does stuff for a variety of people
0:48:30 in fitness, but reached out to me a few years back and has really helped me to make some cool stuff
0:48:37 American made. What other principles, topics, exercises would you like to talk about? Maybe one
0:48:45 way to edge into starting point for that is before coming here to do this recording and we did some
0:48:51 movement earlier, I did what I’ve done a number of different times because your name has come up
0:48:56 over the years and I’ve looked at your videos and watched a lot of them sorted your videos by most
0:49:02 popular. I’m sure a lot of people do that as a way to produce like a manageable shopping list of
0:49:12 videos. So my question for you is which videos were not anointed by the YouTube gods or for whatever
0:49:17 reason have not had the views that you would like where you’re like, if I could point out one video
0:49:24 that I wish people paid more attention to, it could be any video, but like your greatest hits don’t need
0:49:29 the help in a sense. Maybe you’d like to mention one of them, but if there’s a lesser known video where
0:49:36 you’re like, man, this one’s really, I think quite important and it hasn’t had the visibility.
0:49:43 So I just made a video really recapping all my knowledge because of going on this podcast. I didn’t
0:49:47 say in the video, you don’t want to jinx it like, Hey guys, I’m going on Tim Ferriss and then you get
0:49:55 canceled. But I made it for this podcast and it happens to be doing really well. I found that the
0:50:00 videos I put out that really hit home and help people then long-term wind up doing well. So for
0:50:05 me, it’s almost like my experience has been the better videos do have more views because I try to
0:50:11 be really careful to never lie in a YouTube title. What I have to look out for, which I’ll still have
0:50:17 to check it on your video because who knows on your staff, who’s going to title it is people have me on
0:50:21 or whatever. And then it’s like, I found one as like, and they’ve since corrected it, but it said
0:50:31 fix knee pain guaranteed in 60 seconds. The only, I won’t have a video with that only exercise you’ll
0:50:42 ever caps need. And so sure enough, the guy, great channel, great guy, very busy, naturally hired a
0:50:47 professional company. And then it actually alerted him and he found a bunch of lies like that in the
0:50:52 titles. So because of that, you can get a lot of views if you lie in the title. Even for me, I’m not
0:50:56 saying this from a point of perfection. There was one that’s so hard. I think I’ve kept it up. And
0:51:02 sometimes I go back and forth. I had titled it, this was four or five years ago, how to make yourself a
0:51:06 world-class athlete. And I use all these stories of people who weren’t world-class athletes and made
0:51:11 themselves world-class athlete. But still that was the closest one I can remember that I feel like was
0:51:16 potentially a lie. Now you’ll pin the video that you refer to, which is sort of the recap of a lot
0:51:22 of what we’re talking about visually. Yep. Do you recall the title of that? Yeah. Minimalistic
0:51:29 workout program with sets and reps. Like that’s how I title things now. Yeah. There’s no, no fluff.
0:51:34 Yeah. So what’s funny is that, so now to get views, it really is about the content itself,
0:51:39 not the title. So it doesn’t say knees over toes. It doesn’t say fix knee pain because there’s these
0:51:45 keywords that you should get views. So it just says minimalistic workout program with sets and reps
0:51:51 and it’s doing great. But that’s the most recent one I made for this podcast for someone to not beat
0:51:56 around the bush, get all the key information. It even gives you sets and it gives you my actual program.
0:52:00 It’s not a theoretical program. These are the two workouts I do a week. All the people I train are on
0:52:09 very similar versions of this. And I want to give people a taste of some of what we recorded earlier
0:52:17 in case they don’t see it. And in effect, I’ll summarize, but feel free to jump in because I’m a
0:52:23 stickler for detail and I like exact recipes. Could be my OCD screaming at the back of my head,
0:52:33 which is pretty often. But the point you made, or at least that I heard was you’re not really a magic
0:52:40 sets and reps guy in terms of some Goldilocks, perfect protocol. And the reason I bring that up
0:52:48 is that just like you can regress range of motion in a movement, you can regress the volume.
0:52:58 What I would say is that in pain free range of motion, a little bit can go a long way. So if
0:53:03 you look at something and you’re like, I don’t have time for three sets of this or five sets of that or
0:53:09 whatever it might be. Okay, fine. Well, maybe you start with one set. And I know people who’ve gotten
0:53:15 into tremendous shape coming from a baseline of zero, right? No athleticism, nothing. And they’re like,
0:53:18 no, I don’t have time to go to the gym. I don’t have to do that. I’m like, what about one pushup
0:53:22 before bed? What about one pushup? Is there a reason you can’t do one pushup? They’re like,
0:53:27 yeah, of course I can do one pushup. I’m like, okay, great. Do one pushup. And then it turns into
0:53:32 two and then it turns into whatever. And I know one guy like within a few months, he was doing 50 pushups
0:53:39 before bed. He was seeing real results. And then that was the unlock, right? So that’s a long winded
0:53:48 way of just saying, don’t get fixated on your limitations. You can always scale down.
0:53:55 My starting system is one to two sets. And then I found for myself, one to two sets, I can maintain
0:54:04 great. Only on exercises that I’m planning to put more weights on, I’ll go a couple more sets just to
0:54:08 actually, you’re probably still only talking one or two sets really exerting.
0:54:15 like work sets. Yeah. Just to make sure people safely take their time. Now, I simply wouldn’t
0:54:22 have believed 15 years ago that now I’d be like doing only two workouts a week, 45 minutes dunking
0:54:26 and stuff. So I wouldn’t have believed it. So if someone doesn’t, like if someone thinks we’re full
0:54:31 of shit, like I would have thought we were full of shit. That also doesn’t mean that higher volume
0:54:36 programs can’t work. Number one, I see all the different exercises as a beautiful freedom with
0:54:41 different inputs and adaptations. And I like, I see all of fitness as positive. And then I see even
0:54:46 all people’s viewpoints of then how to program that up as positive. The program you stick with that works
0:54:53 for you and your goals is awesome. Yeah. The program you stick with is the best program. And I want to
0:55:02 reiterate what you’re saying because I write books to be references for myself. Basically, if I can find a
0:55:06 book that does the job already, writing is way too hard. The research is way too arduous. It
0:55:11 takes way too long. I don’t want to write a book. It also turns out to generally be a terrible way to
0:55:16 make any money, even if your books do very well. There’s just way too much of pushing boulders up
0:55:21 the hill for me to write a book unless I feel like I’m gathering things that I need and can’t find
0:55:27 somewhere else. That was the case with the four-hour body. And this minimum effective dose, the concept,
0:55:33 the MED of finding the minimum effective dose, and you can look at many comparables, right?
0:55:37 It’s like there’s a certain temperature at which you boil water. You don’t need to get it
0:55:44 30 degrees hotter, right? If you go outside, there’s a point at which you start to adapt
0:55:49 in the sun and develop a tan. You don’t need or want to stay out another hour, right? And you
0:55:55 progress and you start to extend the duration, etc. It turns out that you can apply this almost
0:56:00 everywhere. You can apply it to language learning with the highest frequency words. You can apply it to,
0:56:06 for instance, I was asking on X back when it was Twitter, people for favorite chapters in the
0:56:10 four-hour body because I was curious about possibly updating things, although there’s not a lot that
0:56:16 needs much updating, it turns out. And people gave various examples. There was a, I think it was an NFL
0:56:26 player who was benched and got back to playing professionally using the prehab chapter and Occam’s
0:56:33 protocol. Occam’s protocol is like 20 minutes twice a week resistance training and a handful of other
0:56:38 things. There’s another guy who chimed in and I understand you can’t believe everything you read
0:56:43 on the internet, but I’ve seen multiple examples of this. He got to, I think, a 475-pound deadlift
0:56:50 using the Barry Ross protocol in the book. And Barry Ross coached Allison Felix and many other
0:56:58 sprinters. It is the most minimal thing you could possibly imagine. And a crux piece of it is doing
0:57:04 deadlifts to the knee and then effectively dropping the bar so that you’re not risking any type of
0:57:12 hamstring strain and doing two to three sets of two to three reps. That’s it. And you’re taking big,
0:57:17 fat power lifter rests in between those sets. The amount of strength that you can build doing that
0:57:26 is head spinning. So I just want to emphasize that I don’t have enough time doesn’t really hold up to
0:57:32 scrutiny if you’re willing to scale back. And in fact, you can do a lot more with very little than
0:57:39 you might suspect. To your point, there are also volume-based approaches. And I mean, Poliquin,
0:57:44 we talked about Poliquin. He did a lot of high-volume stuff with his athletes. Not everyone
0:57:48 is going to tolerate that very well, nor is it going to be compatible with their schedules necessarily.
0:57:53 So you find what works for you. And ultimately, the program you stick with is the best program.
0:57:59 I love that. Yeah, the 4-Hour Body had a massive, massive effect on me. And like this phase of life,
0:58:05 it’s like 2-Hour Body for me. And because it’s like the strength, the flexibility, the circulation,
0:58:10 the cardio, all this stuff wrapped in one. I don’t do any other therapies. I don’t have to
0:58:16 take any supplements. Those couple hours go a long way for me. And then I’m, what are my goals?
0:58:23 Like for me, being a dad, and then really focusing on my business, treating people well and doing good,
0:58:28 it takes a lot of time and energy. Because if you turn a blind eye to your business, that’s rarely
0:58:32 going to happen on its own. Yeah, very rarely. I haven’t figured out how to
0:58:38 do that yet. Yeah. So it’s like, those are my goals. I also don’t want to spend any time having
0:58:46 a rehab stuff. And knock on wood, it’s 12 years now, no knee or back problems. It was like 15 years ago
0:58:53 that I got into this. And I would say my biggest mistake was treating it as short-term rehab and being
0:58:58 like, oh, great. And then trying to go back to the methods I used to do. Whereas now for me,
0:59:03 like you had the question in the video of like, so is this like a warmup for the work? And then like,
0:59:08 that’s the workout. And then you get better at those things. And some of these things we’ve
0:59:14 mentioned, whether it be then finishing with a set of ring rows to a good burnout, that’s going to take
0:59:21 what a minute and goes a long way. So the efficiency of sledding and what I use at home is a resisted
0:59:27 treadmill forward and backward. I look at the clock, like three, four minutes I’ve gone by that I’ve done
0:59:33 three sets forward and backward, catching my breath between each set. I’m pumped. My lungs are, have had
0:59:39 a great workout. My legs are like warmed up, springy, fast, all this stuff. So for our body,
0:59:45 you can see in my passion, this is more along my passions in life is almost helping people that
0:59:51 don’t want so much stress on the body to then be able to focus on other things or stress on the
0:59:58 schedule, right? Stress on the family. And I would say that if I were to, and it’s just, these things
1:00:03 are too long and most of it, the vast majority of what’s in the four hour body, I feel is very
1:00:09 defensible. It’s become more defensible over time, which has been cool to see since it came out in 2010,
1:00:19 again. But if I were to add a few things to it, I would add sled work or analogs like the resisted
1:00:27 incline treadmill. I would add a chapter on intermittent fasting. I would add a chapter on,
1:00:37 it might not be a chapter, but maybe a sidebar on various hip activities, exercises, things like
1:00:44 glute medius work, just things that you can do to stabilize everything else in effect that I did put
1:00:51 some of in Tools of Titans with say, some of Peter, Tia’s exercises and so on. I would probably add
1:00:56 chapter or a sidebar on zone two training, which I still to this day find to be the most boring thing
1:01:03 in the world. But if I have to drag myself or whip myself to do anything, that would be on the high
1:01:09 whipping scale. And I think that’s about it. And there are probably chapters that I would pull out
1:01:15 to further simplify things. And that’s about it. I mean, these things are so reliable. And I would say
1:01:22 to someone, for instance, again, this is going to sound like nothing, but if you have access to a sled and
1:01:27 people can look at the resisted treadmill that you have also through ATG, how much does that cost?
1:01:28 600.
1:01:34 600. Right. So, I mean, it’s on the grand scale of things, not just affordable as an investment,
1:01:41 but also space efficient, right? Because the biggest knock against the sled is that you need space and
1:01:46 the sleds are not cheap, particularly the sleds I really like, like the torque sleds, which I own.
1:01:52 I love them. But here in Austin, I don’t have the space for one. But let’s just pretend you have
1:01:56 access to one of these. Let’s call it a sled for simplicity, just so people can visualize it.
1:02:04 Over this past summer, I did sled work where effectively, as prescribed by Peter at T, if I’m
1:02:09 doing VO2 max training, I would want to do like four minutes on, four minutes off. You can make it five
1:02:16 or six or whatever. It depends on how hard you’re pushing. And let’s just say it’s four minutes on,
1:02:21 four minutes off for four rounds or five rounds or six rounds. And I would do that with the sled.
1:02:27 And I would push, this is on a gravel driveway with mechanical resistance. You don’t need to add much
1:02:33 weight. So what we’re talking about, just to do the math, let’s just say it’s 15 minutes,
1:02:38 which often it would end up being 15 minutes because I would run out of gas, but 10 to 20
1:02:45 minutes, let’s call it. I was doing that every other day, fasted after a little bit of caffeine.
1:02:54 And my God, can you get in good shape just from doing that? I mean, it sounds, and I’m sure there
1:03:00 are some very high-level athletes or people who are doing 600-pound squats or 900-pound deadlifts who are
1:03:07 going to laugh hearing me say this, but you might be surprised how much your legs will grow
1:03:14 and how much stability you will develop doing this and how much body fat you can lose
1:03:20 just by making that the first thing you do. And in my case, I’m getting sun exposure at the same time
1:03:25 for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning. And then let that afterburn work for a bit.
1:03:30 I would typically do that in the mornings. And I would take some, like a very, I’m talking like 300
1:03:35 milligrams of essential amino acids instead of branch chain amino acids, but that’s a longer story.
1:03:41 And I would do the workout and then I would hold off on eating for a few hours and then break my
1:03:47 intermittent fast at 2 or 3 p.m. But feeding that way and then doing weight training typically before
1:03:54 like my second and last meal of the day for dinner, gaining muscle mass, not losing muscle mass. And
1:04:00 the total, I mean, we’re talking about weekly time. If I’m doing it every other day, it’s three or four,
1:04:05 let’s call it, days a week. So that’s an hour. And then the weight trainings probably,
1:04:11 since I’m doing some rehab as well because of some current back issues, we’re talking about
1:04:18 two to three hours a week. That’s it. And it’s split up also into very manageable
1:04:23 doses. It’s not like I’m asking you to do a three-hour or two-hour workout at once.
1:04:30 But it is really to this day, there’s still things I come across like the, in my case,
1:04:34 I’m still elevated, but the front foot elevated split squat or the ATG split squat.
1:04:42 Or for instance, the exercise that you showed me earlier, which is basically a seated, let’s call
1:04:48 it more constrained version of like a Romanian deadlift standing. People can find this on your
1:04:56 pinned video, I imagine. So I won’t belabor the description. Or sled work, where I still find
1:05:03 these things like, I think to myself, my God, if I just did these and that was it, the sort of return
1:05:11 uninvested time is so much better than like the long tail of 30 exercises that I could try to do,
1:05:16 it still makes me smile and blows my mind to this day how some of these things are just so inherently,
1:05:23 given their risk to benefit ratio, so high yield. And it’s really wild.
1:05:28 That’s exactly how I feel. It’s still to this day, it’s like, I do my two workouts a week. I’m just
1:05:33 totally stoked. And sometimes I still have that like, wow, every time, because I’m like,
1:05:36 it’s unbelievable. And now I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s not like,
1:05:41 wow, I could just train like that. I have been for a while. And the results are insane.
1:05:43 And you’re playing sports, right?
1:05:49 I try once a week to play some basketball. Right now, that means like playing with the best
1:05:54 kids at the school that I’m volunteering at. So it’s two workouts a week, try to play basketball
1:05:57 basketball once a week, and raise toddlers.
1:06:04 Before you play basketball, any type of warmup that you do for that? Or has your training provided
1:06:05 the warmup?
1:06:09 First and foremost, the training provides a warmup. I don’t have any special warmup.
1:06:16 From what I’ve learned training-wise, I try to at least have systems. And to recap incredibly fast
1:06:20 my systems, because you’d actually ask me like, what are my total principles? And it’s just three
1:06:26 total principles as far as I can see, which is the forward and backward resisted movement. And then
1:06:32 the training from the ground up, just reminding myself, even if it’s one set, okay, I’m going to hit
1:06:38 the lower legs before I go to the upper legs. And then the third one being the strength through my
1:06:43 mobility. And then I just flow that to the upper body and I’m done. That’s the training principles.
1:06:51 If you add all of that up, forward and backward, ground up, because most of us has probably not
1:06:56 done as much work for like the lower body and lower legs as for the upper body. So we’re kind of restoring
1:06:57 some natural balance there.
1:07:00 Yeah, I need to do a lot of work on the lower legs.
1:07:05 Right. We could say that your body’s inputs would think that you didn’t want to get as strong in the
1:07:11 lower legs as the upper. So by doing that, you’re what? You’re restoring some balance to the body.
1:07:17 Quick piece of trivia for people who might find it funny. Go look at really early photographs of
1:07:23 Arnold Schwarzenegger posing, and some of them have him standing in water where water’s up to his knees
1:07:26 because he was so embarrassed about his lower leg development.
1:07:34 Alas, I haven’t figured out how to wade through swamps up to my knees to cover my lack of development
1:07:35 in the lower legs.
1:07:40 Yeah, most of us haven’t. It’s almost like we’re telling the body, hey, I don’t want to be as strong
1:07:46 proportionally in the lower legs as everything above it. And then the amount of foot pains and different
1:07:52 chronic pains that I’ve had people who had for years that are gone now just from restoring that
1:07:57 balance. It’s really cool. And then the third one being training the strength through the mobility,
1:08:02 as I said. So those three, but what’s the strength through mobility again? We’re kind of restoring that
1:08:06 natural balance. Because when we go into weight training, our body starts to shift towards strength
1:08:11 in certain ranges, but not others. So all of it together just means my whole philosophy is just
1:08:17 to have balanced ability in the body. Forward, backward, high positions, low positions, lower legs,
1:08:22 upper legs. So that’s how I train. That makes me healthy that I can just go play basketball.
1:08:30 But because of all that, I try to be sensible about it and do a sort of segmented warmup of
1:08:34 like, okay, dribbling in place, then dribbling in motion. Now what’s a little more pressure than that
1:08:40 might be like shooting. So it’s just super basic like that. Someone could do that for any sport. It’s
1:08:44 like you just take the forces and you just kind of segment them into an obvious warmup. So there’s
1:08:50 no special basketball warmup. No magic sauce. Well, we’ve covered quite a bit. Ben, is there
1:08:56 anything else that you’d like to cover? Any other topics you’d like to jam on? Anything that comes to
1:08:56 mind?
1:09:04 I think more for you, which is for me, as or more important than any of this exercise stuff,
1:09:14 is you’ve managed to become this giant without bashing other people, without playing games that
1:09:19 you know are lower integrity. So you must have some sort of, because I’ve had to kind of set up for
1:09:25 myself, okay, I need to make sure that my posts don’t have any lies to try to start arguments or
1:09:29 that there’s nothing intentionally trying to start arguments. And there’s these things like this that
1:09:35 I’ve had to piece together. But I think of you, and sometimes I’m blank after that. Apologies for
1:09:41 being blank, but it’s like, there’s not a lot that I can look to and go, here’s a guy who’s succeeding
1:09:48 in ways that I would want to succeed, helping people, but with your integrity. And to me, that’s more
1:09:53 important than the rest. Because I feel like that’s the trickle down that makes life shitty for a lot
1:09:59 of people, is the more and more leaders, I mean, who then lose their integrity. Like, I think that’s
1:10:02 more important than all the rest, because that affects everything.
1:10:03 Yeah, thanks, man.
1:10:04 So what’s your…
1:10:05 It’s my process.
1:10:09 I mean, do you, yeah, like, what’s your thoughts on that? I mean, even if you just think about it,
1:10:13 you’ll share some unusual information compared to what normally is going to be on a podcast.
1:10:18 Yeah, I’m happy to riff on it. I would say that there are a few things that come to mind.
1:10:27 And I’ll maybe get there by way of example. So there was an episode I recorded a long time
1:10:35 ago with a fellow named Balaji, who’s very smart. And he’s known for a great many things. He’s actually
1:10:41 been very accurate in predicting a lot of sort of geopolitical events and so on. Also happens to be
1:10:46 incredibly technical and familiar with cryptography and crypto and so on. And I did an episode with him
1:10:53 and it just exploded. And there were many reasons for that, but it ended up being, I think, at the
1:11:02 time the most popular episode of the year. And there were a number of trend lines at the time. People were at
1:11:10 home. This was during COVID. Crypto was on everyone’s radar. All of a sudden, people are using various means of
1:11:14 finding something to do, including trading or quote unquote investing. And I use quote unquote, because it
1:11:21 wasn’t always investing. So there were many things that contributed to this episode doing well. And I
1:11:26 remember having a chat with my team internally. And they were like, here are four or five other guests
1:11:37 who are also involved with crypto, who we think would be very, very strong. And I paused in that
1:11:43 moment. And there’s this quote, it may be incorrectly attributed, but there’s a quote that I have started
1:11:49 almost every presentation I’ve ever given. So it’d be kind of hilarious if it were not attributed
1:11:55 properly. I think it’s attributed to Mark Twain. But whenever you find yourself on the side of the
1:12:00 majority, it’s time to pause and reflect. It’s roughly along those lines. So I looked at what
1:12:07 was happening around me. And I saw a lot of podcasts focusing on crypto. I saw a lot of media focusing
1:12:16 on crypto. And I looked at, in my mind, telescoping forward, what would be the implications of me having
1:12:24 these four or five people on? There would be a definite short or intermediate term reward. Lots of
1:12:29 downloads. Very happy sponsors. I could probably increase my rates. I mean, there would be real
1:12:36 financial rewards. What are the trade-offs? There are always trade-offs. Always. When you make any
1:12:44 decision, just like literally from the perspective of decision, meaning cutting away related to
1:12:50 indecision, you’re choosing one option among many. There are trade-offs. So what are the trade-offs if I
1:13:00 commit to doing four or five more episodes on crypto? One is that I start to filter out anyone in my
1:13:06 audience who is not interested in crypto, most likely. Some will be willing to indulge me because
1:13:12 they have followed the podcast for a long time and want to see how I tackle it. But after four or five
1:13:18 episodes, after a month or two, I will basically have called my audience of anyone who is not
1:13:26 particularly interested. That is a very large sacrifice. Number one, because I want a diverse
1:13:35 audience. Number two is that I would be training myself to succumb to audience capture. There’s some
1:13:41 great pieces that have been written about audience capture. But the way I would describe it, actually,
1:13:46 I’ll give, I apologize that I can’t remember the author’s name. It’s a really fantastic piece.
1:13:53 But he starts with this example of a YouTuber whose channel focused on him gorging himself,
1:14:00 just eating these kind of absurdly large meals. And he started off pretty thin and ended up,
1:14:05 as he was rewarded for these videos, and as it became the corner he was painted into,
1:14:09 as he felt he needed to continue to rack up views serving people what they wanted,
1:14:17 he destroyed his health completely, became obese, put on this mask. And if you wear a mask long
1:14:23 enough, you become the mask. I think that’s something that people miss. And I recall, just as a side
1:14:28 note, because I want to try to answer your question, but there’s a lot to it. I remember I interviewed
1:14:35 Andrew Zimmern, who has been on, man, he’s been on TV for decades now. Amazing guy, very smart. His life
1:14:41 story is incredible for people who want to check out the podcast episode. And he said to me at one
1:14:46 point, because I was delving into television, he said, be very, and I’m paraphrasing, but be very careful
1:14:55 careful about what you do in that first episode. Because if you pretend to be something that you’re not, and it’s
1:15:05 successful, you will feel the obligation to continue to do that. And there are a lot of risks related to that. And
1:15:16 furthermore, if you’re training yourself to respond to audience demands, or whims, or trends,
1:15:23 instead of some type of internal compass, and simultaneously, you’re training yourself,
1:15:30 and these are often related to basically pursue the option that has the most economic upside.
1:15:39 I feel like, particularly if you’re in the online media game in any capacity, and by the way, you don’t
1:15:44 need to have a business to succumb to this, you might just have a personal page, and you’re being trained
1:15:53 by the platform to be in the vanity Olympics. And these algorithms are so good. And I know a lot of data scientists
1:16:01 and PhDs who work at these companies, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight psychologically. So if you encourage
1:16:10 yourself to be captivated by those incentives, you’re lost. You’re just lost at sea. You’re going to be lost. And it’s a lot
1:16:17 easier to get lost than it is to get unlost. And that has a trickle down effect, right? So if I make decisions
1:16:26 based on, and it’s very hard, and I’m not always perfect, if I allow myself to be steered by the most
1:16:35 extreme things, perhaps, that guests say, what am I going to do? I’m going to optimize for extreme. And then if I’m
1:16:39 optimizing for extreme, why am I doing that? It’s for views. Why do I care about views? It could be vanity.
1:16:45 It could also be for CPMs and advertising. It could be for product sales. Well, what’s going to
1:16:48 happen to my headlines? They’re going to become the National Enquirer for people old enough to remember
1:16:56 that. They’re going to become the most clickbaity, exaggerated, indefensible set of claims you can
1:17:02 imagine. And you don’t have to be a data scientist to realize this. Just go look at where you’re served
1:17:08 up in your personal feed on YouTube, and chances are there’s going to be a lot of nonsense or a lot of
1:17:16 misleading. And what I’ve learned is that when you develop an awareness of this, not that you’re,
1:17:24 I’m holding myself up to be some paragon of personal excellence and integrity, but I recognize that it’s
1:17:32 a lot easier to get hooked on a drug than to get off of said drug. And make no mistake, you’re being
1:17:38 trained by the platform, you’re being trained by your audience. Those are all drugs that are very
1:17:44 addictive. And there are lots of rewards for pursuing that. But to come back to what I said
1:17:52 earlier, there are lots of trade-offs. And for me, also on top of that, I would say that
1:18:01 I have worked so hard to ensure that my audience feels they can trust me. There are certain lines
1:18:07 once you cross. If you do not deliver on the promise of a headline, you do not deliver on the
1:18:13 promise of a title. If you make a recommendation that costs someone time, money, or God forbid causes
1:18:19 some type of injury, you’re done. You are dead to that person. And for good reason. I feel like
1:18:23 with a great audience, and that could be a small audience, it could be a big one, comes great
1:18:30 responsibility. And I should say also, this isn’t because I’m some type of saint. It’s also being
1:18:42 long-term ambitious. For me, the greatest insurance plan, the greatest, choose your metaphor, safety
1:18:50 net, but also propellant for doing well long-term is not doing anything. And you’ll make mistakes,
1:18:55 but really try hard not to do anything that will compromise the trust that your audience puts in you.
1:18:59 That could be readers, it could be listeners, it could be viewers, it could be anything.
1:19:05 And for that reason, I’m very cautious about what I recommend. I’m very cautious about who I have on
1:19:12 the podcast. I’m very cautious about chasing any type of trend, hence that what I think is a Mark
1:19:16 Twain quote, but could be someone else. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
1:19:22 it’s time to pause and reflect. So in the case of the crypto episode, that was massively successful.
1:19:28 I could have milked that, but it would have been the equivalent of killing the golden goose.
1:19:40 And those are a few ways that I think about my life that is at this point toothpaste out of the
1:19:44 toothpaste tube. You can’t really put it back in from a public exposure perspective. There are lots
1:19:51 of trade-offs, privacy-wise and so on, for being public-facing. Although a lot of folks who are long-term
1:19:56 listeners and viewers will notice that I am not doing even a tiny fraction of the video,
1:20:04 that most of my colleagues or peers, certainly the up-and-comers, and there are costs to that.
1:20:11 So I have my reasons for doing that. I want to have a family soon. I do not need any more facial
1:20:19 recognition. I want to be very cognizant of protecting the privacy of my family. But have I left a lot of
1:20:23 money on the table? Yeah, I have. But what are you using the money for in the first place? And this is
1:20:28 why it’s like, why, why, why? Just keep asking why. Why? So what? Why is that important? Then what happens?
1:20:37 And if money, fundamentally, it’s sort of a story, right? It’s like this abstraction, but it’s a
1:20:43 currency that we can use to trade for other things. Now, having that in savings could provide you with
1:20:51 psychological reassurance for any number of reasons. Family, childhood, scarcity, who knows? So there could
1:20:59 be that. Otherwise, you’re trading it for things and experiences, but which ultimately translate to
1:21:04 feelings. It’s like, okay, where else could you get those feelings? Do you really need those incremental
1:21:10 dollars with those trade-offs? So for me, I decided I didn’t. And that’s also the reason why, keep in
1:21:17 mind, right, 4-Hour Workweek details my first real business, which was in sports nutrition. I know the
1:21:25 supplement world inside and out. And when I launched the 4-Hour Body, I had a huge audience from the first
1:21:32 book that was waiting for my next book. I could have made tens of millions, maybe a hundred million plus
1:21:37 by launching a supplement brand to capitalize on every one of my main product recommendations.
1:21:43 I’d be lying if the thought didn’t occur to me, especially at that time, because even with the
1:21:52 success of the 4-Hour Workweek, royalties are very slim in a traditional deal. And the temptation,
1:21:59 therefore, to do something like that was huge. I was like, this is how I can secure my entire financial
1:22:06 future. And I decided not to do it. Why? Because if I had launched a supplement brand,
1:22:11 everyone would have, not everyone, but a lot of people rightly would have said,
1:22:18 well, we’re asking a barber if we need a haircut. This guy is shilling his bags. He’s selling exactly
1:22:23 what he’s recommending. How can I trust anything this guy says? And I was like, that is too steep a cost.
1:22:26 I’ll find another way to do it.
1:22:30 I mean, that’s remarkable because it would have been a shoe-in.
1:22:32 Yeah, it would have been a shoe-in.
1:22:37 I similarly, you’ll know when I sell out, if I’m selling a joint supplement.
1:22:44 But it’s not that I have anything against supplements. It’s that it wasn’t actually part of my journey.
1:22:50 So if I now sold a supplement, I want to know what effect I get from the exercises. And yeah,
1:22:54 that would be the easiest business route as the news over toast guy.
1:22:59 Which is not to knock, maybe it’s just can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I mean, I consume
1:23:06 a ludicrous number of supplements. I do consume a lot of supplements. So clearly, there are brands
1:23:11 that I trust typically have been third-party verified. Things have been tested because my God,
1:23:18 it is the Wild West folks. There’s no enforcement. So really do your homework on the supplements that
1:23:25 take. But that is all just a long way of saying, there are some good players in the supplement
1:23:34 sphere. But if I’m combining that, in my case, with a book that is purported to provide unbiased
1:23:40 information, you can’t believe those claims if I’m selling exactly the thing that I’m recommending.
1:23:48 Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that I’ve ethically compromised in some way. But people would
1:23:52 be right to question. You wouldn’t have. You would have made a great supplement line. You would have
1:23:58 been honest, but the integrity point would have been out. That’s what I find remarkable. And that’s
1:24:06 what like, if me going the rest of my career, I see that actually as not boasting about it, just doing
1:24:13 things along those lines. Because as you know, I mean, how many young people ask you for advice,
1:24:17 right? And then how many of these people become successful? You leave this trickle-down impact
1:24:22 that at this point, for me, it’s like, that’s really what it’s about. And for my kids,
1:24:28 and then helping them learn these same values. Like, I feel like that’s a whole podcast to unpack,
1:24:33 but I appreciate you digging in there. Because it’s very unusual. You would have cashed out big,
1:24:37 but that integrity wouldn’t have been as trustworthy.
1:24:44 Yeah, thanks. There are times that I’m like, fuck, that would have been so much money.
1:24:50 There are times it’s not easy for me to walk away from that, right? There are times I’m just like,
1:24:55 oh my God. Like, I remember when the 4-Hour Body hit number one New York Times and just kept going,
1:24:59 kept going. And this book was published 15 years ago. And even I’ll give credit where credit is due.
1:25:05 Gary Brecka put out a video about some components of the 4-Hour Body and had this huge resurgence and like
1:25:11 back on a bunch of bestseller lists. And I’m just like, man, can you imagine the annuity of this thing
1:25:18 would have been? Good Lord. But I don’t regret it. And I’ll say two things in addition to that that build on this.
1:25:25 Number one is, when people think about losing trust, which is losing your reputation, at least for me,
1:25:30 there are many ways to think of reputation. I mean, I guess you could have like an Al Capone reputation.
1:25:34 Like, there are many different types of reputations. But if you have a reputation for being trustworthy,
1:25:42 losing that trust does not mean that you do something so bad that everyone says, I can’t trust Tim. I can’t
1:25:50 trust Ben. All that needs to happen is they ask themselves once, can I really trust Ben? Can I
1:25:57 really trust this video? Can I really trust this? Can I trust this advice that Tim is giving? As soon as
1:26:05 there is a question, you’ve lost the trust. And as soon as there is a seed of doubt, it is very hard
1:26:13 to reclaim. Now, if I’m talking about long-term, right? Being long-term greedy or long-term ambitious,
1:26:22 because of that trust and for instance, being very clear on situations, say in San Francisco where I
1:26:27 lived at the time, having friend IS, as some people call them. So NDA, non-disclosure agreement,
1:26:31 friend IS is basically if someone tells you something in confidence, even if they don’t
1:26:37 emphasize that you need to keep it confidential, basically not sharing things that anyone says to
1:26:46 you. And by developing, becoming a known quantity as someone who’s very good at discretion, who does what
1:26:52 he says he’s going to do on time, those were ingredients that led to ultimately the angel investing and
1:26:58 being able to invest in a lot of these startups and work with a lot of these founders. Inherently, I would
1:27:05 be exposed to a lot of really confidential, private information that’s critical to their business success. So
1:27:13 developing that trustworthiness through actions over time and people telling other people is what allowed me to do the
1:27:19 do the angel investing with which ultimately returned much more than any supplement business ever would
1:27:26 have. So don’t overestimate the value of the dollars in your bank account and don’t underestimate the
1:27:33 value of having a consistent reputation for being trustworthy. And there’s so many ways to fuck that up.
1:27:41 And who knows, maybe also, I mean, I’m very hypervigilant. I’m very aware and over aware and probably over
1:27:47 emphasize dangers in the world. So I think there’s also maybe it’s worked to my advantage in the sense
1:27:54 that if you don’t have your word, if people feel like they can’t trust that, like, you’re done. It’s just
1:28:01 like, it’s going to be mad max for you. Not in a good way. I’m not sure exactly. But this is how I’ve
1:28:07 thought about some of it. It’s a right characteristic. The world would be a lot better if
1:28:14 more leaders did that. So yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. I’ve made plenty of mistakes
1:28:20 along the way. Sure, I’ll continue to make tons of mistakes. But the question I’d encourage people
1:28:23 to ask, and I ask this in my personal life, I ask this in my professional life, it’s like, okay,
1:28:31 if you continue to do this, if you continue to do X, whatever X is, and let’s just say you do 2%
1:28:37 more of it, or you do it with 2% more intensity every week or month, over time, like three years
1:28:44 from now, what does that look like? Be very aware of the trend line and the way it compounds.
1:28:52 So in the case of, say, YouTube titles, okay, if you’re exaggerating 2% and people accept that
1:28:57 and you get better results, do you think you’re going to stop at 2%? Of course you’re not going
1:29:03 to stop at 2%. Now it’s going to be 4%. And eventually you’re going to cross the line without realizing that
1:29:08 you’ve crossed that line. That explains a lot. And that’s how my wife and I run our business together.
1:29:15 She’s really much more of a business genius, and thank God. But even on the integrity stuff,
1:29:21 it’s hard to explain in a way, okay, if I was in any country, I would want, just based on all my
1:29:26 observations of being business, I would want to be supporting local businesses and stuff. So, okay,
1:29:33 so we’ve got this passion for making stuff in America that really, from observing everything
1:29:40 in this last year. And now she’s just like off to the races, crushing it in terms of takes calls and
1:29:45 networking and finding people and continuing until, because you’re told, no, no, can’t make this,
1:29:48 can’t make the, and then you find the person who can make it. You find the factory, you find the
1:29:55 technology. And if I was in Canada or if I was in China, I would feel the same way. It’s something
1:30:00 that’s important to us, but I like your 2% thing. Like if we keep putting 2% more energy on that,
1:30:05 because when you were describing this, I was thinking, because this is something that’s on
1:30:09 our minds a lot. And I’m thinking three years, wow, I’m like three years from now. Life is going
1:30:13 to be amazing. Yeah. I don’t know what the exact numbers will be. Yeah, it applies to the good stuff
1:30:17 as well. We’re breaking through all kinds of stuff that people aren’t able to make here that now we’re
1:30:22 actually getting. And it’s so cool. You can go to the factory, see the people, see the person. You can
1:30:29 have, like how I said, okay, when you blew up our wrist bar sales, it’s like for us, it makes us
1:30:33 happier. We like it. And I like your rule. What does it look like a few years from now?
1:30:37 If we keep putting a little more and I’m like, that’s a life I really like. The numbers won’t
1:30:42 be gigantic, but they’ll be good. And we’ll be, we’ll be super happy about it.
1:30:47 And also it’s like enough is enough at some point and enough, what enough means will differ
1:30:52 from person to person. But generally speaking, money’s not going to solve all the problems you
1:31:01 think it will. And what you need to live an amazing life is much less than most people realize.
1:31:10 And then if you cross the finish line, so to speak, right, with annual income or savings or
1:31:15 some combination, invested capital and low cost index funds, whatever it might be, whatever gives
1:31:23 you the sense of psychological safety. Once you get close to that or you get there, which can be a lot
1:31:29 less than you might realize. And there’s an exercise called dreamlining. They’ve searched my name and
1:31:34 that you can find it. It’s costing all this stuff out. You’ll realize that the other pieces of the
1:31:39 puzzle that are so important are not in any way addressed by money. And you have to work on those
1:31:47 separately. And part of the way you work on those separately is doing things that you feel good about
1:31:54 that make you feel good about yourself. And so for instance, if part of that is making things in the
1:32:03 U.S., that in and of itself can more than offset the additional cost that’s incurred compared to doing
1:32:07 it overseas, like the actual benefit, and particularly since you’re doing it with your wife, like the
1:32:15 benefit to your family collectively. And if you’re proud of that, the way you radiate that to your kids,
1:32:17 that’s a lot. That’s valuable.
1:32:19 Ben, so nice to spend time together.
1:32:20 Really nice to spend time together.
1:32:25 As you can see, I could grill you on this whole side of things, but I appreciate it.
1:32:28 Yeah, definitely. Where can people find you online?
1:32:36 Knees over toes guy on YouTube and Instagram are the best places where you can just go and
1:32:38 learn everything that I know.
1:32:43 Perfect. All right. We’ll link to those in the show notes. People will be able to find that.
1:32:49 You’ll pin the video. It gives people an overview of what we recorded earlier. We’ll also link to the
1:32:56 video we did together so people can check that out because that was a lot of fun. And thanks for taking
1:33:03 the time. Yeah, I really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, as always, we will link to
1:33:09 everything in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. Just search Ben Patrick, or if you want to
1:33:15 type out knees over toes guy, it will probably pop right up. But you can search Ben Patrick, and you’ll
1:33:20 find everything we’ve spoken about. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to
1:33:26 others, but also to you yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
1:33:32 Hey, guys, this is Tim. Again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet
1:33:37 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
1:33:42 before the weekend, between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
1:33:48 my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is
1:33:54 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered
1:33:58 or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things. It often
1:34:05 includes articles I’m reading books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech
1:34:12 tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange
1:34:18 esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them. And then I share them with you. So if that
1:34:23 sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the
1:34:28 weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to Tim dot blog slash Friday,
1:34:34 type that into your browser, Tim dot blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very
1:34:39 next one. Thanks for listening. I don’t know about you, but with so many options for banking and
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0:00:09 volume, folks. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Ben Patrick.
0:00:15 Ben Patrick is better known as Knee Over Toes Guy, and you can find him on Instagram and everywhere
0:00:22 else as Knees Over Toes Guy. He is the founder of Athletic Truth Group, ATG, an online and brick
0:00:27 and mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of
0:00:31 debilitating knee and shin pain, including multiple surgeries, he rebuilt his body from the
0:00:38 ground up and his performance going from sub 20-inch vertical to a documented 42-inch leap. He is the
0:00:43 author of Knee Ability Zero and other books on fitness and recovery. He’s become a phenomenon
0:00:51 online. And I should note, there is a companion video for this episode where Ben and I walk through
0:00:56 all of the exercises we discuss together. So if you want to see me with beginner’s eyes
0:01:02 going through this, asking questions with him, then you can check it out. And you can find that on
0:01:11 youtube.com slash timferriss, T-I-M-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. You can also find a video pinned on Ben’s Instagram,
0:01:19 that’s Knees Over Toes Guy. And that runs through a more comprehensive version of what we did in person.
0:01:26 But if you want the minimum effective dose, go to the youtube.com slash timferriss and you’ll see
0:01:31 what we did, especially making some adjustments for my current back pain. And if you want to see the
0:01:37 more comprehensive stuff, you can check out his Instagram. We also get into a lot more than just
0:01:44 exercise. Ben asked me some questions about how to navigate different decisions and integrity and so on
0:01:49 in podcasting, business, et cetera. And we actually spent a good amount of time on that towards the
0:01:54 end of this conversation, if that’s of interest. And that is it. Without further ado, please enjoy
0:01:59 a wide-ranging conversation with Ben Patrick. And don’t forget about the companion videos at
0:02:07 youtube.com slash timferriss, as well as at Knees Over Toes Guy pinned post on Instagram. Thanks for listening.
0:02:37 Ben, nice to see you, brother. Thank you. Nice to finally spend time together.
0:02:42 We did a bit of a workout overview, recorded some video, so people will be able to find that.
0:02:48 And we’ll put links in the show notes. We’ll talk more also about things you might pin for people
0:02:56 who want a visual reference here. But let’s go back in time. Nicknames. We were chatting a bit
0:03:01 before recording. What was the nickname that we were discussing and who gave it to you?
0:03:07 I had a high school basketball coach who started calling me old man. I was so stiff.
0:03:12 Stiff. It’d take me so long to warm up compared to other players. I knew I wasn’t built well for
0:03:18 basketball. I thought I could work my way. I was just doing crazy workouts from the time I was maybe
0:03:25 9 years old. So by 12, chronic knee pain. So even by high school, I couldn’t get low in my legs.
0:03:31 So I think during all that puberty time, things weren’t forming right because I was so stiff. I
0:03:43 started calling me old man. So we’ve got old man Patrick in high school. Flash forward. Now you’re known as
0:03:47 knees over toes guy. So something happened in between those two.
0:03:54 What were the… And we can approach this any number of ways. You could explain why the name,
0:04:02 or you could talk about maybe catalyzing moments or findings that set you on the path that led you to
0:04:04 become knees over toes guy.
0:04:13 Absolutely. As you alluded to on my Instagram, YouTube, it’s pinned where this kind of stuff
0:04:17 we’re talking about. Someone just can just go look at it and see it visually, like almost
0:04:26 in order. So the chronic pains and stiffness, doctors did think around 14, probably something
0:04:31 happened. I should have had surgery on. Didn’t have surgery. Different things started stacking up.
0:04:37 By 18, I then did have surgery. Partial kneecap replacement, like part of my kneecap was just
0:04:46 floating there. Quad tendon reattached and then had a meniscus transplant. And then it took about
0:04:54 a year and a half because I was so extreme, so stiff. I was immobilized and really couldn’t even run
0:04:58 for like a year and a half. That kind of set off a chain of things. By then, my right knee was hurting
0:05:02 worse than my left knee ever had. Yeah. I mean, that happened when I had my left shoulder
0:05:08 surgically reconstructed. After the year, year and a half it took to finally rehab the left,
0:05:14 the right was screaming. So I was in a pretty dark place because considering my right knee hurt worse
0:05:21 than my left knee ever had, I’m like, I probably need surgery on the right knee now. And I had gotten
0:05:27 from the surgeries and I had stayed on painkillers and parents didn’t know. My girlfriend didn’t know.
0:05:32 It was my wife now. Staying on the painkillers. Yeah. Right. I was just like popping them. And then
0:05:40 I stumbled on some stuff from Charles Poliquin, who you had on your podcast.
0:05:42 Yeah. Spent a lot of time with Charles back in the day.
0:05:52 And he had various information that was very clear that it was like, no, no, no. What we’ve
0:05:59 in the fitness world had all been taught of don’t let your knee over your toes. He had stuff saying,
0:06:06 no, this is actually the athletes. He helps them prevent injury and rehab with training that position.
0:06:13 And just for people who are trying to imagine what this means. So if you were to say be in a squat
0:06:20 position, keeping your shins vertical where your knees are aligned over your ankles, that would be
0:06:29 the, let’s just call it pre-exposure to Poliquin sacred cow, at least in some of the, a lot of the
0:06:35 sort of exercise science worlds. Do not let your knees travel over your toes. Yeah. Right. Keep your
0:06:41 shins vertical. Yeah. So Charles is saying quite the opposite. Yeah. And good point there. It was
0:06:49 totally understandable why that occurred. 1970s exercise science is becoming a thing in school.
0:06:54 And they found that when the knee goes over the toe, then there’s more pressure on the knee.
0:07:00 So what, what into textbooks was showing when you exercise, don’t let your knee over your toes.
0:07:08 Now for someone to compare, think about stepping down the stairs and stop. You take a step downstairs,
0:07:15 stop. You’re loading your knee over your toes. Every single step you take downstairs. So when I
0:07:22 started studying Charles Poliquin, because of what I had been through for me instantly,
0:07:28 I knew there was something here because I had tried all the mainstream methods of no knees over toes.
0:07:36 So the first thing then that I could tell that allowed me to get off the painkillers was dragging
0:07:44 a sled backwards. So every step I take, my knee is over my toes. It’s almost like if someone walked
0:07:50 backward up a hill to rehab rather than going down the hill. And that’s actually the progression of the
0:07:58 rehab is walking backwards, trying to add resistance to walking backwards, which is gentler to then I use
0:08:03 a slant board, but someone could really, you could roll up a towel to elevate your heel. You could start
0:08:07 with your heel flat. Like you don’t have to even elevate the heel to start where you actually work
0:08:12 on stepping down. So you’re actually controlling the motion at your pain-free level of stepping down.
0:08:16 Even if you can’t, I couldn’t do a six inch step. I could maybe control a couple inches and you’re
0:08:21 using high repetitions as if you were a gymnast. When you say you can only do a couple of inches,
0:08:26 can you just paint a picture for what that means? Let’s say you’re walking down the stairs. Each
0:08:32 stair is probably six inches. I couldn’t control that motion without pain. I had to sort of clunk my
0:08:40 way down the stairs, ease up pressure with the upper body. I couldn’t control step by step without my
0:08:49 knee hurting. But someone could do less than a six inch stair. So the walking backward as a warm up, you’re
0:08:58 getting circulation. We’re talking maybe stacking up 100, 200 yards backward, which was didn’t hurt, and then
0:09:03 was getting circulation, getting some strength. So that was what I felt like, okay, I can get off the painkillers
0:09:10 now because I have this way of naturally reducing the pain and getting some strength going in a knee
0:09:17 pressure position. And let me just sidebar quickly for folks. I have only in the last handful of years,
0:09:23 I’d use sleds a lot, but I was always pushing. It’s only in the last handful of years. And you have met
0:09:33 these guys as well, but Nseema Young and Mark Bell. And of course, Mark Bell used to train with, he was at
0:09:39 Westside Barbell, Louis Simmons. You mentioned his name when we were recording earlier. I have come to
0:09:47 appreciate just how incredibly therapeutic this pulling of the sled is, which you could do with
0:09:52 a band around, a harness around the waist. You could do it with a vest. You could simply hold on
0:09:57 to, that’s typically how I’ve seen Mark do it, for instance, where you’re effectively just holding
0:10:05 on to handles with a strap that attaches you to the sled. For rehabilitation, for prehab, for building in
0:10:13 some insurance policy for the knees, it is just incredibly effective, but also so elegant. It’s so
0:10:18 simple and hard to hurt yourself. Now, of course, talk to your doctor. I don’t pretend to be one on
0:10:24 the internet, but that’s all I wanted to say was personally, I can also vouch for this. Did you come
0:10:30 across that through Poliquin? Charles Poliquin, he was interviewed for this article where he helped an
0:10:35 Olympic athlete who wasn’t going to be able to compete in the Olympics. And they started going backward
0:10:41 with the sled often because they could recover fast. And he was able to get back and actually win a
0:10:49 medal at the Olympics. So I’m not advising someone to rush, but that was a unique case where this might be the
0:10:54 guy’s only chance. You have a constraint. Ever. Yeah. So that kind of sold me on it. And then once I was
0:10:59 experiencing it, I was like, okay, I can see there’s something here. It’s not like that solved all my problems.
0:11:06 That was enough for me in my state to be willing to get off the painkillers and then start exploring further
0:11:11 stuff. How long did it take you to get off of the painkillers after you started doing the sled work?
0:11:22 Well, I remember after the first week of doing this, I then intentionally got off. That didn’t mean all
0:11:28 my pain was gone, but it was like, I wanted to experience this route and not try to shield the
0:11:33 pain anymore. So within a week I knew, okay, there’s something different here of progressing the
0:11:37 knee over the toes rather than avoiding the knee over the toes. I didn’t really want to think about
0:11:43 any further progressions, but that gave me something I could do. Didn’t hurt. And to give someone an idea
0:11:49 on the safety, we can’t say anything is a hundred percent safe, but real numbers at the gym, I eventually
0:11:56 made coached thousands of group training sessions. So it wound up being, I counted like over a hundred
0:12:02 thousand times that I coached people on the sled. No one was ever hurt doing the sled. It could happen
0:12:07 to give you a visual that we actually did that, which was, I feel like the best visual to explain
0:12:16 people. My mom is 71. We put a thousand pounds on the sled and had her try to drag it backwards.
0:12:19 She couldn’t budget, but she was fine.
0:12:22 People are going to be wondering why you would do that to your mom.
0:12:28 More people are like, oh, now I get why it’s safe because the thousand pounds that she’s trying to
0:12:33 drag is not bearing down on her. So when you’re trying to drag a weight, it probably has less
0:12:40 potential to body build and create that breakdown that turns into new muscle tissue and stuff.
0:12:48 but it has more potential for getting into something with safety without pain. That was my stepping
0:12:58 stone. Charles Poliquin was, this was before social media. So I didn’t actually see any videos of any of
0:13:04 the stuff. I had to really decipher articles. I had to self-teach based on information he had put out.
0:13:12 And through my just self-experimenting, I was able to get to where I could play basketball really hard
0:13:18 without my knees hurting. What other ingredients were added to the cocktail outside of the backwards
0:13:23 sled pulls? So you got the backwards sled pulls. Then it was really clear that he was getting people
0:13:29 into a full range of motion squat. And that was also something that growing up my whole life in
0:13:36 basketball is like, don’t do any deep squats. Your knee goes over your toes. So it was sort of don’t
0:13:42 go below 90 degrees and don’t let your knee over your toes were the two prevailing things. And I went to
0:13:48 six, eight, 10 trainers. Maybe that was bad luck that none of those trainers knew differently. It does seem
0:13:53 like it was the prevailing way. And having been on basketball teams now, having coached, I could safely
0:13:58 estimate that 99% of basketball teams don’t squat with a full range of motion.
0:14:05 Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:16:36 I’ll throw out a polyquinism. He had quite a few of these. At some point, I’ll tell you the origin
0:16:41 story, how I connected with Charles, which is pretty funny. But this is one of his lines, and this is,
0:16:46 I’ll give credit where credit’s due. This is from outside online. But strength is gained in the range
0:16:54 it is trained. Very Seussian, as they put it. And you just see this over and over again. And I’ve
0:16:59 interviewed, for instance, coach Christopher Sommer, who used to be the men’s national
0:17:09 gymnastics coach. And you look at a lot of, say, cases of what people might consider inflexibility,
0:17:15 and it’s just the body being very smart to guard itself against injury where it is weak
0:17:20 at the extent of your range of motion, right? And when you start to develop strength at the
0:17:26 end range, all of a sudden, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, your quote-unquote flexibility improves,
0:17:31 right? Because the body is very, very intelligent. And it’s guarding you against injury. I just wanted
0:17:37 to mention the polyquinism, because I think it puts a fine point on some of what you’re saying,
0:17:43 right? It’s like if you’re never getting into a full squat position, if you ever engage in anything
0:17:49 that puts you into those positions, your foot slips while you’re playing intramural soccer,
0:17:52 who knows, right? You’re going to be potentially in a world of hurt.
0:17:58 No, I appreciate that. And I think to make it an effective podcast for people, please keep chiming
0:18:06 in. Even for our body, this is the mindset, the efficiency, the 80% of the results from 20%.
0:18:16 This is the stuff that helps me make my system. So it’s hugely inspired by that. And outside of my
0:18:23 videos, I don’t have a ton to say here. So please keep it coming. Make it interesting for people to say.
0:18:31 Well, on the deep squat, what I have to offer is lots of experience trying to help people who
0:18:37 can’t figure out how to apply this stuff. Deep squats hurting is super common. People feeling
0:18:43 like they don’t have the mobility to get into a deep squat. Elevating your heels a bit can help people
0:18:49 get lower on a squat and holding a weight out in front of you reduces the pressure on the knee.
0:18:57 Do you recommend people do what people would envision as a normal squat? So both feet on the ground,
0:19:05 same plane, or one exercise that you’re very well known for, the ATG split squat or front foot
0:19:14 elevated split squat. Would you have them start with that in place of the prototypical squat? How do you
0:19:14 think about that?
0:19:22 I see it in relation to age, almost like a reverse system, meaning my kids are three and five. Their
0:19:30 squats are incredible. I’m not like, wait until you program. So it’s almost like in youth, my whole system
0:19:36 for the knees is if I can have you comfortable and able to be getting stronger, controlling a full
0:19:41 range of motion squat where you feel like you don’t have to stop before you get all the way down, but
0:19:44 also where you feel like you don’t have to bounce to get out of it, like where you’re able to own it.
0:19:50 You can control it all the way down, pause, and then explode up without pain, able to get stronger.
0:19:58 Kids naturally have that. And so when I’m coaching, I volunteer at a school. I’ve had to coach 50 kids at a
0:20:04 time. I set up 10 slant boards. Some kids need to elevate the heel. Some don’t. They’re able to
0:20:11 back their heels up, whatever they want. Everyone can get down into a deep squat without pain. Some
0:20:15 need to hold some weight out in front of them to get down there, but the younger they are,
0:20:19 a hundred percent can do it. Like all little toddlers can deep squat.
0:20:27 Why does the weight in front of you help someone to get into a squatted position, whether the heels are
0:20:34 elevated or not? It’s simply a counterbalance. So when you go to squat down and you think about that
0:20:38 for someone with knee pain, you think about that pressure holding the weight on the front, you
0:20:44 actually lean back a bit, not have to go, your knee doesn’t have to go as far over your toes.
0:20:50 So I’m trying to help people get better at knees over toes, not work through pain in the process,
0:20:55 gradually coax that ability. Or if they’ve already got it, we can fortify it super easily.
0:21:00 So a progression using common weights, because it’s mostly going to be adults listening to this.
0:21:06 Let’s say you roll up a towel on the floor and you lift your heels up onto it to simulate some more of
0:21:12 that mobility, get low, and you hold a 25 pound plate out in front of you. You get where you can
0:21:17 lower down pain-free in a squat. Let’s say five reps controlling down. Okay. Now let’s say you hold a
0:21:23 45 pound plate, not all the way out in front of you, just in front of your knees. Get to where that’s
0:21:31 pain-free five reps, let’s say. Okay. Now you hold a 45 or more pound kettlebell, not far out in front
0:21:37 of you, but kind of above your thighs. Closer to your center of gravity. Yeah. And then depending on
0:21:44 a person’s goals, what would be even closer than that would be a bar on front. So depending on sports
0:21:50 goals, I find with all students, I want them to be able to hold a kettlebell and get down in a deep
0:21:55 squat without pain. That’s a pretty good, I have to get down and pick up one kid, two kids. I got a
0:22:01 third kid on the way. I have to squat down. If you got to pick up two toddlers, you can’t just bend
0:22:06 your back over. You can for one. Think about trying to pick up two little bodies. You got a deep squat.
0:22:13 So I got a deep squat with some load. Saying everyone has to barbell squat, that’s just not true.
0:22:20 But I do think it’d be a common sense goal for everyone to be able to hold a kettlebell and squat
0:22:26 all the way down without pain. I want you to fact check me if I’m off base here, but I would like to
0:22:32 come back to the split squat for a second, particularly with that front foot elevated.
0:22:39 So imagine that you had someplace in your house, I’m making this up, where there’s one step up. Maybe it’s from
0:22:45 living room to the kitchen or vice versa. Could just as easily as we did earlier be like two thick
0:22:51 45-pound plates if they’re kind of like the bumper plate style. So whatever that might be. Six to eight
0:22:58 inches, whatever the height happens to be. You’ve got one foot on that. Then you have your other leg as far
0:23:07 back as is pain-free and you go down into a squat to the extent that you can be pain-free in that range
0:23:13 of motion. And your knee, if you build up to it, maybe you’ll get there naturally quickly. Your front
0:23:18 knee is going to project way over your toes. And the reason that I wanted to come back to this is A,
0:23:28 because I’ve derived so much value from this and so much pain reduction in the back. And the third
0:23:38 is from a form perspective, I wouldn’t want people who have never explored really deep squatting to jump
0:23:46 into doing squatting where they’re rounding the low back at the bottom most portion of the squat.
0:23:50 So just to paint a picture for folks, maybe they’ve heard these terms, but if you imagine
0:23:59 your hips, your pelvis, like a glass of wine, if you’re pouring wine out the front, that’s anterior
0:24:04 pelvic tilt. If you’re pouring wine out the back, that’s the posterior pelvic tilt. If you go into the
0:24:08 bottom of the squat, especially if you’re loading yourself up with a barbell or something, and you
0:24:14 have a lot of posterior pelvic tilt, some people call that the butt wink at the bottom, you can really
0:24:23 hurt yourself. And I was guilty of that at one point. And I like the safety profile, and I don’t want to
0:24:29 make anything sound risk-free, of course, but of all the exercises that I’ve seen, especially under
0:24:38 control, slow cadence, the front foot elevated split squat, it seems harder to commit cardinal sins where
0:24:40 you’re going to injure yourself. Is that a fair statement?
0:24:48 I think so. And that was, for someone listening who is confused on what we’re talking about, now you
0:24:55 understand where I was when I was 19, trying to figure this out without seeing visuals. So I have by far
0:25:02 made the most step-by-step free videos on how to do that. Yep. And how to use, I mean, a stairwell
0:25:10 is a near perfect device. You have balance to hold on, to reduce the load, you have scalable steps to use.
0:25:15 Which is what I did in the beginning. I had my front foot two steps up, holding onto a railing with one
0:25:23 hand, and then just worked the way down. That’s how my mom has mostly done them. She’s 71. If you see her
0:25:26 sprint, it’s like, I’m going to need to see a birth certificate.
0:25:29 That’s wild. 71, your mom can sprint.
0:25:34 My mom is more impressive. Like, I try, I can’t get, my mom can get more views than I can when I talk
0:25:35 about her.
0:25:40 So just to give voice, certainly this pops into my mind. I’m like, wait a second. All right. So do you
0:25:47 just come from thoroughbred genetic stock? I mean, this sounds kind of outrageous. I mean,
0:25:51 has your mom been sprinting her whole life? Did she have a period where she couldn’t do it?
0:25:57 I started training her because her hips were deteriorating. She then had a fall,
0:26:04 sort of chronic hip issue began. And so I’ve been training my mom for going on eight years.
0:26:09 And I wound up at my gym. I had a whole women’s class, people of all ages, grandmas,
0:26:17 young moms, everything in between. And then my dad is more like me, Mr. Fragile. The broken bones,
0:26:21 the knees, the knee tears. I think that’ll be my new podcast name, the Mr. Fragile show.
0:26:25 Yeah. When I was a kid, I went to a speed class to try to get faster. And he signed up with me.
0:26:31 And this is a youth speed class. So there was no warmup structure. It was just, okay,
0:26:32 here’s the first run.
0:26:33 Oh boy.
0:26:38 And he didn’t get to his second step and pulled his hamstring. And so I come more from his fragile
0:26:44 side. My mom’s been working from a desk for 50 years. So we don’t really know what she ran when
0:26:51 she was a young girl, probably pretty athletic, but didn’t like keep doing sports or anything.
0:26:57 And generally ate well, stuff like that. But now the hip is deteriorating. I remember going to visit
0:27:02 her after she had a fall and I’m like, I was getting worried. I had her start coming to the gym.
0:27:09 So she fell in love with the sled. Eight years. She’s been sledding regularly. She’s very gentle
0:27:16 with her program. She spends maybe 10, 15 minutes a day. And similarly, I work out only twice a week.
0:27:21 It’s a bit different for me because I’m raising toddlers running a business. So it’s like, I know
0:27:27 I can carve out my time to exercise twice a week. Me and my mom, we do all the same exercises basically
0:27:34 just at different levels. But that split squat, she credits with fixing her hip problems. She’s got
0:27:40 great mobility with the grandkids. She slowly coaxed my dad along. So my dad does different pieces of the
0:27:46 programming to fix up old pains and stuff. So there’s some mixture of good genetics. Definitely not like
0:27:51 my dad never was able to grab the rim or anything like that. And I was the same. Like I in basketball,
0:27:57 I went through my high school career, unable to grab the rim and now not that much proof, but okay,
0:28:03 I’m 34. I’ve been dunking for over a decade without having a knee problem. I was your, your video guy
0:28:10 filming Duncan out on that concrete court. And for me, it’s the fact that I can go play. And that’s what
0:28:14 I trained for. We don’t really know genetically. Do I have good genetics, bad genetics somewhere?
0:28:19 Yeah, I’m not trying to. I just, it was more like my 71 year old mom is sprinting. I’m like,
0:28:24 wait a minute, hold the press. I just wanted to unpack that. So thank you for that. If I were to
0:28:33 ask your mom, all right, you can only pick three or four exercises. That’s it that you get to continue
0:28:39 with. You’ve had eight years to trial and error and try a bunch of stuff. What do you think she would
0:28:45 respond with of the like three or four? I know she would do the sled forward and backward.
0:28:52 That became way of life at our gym and she’s kept it up ever since. I know she would do that
0:28:58 full range of motion, which varies based on the person, what that means, but where you’re
0:29:02 not stopping short, you’re embracing your flexibility, full range of motion, split squat.
0:29:06 I know those would be her top two. And then I know she would throw something in for the posterior.
0:29:12 I’ll have to ask her what is her favorite. Today in the video, I showed the three main different
0:29:13 posterior exercises.
0:29:15 I think you just had to hazard a guess. What do you think she might choose?
0:29:20 I think she would choose the way that we use that back extension machine because she works from a desk.
0:29:26 And so particularly when you put that full split squat, which stretches the front of the hip
0:29:34 with then where you’re getting to squeeze those glutes, that sets that pelvis that it’s almost like
0:29:39 whether someone has posterior or anterior, it seems to benefit everyone because you’re getting both
0:29:41 sides of that equation. I think she would do that one.
0:29:47 All right. And again, just a reminder for folks, we’re going to link to everything and you’re going
0:29:54 to have videos pinned and just search knees over toes guy for all the platforms and you’ll find those.
0:30:00 What else did you pick up from Poliquin? If anything comes to mind, let’s start there and then I’ll trade
0:30:00 with you.
0:30:06 So many gems. That’s a tough question.
0:30:12 It is. Sadly, Charles is no longer with us. Got the phone call about it pretty much immediately
0:30:20 after he died, which was very sad, very tragic, way too early. But anything else come to mind?
0:30:23 Okay. I can buy some time if you want.
0:30:31 He was trying to master everything from, he was helping bodybuilders, athletes. The thing he told
0:30:39 me, so only one time when I finally had the money and freedom to go see, he came to America, did seminar
0:30:47 and he said, this was towards the end. And he said, only regret was not getting into flexibility sooner.
0:30:54 And you know, he was a wealth of strength knowledge, a lot of that strength relating to range of motion.
0:31:00 That definitely left an impact on me that he wished he had gotten into that sooner. And the conclusions
0:31:05 that I’ve come to is you can see my style of training. The way I stretch wouldn’t be how someone would
0:31:11 normally think of stretching, but just the idea of your strength and your flexibility, really getting
0:31:16 those into harmony to where the positions that you’re flexible and you feel strong in those positions.
0:31:23 And so I’ve really explored that deeply now compared to, let’s say, look, people are going to have way
0:31:29 more experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, strong, these kinds of things. And Charles had way more
0:31:34 experience there than me. So I think that was, if someone goes to my pages and sees the style that I
0:31:40 train, I feel like that was the gem that was just what I needed that gave me now like the systems
0:31:41 that I love.
0:31:47 And also getting strength and flexibility or mobility and harmony can sometimes mean that you’re
0:31:54 training both at the same time. Often can mean that. And we were recording earlier and not that I’m
0:31:57 going to win any gold medals in the split squat, but like my range of motion is pretty good,
0:32:06 all things considered. And I credit that to doing the movement. And also I gave him a shout out when
0:32:12 we were recording Jersey Gregor at some credit where credit is due, who holds multiple world records or
0:32:19 did in masters Olympic weightlifting. He is, he’s got to be close to 70, if not 70. Now he can still do,
0:32:26 he can stand on a balance board, like an endo board, the fully loaded barbell and do an ass to heels
0:32:32 Olympic snatch at his age. It is unbelievable. His wife also holds a few world records. She can do the
0:32:42 same thing. Their sustained athleticism is just beyond incredible. And for ankle mobility, he had me doing
0:32:50 basically one or two reps on the minute overhead squats. So I’m holding a barbell overhead, but
0:32:56 we’re talking bar, maybe plus five pounds on either side, very lightweight. Just doing one rep on the
0:33:04 minute for like 10 to 20 minutes. That’s it. And by greasing the groove in that way, I went from
0:33:10 basically zero ankle mobility, lots of injuries, still a lot of lateral instability to being able
0:33:17 to do what we did earlier, which is frankly, years after I did that training, it’s been really durable,
0:33:24 which is wild. One of the points that I hear you making that I see reflected in a lot of what you do
0:33:29 is that you don’t necessarily have to do, you absolutely don’t have to do for most things like
0:33:37 an hour of strength training every other day, plus an hour of stretching every day or every other day.
0:33:42 You just do not, that is not necessary for most people at all. Like the surface area for injury
0:33:47 goes up also when you’re throwing everything in the kitchen sink with lots and lots of hours.
0:33:52 And certainly, I mean, I had conversations with Charles back in the day where we would talk about
0:33:59 some of these professional athletes, let’s just say NFL players, who have five, six percent body fat.
0:34:04 You know, they destroyed the combine. They’re these absolute phenoms. And I would ask him,
0:34:09 what do they eat for their diet? And he’d be like, oh, Wendy’s for breakfast, Burger King for lunch,
0:34:15 McDonald’s for dinner. I mean, you have to be very careful that you’re not modeling your training on
0:34:21 mutants. So I’ll just pull out a couple of things from Charles. So I first met Charles because he reached
0:34:27 out to me after reading The 4-Hour Workweek, my first book. And he had applied a lot of it to his
0:34:35 business and his productivity. And I think at the time, he didn’t realize this, but I had been exposed
0:34:41 to tons of his stuff just as you had through magazines way back in the day. And he reached out
0:34:44 and he’s like, you don’t know who I am. And I was like, well, actually, that’s funny because I do know
0:34:53 who you are. And then we connected and Charles ended up in the 4-Hour Body. He introduced me to
0:35:00 myofascial release and active release technique. And there’s some before and after photos with internal
0:35:07 rotation on the shoulder in the 4-Hour Body that are unbelievable. They look like they were staged
0:35:13 because the gains in range of motion are so significant. He was right about so many things,
0:35:19 wasn’t right about everything, but there’s so many things that Charles did that ended up being proven
0:35:26 out through studies and data collection later and exercise science and other fields. It’s pretty
0:35:32 remarkable. I mean, he got a lot of things right. He was so dedicated. I forget the exact number,
0:35:38 but he learned a bunch of different languages just so that he could read essentially everything
0:35:45 that had been written about exercise. Yeah. In the source language. Right. What a maniac. Also,
0:35:55 cantankerous as fuck. Oh my God. He was so salty. And part of his charm, one of a kind. Who else has
0:36:06 influenced your thinking on exercise and movement? Just broadly speaking, your way of training?
0:36:10 Charles was really cool about crediting where he learned different things. And so that’s something
0:36:16 I’ve kept in. And it also gave me the idea that like, okay, there might be real gems in quite a few
0:36:23 areas. So I know you’ve talked about gymnastic rings. Okay. Doing rows and pull-ups with gymnastics
0:36:29 rings. I do one set to burn out of each per week. That saves me so much time and gives me a pretty
0:36:34 balanced upper back for my goals. So like there’s a gem that Paul Aquin didn’t teach me, but his general
0:36:39 mindset of learning. I’m just going to pause to ask you to repeat something you told me earlier. Where
0:36:45 did Charles figure out the backwards sled pulling? Oh man, it’s such a cool story. If you want to talk
0:36:52 about pulling from unusual places. Yeah. So Charles went to the source, Westside Barbell in Ohio,
0:37:01 led by Louis Simmons, who was creating the strongest powerlifters in the world. And Louis was jealous of
0:37:08 these, uh, Finland powerlifters of their squats. And they said that their secret weapon was their day
0:37:16 job was dragging trees. So Louis invented the idea of dragging weight as a form of exercise. And then that
0:37:24 became a way of life at Westside Barbell. One of Louis Simmons disciples, Dave Tate, who made the,
0:37:29 if you’ve heard of elite FTS, they made the prowler style sled, all kinds of amazing stuff.
0:37:34 I’m going to see Dave in two weeks actually for the first time. Dave has a quote that’s like,
0:37:39 we didn’t have warmups. It was Louis Simmons just telling him, Hey, before you train,
0:37:44 go out to the parking lot and drag the sled. He’s like, we didn’t have shit called warmups. It was
0:37:50 called the stuff you do before you train. And people are like, how long, how many sets and refs at? I
0:37:53 don’t know. It was X amount of times down the parking lot. Oh, how long was the parking lot?
0:37:58 Don’t know. So it was cool. The history there, but it’s cool how Charles Poliquin would just go to the
0:38:02 source. He’d go to the source in Europe or Ohio or wherever it was, he would go to the source.
0:38:07 And then it was like, I told you, it was this article of where he used the backward sled for
0:38:11 knee rehab for this Olympic athlete that kind of gave me a stepping stone to all this stuff.
0:38:19 Yeah. If people also want to look up Louis Simmons and his writing online, a lot of amazing tidbits
0:38:24 to be found to this day. And a lot of his writing and Westside barbell for a period of time, it was
0:38:31 just one of those factories for mutants that, and of course there’s some selection bias. If people are
0:38:35 traveling to the Mecca to station themselves there to train, there’s a little bit of selection bias,
0:38:45 but the results were just so incredible. And the number of world records broken and the number of
0:38:52 innovations, whether that’s say chains to provide more resistance as you get into stronger ranges of
0:38:58 motion with whether it’s deadlift or anything else, I mean, bands and so on. I mean, a lot of what you
0:39:07 see that is propagated throughout the gym universe started there, or at least was codified and sort
0:39:15 of formalized in some way there. So that was a great one. One that I think would be inaccurate if
0:39:22 we missed. There was a bodybuilder named Bob Guida. G-A-J-D-A. Bob Guida.
0:39:22 Don’t know that name.
0:39:30 Okay. He was Mr. Universe, like right before bodybuilding really blew up. And now these are
0:39:35 his words. He worked at the Chicago YMCA. His passion was helping get kids off the streets,
0:39:41 off drugs, doing bodybuilding. He’s Mr. Universe. He goes into the lockers one day and sees people
0:39:46 shooting up drugs, steroids. Like this was the beginning of steroids. And when I say this,
0:39:50 people are like, oh no, Bob was on steroids too. Look, this is Bob’s story. Bob’s story,
0:39:57 what you can look up is he was Mr. Olympia when he quit. Not a lot of people are going to quit
0:40:03 right when, guess what he was getting offered? The first protein shake deals. So there wasn’t
0:40:10 money in what he was doing. All of a sudden there was money in bodybuilding and guys were doing steroids
0:40:16 and he quit. When someone turns down money, I feel like there’s a little, you know, I believe what he’s
0:40:24 saying. And he wound up then getting into sort of like my passion of helping people enjoy life without
0:40:32 breaking down. And he invented this device that he called a DARD. D-A-R-D. I think it was dynamic
0:40:39 axial resistance device. Okay. Rolls off the tongue. It didn’t catch on. It didn’t, uh, by the time I was
0:40:45 studying this, you couldn’t even buy it anywhere. Didn’t turn into a business that worked out, but it
0:40:49 allowed you to do the opposite of a calf raise and strengthen the front chin muscles.
0:40:55 Oh, got it. Tibialis interior. Yeah. So one of the things I do that’s really unusual and Charles
0:41:01 Poliquin did calf training, did tibialis training. Lots of coaches have done this. Bob was the creator
0:41:08 and really had a big impact on me. And in my workout style, which I hadn’t seen anyone doing,
0:41:15 I go from the resistance forward and backward with the sled to then working my lower leg muscles.
0:41:19 So with the sledding, you’re pushing through your feet in various ways. I mean,
0:41:23 you’re working all kinds of stuff. My mindset was like, okay, move the body forward and backward,
0:41:29 then start addressing the body from the ground up. Let’s get some extra built. Like before we even get
0:41:36 into the knees, I found extra desensitization before getting into the knee work by doing the
0:41:41 lower leg work after the sled work. Maybe it was just because the sled burns your legs and you get a
0:41:47 little break, but we can’t say it’s a bad thing to have some extra ability in the front and back of our
0:41:53 shins. And so an equipment company reached out, said like, this is when the knees over toes guy was
0:41:56 starting to catch on on social media. Like, is there anything that doesn’t exist that you think
0:42:02 should exist? I’m like, yeah, like there should be these dart bars, but I told him to call it a
0:42:08 tib bar to make it simple for people. Cause it’s the anterior front tibialis. Tibia is your shin bar.
0:42:14 I’m just calling something a dart also. I’m going to hell, but I mean, it’s a hard one to sell.
0:42:19 Yeah. So with the knees over toes guy stuff, I could see, okay, I’ve got a pretty good skill here at
0:42:27 helping people understand stuff. I think tib bar and, and now it’s a pretty common device. Like you can
0:42:34 even go on Amazon by tib bars. I mean, there’s like 10 sellers. Now I have the, by far the lowest price
0:42:39 for an American made tib bar. I don’t sell the most tib bars. Pretty much anything that I make
0:42:43 in America, someone’s going to make more money copying in China. And that’s actually at first
0:42:48 it seemed annoying, but now I’m like, it’s actually pretty cool. Like everyone wins. I can make a nice
0:42:54 living pursuing American made on everything I do. And like people are going to copy it because the price
0:42:59 is going to be higher. American made. All right. Everyone went, you can get it cheaper from someone
0:43:03 making it in China. And that doesn’t mean all my stuff is made in America. I’m pursuing all my stuff
0:43:08 made in America and anything on my website. I don’t play games with people. It says ATG USA. Then you
0:43:13 know, if it says that it’s made in America. So this was a really cool device, particularly for rehab.
0:43:17 But even for me, like what I showed you in my video, you can put a butt against the wall
0:43:25 with no equipment whatsoever, raise your toes and do that for a while and burn out and get a reverse
0:43:29 calf race, a tibialis race. Yeah. If you basically, I’ll just paint a picture for folks. So if you have
0:43:37 your, you’re standing facing away from a wall, maybe your heels are a foot away from the wall, your heels.
0:43:43 One to two feet. Yeah. One to two feet. Then you lean back against the wall. Now take your upper back
0:43:48 off of the wall. So it’s just kind of your hips and low back against the wall. So you’re not cheating.
0:43:55 Your legs are locked, right? Your knees are locked and then you’re lifting your toes to the greatest
0:43:59 extent that you can. And the next point that you added to that, I was like, oh, that’s actually
0:44:07 very smart. And it’s particularly, I would say helpful for someone like me, who’s basically torn
0:44:14 everything in both ankles. Too many heel hooks and nonsense way back in the day. That basically
0:44:19 lifting the foot as much as possible, then going down on the pinky side, then coming up and going
0:44:25 down on the big toe side and alternating back and forth like that. I could see helping also with some
0:44:27 of the lateral stability issues that I have.
0:44:33 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:45:42 So we were chatting a bit before recording about some of your different pieces of equipment. And I told you
0:45:51 that I really liked your wrist bar. So the wrist bar is imagine a baton like you would hand off to
0:45:58 someone in a relay race, but at one end, half of it is thick enough. I don’t know what the exact diameter
0:46:03 is. Let’s call it two, two and a half inches that you can plate load. You can put an Olympic plate
0:46:09 on that and then secure it, which makes it very interesting because you can work with progressive
0:46:14 resistance. Right. And for me, that was important and will be important. I’m six weeks after elbow
0:46:20 surgery. So I’m not quite there yet, but for sort of supination and pronation, whether I’m doing
0:46:29 isometrics or otherwise. And it’s very small, very portable. And one of the advantages, I, you know,
0:46:33 we were chatting to, well, why don’t you just tell the story and then I can add some color if need be.
0:46:38 I put this bar in five bullet Friday, which is my newsletter that goes out to 2 million plus
0:46:44 subscribers. There’s a few moments. I look back at just like sheer luck. Like when you won something
0:46:50 at the fair that you thought you went and done it. One of those highlight, just lucky moments is we’re
0:46:56 just seeing the wrist bar sales just going nuts. So my staff like, what the heck is going on? Like,
0:47:01 why are we selling so many wrist bar? And we quickly traced down that it was because of you.
0:47:05 That’s like an old time business moment. And that’s made in America. So we were able to
0:47:08 basically just make them to order and just quickly service anyone.
0:47:12 Right. So that last part is important, right? Because I think you mentioned it was like
0:47:20 more units than like the history of the bar up to that point or something. And I try to give people
0:47:25 a heads up if something is going to land in the newsletter because what can end up happening as one
0:47:30 of my fans termed it, the hug of death. So the hug of death can take a number of different forms.
0:47:36 It could be a website crashing, but it could also be where someone has a long lead time on ordering
0:47:41 inventory. Let’s just say they’re getting it from China. Not that that’s intrinsically bad. I’m not
0:47:47 saying that that is, but let’s just say for them to get an order, they have certain minimums and so on.
0:47:52 And they believe that the sales from the newsletter are going to continue at that velocity.
0:47:57 And they only had a hundred in stock. Now they order 2000 because they expect to be able to move
0:48:04 those and they don’t. The hug of death is, oh, I’m not going to make this money back. And companies,
0:48:09 small companies in particular can go under if they misgauge stuff like that. So you had the advantage
0:48:14 where you’re making them, I mean, from a global perspective, right around the corner.
0:48:19 So you could do just in time inventory. Yeah. We didn’t even have to order a batch. We were just
0:48:25 able to fulfill the orders. Awesome family in Minnesota who does stuff for a variety of people
0:48:30 in fitness, but reached out to me a few years back and has really helped me to make some cool stuff
0:48:37 American made. What other principles, topics, exercises would you like to talk about? Maybe one
0:48:45 way to edge into starting point for that is before coming here to do this recording and we did some
0:48:51 movement earlier, I did what I’ve done a number of different times because your name has come up
0:48:56 over the years and I’ve looked at your videos and watched a lot of them sorted your videos by most
0:49:02 popular. I’m sure a lot of people do that as a way to produce like a manageable shopping list of
0:49:12 videos. So my question for you is which videos were not anointed by the YouTube gods or for whatever
0:49:17 reason have not had the views that you would like where you’re like, if I could point out one video
0:49:24 that I wish people paid more attention to, it could be any video, but like your greatest hits don’t need
0:49:29 the help in a sense. Maybe you’d like to mention one of them, but if there’s a lesser known video where
0:49:36 you’re like, man, this one’s really, I think quite important and it hasn’t had the visibility.
0:49:43 So I just made a video really recapping all my knowledge because of going on this podcast. I didn’t
0:49:47 say in the video, you don’t want to jinx it like, Hey guys, I’m going on Tim Ferriss and then you get
0:49:55 canceled. But I made it for this podcast and it happens to be doing really well. I found that the
0:50:00 videos I put out that really hit home and help people then long-term wind up doing well. So for
0:50:05 me, it’s almost like my experience has been the better videos do have more views because I try to
0:50:11 be really careful to never lie in a YouTube title. What I have to look out for, which I’ll still have
0:50:17 to check it on your video because who knows on your staff, who’s going to title it is people have me on
0:50:21 or whatever. And then it’s like, I found one as like, and they’ve since corrected it, but it said
0:50:31 fix knee pain guaranteed in 60 seconds. The only, I won’t have a video with that only exercise you’ll
0:50:42 ever caps need. And so sure enough, the guy, great channel, great guy, very busy, naturally hired a
0:50:47 professional company. And then it actually alerted him and he found a bunch of lies like that in the
0:50:52 titles. So because of that, you can get a lot of views if you lie in the title. Even for me, I’m not
0:50:56 saying this from a point of perfection. There was one that’s so hard. I think I’ve kept it up. And
0:51:02 sometimes I go back and forth. I had titled it, this was four or five years ago, how to make yourself a
0:51:06 world-class athlete. And I use all these stories of people who weren’t world-class athletes and made
0:51:11 themselves world-class athlete. But still that was the closest one I can remember that I feel like was
0:51:16 potentially a lie. Now you’ll pin the video that you refer to, which is sort of the recap of a lot
0:51:22 of what we’re talking about visually. Yep. Do you recall the title of that? Yeah. Minimalistic
0:51:29 workout program with sets and reps. Like that’s how I title things now. Yeah. There’s no, no fluff.
0:51:34 Yeah. So what’s funny is that, so now to get views, it really is about the content itself,
0:51:39 not the title. So it doesn’t say knees over toes. It doesn’t say fix knee pain because there’s these
0:51:45 keywords that you should get views. So it just says minimalistic workout program with sets and reps
0:51:51 and it’s doing great. But that’s the most recent one I made for this podcast for someone to not beat
0:51:56 around the bush, get all the key information. It even gives you sets and it gives you my actual program.
0:52:00 It’s not a theoretical program. These are the two workouts I do a week. All the people I train are on
0:52:09 very similar versions of this. And I want to give people a taste of some of what we recorded earlier
0:52:17 in case they don’t see it. And in effect, I’ll summarize, but feel free to jump in because I’m a
0:52:23 stickler for detail and I like exact recipes. Could be my OCD screaming at the back of my head,
0:52:33 which is pretty often. But the point you made, or at least that I heard was you’re not really a magic
0:52:40 sets and reps guy in terms of some Goldilocks, perfect protocol. And the reason I bring that up
0:52:48 is that just like you can regress range of motion in a movement, you can regress the volume.
0:52:58 What I would say is that in pain free range of motion, a little bit can go a long way. So if
0:53:03 you look at something and you’re like, I don’t have time for three sets of this or five sets of that or
0:53:09 whatever it might be. Okay, fine. Well, maybe you start with one set. And I know people who’ve gotten
0:53:15 into tremendous shape coming from a baseline of zero, right? No athleticism, nothing. And they’re like,
0:53:18 no, I don’t have time to go to the gym. I don’t have to do that. I’m like, what about one pushup
0:53:22 before bed? What about one pushup? Is there a reason you can’t do one pushup? They’re like,
0:53:27 yeah, of course I can do one pushup. I’m like, okay, great. Do one pushup. And then it turns into
0:53:32 two and then it turns into whatever. And I know one guy like within a few months, he was doing 50 pushups
0:53:39 before bed. He was seeing real results. And then that was the unlock, right? So that’s a long winded
0:53:48 way of just saying, don’t get fixated on your limitations. You can always scale down.
0:53:55 My starting system is one to two sets. And then I found for myself, one to two sets, I can maintain
0:54:04 great. Only on exercises that I’m planning to put more weights on, I’ll go a couple more sets just to
0:54:08 actually, you’re probably still only talking one or two sets really exerting.
0:54:15 like work sets. Yeah. Just to make sure people safely take their time. Now, I simply wouldn’t
0:54:22 have believed 15 years ago that now I’d be like doing only two workouts a week, 45 minutes dunking
0:54:26 and stuff. So I wouldn’t have believed it. So if someone doesn’t, like if someone thinks we’re full
0:54:31 of shit, like I would have thought we were full of shit. That also doesn’t mean that higher volume
0:54:36 programs can’t work. Number one, I see all the different exercises as a beautiful freedom with
0:54:41 different inputs and adaptations. And I like, I see all of fitness as positive. And then I see even
0:54:46 all people’s viewpoints of then how to program that up as positive. The program you stick with that works
0:54:53 for you and your goals is awesome. Yeah. The program you stick with is the best program. And I want to
0:55:02 reiterate what you’re saying because I write books to be references for myself. Basically, if I can find a
0:55:06 book that does the job already, writing is way too hard. The research is way too arduous. It
0:55:11 takes way too long. I don’t want to write a book. It also turns out to generally be a terrible way to
0:55:16 make any money, even if your books do very well. There’s just way too much of pushing boulders up
0:55:21 the hill for me to write a book unless I feel like I’m gathering things that I need and can’t find
0:55:27 somewhere else. That was the case with the four-hour body. And this minimum effective dose, the concept,
0:55:33 the MED of finding the minimum effective dose, and you can look at many comparables, right?
0:55:37 It’s like there’s a certain temperature at which you boil water. You don’t need to get it
0:55:44 30 degrees hotter, right? If you go outside, there’s a point at which you start to adapt
0:55:49 in the sun and develop a tan. You don’t need or want to stay out another hour, right? And you
0:55:55 progress and you start to extend the duration, etc. It turns out that you can apply this almost
0:56:00 everywhere. You can apply it to language learning with the highest frequency words. You can apply it to,
0:56:06 for instance, I was asking on X back when it was Twitter, people for favorite chapters in the
0:56:10 four-hour body because I was curious about possibly updating things, although there’s not a lot that
0:56:16 needs much updating, it turns out. And people gave various examples. There was a, I think it was an NFL
0:56:26 player who was benched and got back to playing professionally using the prehab chapter and Occam’s
0:56:33 protocol. Occam’s protocol is like 20 minutes twice a week resistance training and a handful of other
0:56:38 things. There’s another guy who chimed in and I understand you can’t believe everything you read
0:56:43 on the internet, but I’ve seen multiple examples of this. He got to, I think, a 475-pound deadlift
0:56:50 using the Barry Ross protocol in the book. And Barry Ross coached Allison Felix and many other
0:56:58 sprinters. It is the most minimal thing you could possibly imagine. And a crux piece of it is doing
0:57:04 deadlifts to the knee and then effectively dropping the bar so that you’re not risking any type of
0:57:12 hamstring strain and doing two to three sets of two to three reps. That’s it. And you’re taking big,
0:57:17 fat power lifter rests in between those sets. The amount of strength that you can build doing that
0:57:26 is head spinning. So I just want to emphasize that I don’t have enough time doesn’t really hold up to
0:57:32 scrutiny if you’re willing to scale back. And in fact, you can do a lot more with very little than
0:57:39 you might suspect. To your point, there are also volume-based approaches. And I mean, Poliquin,
0:57:44 we talked about Poliquin. He did a lot of high-volume stuff with his athletes. Not everyone
0:57:48 is going to tolerate that very well, nor is it going to be compatible with their schedules necessarily.
0:57:53 So you find what works for you. And ultimately, the program you stick with is the best program.
0:57:59 I love that. Yeah, the 4-Hour Body had a massive, massive effect on me. And like this phase of life,
0:58:05 it’s like 2-Hour Body for me. And because it’s like the strength, the flexibility, the circulation,
0:58:10 the cardio, all this stuff wrapped in one. I don’t do any other therapies. I don’t have to
0:58:16 take any supplements. Those couple hours go a long way for me. And then I’m, what are my goals?
0:58:23 Like for me, being a dad, and then really focusing on my business, treating people well and doing good,
0:58:28 it takes a lot of time and energy. Because if you turn a blind eye to your business, that’s rarely
0:58:32 going to happen on its own. Yeah, very rarely. I haven’t figured out how to
0:58:38 do that yet. Yeah. So it’s like, those are my goals. I also don’t want to spend any time having
0:58:46 a rehab stuff. And knock on wood, it’s 12 years now, no knee or back problems. It was like 15 years ago
0:58:53 that I got into this. And I would say my biggest mistake was treating it as short-term rehab and being
0:58:58 like, oh, great. And then trying to go back to the methods I used to do. Whereas now for me,
0:59:03 like you had the question in the video of like, so is this like a warmup for the work? And then like,
0:59:08 that’s the workout. And then you get better at those things. And some of these things we’ve
0:59:14 mentioned, whether it be then finishing with a set of ring rows to a good burnout, that’s going to take
0:59:21 what a minute and goes a long way. So the efficiency of sledding and what I use at home is a resisted
0:59:27 treadmill forward and backward. I look at the clock, like three, four minutes I’ve gone by that I’ve done
0:59:33 three sets forward and backward, catching my breath between each set. I’m pumped. My lungs are, have had
0:59:39 a great workout. My legs are like warmed up, springy, fast, all this stuff. So for our body,
0:59:45 you can see in my passion, this is more along my passions in life is almost helping people that
0:59:51 don’t want so much stress on the body to then be able to focus on other things or stress on the
0:59:58 schedule, right? Stress on the family. And I would say that if I were to, and it’s just, these things
1:00:03 are too long and most of it, the vast majority of what’s in the four hour body, I feel is very
1:00:09 defensible. It’s become more defensible over time, which has been cool to see since it came out in 2010,
1:00:19 again. But if I were to add a few things to it, I would add sled work or analogs like the resisted
1:00:27 incline treadmill. I would add a chapter on intermittent fasting. I would add a chapter on,
1:00:37 it might not be a chapter, but maybe a sidebar on various hip activities, exercises, things like
1:00:44 glute medius work, just things that you can do to stabilize everything else in effect that I did put
1:00:51 some of in Tools of Titans with say, some of Peter, Tia’s exercises and so on. I would probably add
1:00:56 chapter or a sidebar on zone two training, which I still to this day find to be the most boring thing
1:01:03 in the world. But if I have to drag myself or whip myself to do anything, that would be on the high
1:01:09 whipping scale. And I think that’s about it. And there are probably chapters that I would pull out
1:01:15 to further simplify things. And that’s about it. I mean, these things are so reliable. And I would say
1:01:22 to someone, for instance, again, this is going to sound like nothing, but if you have access to a sled and
1:01:27 people can look at the resisted treadmill that you have also through ATG, how much does that cost?
1:01:28 600.
1:01:34 600. Right. So, I mean, it’s on the grand scale of things, not just affordable as an investment,
1:01:41 but also space efficient, right? Because the biggest knock against the sled is that you need space and
1:01:46 the sleds are not cheap, particularly the sleds I really like, like the torque sleds, which I own.
1:01:52 I love them. But here in Austin, I don’t have the space for one. But let’s just pretend you have
1:01:56 access to one of these. Let’s call it a sled for simplicity, just so people can visualize it.
1:02:04 Over this past summer, I did sled work where effectively, as prescribed by Peter at T, if I’m
1:02:09 doing VO2 max training, I would want to do like four minutes on, four minutes off. You can make it five
1:02:16 or six or whatever. It depends on how hard you’re pushing. And let’s just say it’s four minutes on,
1:02:21 four minutes off for four rounds or five rounds or six rounds. And I would do that with the sled.
1:02:27 And I would push, this is on a gravel driveway with mechanical resistance. You don’t need to add much
1:02:33 weight. So what we’re talking about, just to do the math, let’s just say it’s 15 minutes,
1:02:38 which often it would end up being 15 minutes because I would run out of gas, but 10 to 20
1:02:45 minutes, let’s call it. I was doing that every other day, fasted after a little bit of caffeine.
1:02:54 And my God, can you get in good shape just from doing that? I mean, it sounds, and I’m sure there
1:03:00 are some very high-level athletes or people who are doing 600-pound squats or 900-pound deadlifts who are
1:03:07 going to laugh hearing me say this, but you might be surprised how much your legs will grow
1:03:14 and how much stability you will develop doing this and how much body fat you can lose
1:03:20 just by making that the first thing you do. And in my case, I’m getting sun exposure at the same time
1:03:25 for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning. And then let that afterburn work for a bit.
1:03:30 I would typically do that in the mornings. And I would take some, like a very, I’m talking like 300
1:03:35 milligrams of essential amino acids instead of branch chain amino acids, but that’s a longer story.
1:03:41 And I would do the workout and then I would hold off on eating for a few hours and then break my
1:03:47 intermittent fast at 2 or 3 p.m. But feeding that way and then doing weight training typically before
1:03:54 like my second and last meal of the day for dinner, gaining muscle mass, not losing muscle mass. And
1:04:00 the total, I mean, we’re talking about weekly time. If I’m doing it every other day, it’s three or four,
1:04:05 let’s call it, days a week. So that’s an hour. And then the weight trainings probably,
1:04:11 since I’m doing some rehab as well because of some current back issues, we’re talking about
1:04:18 two to three hours a week. That’s it. And it’s split up also into very manageable
1:04:23 doses. It’s not like I’m asking you to do a three-hour or two-hour workout at once.
1:04:30 But it is really to this day, there’s still things I come across like the, in my case,
1:04:34 I’m still elevated, but the front foot elevated split squat or the ATG split squat.
1:04:42 Or for instance, the exercise that you showed me earlier, which is basically a seated, let’s call
1:04:48 it more constrained version of like a Romanian deadlift standing. People can find this on your
1:04:56 pinned video, I imagine. So I won’t belabor the description. Or sled work, where I still find
1:05:03 these things like, I think to myself, my God, if I just did these and that was it, the sort of return
1:05:11 uninvested time is so much better than like the long tail of 30 exercises that I could try to do,
1:05:16 it still makes me smile and blows my mind to this day how some of these things are just so inherently,
1:05:23 given their risk to benefit ratio, so high yield. And it’s really wild.
1:05:28 That’s exactly how I feel. It’s still to this day, it’s like, I do my two workouts a week. I’m just
1:05:33 totally stoked. And sometimes I still have that like, wow, every time, because I’m like,
1:05:36 it’s unbelievable. And now I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s not like,
1:05:41 wow, I could just train like that. I have been for a while. And the results are insane.
1:05:43 And you’re playing sports, right?
1:05:49 I try once a week to play some basketball. Right now, that means like playing with the best
1:05:54 kids at the school that I’m volunteering at. So it’s two workouts a week, try to play basketball
1:05:57 basketball once a week, and raise toddlers.
1:06:04 Before you play basketball, any type of warmup that you do for that? Or has your training provided
1:06:05 the warmup?
1:06:09 First and foremost, the training provides a warmup. I don’t have any special warmup.
1:06:16 From what I’ve learned training-wise, I try to at least have systems. And to recap incredibly fast
1:06:20 my systems, because you’d actually ask me like, what are my total principles? And it’s just three
1:06:26 total principles as far as I can see, which is the forward and backward resisted movement. And then
1:06:32 the training from the ground up, just reminding myself, even if it’s one set, okay, I’m going to hit
1:06:38 the lower legs before I go to the upper legs. And then the third one being the strength through my
1:06:43 mobility. And then I just flow that to the upper body and I’m done. That’s the training principles.
1:06:51 If you add all of that up, forward and backward, ground up, because most of us has probably not
1:06:56 done as much work for like the lower body and lower legs as for the upper body. So we’re kind of restoring
1:06:57 some natural balance there.
1:07:00 Yeah, I need to do a lot of work on the lower legs.
1:07:05 Right. We could say that your body’s inputs would think that you didn’t want to get as strong in the
1:07:11 lower legs as the upper. So by doing that, you’re what? You’re restoring some balance to the body.
1:07:17 Quick piece of trivia for people who might find it funny. Go look at really early photographs of
1:07:23 Arnold Schwarzenegger posing, and some of them have him standing in water where water’s up to his knees
1:07:26 because he was so embarrassed about his lower leg development.
1:07:34 Alas, I haven’t figured out how to wade through swamps up to my knees to cover my lack of development
1:07:35 in the lower legs.
1:07:40 Yeah, most of us haven’t. It’s almost like we’re telling the body, hey, I don’t want to be as strong
1:07:46 proportionally in the lower legs as everything above it. And then the amount of foot pains and different
1:07:52 chronic pains that I’ve had people who had for years that are gone now just from restoring that
1:07:57 balance. It’s really cool. And then the third one being training the strength through the mobility,
1:08:02 as I said. So those three, but what’s the strength through mobility again? We’re kind of restoring that
1:08:06 natural balance. Because when we go into weight training, our body starts to shift towards strength
1:08:11 in certain ranges, but not others. So all of it together just means my whole philosophy is just
1:08:17 to have balanced ability in the body. Forward, backward, high positions, low positions, lower legs,
1:08:22 upper legs. So that’s how I train. That makes me healthy that I can just go play basketball.
1:08:30 But because of all that, I try to be sensible about it and do a sort of segmented warmup of
1:08:34 like, okay, dribbling in place, then dribbling in motion. Now what’s a little more pressure than that
1:08:40 might be like shooting. So it’s just super basic like that. Someone could do that for any sport. It’s
1:08:44 like you just take the forces and you just kind of segment them into an obvious warmup. So there’s
1:08:50 no special basketball warmup. No magic sauce. Well, we’ve covered quite a bit. Ben, is there
1:08:56 anything else that you’d like to cover? Any other topics you’d like to jam on? Anything that comes to
1:08:56 mind?
1:09:04 I think more for you, which is for me, as or more important than any of this exercise stuff,
1:09:14 is you’ve managed to become this giant without bashing other people, without playing games that
1:09:19 you know are lower integrity. So you must have some sort of, because I’ve had to kind of set up for
1:09:25 myself, okay, I need to make sure that my posts don’t have any lies to try to start arguments or
1:09:29 that there’s nothing intentionally trying to start arguments. And there’s these things like this that
1:09:35 I’ve had to piece together. But I think of you, and sometimes I’m blank after that. Apologies for
1:09:41 being blank, but it’s like, there’s not a lot that I can look to and go, here’s a guy who’s succeeding
1:09:48 in ways that I would want to succeed, helping people, but with your integrity. And to me, that’s more
1:09:53 important than the rest. Because I feel like that’s the trickle down that makes life shitty for a lot
1:09:59 of people, is the more and more leaders, I mean, who then lose their integrity. Like, I think that’s
1:10:02 more important than all the rest, because that affects everything.
1:10:03 Yeah, thanks, man.
1:10:04 So what’s your…
1:10:05 It’s my process.
1:10:09 I mean, do you, yeah, like, what’s your thoughts on that? I mean, even if you just think about it,
1:10:13 you’ll share some unusual information compared to what normally is going to be on a podcast.
1:10:18 Yeah, I’m happy to riff on it. I would say that there are a few things that come to mind.
1:10:27 And I’ll maybe get there by way of example. So there was an episode I recorded a long time
1:10:35 ago with a fellow named Balaji, who’s very smart. And he’s known for a great many things. He’s actually
1:10:41 been very accurate in predicting a lot of sort of geopolitical events and so on. Also happens to be
1:10:46 incredibly technical and familiar with cryptography and crypto and so on. And I did an episode with him
1:10:53 and it just exploded. And there were many reasons for that, but it ended up being, I think, at the
1:11:02 time the most popular episode of the year. And there were a number of trend lines at the time. People were at
1:11:10 home. This was during COVID. Crypto was on everyone’s radar. All of a sudden, people are using various means of
1:11:14 finding something to do, including trading or quote unquote investing. And I use quote unquote, because it
1:11:21 wasn’t always investing. So there were many things that contributed to this episode doing well. And I
1:11:26 remember having a chat with my team internally. And they were like, here are four or five other guests
1:11:37 who are also involved with crypto, who we think would be very, very strong. And I paused in that
1:11:43 moment. And there’s this quote, it may be incorrectly attributed, but there’s a quote that I have started
1:11:49 almost every presentation I’ve ever given. So it’d be kind of hilarious if it were not attributed
1:11:55 properly. I think it’s attributed to Mark Twain. But whenever you find yourself on the side of the
1:12:00 majority, it’s time to pause and reflect. It’s roughly along those lines. So I looked at what
1:12:07 was happening around me. And I saw a lot of podcasts focusing on crypto. I saw a lot of media focusing
1:12:16 on crypto. And I looked at, in my mind, telescoping forward, what would be the implications of me having
1:12:24 these four or five people on? There would be a definite short or intermediate term reward. Lots of
1:12:29 downloads. Very happy sponsors. I could probably increase my rates. I mean, there would be real
1:12:36 financial rewards. What are the trade-offs? There are always trade-offs. Always. When you make any
1:12:44 decision, just like literally from the perspective of decision, meaning cutting away related to
1:12:50 indecision, you’re choosing one option among many. There are trade-offs. So what are the trade-offs if I
1:13:00 commit to doing four or five more episodes on crypto? One is that I start to filter out anyone in my
1:13:06 audience who is not interested in crypto, most likely. Some will be willing to indulge me because
1:13:12 they have followed the podcast for a long time and want to see how I tackle it. But after four or five
1:13:18 episodes, after a month or two, I will basically have called my audience of anyone who is not
1:13:26 particularly interested. That is a very large sacrifice. Number one, because I want a diverse
1:13:35 audience. Number two is that I would be training myself to succumb to audience capture. There’s some
1:13:41 great pieces that have been written about audience capture. But the way I would describe it, actually,
1:13:46 I’ll give, I apologize that I can’t remember the author’s name. It’s a really fantastic piece.
1:13:53 But he starts with this example of a YouTuber whose channel focused on him gorging himself,
1:14:00 just eating these kind of absurdly large meals. And he started off pretty thin and ended up,
1:14:05 as he was rewarded for these videos, and as it became the corner he was painted into,
1:14:09 as he felt he needed to continue to rack up views serving people what they wanted,
1:14:17 he destroyed his health completely, became obese, put on this mask. And if you wear a mask long
1:14:23 enough, you become the mask. I think that’s something that people miss. And I recall, just as a side
1:14:28 note, because I want to try to answer your question, but there’s a lot to it. I remember I interviewed
1:14:35 Andrew Zimmern, who has been on, man, he’s been on TV for decades now. Amazing guy, very smart. His life
1:14:41 story is incredible for people who want to check out the podcast episode. And he said to me at one
1:14:46 point, because I was delving into television, he said, be very, and I’m paraphrasing, but be very careful
1:14:55 careful about what you do in that first episode. Because if you pretend to be something that you’re not, and it’s
1:15:05 successful, you will feel the obligation to continue to do that. And there are a lot of risks related to that. And
1:15:16 furthermore, if you’re training yourself to respond to audience demands, or whims, or trends,
1:15:23 instead of some type of internal compass, and simultaneously, you’re training yourself,
1:15:30 and these are often related to basically pursue the option that has the most economic upside.
1:15:39 I feel like, particularly if you’re in the online media game in any capacity, and by the way, you don’t
1:15:44 need to have a business to succumb to this, you might just have a personal page, and you’re being trained
1:15:53 by the platform to be in the vanity Olympics. And these algorithms are so good. And I know a lot of data scientists
1:16:01 and PhDs who work at these companies, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight psychologically. So if you encourage
1:16:10 yourself to be captivated by those incentives, you’re lost. You’re just lost at sea. You’re going to be lost. And it’s a lot
1:16:17 easier to get lost than it is to get unlost. And that has a trickle down effect, right? So if I make decisions
1:16:26 based on, and it’s very hard, and I’m not always perfect, if I allow myself to be steered by the most
1:16:35 extreme things, perhaps, that guests say, what am I going to do? I’m going to optimize for extreme. And then if I’m
1:16:39 optimizing for extreme, why am I doing that? It’s for views. Why do I care about views? It could be vanity.
1:16:45 It could also be for CPMs and advertising. It could be for product sales. Well, what’s going to
1:16:48 happen to my headlines? They’re going to become the National Enquirer for people old enough to remember
1:16:56 that. They’re going to become the most clickbaity, exaggerated, indefensible set of claims you can
1:17:02 imagine. And you don’t have to be a data scientist to realize this. Just go look at where you’re served
1:17:08 up in your personal feed on YouTube, and chances are there’s going to be a lot of nonsense or a lot of
1:17:16 misleading. And what I’ve learned is that when you develop an awareness of this, not that you’re,
1:17:24 I’m holding myself up to be some paragon of personal excellence and integrity, but I recognize that it’s
1:17:32 a lot easier to get hooked on a drug than to get off of said drug. And make no mistake, you’re being
1:17:38 trained by the platform, you’re being trained by your audience. Those are all drugs that are very
1:17:44 addictive. And there are lots of rewards for pursuing that. But to come back to what I said
1:17:52 earlier, there are lots of trade-offs. And for me, also on top of that, I would say that
1:18:01 I have worked so hard to ensure that my audience feels they can trust me. There are certain lines
1:18:07 once you cross. If you do not deliver on the promise of a headline, you do not deliver on the
1:18:13 promise of a title. If you make a recommendation that costs someone time, money, or God forbid causes
1:18:19 some type of injury, you’re done. You are dead to that person. And for good reason. I feel like
1:18:23 with a great audience, and that could be a small audience, it could be a big one, comes great
1:18:30 responsibility. And I should say also, this isn’t because I’m some type of saint. It’s also being
1:18:42 long-term ambitious. For me, the greatest insurance plan, the greatest, choose your metaphor, safety
1:18:50 net, but also propellant for doing well long-term is not doing anything. And you’ll make mistakes,
1:18:55 but really try hard not to do anything that will compromise the trust that your audience puts in you.
1:18:59 That could be readers, it could be listeners, it could be viewers, it could be anything.
1:19:05 And for that reason, I’m very cautious about what I recommend. I’m very cautious about who I have on
1:19:12 the podcast. I’m very cautious about chasing any type of trend, hence that what I think is a Mark
1:19:16 Twain quote, but could be someone else. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
1:19:22 it’s time to pause and reflect. So in the case of the crypto episode, that was massively successful.
1:19:28 I could have milked that, but it would have been the equivalent of killing the golden goose.
1:19:40 And those are a few ways that I think about my life that is at this point toothpaste out of the
1:19:44 toothpaste tube. You can’t really put it back in from a public exposure perspective. There are lots
1:19:51 of trade-offs, privacy-wise and so on, for being public-facing. Although a lot of folks who are long-term
1:19:56 listeners and viewers will notice that I am not doing even a tiny fraction of the video,
1:20:04 that most of my colleagues or peers, certainly the up-and-comers, and there are costs to that.
1:20:11 So I have my reasons for doing that. I want to have a family soon. I do not need any more facial
1:20:19 recognition. I want to be very cognizant of protecting the privacy of my family. But have I left a lot of
1:20:23 money on the table? Yeah, I have. But what are you using the money for in the first place? And this is
1:20:28 why it’s like, why, why, why? Just keep asking why. Why? So what? Why is that important? Then what happens?
1:20:37 And if money, fundamentally, it’s sort of a story, right? It’s like this abstraction, but it’s a
1:20:43 currency that we can use to trade for other things. Now, having that in savings could provide you with
1:20:51 psychological reassurance for any number of reasons. Family, childhood, scarcity, who knows? So there could
1:20:59 be that. Otherwise, you’re trading it for things and experiences, but which ultimately translate to
1:21:04 feelings. It’s like, okay, where else could you get those feelings? Do you really need those incremental
1:21:10 dollars with those trade-offs? So for me, I decided I didn’t. And that’s also the reason why, keep in
1:21:17 mind, right, 4-Hour Workweek details my first real business, which was in sports nutrition. I know the
1:21:25 supplement world inside and out. And when I launched the 4-Hour Body, I had a huge audience from the first
1:21:32 book that was waiting for my next book. I could have made tens of millions, maybe a hundred million plus
1:21:37 by launching a supplement brand to capitalize on every one of my main product recommendations.
1:21:43 I’d be lying if the thought didn’t occur to me, especially at that time, because even with the
1:21:52 success of the 4-Hour Workweek, royalties are very slim in a traditional deal. And the temptation,
1:21:59 therefore, to do something like that was huge. I was like, this is how I can secure my entire financial
1:22:06 future. And I decided not to do it. Why? Because if I had launched a supplement brand,
1:22:11 everyone would have, not everyone, but a lot of people rightly would have said,
1:22:18 well, we’re asking a barber if we need a haircut. This guy is shilling his bags. He’s selling exactly
1:22:23 what he’s recommending. How can I trust anything this guy says? And I was like, that is too steep a cost.
1:22:26 I’ll find another way to do it.
1:22:30 I mean, that’s remarkable because it would have been a shoe-in.
1:22:32 Yeah, it would have been a shoe-in.
1:22:37 I similarly, you’ll know when I sell out, if I’m selling a joint supplement.
1:22:44 But it’s not that I have anything against supplements. It’s that it wasn’t actually part of my journey.
1:22:50 So if I now sold a supplement, I want to know what effect I get from the exercises. And yeah,
1:22:54 that would be the easiest business route as the news over toast guy.
1:22:59 Which is not to knock, maybe it’s just can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I mean, I consume
1:23:06 a ludicrous number of supplements. I do consume a lot of supplements. So clearly, there are brands
1:23:11 that I trust typically have been third-party verified. Things have been tested because my God,
1:23:18 it is the Wild West folks. There’s no enforcement. So really do your homework on the supplements that
1:23:25 take. But that is all just a long way of saying, there are some good players in the supplement
1:23:34 sphere. But if I’m combining that, in my case, with a book that is purported to provide unbiased
1:23:40 information, you can’t believe those claims if I’m selling exactly the thing that I’m recommending.
1:23:48 Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that I’ve ethically compromised in some way. But people would
1:23:52 be right to question. You wouldn’t have. You would have made a great supplement line. You would have
1:23:58 been honest, but the integrity point would have been out. That’s what I find remarkable. And that’s
1:24:06 what like, if me going the rest of my career, I see that actually as not boasting about it, just doing
1:24:13 things along those lines. Because as you know, I mean, how many young people ask you for advice,
1:24:17 right? And then how many of these people become successful? You leave this trickle-down impact
1:24:22 that at this point, for me, it’s like, that’s really what it’s about. And for my kids,
1:24:28 and then helping them learn these same values. Like, I feel like that’s a whole podcast to unpack,
1:24:33 but I appreciate you digging in there. Because it’s very unusual. You would have cashed out big,
1:24:37 but that integrity wouldn’t have been as trustworthy.
1:24:44 Yeah, thanks. There are times that I’m like, fuck, that would have been so much money.
1:24:50 There are times it’s not easy for me to walk away from that, right? There are times I’m just like,
1:24:55 oh my God. Like, I remember when the 4-Hour Body hit number one New York Times and just kept going,
1:24:59 kept going. And this book was published 15 years ago. And even I’ll give credit where credit is due.
1:25:05 Gary Brecka put out a video about some components of the 4-Hour Body and had this huge resurgence and like
1:25:11 back on a bunch of bestseller lists. And I’m just like, man, can you imagine the annuity of this thing
1:25:18 would have been? Good Lord. But I don’t regret it. And I’ll say two things in addition to that that build on this.
1:25:25 Number one is, when people think about losing trust, which is losing your reputation, at least for me,
1:25:30 there are many ways to think of reputation. I mean, I guess you could have like an Al Capone reputation.
1:25:34 Like, there are many different types of reputations. But if you have a reputation for being trustworthy,
1:25:42 losing that trust does not mean that you do something so bad that everyone says, I can’t trust Tim. I can’t
1:25:50 trust Ben. All that needs to happen is they ask themselves once, can I really trust Ben? Can I
1:25:57 really trust this video? Can I really trust this? Can I trust this advice that Tim is giving? As soon as
1:26:05 there is a question, you’ve lost the trust. And as soon as there is a seed of doubt, it is very hard
1:26:13 to reclaim. Now, if I’m talking about long-term, right? Being long-term greedy or long-term ambitious,
1:26:22 because of that trust and for instance, being very clear on situations, say in San Francisco where I
1:26:27 lived at the time, having friend IS, as some people call them. So NDA, non-disclosure agreement,
1:26:31 friend IS is basically if someone tells you something in confidence, even if they don’t
1:26:37 emphasize that you need to keep it confidential, basically not sharing things that anyone says to
1:26:46 you. And by developing, becoming a known quantity as someone who’s very good at discretion, who does what
1:26:52 he says he’s going to do on time, those were ingredients that led to ultimately the angel investing and
1:26:58 being able to invest in a lot of these startups and work with a lot of these founders. Inherently, I would
1:27:05 be exposed to a lot of really confidential, private information that’s critical to their business success. So
1:27:13 developing that trustworthiness through actions over time and people telling other people is what allowed me to do the
1:27:19 do the angel investing with which ultimately returned much more than any supplement business ever would
1:27:26 have. So don’t overestimate the value of the dollars in your bank account and don’t underestimate the
1:27:33 value of having a consistent reputation for being trustworthy. And there’s so many ways to fuck that up.
1:27:41 And who knows, maybe also, I mean, I’m very hypervigilant. I’m very aware and over aware and probably over
1:27:47 emphasize dangers in the world. So I think there’s also maybe it’s worked to my advantage in the sense
1:27:54 that if you don’t have your word, if people feel like they can’t trust that, like, you’re done. It’s just
1:28:01 like, it’s going to be mad max for you. Not in a good way. I’m not sure exactly. But this is how I’ve
1:28:07 thought about some of it. It’s a right characteristic. The world would be a lot better if
1:28:14 more leaders did that. So yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. I’ve made plenty of mistakes
1:28:20 along the way. Sure, I’ll continue to make tons of mistakes. But the question I’d encourage people
1:28:23 to ask, and I ask this in my personal life, I ask this in my professional life, it’s like, okay,
1:28:31 if you continue to do this, if you continue to do X, whatever X is, and let’s just say you do 2%
1:28:37 more of it, or you do it with 2% more intensity every week or month, over time, like three years
1:28:44 from now, what does that look like? Be very aware of the trend line and the way it compounds.
1:28:52 So in the case of, say, YouTube titles, okay, if you’re exaggerating 2% and people accept that
1:28:57 and you get better results, do you think you’re going to stop at 2%? Of course you’re not going
1:29:03 to stop at 2%. Now it’s going to be 4%. And eventually you’re going to cross the line without realizing that
1:29:08 you’ve crossed that line. That explains a lot. And that’s how my wife and I run our business together.
1:29:15 She’s really much more of a business genius, and thank God. But even on the integrity stuff,
1:29:21 it’s hard to explain in a way, okay, if I was in any country, I would want, just based on all my
1:29:26 observations of being business, I would want to be supporting local businesses and stuff. So, okay,
1:29:33 so we’ve got this passion for making stuff in America that really, from observing everything
1:29:40 in this last year. And now she’s just like off to the races, crushing it in terms of takes calls and
1:29:45 networking and finding people and continuing until, because you’re told, no, no, can’t make this,
1:29:48 can’t make the, and then you find the person who can make it. You find the factory, you find the
1:29:55 technology. And if I was in Canada or if I was in China, I would feel the same way. It’s something
1:30:00 that’s important to us, but I like your 2% thing. Like if we keep putting 2% more energy on that,
1:30:05 because when you were describing this, I was thinking, because this is something that’s on
1:30:09 our minds a lot. And I’m thinking three years, wow, I’m like three years from now. Life is going
1:30:13 to be amazing. Yeah. I don’t know what the exact numbers will be. Yeah, it applies to the good stuff
1:30:17 as well. We’re breaking through all kinds of stuff that people aren’t able to make here that now we’re
1:30:22 actually getting. And it’s so cool. You can go to the factory, see the people, see the person. You can
1:30:29 have, like how I said, okay, when you blew up our wrist bar sales, it’s like for us, it makes us
1:30:33 happier. We like it. And I like your rule. What does it look like a few years from now?
1:30:37 If we keep putting a little more and I’m like, that’s a life I really like. The numbers won’t
1:30:42 be gigantic, but they’ll be good. And we’ll be, we’ll be super happy about it.
1:30:47 And also it’s like enough is enough at some point and enough, what enough means will differ
1:30:52 from person to person. But generally speaking, money’s not going to solve all the problems you
1:31:01 think it will. And what you need to live an amazing life is much less than most people realize.
1:31:10 And then if you cross the finish line, so to speak, right, with annual income or savings or
1:31:15 some combination, invested capital and low cost index funds, whatever it might be, whatever gives
1:31:23 you the sense of psychological safety. Once you get close to that or you get there, which can be a lot
1:31:29 less than you might realize. And there’s an exercise called dreamlining. They’ve searched my name and
1:31:34 that you can find it. It’s costing all this stuff out. You’ll realize that the other pieces of the
1:31:39 puzzle that are so important are not in any way addressed by money. And you have to work on those
1:31:47 separately. And part of the way you work on those separately is doing things that you feel good about
1:31:54 that make you feel good about yourself. And so for instance, if part of that is making things in the
1:32:03 U.S., that in and of itself can more than offset the additional cost that’s incurred compared to doing
1:32:07 it overseas, like the actual benefit, and particularly since you’re doing it with your wife, like the
1:32:15 benefit to your family collectively. And if you’re proud of that, the way you radiate that to your kids,
1:32:17 that’s a lot. That’s valuable.
1:32:19 Ben, so nice to spend time together.
1:32:20 Really nice to spend time together.
1:32:25 As you can see, I could grill you on this whole side of things, but I appreciate it.
1:32:28 Yeah, definitely. Where can people find you online?
1:32:36 Knees over toes guy on YouTube and Instagram are the best places where you can just go and
1:32:38 learn everything that I know.
1:32:43 Perfect. All right. We’ll link to those in the show notes. People will be able to find that.
1:32:49 You’ll pin the video. It gives people an overview of what we recorded earlier. We’ll also link to the
1:32:56 video we did together so people can check that out because that was a lot of fun. And thanks for taking
1:33:03 the time. Yeah, I really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, as always, we will link to
1:33:09 everything in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. Just search Ben Patrick, or if you want to
1:33:15 type out knees over toes guy, it will probably pop right up. But you can search Ben Patrick, and you’ll
1:33:20 find everything we’ve spoken about. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to
1:33:26 others, but also to you yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
1:33:32 Hey, guys, this is Tim. Again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet
1:33:37 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
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1:33:48 my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is
1:33:54 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered
1:33:58 or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things. It often
1:34:05 includes articles I’m reading books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech
1:34:12 tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange
1:34:18 esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them. And then I share them with you. So if that
1:34:23 sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the
1:34:28 weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to Tim dot blog slash Friday,
1:34:34 type that into your browser, Tim dot blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very
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1:35:56 don’t require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. And that’s why I love the protein bars from today’s
1:36:03 sponsor, David. They’re my go-to protein source on the run. I throw them in my bag whenever I am in
1:36:08 doubt that I might be able to get a good source of protein. David has 28 grams of protein,
1:36:14 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. And on top of that, David tastes great. Their bars come in six
1:36:19 delicious flavors. They’re all worth trying. Protein is also the most satiating macronutrient. What does
1:36:26 that mean? It means that protein out of carbohydrates, fat and protein inhibits your appetite while also
1:36:29 feeding all the things you want to feed, which helps you consume fewer calories throughout the day.
1:36:34 You’re less inclined to eat garbage. All of that contributes to fat loss and reducing the risk of
1:36:40 various diseases. And now you guys, listeners of the Tim Ferriss show who buy four boxes, get a fifth box
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Ben Patrick, better known as “Kneesovertoesguy” (@kneesovertoesguy), is the founder of Athletic Truth Group (ATG), an online and brick-and-mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of debilitating knee and shin pain (including multiple surgeries), he rebuilt his body and performance, going from a sub-20″ vertical to a documented 42″ leap.
This episode is brought to you by:
Momentous high-quality creatine for cognitive and muscular support: https://livemomentous.com/Tim (Code TIM for 35% off your first subscription.)
Monarch track, budget, plan, and do more with your money: Monarch.com/Tim (50% off your first year at monarchmoney.com with code TIM)
David Protein Bars 28g of protein, 150 calories, and 0g of sugar: https://davidprotein.com/tim (Buy 4 cartons, get the 5th free.)
My workout with Ben: https://youtu.be/xpM4V6O9f6w
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