#816: Nsima Inyang, Mutant and Movement Coach — True Athleticism at Any Age, Microdosing Movement, “Rope Flow” as a Key Unlock, Why Sleds and Sandbags Matter, and Much More

25:25Okay, you got it? You got a sword in front. Now he's swinging it to either side. Now imagine instead of the sword, you have a rope that is whatever this is, I don't know, inch, inch and a half, two inches thick, something like that, like a heavy-ish rope. And so now imagine you're swinging this rope around, but instead of just using your hands, let's just say you bring your hands in closer to your chest, and now you're creating that figure eight with your shoulders. And that is then swinging the blade, aka the rope. So just imagine that kind of movement. Is that fair enough? Yes, that's fair. That's fair.

26:00And along with that, it's not just the spine. It's the weight shift of the feet. Because now you're shifting from one side to the other, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, right? And one of the reasons why I believe it's helped so much with my jujitsu, because jujitsu, it's a very rotational practice when you're trying to leverage an opponent from one side or the other, is because my weight shift on both sides of my body has improved from my feet. So this is one reason why when you start to like, do more rope flow and you start to get more of the underhand side of the underhand practice.

26:31You've hit a boxing bag before, right? You've done that type of work. Go do that type of work again and do some uppercuts, do some hooks, but remember the things that you've learned. You're learning how to generate power and rotation from the ground through your fists. There's so many people that I've seen now that have literally said, it's improved my punching, or I actually know how to throw a punch because I've learned how to swing this through space. Also, like you were explaining and the underhand, like, okay, so guys, we're talking about the Conan and the barbarian thing. We won't belabor this.

27:01We'll obviously have some video linked if you're listening to audio, but imagine that you have the rope. It is behind you, right? You're dragging a rope. Let's just say with two hands on one side, it's thick rope. And then you pull it up and the rope is taking this sort of upward trajectory, like a diagonal. that would be sort of, I know it's not the best description, but that'd be like the underhand. Whereas if you're like bringing it over your shoulder, like a whip or something, that would be the overhand. Went to the whip again, Tim. What was that? You went to the whip again, Tim. You know, you know, it's yeah.

27:33You know, this is why you don't go to your BDSM dungeon the night before your podcast. It just bleeds over guys. I'm sorry. All right. Guilty as charged. So what appeals to me, and I mean, this is like my enthusiasm is outstripping my experience. So that's probably the story of my life. But what the little that I've seen of, say, Roplo as one tool in the toolkit, part of what appeals to me about it is that, like my experience early on with Pavel and kettlebells, there's this weird, like, what the fuck transfer, where people who, let's say, do a bunch of kettlebell work suddenly have better running times.

28:08And they're like, what? What do you mean? What the hell is going on? Right? Or because of the thicker diameter over time, they don't even realize it. But suddenly the limiting factor, which was their grip on the deadlift, has been not entirely removed, but improved dramatically. And when I looked at the rope flow, I'm like, okay, forget about the rope. It's a tool for engaging these other planes of movement. And if done in, we were talking about this earlier today as well, not necessarily as an hour-long workout where you're just dying inside, but rather like flossing your teeth or getting up and taking a shower.

28:46It's like, okay, you take a shower once a day, like rope flow once a day. And over time, the adaptations that would take place. And one thing I didn't tell you because I did confess that this is very self-serving as a meeting because I was like, I really want to dial in my programming, recognizing there are things I want to do in the future, which are not breaking powerlifting records. Ain't going to happen. It's definitely not beating you in jujitsu because I'll get all of my appendages snapped off. Don't need that. I would never do that to you. unless dot, dot, dot. I appreciate that. It wouldn't take very much, but there are things I would really like to do.

29:18I would like to compete in more sports, even if it's just in a club capacity. I would love to get back on the tennis courts and get back to playing tennis. And this might require some elbow surgery, but get back to rock climbing. And also one thing I didn't mention, but probably is the thing that I would tie most directly to the rope flow. I love working on pads in Muay Thai. And it is such a good workout. I'm not going to get yet another goddamn concussion. I don't need any more of those. And I would really like to get to the point again where I can train on pads hard for lots of rounds with a really, really skilled trainer.

29:58I just love that experience. And I'm so bored of stationary biking for my endurance work. I'm so bored. I mean, God bless these tools, but still, it's pretty boring. So where should we go? There are lots of tools in the toolkit. Let me ask you this. For people who might be wondering, and guys, I'm not getting an affiliate commission on rope sales here. I have no dog in this fight, but it seems to be a very versatile tool. And there are lots of versatile tools, but it is also a tool that is very hard to injure yourself with. and for me it's like weightlifting and a lot of training number one unless it's a sport right is about injury minimization first and foremost so if i add in strength training that increases the likelihood or endurance training increases the likelihood of me getting injured scratch it it's out and then i'll take my risks where i need and want to take my risks like skiing but i don't want to take it in the weight room how long does it take for people to see some benefits from something like rope flow?

31:01And what have you seen in students and people who try this and stick with it for a couple weeks? Literally, I've had people that are in the strong human community that literally after day one, they're finding that they have better balance walking up the steps. And these are people in their 50s and 60s. They're like, I'm walking upstairs and I feel more balanced. Why? Because you're shifting your weight from one side to the other in a more efficient manner because the rope has taught you how to do that, you'll feel better rather immediately. Now, the question is like, how deep do you want to take?

31:33How many of these movements do you want to learn? I've seen Kelly Strett start posting more about rope flow and he's been talking about it in the form as just being a warmup before you do any of your lifting movements as a good rotational warmup. And that's great. So it can just be used for that. But I think there is a power that comes with the practice when like today we linked around four movements together, the overhand, the propeller and the dragon and the underhand. What was it called when I donkey punched myself in the back of the head with the rope? We should give that one a name. That's the Ferris.

32:02That's what you call Ferris. The one thing I want to mention about this too is this. Honestly, I look at rope flow as kind of like its own internal martial art. Do you know internal martial arts? So when it comes to internal martial arts, like I think Tai Chi would be considered one. Bagua would be considered an internal martial art. when it comes to these martial arts, they're not necessarily like extra martial arts like jujitsu, boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai. That's based on the output, based on the damage you're going to give to an opponent. The focus is more so on breathing, mastering the movement, linking the movements together.

32:36You're more focused on what's going on internally and what your body is doing through space. Now, there are forms of like aspects of Tai Chi that can be applied to combat. But when you see a lot of older people doing Tai Chi, it's this flowy movement practice that gets the body feeling better afterwards than when it began. In a lot of ways, just having spent a good amount of time in early mornings in China and so on, it's kind of like, people are going to crucify me for this, but it's kind of like Chinese yoga in a sense. They are moving through all of these different planes of movement. They're doing it every day.

33:08Even the kind of rotational kidney slapping stuff, there are some similarities. Absolutely. When you look at rope flow and then you look at what these 80, 90-year-olds are doing in China in the park every morning. And they're 80 and 90, dude. That's the thing that's so amazing to me. You're still moving like that at 80 and 90. You're independent. I would even assume that a lot of these people probably feel minimal amounts of pain. They feel a level of freedom in their bodies at that age. That's kind of how I look at rope flow when you learn to link things together. So we learned a few movements today, but there are so many more movements that you learn.

33:39And the cool thing is that you do some of this stuff this week, Tim. You're going to wake up and it's just going to be there. You don't have to think about the movement now. You just go out side, you do it, it's no thought. It turns into a flow. It turns into a flow state practice. That's where I think the strength is. Because that feels like play. It no longer feels like a frustrating rope flow practice. Although when you start learning new moves, there's a level of frustration. I still hit myself. That I hit you did today where you knocked your eye, I do that all the time when I'm learning new shit.

34:08The rope will still do that to me. Because the rope teaches you how to rotate. You learn how to follow its weight. It'll teach you how to rotate better by hitting you, by not rotating cleanly. When you clean that up, then it rotates cleanly to the left and cleanly to the right. And then again, when you link all this stuff together, it's play. It's a flow state play that always feels better afterwards.

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35:58Now for people listening and for me, oftentimes when I say for people listening, it's just because I want to ask a question for myself. I am the type of person, I know myself well enough at this point, I am almost certainly not going to become the Muhammad Ali of rope flow or the Fred Astaire of rope flow. It's just not going to happen. What are the bread and butter minimum effective dose? Maybe people can find this. You can point them to where they can find these things. But are there two or three movements where you're like, okay, if you're just going to do five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day, maybe it's two times five to start your day and to end your day.

36:37what are like the bread and butter moves where it's like if you only did this there would be a lot of upside yeah what are those that would be first off i have a full foundations row flow course that is free it's like 50 plus videos of it it's at school.com slash the stronger human okay it's free okay now overhand race and chase underhand race and chase propeller or dragon which is what we did today yeah right i do race and chase you did yeah that's what you did the overhand race and chase you did the underhand race and chase race and chase is walking while you're doing that's it's not walking you just you can just stand there but you added walking into it you added a gate pattern into it right so overhand race and chase underhand race and chase propeller link those three together you have a flow from side to side right and those are like that's the basics right you learn to link those together you'll feel better yeah but again i think that you mentioned you're not gonna become the mom and i'll leave rope floor or whatever but one thing that i think is good to understand is like, we got decades for this, bro.

37:34You know what I mean? Like what is three to five or 10 minutes a day for a few years? How good are you going to be at this a year from now, just for five minutes? Like you're going to look pretty fucking good. And then my mom's probably listening. She didn't want me to curse. Sorry, mom. I'm going to forget and I'm going to curse myself. So you can blame it on my bad influence. But five years from now doing it five minutes, you'll probably do it longer because you're going to naturally just get better at it. you're going to just be moving really well with this from this minimal input. It can be a practice that beats you up, especially if, because you can get a workout from it.

38:08It doesn't have to be that. It doesn't have to be something that beats you up. But if you want to go intense with it, use a heavier rope. How much do ropes cost for people listening? Because I haven't even asked that. I should have asked that. Yeah. Like to get something you can use for this. Cause I do find a little bit of heft to be helpful, right? We started with a very lightweight, light rope, which was almost like a lariat, like a lasso. I mean, it was very small in diameter. How much does it cost to get the Magna XL? The Magnum XL? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. How much does one of those cost?

38:40I think the Magma XL is like - Oh, it's Magma. Magma, not Magnum. No, it's Magma. Your mind went to Magma. I know, I know, I know. But it's Magma. It's red. Some people can't be saved. I got it. Magma. Okay, God, I screwed that up twice. Okay. Magma XL. And this probably we were kind of bouncing around probably the rope itself probably weighs like two pounds two three pounds yeah maybe maybe maybe less yeah yeah all right and how much does that cost that one's like 80 i think 80 this is the thing though if you want to just get yourself a rope from home depot and cut it and make a rope that's fine you can work that you can even work with an exercise band you might have at home you can mess with some of this using a belt if you don't want to get anything if you just want to like do the bare bones stuff but certain ropes like the magma XL, the RMT rope, which I think is like 40 or$45.

39:31There's a feedback that you get from the rope because it's very smooth when you're rotating it. That kind of feels better than a Home Depot rope. Doesn't mean you can't use a Home Depot rope or a rope from a boating store. Boating store ropes are actually pretty good quality. Boating stores are really good quality ropes. So you could get something from there, cut it up, make your rope, you're good. So that's the thing. It's a practice that if you don't want to spend anything on it, you don't have to. Or if you want to spend nothing or very minimal amounts of money. You can do that. But then all you need is your rope, some sunlight, or you can do it indoors if you want to, and you're going to feel better.

40:08One thing I want to stress is this. Do you know who Bill Maeda is out of Hawaii? I have seen his videos. Yeah, Bill's the man, man. Yeah. I love Bill. And we had him on a show a few years back. People have probably been saying this forever, but when he told me, when he started speaking this way, it really resonated with me, where he calls his workout each day. He calls it a practice. It's his practice. For people who don't know who this is, how would you describe Bill? He's a lifting samurai. That's how I would personally describe him. How old is Bill at this point? 55 or 56. And that guy is unbelievably shredded and strong.

40:43Strong, shredded. Bill has a level of also curiosity that I admire because Bill has had so much fitness experience through the years. He's done so much. He's had a lot of positive and negative experiences, but he's also someone that as much as he knows, he's continuously open to learning more and refining his knowledge and what he teaches his clients, the people he works with. And that's one thing I really admire about him because he's 50 something years old. He looks amazing. He does well, but like, he's also a sponge and that's something that I want to ideally, I hope when I'm 55 or 56, I want to remain a sponge.

41:16I don't want to lose that, but he calls his movement, his workouts of practice because he changes it up each day. He does like five, 10, 15 minutes of movement and that's his daily practice. And that's kind of the way I look at my movement practice. There are like when I go into a gym, I have in my notes app, I have just certain things that I might be doing during that day or I'll know what I did last week. So I'll be okay. Let's maybe add this in or do something else. But I keep things around so that I get a general daily minimum amount of movement in no matter what. So I have like certain flow movement that I'll get in.

41:50I have a club by my desk. I have a sandbag by my workstation. I have a sandbag in my garage. I have rings in my kitchen. I have things spent throughout the house and throughout my space so that when I go by them, I'm encouraged to lift them. I'm encouraged to lift the bag. I'm encouraged to swing the rope. I'm encouraged to swing the club. I do all these things on a daily basis. That has my body feeling better and better as I continue to progress at the meat and potatoes of what I'm really trying to push forward. So I have these daily minimums, which is just my practice. These don't have certain things that might be the workout, whether it's the jujitsu or the thing I do in the gym or my garage, or maybe I go out to the field and I do some stuff, some extra work.

42:28But I have those daily minimums that are just part of my practice that just make sure that I'm always making progress so that the only time that I do something isn't just in my workout. I want my body to be able to do these things at any time. And I mean, that underscores also some of the stuff that I saw and you explained in the video. And you have a lot of videos. This just happens to be the one that initially caught my attention. But if someone, let's just say, is training the big three lifts or whatever they happen to do, and they're hitting them once a week or who knows, and then they're not getting really any movement practice between those, it's like of course they're going to be very constrained to a certain plane of movement certain types of movements well let me bring this back to me i've been watching conan o 'brien must go if people haven't seen that travel show you should you should watch it because that's basically conan's move so i'll copy conan here we were talking about this back issue that's been plaguing me and how I am actually back to a point now as of just a few days ago where I'm loading more in terms of, let's just say back squat, which is like a very open question as to whether to include it or not and other things, making a lot of progress ever since really surgically trying to focus on glute exercises, which seems self-evident, but I could give people a long list of stories about why that's been a challenge over the last three years, but I've made progress and want to get back to, let's just say, doing five rounds of heavy work on tie pads.

44:10And who knows, maybe even doing some jujitsu, although I have a lot of PTSD from my joint injuries. So what are some of the things you would potentially suggest? If you were getting me started with programming. And I'm sure you'd have to do an assessment and so on. There are some of the things we talked about over lunch. We don't have to talk about these, but like sandbag, box squat, recognizing that I'm very apprehensive about the low back. If I have to sit, for instance, on like a hardwood bench for 30 minutes and I don't have any padding, my back could be seized up for a week, which means basically no sleep.

44:46So I'm scared of having that experience. And I recognize that if I don't load and work on my body, not just the low back in isolation, it's never going to be fixed or improve. So how would you think about training with respect to this? I'd have to rewind it. We talked a little bit about this early, but I'd have to rewind things back to first off the way someone breathes through the way that they move daily, every single day. Because when you injure something initially, you injure a lower back, which has happened to me many a time in the past, when something happens that aggravates the area, you tend to hold your breath.

45:24So when you bend to grab something, and then when you feel safe enough, you'll exhale and start breathing again. Some people do this without even realizing. They'll go down to tie their shoes and they have breath holds without realizing they have breath holds. It's just an ingrained movement pattern that they bend, hold their breath, come up, Boom. They get out of the car. They're holding their breath. Many people have instances through their day that the breath is being held. And the problem with that, the reason why that's a really big issue, is because when you hold your breath, your tissues will kind of seize up to keep everything in place.

45:59That's the Valsal maneuver. When lifters lift heavy loads and sometimes not heavy loads is meant to increase that intra-abdominal pressure so that there is no movement of the spine when you're dealing with the load. That's what it's meant to do. but also there's limited movement when you're holding your breath. So the thing that I would want to get you doing is first to make sure that you learn how to breathe while doing everything. That doesn't mean just like breathe when you're doing everything through the house, et cetera. Like even when you're going to go pick something up and you find, okay, I'm going to hold my breath when I do this.

46:37Can you slow that movement down in a way that you can try to breathe while doing it so that you're not ingraining that pathway of hold breath and do the thing? How can we do the thing and breathe? Because when we're breathing, the body feels safe. If you're breathing and doing stretching, you're breathing or doing anything when it comes to movement, you move more freely. Once you hold your breath, your body goes into this, I'm trying to stay safe. Same thing in jujitsu. When a new person starts jujitsu, the first thing that you have to tell them to do is breathe. You remember, right? You're on bottom side control or you're in some type of position and immediately you're like, you're trying to produce force and you're holding your breath while doing so because you don't feel safe enough to produce that force while breathing.

47:26What this is going to do is it's going to help us to kind of get those tissues moving in the way that they should. The body's going to feel safe, so those tissues are going to start moving well, and we won't have excess tension throughout the whole system. And this is why I would tell somebody with whatever lifting that they're doing right now, let's lower the loads that we're working with and learn how to use the breath while lifting, pushing, pulling, hinging. Let's learn to use the breath while doing all of this. What this means is when we are in our concentric phase the lift, whether it's a push when lifting, whether it's a pull when pulling, whether it's hinging or coming up from a squat or exhaling.

48:10Let's just use the squat as an example rather than a bunch of things. The squat. Inhale when you're going down to the hole. Exhale when you're coming out of the hole. Let's learn how to do that. Because in life, if we're going to squat down to the ground, we wouldn't, we shouldn't hold our breath when going down to the ground. But many people do. We should just kind of like, whether it's inhale when getting down there and then breathe normally. We should be able to do that. And what I want to try to help you do is I want you to make this a global phenomenon. You're having very minimal or no, unless they're purposeful breath holds, you're not holding your breath during the day, right?

48:44There's other benefits outside of this where you're not going to feel as stressed because a lot of people, when they are looking at their phone, where they start thinking of something that brings a level of anxiety, inherently they'll start to hold their breath and they don't realize it. This is something that's going to help you get rid of global tension outside of what you're doing in the gym, which is going to help you just feel better overall. And this isn't something you deal with in just a day. This is a habit change, right? If you want to change the way you do this when you're lifting, you must lower your loads.

49:11You don't do this with maximal loads. You don't do this with heavy squats, heavy deadlifts. You don't do this when lifting heavy sandbags or even kettlebells, right? If you're not used to this, you work on doing this with light load. And just like you progressed before with heavier loads, you progressively overload your ability to lift while breathing over time. You can progressively work with heavier and heavier load. So assuming I'm working on this, I'm working on the breathing. Tim, breathe. All right. My garage is a gym. I may not have all the requisite tools at the moment. It's got all the basics.

49:45What are, whether it is me or others, but what are some of the non-negotiable exercises that you might prescribe for someone in my position where it's like, okay, I remember back in the day, I like to consider myself pretty athletic. My enthusiasm outstrips my structural integrity on some regular occasions. And I would like to train for the long game, but also I would like to be very strong. I would like to be, for me, I would like to be very strong. I still know I can develop that capacity. It's just a matter of strengthening or catering to the low back so that I'm not terrified every time I set foot in the gym of having some spasm that cost me two weeks of sleep.

50:30So let me ask you a question. So back squat or no back squat? For you? Yeah. Or - Depends on the type of back squat we're talking. All right. Because we had box squats come up and I had some questions and concerns around that. Talked about sandbags. How would you think about lower body, I mean, I guess it could be full body, but lower body loading for someone like me? I would want you to focus a little bit more on unilateral before we do more bilateral axial spine back squat loading. So something like different forms of lunges, the ATG split squat is a really good money movement. Do you know what the ATG split squat is?

51:09I do not know what that is. ATG split squat is something popularized by Ben Patrick. Deep knee flexion of the front knee, the back foot has a large amount of a hip extension so you're getting hip extension of the back leg deep knee flexion of the front leg so you're building a level of strength through long ranges of motion with that movement so those atg split squats different types of lunges i'd have you focus on that instead of the traditional actual loaded back squat for a while i'd also say that not that bilateral squatting is bad but if you do maybe you start learning how to do that with a sandbag.

51:44So use a kettlebell or a sandbag with that. First thing you need to learn how to lift a sandbag because when you lift a sandbag, the load is in front of you. Your spine is going to be in a fairly neutral position, but you're going to have a little bit more of slight maybe flexion in that spine. And you're going to learn how to breathe against that load while squatting down with it in front of you. So that could be a 50, 100 pound sandbag. You'll probably start there and you'll probably move forward with that over time. But the thing is, is you're not directly loading that spine right now as you're doing.

52:14You're not causing all of that compression. Not that compression is bad, but it seems as if you're a bit compression sensitive when it comes to squatting patterns because of what's going on with your back. Now, if you did want to work on some bilateral squatting, which I don't think is a horrible idea, I would probably say if you wanted to work with a barbell, don't squat to full deep knee flexion depth. Let's stay away from that for a while. So let's do barbell back squats to a box, making sure you're maintaining tension as you go down to the box and coming up. So you're not just plopping down to the box, sitting back, losing that tension, then coming out, maintaining that tension while breathing.

52:53And you're working with maybe 40, 50%, 50, maybe 60 % of your one rep max, where it's like you can actually master the movement without stressing about the load. But over time, you can inch that load up in a safe manner. And is the reason for that just because this might help other people. So I injured myself three years ago doing a workout that did not feel like an injury at the time. It was back squatting, but I was basically going like ass to heels. And I suspect in retrospect that I was doing like a little butt wink where I was starting to, to make it simple, just kind of like round the lower back in the bottom ranges.

53:30and I think it was that kind of bending of the paper clip that caused that initial acute problem that was a real squat bro yeah yeah that's how you're supposed that's a real squat bro like you don't squat ass to grass so the box would let's just say would it be just above parallel something like that above parallel or right at 90 degrees yeah basically helps to mitigate the risk of that would you do something similar with the sandbag or would you do that from the floor like what does the range of motion look like? You could squat down to a box or you could squat all the way down with a light load if you feel comfortable.

54:05I would suggest that in your situation, you inch that down over time. What you could do is if you have multiple sandbags, you could squat down to the other sandbag or you could squat down to a box. And then over time, lower that height where you feel comfortable. Just make sure as you're squatting down, when you hit depth, you're maintaining tension. When I say maintaining tension, by the way, I mean, you're not totally just sitting down in the box, limping out and then coming back up. You're inhaling as you go down to the box. You're still maintaining that position, and then you drive up. You're not losing that tension that you've created in your legs, your feet especially, as you go down.

54:38You're maintaining it. The reason why people do the Valsalva maneuver is so when they hold their breath, they can maintain structural integrity of the spine, ribcage over hips, et cetera. When you're braced and you can't move, what's keeping that integrity is the air that you've stored in your abdomen when you're squatting down. When you're breathing while doing this, whether you're inhaling while you're going down and exhaling when coming up, the structural integrity is you're maintaining it. Like you're maintaining it while you're breathing. So when you're breathing, you do have more room for that to happen.

55:09But you should be able to maintain that structure without the breath. When I deadlifted 755, I didn't use a belt. The main reason I didn't use a belt is I wanted to make sure that my structure could deadlift this weight without the need of outside assistance. the weight belt when you're using it is supposed to when you push against it increase the amount of intra-abdominal pressure you're able to create and help you maintain that but i when i did that the reason why i didn't use the belt is because it didn't make sense to me to develop all this strength if i couldn't do it on my own so when now we're breathing while doing this very constantine constantinos i think yeah back in the day a lot of russians did that though a lot of russians would do that you know but i think that there's a knowledge there because like you want to be able to do all of this stuff on your own.

55:56Yes, it can add some, but having to need to use a belt to do everything to maintain your structure, I don't think it's the best idea. Now, when we're using the breath, we're not getting that extra pressure that it helps create, but we're training ourselves to always be able to maintain the right structure and maintain the right amount of tension while breathing when lifting weights. And the reason why we're doing that is because life wants us to do that. When we're going through life, when we're fighting, we're not holding our breath. And I know that some people will say, well, this isn't the gym.

56:27The gym is supposed to help you do this stuff better. The reason why I started doing this is because I wanted to make sure that the strength I was building in the gym would be something that would transfer really well to the fighting that I was doing and the stuff that I was trying to do. And in all of that, breath holding is never part of it. Unless swimming, there's breath holding. I think even for me now, when lifting something really heavy, it's an exhale. I will use, when people see me using sandbags, this is an aside, but I was always somebody who when I lifted, I purposefully wanted to stay quiet.

57:05I don't like emoting. I don't like it. It's not in my nature to be the person who goes, ah, when doing stuff. But when you learn to breathe while lifting, what ends up happening is when you're creating that force, when you're lifting that sandbag off the ground, when you're pushing, that happens, right? You're lifting, that happens. It's not because I'm trying to sound hard or tough or whatever. It's because - It's like the TIE fighter's kicking. It's what my body needs to do to produce the force efficiently and I can stay safe through it. As that started to happen, I started to feel stronger and it transfers.

57:38You know what I mean? So that's why something that actually I think would help people kind of understand this, especially the exhaling to create tension, is let's do this right now. I think you already understand, but I think it's serve. Growl. Growl. Growl. I'll do it first. Growl. What do you feel? Do it. Just breathe and then. I feel, I mean, there's a sort of shielding. There's like abdominal contraction. There's a level of tension that's created. That's the most noticeable thing, yeah. But now when you're exhaling, when you see a fighter, that tension is created to keep this structure in place so it's safe when producing force.

58:25So this is why when I'm lifting a heavy sandbag or when I'm coming out of the hole of a squat or when I'm deadlifting, sometimes this will come out because it's my breath helping me create a strong enough structure to not buckle under the load I'm lifting. rather than me holding the breath. And not that again, not that this is bad. If you're a lifter and you're doing this for your maximal lifts, I'm not telling you to just desert the Valsal maneuver. But I do believe that if you learn to breathe while lifting, this is one of the fundamental things that will keep you safe while lifting, that will help you progress well, and will help you decrease the amount of stress that it has on your body over time.

59:03Yeah. Okay, cool. And lastly, the biggest thing I think is it'll help you get rid of excess tension that you're holding in your body when you don't need to have that tension. A lot of people deal with that. Let's say I'm working on that. Let's say I decide box squat, I can give that a go. Maybe I have a safety squat yoke or something. Sandbag, all right. Probably do some isolateral stuff. So ATG split squat. For somebody who's listening, let's say maybe they're in a similar boat or maybe their back is fine, but they want to get stronger using these movements. what type of set rep programming do you give to someone who's not an elite powerlifter there's no need to do anything under five or six reps and then if that's the case you don't have to do that because over time as you work with sets of five six eights tens right over time you'll naturally be able to get stronger with those in those rep schemes with those loads and i'm not saying that heavy lifting isn't good.

1:00:05I do things that are three, four or five reps when I'm working with heavy loads. I still do that. But the problem that happens with a lot of people when they get into a program that's focused on the load and the heaviness of the load, they start doing things they shouldn't do to lift that load. So if we're trying to focus on maintaining our breath, there's going to come a point where you're working with a load that you're going to find you won't be able to breathe well. You won't be able to inhale and exhale at the phases of the lift that you should be, but you are also, you manage to lift it and you're like, okay, I'm strong enough for this.

1:00:34So you'll add on more and then you'll get to a place where you're holding your breath. And then you'll get to the place where all the times that anything's really happened for me has been when I was creating a little bit too much tension. I was holding my breath and something happens, right? Not when I was breathing with it. So that's why I don't necessarily, if you're not someone who's powerlifting and if you're in the gym, you're just wanting to lift and get stronger. I don't want you to focus on the weight on the bar. I want you to focus on the quality of the movement. Yeah. I'm by myself in my garage.

1:01:02So I definitely have no one to impress. So what would you suggest then? Would it be two, three sets of blank with like X number of minutes in between? Because like we were chatting a little bit and this is nothing obviously compared to what you do. But when I was my strongest, like back in the day, which was like probably 96 when I was in China of all places, I was doing sets of, let's just call it six to 10, but closer to six in pretty much all movements with like five to 10 minute rests right i was taking really long intervals and generally hitting it was split push pull legs and it was i was hitting each of those workouts once a week roughly what would you prescribe as a starting point like for me with sets and reps and rest intervals and things like that any thoughts on how to three sets per movement.

1:01:57I like people doing things for sets of, not sets, reps, six, 10, 12. I would say doing that kind of rep scheme. So what I would do is on certain days, if you're doing two times a week in the gym, one of those days, have your movements doing maybe sets of six or so. And I would also split it up like this too. When I lift, I kind of do upper and lower body. I don't just break it up into like a push pull, whatever I do kind of full body stuff. Right. So if you're doing upper and lower on a certain day. For one day, for your upper body movements, if you're doing sets of six or so, do sets of 10 on your lower body, eight to 10, higher repetitions.

1:02:31Okay. So this day, let's just say it's Monday. Upper body would be six rep sets. Lower body would be 10. Higher rep, 10, 12 sets. Yeah. 12 reps per set. On another day, if you're doing a full body day again, I would say for the upper body, that would now be higher repetitions and your lower body would be lower repetitions if you're doing two full body days. Now, I think you said you're doing push, pull legs, right? And I'm not married to that. It's just easy for me to remember. There are so many ways to set things up, but for minimum effective dose, if you can do each body part twice per week, which you can probably do in two to three training days, it doesn't have to be a five-day split.

1:03:13Literally, you can do all this two or three days in the gym for two days, that's how I would split it up. For three days, you get a little bit more leeway with volume. And three days is nice because if you, for example, on your first day, if you find that you do better having slightly lower amounts of movements, then you can split that volume into three separate days rather than having that volume in two days instead. Does that make sense? Can you give me an example? So if you did five upper body movements and five lower body movements on one day, And then day two, you did five lower and five up.

1:03:48If you're finding that you, that's too much for you to do in a two day period, you could take some of that for me. I get, for whatever reason, handle volume very poorly. Instead of just totally taking down that workload, split that workload into three days. So then you're doing, what is it? You just mentioned 20 total sets, do six sets, six sets. And then on another day, it's going to be eight sets of that movement. You split that volume to three days, you're good. But you can still do that rep scheme where you hit each body part twice a week. You manage to do some slightly lower repetition, some slightly higher repetition.

1:04:23You're good. And then what about rest between sets? That's variable because some people like to have actual rest between sets. But then you can also, if you're doing on a certain day, let's say for your upper body movements that you do some push and some pull, you could superset those because they're antagonistic. So when I say antagonistic, you do, instead of resting, you do a pushing movement. Then you could literally just, let's say you do a push and you do a row. You could do that back to back because the recovery of each movement doesn't necessarily get too much in the way of each other. There will be some stress from the weight you did in that specific first set, but the muscles being worked when you're doing that push movement do not get as much in the way as the muscles you're doing work in the pull movement.

1:05:04So you could rest if you wanted to, but you could also superset it. And one thing that I think a concept that I want people to take from this because I know how people love To have that specific program that they do, which is good but Learn to add an element of play into this learn to have an element of freedom into this So if you feel like you want to rest like a minute or two in between the set rest you feel like you want a super set super set because again I think that you can get very specific with it But when you start making too many stringent rules within it, it can, for some people become quite daunting and monotonous.

1:05:43So something that I do is like, when I'm doing like a squat, I'll sometimes do some rope flow in between just to get some rotation. Let me ask you this, just to stand in for the audience here. Yeah. Do you think you could have gotten away with that earlier in your training, right? Have you laid such an incredible foundation of strict, maybe monotonous training that now you're like, okay, like this body's not really going anywhere. So if I want to do some Sudoku in between my overhead presses and do some rope flow over here, maybe a little pantomiming in between this set and that set that you can get away with it in a way that might not serve a beginner or intermediate.

1:06:24Or is that, am I off base there? So the reason, let me mention the reason why I do rope flow in between. It's not because it's part of a workout, it's because it helps me feel better. When I put so much compression on myself, there's a level of like for me stiffness that i feel from that set the reason why i do the rope flow is to help me kind of undo that stiffness before my next set that's the reason why i do it i don't do it because it's like a super efficient part of the workout but i do it because it helps me feel better for the next set i'm about to do when i do a lot like and other people notice this too but when you do a lot of compressive things back to back you start to kind of feel this lower back tension and stiffness and this overall stiffness that you're creating for the workout So the stiffness isn't necessarily a bad thing.

1:07:05If you have something, especially like you don't have to do rope flow in between sets too. You do that post-workout or later, that will be something that really will help you feel better. But the thing is, is like when you only do that, you then walk around with that stiffness that you've created and you have nothing to undo it. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people will work out. Then after their workout, they'll do dead hangs because they feel like I'm getting this decompression in my spine from everything. And that can feel better. But the thing is, is like you can get that same decompression from the rope.

1:07:36You could get the same type of decompression from swimming. Swimming does the same thing. But the reason why I was saying all this is like, have a structure to what you do, but allow yourself to kind of add things to it or subtract things to it when you want. The only thing that's going to help you get bigger and stronger is progressive overload over a long period of time. Yeah. It's not going to be the magic set and ret scheme that you're doing right now. it's going to be what you're doing being progressed over years. And for people listening, because I think one criticism that I get a lot is like, you didn't get this big from rope flow.

1:08:10Nah, I didn't get this big from rope flow. But at the same time, I could have gotten this big while feeling better for years if I had the other practices that I do, like the rope, the clubs, the kettlebells. If I'd had those practices included, it's not about getting big. it's about gaining strength and muscle but moving well throughout the whole process yeah not focusing on the way you look but moving like a fridge and feeling like you're old yeah that's not the goal right i mean i don't think anyone sets out to gain muscle and strength with also the goal of feeling like they're 80 years old no one wants that but that's where a lot of people are and a lot of people they'll assume that that's just part of the process yeah and doesn't need it doesn't really it doesn't need to be at all yeah you definitely need to hang out with jersey you'll enjoy hanging out with jersey and aniela i'm excited now for what you told me about i'm gonna like them yeah you guys you guys will get a kick out of each other because for instance like jersey he also does decompression but usually hanging upside down and like and like boots boots but he some like really heavy weights.

1:09:20Like he'll hold on to like a hundred pounds in addition to hanging upside down. Anyway, he's got his own like approach to things for very, very short duration, like five to 10 seconds. But I think you'll find a lot of his stuff thought provoking, but he is all about movement and he tracks everything meticulously with his trainees, but he'll also look at their gait and he's like, I want to get you to the point where you walk like a dancer. He's like, that's definitely one of his explicit goals is to like watch gait and movement in that way. And when I told him that I was doing, and I think there's a place for this, I'm going to continue to do it.

1:09:53But I was doing biking for exercise and what his thoughts were. And he was like, terrible. He's like, that's stupid. So stupid. And Jersey, I know I'm paraphrasing here, but he was like, if you want to ride a bike because it's fun to ride from point A to point B, he's like, great. He's like, if you want to ride for 50 miles because you enjoy it, great. He's like, if you're doing it though, as this monotonous punishment in training, he's like, terrible. always like, don't do that. Yeah. I think that, you know, I want to mention, don't lose your train of thought, but I think that's what he's mentioning there in terms of relation to gait.

1:10:22It's a very smart way to try to think about some of your training because when a lot of people think about the squat, when a lot of people get their feet set, they usually have their feet out at an angle. Slightly pointed out. Slightly pointed out, right? Slightly pointed out toes. You're creating this force upward with that barbell. So you're learning how to have force coming from the ground through, but you're just going straight up and down. Now, the thing to think about, and the reason why I mentioned this is when you do watch a lot of people that develop those capacities, and a lot of them walk through space, it's almost like they're walking in a squat position with their feet.

1:10:59They're walking with their feet out like this. Yeah, they got a Charlie Chaplin mask. Yeah. The thing is, you'll see some pro NBA players walking like this. You see a lot of that. I'm not going to necessarily say that. that's bad. What I'm going to say is over time, I used to kind of walk like that. But as I started thinking about what my feet were doing during everything I was doing, and I started thinking about doing certain exercises that would potentially improve my gait, over time, now my feet face forward when I walk. And I'm not intentionally doing this. It's just my directionality through space is now forward.

1:11:32I'm not fighting myself trying to navigate forward with feet that are outwards. That's not efficient. I'm not saying everybody needs to walk with their toes forward, but I'm saying when you start thinking about ways to adjust your gait with your movement, so this could be the bilateral movements like the ATG split squat. That could be using a sled. I think sleds are super powerful. And the unfortunate thing is not everyone has access to a sled, but that is literal forward and backward force production. When you're pushing a sled, there's this force that you're learning how to push forward, but you need to have your feet moving you forward too.

1:12:07So you're learning over time how to push a weight forward through space. I think they're super powerful, not just for developing structural strength, but also improving one's gait over time. The way you walk will change and the rope will help with that too. But that's something to think about. Like, I don't think most people should be walking with their feet ducked out. And I used to walk like that because sumo deadlifting, the feet are here. I'm producing force from a foot position like this. Squatting, I'm producing force from a foot position like this. Now when I go and do other things, that's the way I move through space.

1:12:40And that's not efficient. So just because I'm curious and at least long ago found a lot of dividends from doing sumo deadlifts. They're not bad, by the way. Recommendations for sumo deadlifts. Any thoughts on common mistakes, tips that you've sort of principles that you've refined over time where you're like, okay, here's some of my pre-flight checklist that might be helpful to people. And could you just describe, well, so it's called sumo deadlift because it's a deadlift. You're pulling a barbell loaded with plates off the ground, but your legs are wide. Your hands are in between your legs going down to grab the barbell.

1:13:20So you look like a Yokozuna, like squatting down and getting ready to do the whole sumo thing. Hence the name. What recommendations might you have for people who are hoping to improve their sumo deadlift? there's this funny thing within the powerlifting community where the powerlifters are like they look at the sumo deadlift and they say that's not a real deadlift yeah that's not a conventional deadlift conventional deadlift would be like knees inside the arms yeah and it's just so funny to me we had a an aside colton engelbrecht he has the highest total ever in powerlifting of around i think i'm gonna butcher this but i think it's like 26 50 at two i think he was 275 when he did this So he wasn't even like at the heaviest weight class.

1:14:01He was 275. At 22 years old. He's been powerlifting for three years. This is for the three lifts. All right. So he squatted 470 kilograms, 260 kilogram bench, 470 kilogram deadlift on an eight or nine day. So he squatted and deadlifted at 1 ,036 pounds in the same meet. At 22. At rifle at the age of 22 years old. Good Lord. The reason why I'm mentioning this. This is yet another reason you never start your street fights, people. I mean, I doubt you'd pick on this guy, but you just never know. So much stronger, so much younger. It's insane. But the reason why I'm mentioning Colton is because Colton does the sumo deadlift.

1:14:39And some people roast him for that. And they're like, it's not conventional. It's like, whatever. But when we had him on the show, I was like, Colton, why do you sumo deadlift? And he was like, it feels more natural. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, it does. It feels weird to bend down and pick up a barbell implement in the conventional way, at least for my body type. Some people with very long arms, certain length of their femur, some people feel better with conventional. But the sumo, for me, has just made more sense because you're getting down in this hip position, you're driving with your legs, it just makes more sense, in my opinion.

1:15:13So nothing against conventional, nothing against any other deadlift, but the sumo. Now, when doing the sumo deadlift, I think one thing that people really need to focus on is what their feet are doing. And I think this would be how it should be with every single lift. But when doing the sumo especially, there's a cue that people get, and people get this cue in squatting too, where you'll hear knees, push your knees outward. For the squat, you push your knees out so you can have space to get in between your hips when you're squatting. Sometimes your knees are too far forward. Some people with their limb lengths don't have the ability to get down to depth.

1:15:42So when you push your knees out, you provide room. The sumo deadlift, when people say push your knees out, when you push your knees out, you provide room for the barbell to ride up your body. but the other cue of rooting the feet into the ground and i learned this cue from kelly stratt's book becoming a supple leopard back in 2013 have you met kelly met kelly yeah we've had him on the show a few times okay i i always mention where i've learned these things because kelly's awesome but i learned that from his book i also learned and the reason why i keep my face relaxed when lifting and stuff i also learned that from his book supple leopard that's when he talks about myofascial release you shouldn't have a pain face real if you relax it's going to allow yourself to relax through these movements.

1:16:23But anyway, that's an aside. Rooting your feet into the ground will allow you to have external rotation of the hips. I mean, we did a little bit of this earlier today, but just describe for people what that actually means. You're in a gym doing a sumo deadlift. You have shoes on, presumably. What are you doing with your feet and legs? I think something that can help somebody understand this is using the hands, putting your hand on the table and trying, you could actually do this with both hands, keep your fingers planted in the table and try to see if you can rip the table apart while keeping your fingers where they are, like rip the table apart.

1:16:58Now, what do you feel when you do that? So in this case, you're sort of externally rotating your hands, even though they're not moving. Yeah. Ripping that table apart. But what do you feel when you do that with your hands? That's actually, what do you feel? What do I feel? I mean, I feel a lot of tension in my arms. You feel a lot of tension in your arms. What do you feel on your shoulder? Shoulders have gone down. and my lats are engaged. So, I mean, there's a lot going on. So the shoulder can be compared to the hip where the hip externally rotates as you're grabbing the ground. The shoulders will have this downward rotation.

1:17:30Right. As I do this, I guess it depends on if we were doing like a push-up, it might even be better right now. Arms are extended in front of us. If we're doing a push-up, what I would expect is that this eye of the elbow, the inside of the elbow, let's just call it the eye kind of, when you bend your arm, it would be in that crook, would almost certainly rotate. I would imagine there would be some rotation in a push-up position. Exactly. Which would then mimic the, I guess, femur. Exactly. So the reason why I wanted you to do that through your hands is I think that could help some people understand what they should be doing with their feet.

1:18:01You've got some meaty hands, my friend. I would not want to get slapped with those things. Jesus. Tim, Tim. I'm just saying. Let me say this. You don't know how happy that makes me feel. Do you know why? Because you've wanted to slap me and now it's not allowed? No, no, no, no, no. But over the past jujitsu, and we're going to come back to the foot thing, but jujitsu is a martial art that has a lot to do with the hands, the grip. And I've noticed that my hands have gotten bigger because I've purposely started doing more hand type of work this past year. Like the rice bucket. Like the rice bucket.

1:18:33I've been doing a lot of hand work because I started, because of all the gripping and the martial art, I started to feel pain in my fingers. And one thing you notice with a lot of high-level black belt grapplers is their fingers are kind of mangled because of everything that happens over the years. So I started doing rice buck work and a bunch of other things, but my hands, I'm happy you say that because my hands didn't used to be this meaty. So thank you. You're welcome. It's working. You're welcome. Okay. Yeah. If this jujitsu or YouTube thing doesn't work out, you know, you could go into one of those Russian slapping competitions.

1:19:01I would never. Yeah. I wouldn't have not worth, not worth the TBI. They would mess me up for sure. I'm not strong enough for that. But the reason why I wanted people to do that on the table and feel that is because when a lot of people try to do this with the feet, they just grab the ground like this. And like what you were doing in the park initially, they kind of just curl their toes. Like pinch. Yeah. Like pinch instead of pinching slightly and then ripping apart to create that rotation. And ripping apart, just to be clear, is not straight out to the sides. It's really like a rotational. Yes.

1:19:30Right. And that rotation is going to allow the knees to come out. And for the sumo deadlift, the knees will pull out because you're getting external rotation of the hips, which will allow you room to drive the hips forward. Let me ask you this. with the summa deadlift, when you place your feet, let's just say straight ahead is 12 o 'clock and then your toes are getting pointed out. How externally rotated are your feet to begin with? Are they as far out as you can get them and really close to the plates? Are they at 10 o 'clock and two o 'clock? And then you get that type of tearing apart external rotation.

1:20:07Nowadays, my feet would probably be at 11 and one. Okay. All right. The reason why they're at 11 and one is because I have better mobility than I had asked. So when I do create that torsion, I have more hip mobility to even to, to create when I'm moving out. Some people who don't have that hip mobility have to have their feet in a wider position so that they can create enough width to have their knees not be in the way of bar. Yeah. Right. So that's, that's totally dependent on one's hip mobility. But when you get more hip mobility, when you're creating that torsion, your, your feet angle will change slightly for how comfortable you are in the position.

1:20:40So whatever position you have right now, there's not like, there's a golden position for the level of mobility you currently have. And as that mobility improves and as your ability to create more force improves, that position will adjust. How close to the plates are your toes? My toes? Oh, no, no. Yeah. My toes aren't like, how wide is your stance? Is it another way to put it? It's like 90 degrees. So, so when I say 90 degrees, I mean, my legs are out and my feet are like, or my knees are right below my femurs. So I'm not like, I don't have this. You see a lot of people where they almost have this triangle angle with their feet.

1:21:13Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a box. That's the structure I'm creating. In the bottom position, you're saying? In the bottom position. Yeah. Yeah. In the bottom position, it's like, boom, boom. From knee to ankle is perpendicular. From knee to ankle is perpendicular. Yeah. Interestingly enough, you notice in Ed Cohn, he had this outward angle. You'll notice his feet were closer together in his sumo deadlift. Yeah. And he was a crazy sumo deadlifter, but that's where he found he was able to create the most force. What was his crazy record-setting deadlift? Some insane number. What was it, like 970 to 220 or something?

1:21:47Yeah, let's put it on screen. Ed Cohn's had a lot of records. Yeah, he's had a lot of records. I remember getting this book. I'm blanking on the author's name, but it was like Ed Cohn, The Man, The Myth, The Method, which was a great book. And there was a photo. You want to talk about people who are well-built for their sport. Like you look at Michael Phelps, you're like, okay, I could swim my whole life. Like my body doesn't look like that guy. Like his ankles are funny and like, he's just perfectly built for the sport. Right. And there was a photo, I don't know if it was Wilt Chamberlain or some NBA player who's like 10 foot 10.

1:22:17Right. And he's next to Ed Cohn, who's not 10 foot 10. He's like five foot five. And they put their hands together and they were the same size. And I was like, man, oh man, you could not design from scratch a better body for this exact lift. Have you ever met Ed Cohn? I don't think I have met Ed. We've had conversations before, but no, I don't think I've met him in person actually. Okay. Ed is a literal mutant to this day. The last time I saw him in person was a few years ago. I mean, is it fair to say, I mean, one of the greatest powerlifters, if not the greatest of all time? Still the greatest powerlifter of all time.

1:22:55I would say he's still the greatest powerlifter of all time. I think he popularized the sport so much. He got so many people into powerlifting. He inspired so many of the greatest minds in powerlifting to this day that I don't think no matter what anybody else does in powerlifting, I think Ed Cohn is probably still the greatest. And then from there, it's like, well, who has the highest total in that? You know what I mean? And going back to Ed's structure, first off, his hands are huge. I shook his hand and his hand engulfed my hand, right? Me being so much taller, it's like he ate my hand with his and made me feel so small.

1:23:28The second thing is the length of his arms. Yeah. Ed has these - His ape index must be off the charts. He has these orangutan arms, bro, where it's like, when you look at his sumo deadlift form, it kind of makes some sense with how easy - He doesn't have to have the legs super wide. He doesn't. He doesn't, right? So one of the things about the sumo and one of the things about lifting in general is finding the best position for your anatomical leverages. Like some people, like for example, a Kelly Sturette, a lot of the time he was squatting with his feet pointed straight forward, creating that torsion.

1:23:58but you look at his limb lengths, he could be really good for that. Some people, if they have a longer torso, sometimes that position doesn't do well for them because as they head down into the hole, their body folds. So some of them need to have a much wider stance so that when they head down into the hole, they don't have this massive folding of their torso. So that's one of the cool things with lifting where you'll see someone like an Olympic lifter with beautiful mechanics, but then you also really have to pay attention to the way this person is built and you have to find the best way to move that way through space with your leverages.

1:24:30Yeah, totally. Makes me think of one of my buddies, amazing striker, used to compete at a very high level. And I mean, he is like gangly as fuck. And that was part of the problem because he would be like a foot taller or he would have like eight inches of additional reach on people. So he would just pummel the hell out of people in the same weight class. But there's certain movements, like you want that guy to like do bench press, you're going to come away with the misperception that he is weak. It's like, no, maybe with that particular movement, sure, it's not very well built for his dimensions, but let him throw a power jab at your face.

1:25:04Yeah, he's well built for that. Just different body types. Let me add this in because I think this is something that can maybe give some people something to explore when it comes to their deadlift movement. When it comes to deadlifting, the things that we think about is the conventional deadlift, the sumo deadlift. Well, you could also attempt doing like a staggered stance deadlift. So a staggered stance deadlift would mean there's one foot ahead, one foot behind. The foot behind has the heel elevated slightly, like a kickstand. Kickstand, it could be called kickstand, staggered stance deadlift, deadlift in that way.

1:25:38You could use either a straight bar, you could use a trap bar. The concepts still hold true, but the reason why I have enjoyed progressing that staggered stance deadlift, and I use a trap bar when I do that, is just because for me, it feels as if it relates to gait a little bit better than the standard deadlifts do. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do the standard sumo or conventional. But when I'm thinking about creating upward force, how would I jump off of the ground? When I think about that and then I think about, okay, transferring that to a barbell, I wouldn't necessarily jump off of the ground in the stance that I'm using in sumo or conventional, I would do it in this kind of staggered kickstand stance and then pop off.

1:26:18If I were trying to actually create force upwards, that's how I would do it. And I think that that would be worth one's time to progress. You're not gonna lift as much weight initially, but over time you can build up some, I don't even like saying this because I don't want people to think of it in terms of numbers. I want people to think about the movement, but you can get very strong doing that. And then you're also strong in this stance that can relate to how you'll actually move yourself through space. But now you're creating force with it. What are some exercises that you think, I know this is such a maybe trite question, but just really incredible bang for the buck exercises.

1:26:57And for instance, for me, and I'm not saying I'm any paragon of exercise expertise, but the two-handed kettlebell swing is just, it seems like you get so much from that exercise performed consistently with progressive resistance, whether that's in terms of loading through higher volume or increasing the weight. I mean, it is just remarkable how much I get out of that exercise, even once or twice a week. It's just astonishing to me continually. Anything else that you would throw into that type of category that come to mind with the condition that you can get somebody to the point where they can perform them safely reasonably quickly.

1:27:44I think everyone should own a sandbag because picking up a sandbag off of the ground, starting light. So you get yourself, let's say you get a 75 pound bag, you fill it up to 50 pounds, you get yourself to lifting that without any type of discomfort. And one of the reasons why I think that is so beneficial and so useful is the way that one will bend down to pick up a sandbag. Because when you bend down to pick up a barbell, it's this implement that's perfectly symmetrical. Only way that the hands are involved or when they're gripping like this, you have to get yourself in this neutral position.

1:28:19You hinge forward. It teaches you how to be a perfect hinge, a perfect lever. But whenever you lift a sandbag, Every sandbag lift has its own, it's never the same because of the nature of the implement. It's this shapely thing that you have to, first off, you have this open palm grip, you have to grip around it, and then you have to organize your body to lift it safely. Anybody can lift a light sandbag safely while breathing. Over time, you increase the weight. But I think that if people learn to lift sandbags well, that will be something that will actually prepare you to lift well for life because your spine isn't in this perfect neutral position as you're doing it.

1:28:58There's slight curvature and you learn that it is safe to lift something with some slight rounding of the spine. Of course, with a barbell, you don't do that often unless you're doing something like a Jefferson curl, which I think they're pretty solid, especially if you don't load them to a crazy extent as you're progressing it because some people get focused on the load. By the way, what a Jefferson curl is, it's a purposeful rounding of the spine to lift a barbell off the ground. It's actually the antithesis of, I think I'm using the word antithesis, correct? But it's the opposite of what you're taught to do when you deadlift to create a neutral spine.

1:29:30You're literally rounding your back to lift the barbell off the ground. It sounds like a joke, but it's to ingrain in your body that my spine is okay getting to this position, lifting something. But I think a sandbag would be money for people. Just for clarity, are you picking it up and then dropping it and then picking it up? So a base thing that you could do is literally pick it up, surround your stomach, bring it back down to the ground. You can either drop it or you can lower it back down to the ground. Then there are progressions where now you pick it up, launch it up to your shoulder, bring it down to the back of the ground.

1:30:03So you could drop it or you can bring it slowly back down to the ground. And then you could pick it up, throw it over your shoulder, pick it up, throw it over the opposite shoulder. It's inherently a rotational throw when you become adept with it. So there are progressions, but the base progression would be literally just, the first thing you would do is you would just do a sandbag deadlift. Then you would do a lift to the stomach. Then you would do a lift to the shoulder. Then you could do a throw. And then there's a bunch of things. You could do squats. You could do split squats. You could do caustic squats.

1:30:30You could do lunges. Caustic squats is another one. Typically, I've just done that with like a kind of a goblet squat type of pole on a kettlebell. But just remarkable how much you get out of that exercise as you slowly. And you know, what was wild about it to me, what a funny name, number one, is I was using it as a warmup for some acrobatic stuff that I was doing way back in the day. I was just using it as a warmup, but I noticed I was getting stronger. And so I started adding a little bit of weight, a little bit of weight. And I got to the point where I was doing Gossack squats, and it's not like this isn't that ton of weight, but it's like with a, I don't know, 70 or 80 pound kettlebell.

1:31:04And again, the transfer, I was just like, wow, I wasn't even treating this as part of my workout. So just over time, because I was doing the acrobatic stuff very regularly, so I was never doing it to exhaustion, just that greasing the groove. And I was like, what the hell is going on here? It's remarkable how much it transferred. It's a money movement. So I mentioned all those movements because these are all things that you could do throughout the day with a sandbag that you keep by your desk. You could do squats. You could do some quick lunges. You could bring it up to your shoulder. You could do some quick classic squats.

1:31:38You could do a reverse lunge. You could literally do all these movements with a single sandbag. Are you just bear-hugging the caustic when you're doing the caustic? Yeah. Yeah, you keep it right there. Yeah. And then you go into a caustic squat position. Yes, absolutely. All right. And with the caustic squat specifically, it's particularly powerful because most people, when it comes to training the adductors, they mainly do that with the machine in the gym. Yeah. So adductors, guys, inside of your thighs. I mean, that's very super. Like Suzanne Somers, thigh master. that's adductors, right? So if you're trying to like, if you're trying to pop a ball between your knees using your adductors.

1:32:16There's a very shady side of the internet of women popping watermelons with their adductors. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's interesting. I thought I'd seen it all. You haven't. Will you see that? This is going to be the headline for your episode. Yeah. But if you want the strength to do that, right? Cossack swats are going to be great. There are more specific adductor movements like the Copenhagen plank. You were saying most people who train their adductors are only using one of those machines. If they ever use that machine sparsely, they use that sparsely typically. And that ends up being a very weak link.

1:32:46Just for people who might wonder, because those machines are very popular and they're usually monopolized by any, not to paint with a broad brush, like a few women are just sitting on there for like hours, it seems working this stuff, right? Why is that a weak link compared to doing something like a Cossack squat or something else? You do get some tension on those tissues when you're doing a typical squat, but but not an insane amount. When you're doing a sumo deadlift, you also get some tension on that area, but not as much as when you're isolating it in a bilateral fashion with a Cossack squat.

1:33:18Along with that, in the Cossack squat, you get more length of those tissues when you get to depth of the Cossack squat than you would. I'll give another bad visual for people. People are like, what the hell are they talking about Cossack squat? Imagine the most stereotypical like Russian dancer, arms folded, like kicking out from side to side and then freeze frame on the ground where like one leg is fully extended to one side and he or she is basically squatting like ass to the other heel on the other side. Okay. Cossack squat. Yeah. Yeah. And one thing I find interesting about that is for a long time, I was really trying to get good at Cossack squats and it wasn't until I was allowing myself to breathe when I got down as that position, then I actually got there safely and came out.

1:34:04What have you found most effective for improving ankle mobility, right? Because for a lot of people, if they try to do a Cossack squat, well, do you have heel up or heel down? Heel down. Heel down. Okay. I have heel down. So for a lot of folks, if they try to do that, they're going to fall backwards if they don't have the ankle mobility, right? If the knee can't travel kind of over the toes. Yeah. Any thoughts on developing that? I think that a great conversation for you would be, Ben Patrick too. Because what I'm going to tell you is this is why I find that I've been so lucky to learn from so many people because the only reason why I'm able to first have the level of mobility I do is because of a lot of things that I've learned from these different people.

1:34:45So for example, the ankle mobility you're talking about right there, some things that helped with that were the ATG split squat that I was telling you about, which is a movement that again, he popularized. But that front leg, I hope that when this podcast comes out, maybe there's an image of an ATG split squat that can be pulled up so people can see that the front leg that's doing the split squat over time, there are regressions to that movement, by the way. So everything we've talked about, if you find that you're not getting there, regress the movement, regress the range of motion. Tell me if I'm getting it roughly right.

1:35:15And also I have his ATG device that is like plate loading for wrist work, extensor work, grip work, which is fantastic. What does ATG stand for? ATG, his company stands for Athletic Truth Group. You think it stands for Astrographs. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I didn't see it coming. Okay, got it. Athletic Truth Group. Athletic Truth Group. All right, got it. And Ben is a guy, one of the reasons why I appreciate Ben so much is because he's a very open-minded individual. You'll run across so many people in these different fitness spaces, and they're so dogmatic, gung-ho about their system. And if you do this system, And this is what's going to happen when you do this.

1:35:56It's not good. And this is what's going to happen when you do this. It's like everything is their system. But the people that I tend to really appreciate are the people that they may have some things that they do, but they can also see the strength in many other things, right? And Ben is that type of person where he's also someone who continues to learn. You know, he has these, what he's done, but Ben is continuously learning and applying new things to the people that he works with and himself and finds benefit. And it's one of those things where he's in the constant growth rather than finding the negatives of everything that everyone's doing, right?

1:36:27To protect his predefined fiefdom. Yeah. Yeah. So let me throw out something. Tell me how close this is. So there is an exercise of all places. It was actually given to me by a physio in Sweden who I chanced upon. It was like, because my back has been bothering me for so long and everybody in me, it's like, oh, you got to try my friend's blah, right? or this person can do this or you have to try my friend, the acupuncturist. Like everybody's got a suggestion. God bless them. But it ends up after a while, you become a little tone deaf to it. So I'm like, all right, look, I can talk to your tarot card reader and I can talk to your Qigong person.

1:37:05I'm just not sure it's going to do anything. But this physio ended up working with a lot of professional fighters, that's not me, and professional soccer players. And he really knew his stuff. I just lucked out. Because this drunk guy at a party was like, you should meet my physio. I'm like, yeah, I'm sure I should meet your physio. And then I just had a wide open day the next day. And I was like, fuck it. All right, sure. I'll meet your physio. And Sebastian's his name ended up being excellent in Stockholm. And he gave me some very basic exercises, again, with the intention of remediating some of the back pain and strengthening.

1:37:34And one of them was elevated front foot split squats, very lightly loaded, going fully down to the bottom position where the front knee is way over the front foot toes and basically ass is on the heel. Three second pause at the bottom, back up and doing like sets of six to eight. That's a regression for the ATG split squat. That's a regression for the flat ground ATG split squat. And to go back to what you're asking about the ankles, why is that really good for the ankles? Do you know that the position that the ankle gets into is this deep position that you can, when you own that position, you lower it to the ground.

1:38:12And now when you own that position of the ankles, you apply that to a caussic squat, you're able to get to full depth of a caussic because of where the knee is over the toe and you're in deep ankle dorsiflexion. That's how these things work. Yeah, dorsiflexion, just pull your toes towards your nose. Exactly. It's dorsiflexion. Yeah, toes towards your knees. That's dorsiflexion. The thing is, when you find that you don't have the mobility for a specific movement, there are so many ways to regress it. With a caustic squat, you could do a caustic squat with a wall behind you. So the wall can help guide you down.

1:38:42Unloaded, wall behind, caustic squat, you can even angle the foot outwards a little bit to allow yourself a little bit more give with that knee. You could also add some heel. You can also put it on a box if you need to, and then slowly regress it down. And I want to mention the concept of regression is what got me out of knee pain is what got me out of like pretty much all pain. But specifically, I want to mention knees because when I was in my early twenties, I had a meniscectomy, partial meniscus removal. I can't remember which knee now. I think it was my left. It's something that happened in jujitsu.

1:39:13I also, when I was younger, I had Oshkid Slaughter and I was a soccer player. So when I got into my early twenties, like I couldn't sprint, I felt like I was probably going to have trash knees for the rest of my life. I couldn't run without pain at all. So let alone run, absolutely couldn't sprint, couldn't jump. I was doing squats and stuff and there was some pain I was having. So I was using knee sleeves. So I was pretty certain that at this point, I just need to make sure to keep them pretty strong, but like sprinting, et cetera, it's not going to be part of the system for me. That's when I came across some of Ben's stuff back in like 2019 or 2018, I think.

1:39:47I came across some of his stuff on Instagram, started regressing it, doing like the simplest regression. So at ATG splits going on a box, there's this pulse movement that you do where you just have this very small range of motion with the knee where you're just putting yourself in slight knee flexion, coming out, pulsing it, driving a lot of blood to the knee area. And I would progress these things over time. After four or so months, I was able to get into full deep knee positions that I was never able to get into without pain before. And then when I started doing things like running, I was able to run without pain.

1:40:19And then I started sprinting without pain, but it started with regression.

1:40:26So the reason why I'm saying that is - That was a very princess-like sneeze, which is a large man. I didn't want to let it out. If I let it out, it would be disgusting. So when you hold it in, it turns into this mousy squeal. Let's keep that in there. Let's keep that in there. If I have to sneeze again, I'll show you what the big one looks like just so I can save myself. My gosh. But I say this because regressions are the name of the game for all this. If you have pain doing something, there is a way to regress it and you need to own the regression before you progress. I just want to underline this because this chronic back pain has been one of the biggest challenges in my life.

1:41:03I've always seen myself as athletic. I've always been able to take a kicking and then get back on the horse and get back to athleticism. And this experience where this pain at such a pivotal cornerstone piece of your body is tied into every movement, when you sleep, there's no escaping it. Psychologically, physically, emotionally, it has been such a difficult experience and given me so much sympathy for people in chronic pain. It's like, if you have not been in serious chronic pain, it is impossible to understand what it's like until you're there. And I would say the one mantra of sorts that has allowed me to start digging out of that hole.

1:41:50And I use a different term for myself. I don't remember where I got it, but it was just like scale it down. And it's the same idea. It's just like, okay, let's just say hypothetically, I might need this surgery in the elbow. Okay, great. I can't do X number of pushups. Okay, fine. Do one-tenth of X number of pushups. Okay, you can't do whatever it might be. well, barbell puts too much torque in the elbow. Okay, fine. Let's use dumbbells. But the rule is like, you can't do nothing. You have to scale it down and maybe you omit exercises. Sure. But it's like train around it, train around it, train around it.

1:42:24And it's like, for instance, the box squat. Great example. Jersey is like the alt Jersey Gregor, who I keep mentioning is like the ultimate master of regressions to use your word, because he'll have someone like they'll do a squat and like, they'll go down eight inches. And he's like, that's it. And they're like, no, but I do like below parallel in the gym. And he's like, you shouldn't. And he's just like, okay, like your max depth is whatever I'm making this number, this number up, but it's like 36 inches off the ground. And they're like, that's a joke. And he's like, that's your assignment. He's really funny too.

1:42:55Cause at one point I was like, so you're suggesting. And he's like, no, I'm not suggesting I am telling you. And it feels like a waste of time to start off in where he would start people. But as they develop the right mechanics and then pain-free progress, and it takes weeks, maybe even months to get back to where they think they should be. And then lo and behold, they're so much stronger. They own the position. All these aches and pains go away. So you can't do nothing, but you can scale it down or like regress it. Right. And the other thing I'll mention just for people who may be in a similar position to myself where they have a lot of low back stuff.

1:43:37The other reason that Sebastian prescribed the front foot elevated split squat was to avoid hyper lordosis, right? Like overarching of the low back. I have a lot of thoracic mobility issues. So I tend to flare out and arch and he was like, okay, let's mitigate that by elevating the front foot. Yeah. All right, cool. Dig it. I want to mention I, Ben, he has an app and on that app, he puts all his stuff there for monthly payment for people. So if you guys are in, Ben mentions that people can do this. So I'm going to mention this too. You could go on there. You could screenshot the movements. You could cancel literally.

1:44:19I have a program there too, in this martial arts section. And you can literally go there and you can just take it all if you want to. But the reason why I mentioned that is because all of the regressions are right there. If you're looking for a way to regress all these movements, that's all there. There's also in that school community, but just take the regressions and be patient with those regressions. Because one of the reasons that I was held back for so long was because I thought I was better than I was. I've been playing soccer for like 16 years. I've always seen myself as an athlete. So So going to do some of these things and these simple regressions, I was just like, no, I can move on to the last chapter.

1:44:56No, I should be able to. And then I'd always find myself in pain. I'd always find myself moving backwards. And it wasn't until I just realized, hey, be a beginner with this, start with the regressions, own those, and then slowly progress upward. But then I was able to make all the progress to where I am now. So it's a big shift. And I think this is the last thing I'll mention. I think one of the reasons why this is hard for some people that lift or that have already been training for a bit is because traditional lifting is kind of easy in the sense that if you get strong with the shoulder press, you just increase that weight week by week.

1:45:31Bicep curl, increase that weight a little bit. You get this big payoff very, very quickly when you see that weight going up. But when it comes to holistic movement in some of these ranges, you will realize that you have some weak links that you have to work on with potentially no weight. And that's not as fun as just doing the heavy shoulder press. You know what I mean? Getting the payoff. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I would also say it's like you can get away, at least I'll personalize it. I think this is true for a lot of people. But like just because you can lift more weight than your friends does not mean your form is good.

1:46:03I don't think my form was the worst in the world, but we were talking about like 96 when I was probably my biggest and strongest and arguably fattest, but wasn't that fat. But I was doing like 400 pound-ish back squats for like a set of 10. Now, in retrospect, should I have been doing that? Probably not. And when I mentioned earlier, I was like, oh yeah, probably three, four years ago, whenever it was in that back squat workout, when I hurt myself, I was probably going too low and having that change in the spinal position with like a butt wink. And I think that probably contributed to it. And I'm sure there are people out there who are like, Tim Ferriss can't even do a goddamn squat.

1:46:41I knew it. That guy's an idiot. What I would say is you could be right. Number one. Number two is get video of your technique and have somebody who actually knows what they're doing, like a very high level competitor, look at that technique. And chances are it's not as good as you think it is. Do you know what I mean? And then there comes a point where it's like, all right, I've bent the paperclip so many times, boom, I have an injury. And now it's just a wake up call. It's like, all right, let's start from scaling it back from the fundamentals, swallow my pride, take my ego down a notch and like work it back up, which is very hard to do psychologically and really tough.

1:47:21And it's like, there's so many parallels that I see here. It's like, man, you have to check your ego at the door because you might walk in. He doesn't care. He really does. He's so salty. He's just like, you could be world champion in X, Y, and Z. And he'll be like, okay, you're going to start with 20 pound dumbbells. And you're like, what? And he's like, yeah, it's like 20 pound dumbbells. He goes, yeah, you shouldn't be doing this with more than 20 pound dumbbells. And people are just like, what? It doesn't even compute. But then with these micro progressions as he would call them it's it is incredible like i was saying to you uh he had this vietnam vet with a number of fused vertebrae who had been walking around on body brace could not bend in any direction got him to the point where he's doing stiff-legged deadlifts with 315 off an elevated platform and continued doing that for decades i mean it's unreal and similarly and I haven't seen this because I haven't really been doing this term in the notes that I had for this conversation.

1:48:22It's not my term, but I like the term, which is microdosing movement. I've only played with that with a few things like slacklining. And it is incredible what your body can end up doing with like three to five minutes a day of slacklining. You do not need. In fact, one could argue you shouldn't do really long sessions what are some other examples of micro dosing movement because as i get older more and more yes you want to be strong yes i agree with pavel like strength is kind of the mother attribute in a lot of ways yes you want to have muscle mass because of sarcopenia and all this stuff as you get older that's all true and fundamentally we are evolved as bodies to move in space.

1:49:10Our brains are evolved to manage that interface. And I find myself hungering for more and more athletic movement. So what are some other ways to microdose movement that might kind of produce benefits, and you can take that however you want to take it, that are surprising to folks? I think one of the simplest things one can do is start introducing different shapes of your spine. Primarily a shape that I think many of us are scared about, which is like spinal flexion. Spinal flexion, reaching over, touching your toes with a rounded back. Exactly. But let me actually just rewind real quick because I want to mention, you know, Pavel talks about greasing the groove.

1:49:53I got introduced to microdosing by a friend of mine, Corey Schlesinger. I think he's like - Just to be clear, microdosing movement microdosing movement yeah not not micro not microdosing psilocybin although that's fun but microdosing movement cory is i don't know if he's working with the phoenix suns now but he was like the director of performance i think for the suns recently so i know he's working with an nba team but he when he talked to us about it you know he was having a lot of his nba athletes he would have them do a little bit of movement before games a little bit of movement after games and you'd figure out ways for them to have movement sprinkled into their day so that they always felt good.

1:50:28Because what happens with some athletes is they have to have this extensive warm-up routine to get their bodies ready. And these are athletes, by the way. So if an athlete needs this extensive warm-up routine to get ready for game day, somebody who's sitting at a desk or just working or whatever, the amount of prep you might need to get ready to move is far too much. The goal of microdosing movement, or greasing the group as Pablo puts it, is to make it so these different movements just become a part of who you are and what you do. You don't need to prepare to bend your spine down into a flex pattern and pick something off the ground because you're just healthy and safe.

1:51:04You feel healthy and safe doing it. Now, the thing I'll also mention here is that there are many really smart people who are against some of the things like Jefferson Girls, like Stu McGill doesn't like it. Stu doesn't like it. And I would agree to the sense of people who haven't regressed the movement enough. If you just rush into something like a Jefferson curl that we were just talking about, where you had deep spinal flexion, you pick up a barbell or something off the ground, that's going to cause you some issue, especially if you don't feel safe doing it. You're going to hold your breath.

1:51:38You're going to force yourself into that position. And then you'll tweak something and then you'll say, this is a bad position or a bad movement. But when you learn to breathe through movement with no weight, like I was talking about, let's say you decide that I'm going to pick that ball off the ground a few times a day, flexing my back and going down to the ground. I'm going to inhale when I go down and exhale when I go up. I'm going to make myself own this movement. Doing that with no weight initially for most people is going to feel fine. And then as you improve that, you're like, okay, can I do that with a six-pound kettlebell?

1:52:11Can I do that with a 20-pound kettlebell? Can I do that with a 30-pound kettlebell? Can I organize my body to lift this safely in this position? And then you own that position because it's no longer foreign to you. Now you're no longer flexion intolerant. But when you're someone who has avoided these different ranges of motion with the spine, whether it's deep flexion, extension, et cetera, and then you go into a workout or you try doing some weighted rotational movement and then you tweak something, you think that these are bad movements or bad ranges of motion. But the thing is that you just didn't regress it enough and you didn't spend time with the most basic forms of those movements.

1:52:47So when it comes to microdosing, one of the ways to make microdosing easy for you is to make your environment serve you. This is why, and some people might just think I'm some fitness nut for this, but I keep equipment around my area, around my desk. I have a kettlebell sitting there. I have a club sitting there. I have a 100-pound sandbag by my desk, by my work desk. I also have a gripper on the table so that if I'm doing something on my laptop to one side, I can hit that gripper up a little bit. I have these things just sitting around to encourage me to touch them. Because if they're not in front of me, I am not going to do them.

1:53:24All this hand stuff, you give me that compliment on my hands, bro, it's because I have grip equipment everywhere. I have it in my car. I have it at my podcast desk. I have it on my work desk. I have it in the kitchen. I have it everywhere. I can't wait for you to, I think you already saw the video, but to take another look at the Abrahangs with Emil Abrahansson. Yeah. Because then you could just have, I mean, you could do it off the back of like a set of stairs. I'm going to do it at home. But if you get like a hangboard and don't overdo the hangboard people, that is the perfect way to blow apart your tendons and ligaments.

1:53:59Take it easy. but that's something you sprinkle in so easily i sprinkle that in my rice bucket sits in front of my tv so that's the thing just for people who are wondering what the hell we're talking about the rice bucket imagine like old badly dubbed chinese kung fu movies where they like shoot that like they make their hands into spears like shoot it into a bucket of rice and like turn their hands into different movements to toughen up their hands and their grip and so on it would be a version of that a lot of baseball players do that too right they knew what they were talking about. They knew what they were doing.

1:54:30A lot of the stuff isn't new. I'm not making this stuff up. People are doing this stuff for centuries because it works. But would I do the rice bucket if I had to pull out the bucket of rice from my garage every single time? No, of course not. I'd have to keep it in the vicinity of something that I already do stuff so that when I go by it, I'm like, I can do this for a quick minute as we're watching something and then go back. I have, for example, there's this stool called a hunkering stool. By the way, you don't need a hunkering stool. You could just have a low seat. Hunkering stool? Hunkering stool.

1:54:58H-U-N-K-E-R-I-N stool. This guy's name is Casey. He owns this company, Hunkering Stool. It's a low springy seat. People will see, if they ever watch any of my videos, you'll see me sitting on a hunkering stool. Oh, I saw one of those in your videos. It's a low springy seat. So now you sit down. What do you use that for? You just sit down in a squat position. You sit down in a low squat position. Okay, got it. So I noticed you have these low mats here that maybe people might sit on for meditation, but you have these things that will encourage you to get lower to the ground. So the sandbag, I also sit down on the sandbag as it's low to the ground.

1:55:30And that encourages me to get down in this low position, this low squatted position to become comfortable there. So now I'm not uncomfortable getting down to the ground, which is an essential thing that we need. You know, like some of us only get down to the ground when we're doing martial arts. Some of us probably can't remember the last time we purposefully went down to the ground on our own volition. Maybe you fell, but can you become comfortable going down and coming up? Because now if like, maybe you do fall, it's not as much of a struggle for you to figure out the puzzle of getting off the ground.

1:55:59It's actually not even a puzzle. You just can. Well, Kelly, you mentioned Kelly Starrett, who he and I go way, way back. And we actually were in Japan together at the same time and went on this amazing trip with a group of guys. But But on that trip, I mean, both of us, it's kind of obvious when it's pointed out. But in Japan, if you're going to traditional in spending time in those types of environments, you are getting up and down all the time. And you are sitting cross-legged and you are getting up and you're basically doing like Turkish get up light all the time. You are constantly getting from that sitting on the floor position to fully standing.

1:56:43and every once in a while these are harder and harder to find like you've got a squat toilet it's like that's it and i remember asking one of my friends when i was 15 because i'd never seen a squat toilet it was my first time out of the u.s i'm like what the hell is this and i went to like a baseball game and all they had was squat toilets and i remember asking my buddy like 15 also i'm like what do your old people do and he's he just started laughing he's like they've been doing it forever. They have no problem. And I was like, wow, can you imagine what would happen? Like how many ER visits and ambulances you need if suddenly that were put in like a US stadium, like forget about it.

1:57:18But the fact of that greasing the groove, right? It's not like these 80 year old Japanese people are doing tons of Jefferson curls and Turkish getups, but they are sitting down, getting up, sitting down, getting up many, many times a day in a lot of cases. And even just that aspect of sitting on the ground, think about the position that the back gets in, the deep knee flexion that you're getting. And many of these people can just comfortably sit in the SESA position without a problem. The position of the ankles, the position of the knees, all these areas when getting up and down off the ground, how healthy that is for your joints and your movement.

1:57:49That's why it's like, instead of thinking about all of this as like exercise, how can we build our environment? The places where we go, even if you're at a cubicle at work, can you put certain things in there that can help you, encourage you to move a little bit more. If you do that, that will make a lot of this stuff so much easier because it's less about how do we program this and more about, let's just touch this a few times a day. After you become more comfortable sitting down in that low position a little bit more, picking up with that with the rounded back, just casually picking up that sandbag.

1:58:23You're not doing these things while warming up. You're just doing them. They're what you do. Then when you want to go progress it, it's even easier because this is just how you move. For me, it wasn't until I truly set my environment up to serve my movement ability that I started making bigger and just bigger leaps in my progress because it became less of, again, a structured workout that I have to go to the gym and do all the time. This is just what I do. I can just pick stuff up. I purposefully hung up gymnastics rings so I can develop my skill of hanging once again. I have those just hanging and the TV's right there.

1:59:00So I'll just do some quick pull-ups and hang on it. I set up this environment. And so it's almost like an environment of play. I have fun here. And I think if more of us did that, it would aid in our movement progression much faster than always having to go to a gym with four walls for less, for less than lights and get this workout in. I'll bring up another person you would have a blast with. If you haven't met him, I remember I got so much shit. It was funny. I got so much shit. A lot of people were interested off the bat, but I also got a lot of shit when I did an episode on gymnastic strength training with a guy named Chris Sommer, coach Chris Sommer, former coach of the national men's team.

1:59:36I think I bought his program years back. Yeah. GST. Yeah. And I remember like, there are a bunch of folks in various communities. I'm not going to name them, but there'd be pretty obvious, pretty belligerent online weightlifting communities. There's a fair number. And there's like, bah, ha, ha, ha, you you know, like now Tim Ferriss is into Pilates. Good luck with that. You know, good luck developing strength. And I'm like, let me see you do an iron cross, right? Let me see you do a planche with your feet off the ground. And then tell me that those guys or gals aren't strong. Like, let me see you do that.

2:00:13But the point that I was just going to make is it doesn't have to be with a bunch of like ferns and chrome inside four walls like you can get so unbelievably strong and this is going to be old news to a lot of people but with calisthenics and doing if i mean you want to try it here i'll give people something they'll be like oh this is so stupid i'm like okay try it do something called pike pulses so there are a lot of ways you can strengthen your core and abdominals and so on this one sit down on the floor legs out in front of you you're sitting up that is a pike and so your feet are straight now what you're going to do is put some strength into the toes point them and now what you're going to do is reach forward on either side of your legs not as far as you can go but pretty far you're probably going to be on your fingertips on either side of your legs now it's very simple all you need to do is lift your legs off the ground and just pulse up keeping your legs completely straight quads locked and just bring your legs off the ground, bring in your kind of knees to your chest.

2:01:17Good luck with that. Do a couple of sets of like 10 or 15 of those. And if it's too easy on the first one, like bring your, your hands forward, like four or five inches, if you can do it and do it again, most people will just be murdered by that. And that is like, you do not need a lot of space. You could do that in the smallest apartment right next to your bed. Oh, there's so many good exercises. This is like really inspiring me also to get back. I really feel like my new chapter i have to be careful not to be too enthusiastic and hurt myself but it's going to be like a couple of fundamentals like i'll probably continue to do sumo deadlift in the way that i described it kind of a la you know barry scott who trained allison felix way back in the day that was in the four-hour body stuff but like the sumo deadlift with no eccentric i just find it just transfers to so much kettlebell swings for sure and i was very interested people can probably find video of you doing this, but kind of pendulum.

2:02:12Yeah. The pendulum swing with some kettlebell juggling. Yeah. Yeah. Haven't gotten to the juggling yet, but different types of swinging rope flow to get into some new planes of movement. And then I think I'm going to re-explore some of the GST stuff because I recall doing some like basic basic ring stuff. It's like, look, I'm not going to win any awards here. And then doing, this is all body weight stuff. And I got so big. People thought they're like, oh my God, like how much heavy lifting you've been doing? And I was like, zero. Most of this is from also because my upper arms, like my biceps are the biggest they'd been in probably a decade.

2:02:51And people were just like, bro, you on gear? Like what's going on? I was like, no, I'm just literally doing straight arm tension. I'm not even doing any flexion. I'm not bending my arms. This is all ring work with fully locked arms. That's it. It's great that you mentioned this because over the years, one thing that I try to do is I try to find stuff I'm interested in that I really suck at to improve at. I'm 250 pounds. So for me - You are a lot bigger in person than you are. I mean, you're big on camera. And then I was just like, I was like, how am I going to find this guy? And I was like, oh, he's not hard.

2:03:29those quads are the size of my office. Jesus. But yo man, like calisthenics was something that I, for me, I think is like a place that I'm not the strong. It's I'm not very, very strong at. Some of that can be attributed to my body weight. And I've been so excited at just really nailing down all of these calisthenics basics to continue to improve so that I can do more complex movements. because one of the things that I think that frustrated me with calisthenics years ago was like these muscle-ups, like, oh, I was always making excuses of my weight, but it's just, I was not strong enough with my body weight to do these things.

2:04:06So one of the things with calisthenics is also owning those basics, push-ups, dips, pull-ups, regressing the pull-ups if pull-ups are tough. Also like regressing like ring turnout push-ups, incredible. Like I have all sorts of, I've had shoulder surgeries and stuff. the degree to which that has helped my shoulders just ring turn out push-ups. The scapular pull-ups. The strength of the scapula, I think, is something that a lot of people, as they're doing calisthenics, they don't realize is so important. And there are ways to isolate the scap and strengthen that with these movements. I realized how weak my scapula was compared to a lot of other things.

2:04:45When I would be doing pull-ups, yes, the scapula is involved, but I wasn't focusing on it, which is why a lot of progressions were elusive to me because my scapula wasn't as strong. So I'm very excited progressing calisthenics, and I'm more so excited for the next five years. I think that in five years, six years from now, I can be pretty elite at calisthenics. And it's going to take me that long, and I'm okay with that. But that's a ways away. But I know that chipping away at that skill is going to be one of those things that for me, when I'm 60, 70, 80 has those big, maybe 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 has those big dividends.

2:05:23Because one thing is when you see people who are very at depth with their body weight, they just have control of everything. They have their very depth of their body weight strength. You can lift weights, but just because you're strong with a barbell or strong with weights does not mean you're strong with body weight. I know many heavy people that can deadlift hundreds of pounds that struggle doing 10 pull-ups because they don't have good control of their body weight. Yeah, or just because you can lift a lot of weight and a few movements does not mean that you've bulletproofed yourself against injury.

2:05:51Nope. Either, right? Exactly. Exactly. And calisthenics is something that will show you those weak links with your control of your body and will help you improve with that over time. And your practice of wanting to rock climbing inherently adds the skill of calisthenics into it. So it's a two for one. I would love to do rock climbing. And the thing is, I do so much jujitsu right now that it's like, I got to pick between rock climbing and calisthenics, like I'll focus on the calisthenics bit and maybe do rock climbing here and there, but that's a very good practice to develop that level of strength because rock climbers, man, elite ones, and even non-elite rock climbers, just the way they can contort their bodies and have the strength through their grip, through their whole body.

2:06:32My gosh, it's another amazing practice. That's awesome for longevity that if you're struggling to find something. Well, that was part of side and knee injury this past ski season. I was super bummed and I was in a great location, but I'm up in the mountains and the climbers are world-class. So I started going to a climbing gym with my ski instructor who was also a very good climber. He sets roots and he's very good, super technical. And in that gym, because we would go when I would typically want to go skiing. So let's just say in the morning, these are work days. So the gym was not empty because this is a popular competitive gym.

2:07:10So national team was there, silver medalist from the Olympics was there when we would go train. So it's amazing to watch those people, number one. But secondly, what really motivated me was, yes, sure. I just love rock climbing. Because it's along with jujitsu, it's human chess. Those two are actually very similar in a lot of ways. But what I noticed in this gym in particular was these groups of mostly women, but not always, mostly women who are like in their 60s and 70s who are doing stuff that I could not conceive of doing. And they do this week in, week out. I saw a guy, my buddy was complaining that he couldn't go climbing because of a hip issue.

2:07:57And I saw this 70-year-old guy with a leg brace on climbing. And I took a photo. Yeah, yeah. With a full leg brace, he twisted his knee. And he's like, I'll just use one leg and two arms and flag with one leg. And I sent a photo to my buddy who's younger than I am. And I was like, bro, I got some bad news for you. And I was so inspired to see these people who are decades older than I am, who are doing things that I could not even approach doing right now. And I was like, okay, this is a good sport. This is a really good sport. Jiu-jitsu too. If you play it smart, just like gymnastics. I can't recall, Coach Summer had a quote.

2:08:39It was something like, there are aggressive gymnasts and there are old gymnasts. There are no aggressive old gymnasts. It's something like that. And it was just like, let's not get too ahead of ourselves. Because the candle that burns twice as bright, burns twice as fast kind of situation. What are the non-negotiable lifts? if we're talking about just for lack of a better modifier like traditional lifts the stuff that you could do that people could do if they walk down to a good neighborhood gym are there any things for you that you're like all right this is kind of these are the some of the ingredients in my multivitamin it's just like i take the multivitamin every week that's how it works a couple of movements the first one would be a sled The reason why I say sled is because it is something that grandma can do and it's something that the NFL linebacker can do.

2:09:32And it can be progressed or regressed to either level while causing probably most likely no issue to either. The reason why I mentioned the sled before I mentioned something like a barbell back squat or a barbell deadlift is because some people, when it comes to direct actual spinal compression where the barbell is right here, they just can't handle forms of that compression when moving through space yet. I mean, I probably shouldn't handle it, frankly, right? Like I've been doing back squats, but there's definitely part of me that's like, homie, this is not a good idea. Yeah. This is the thing though.

2:10:04I think there are many forms of squatting one can do. Like we talked about sandbag squats. That's not actually loaded. That actually feels really good, right? Because the weights from front of you are holding it. They feel safe. They feel good. They can be progressed. But the sled is something that you can load that thing up. And if it doesn't move, you just don't have the ability to produce the force to push or pull it through space. I wish everyone would be able to work with a sled because it's so safe and has such a huge ability to be progressed or regressed to any level safely for literally everyone.

2:10:39That's why I'm starting there. Louis Simmons was someone who, and he was the owner of Westside Bar Valley. He passed. Legendary. Louis is the one who got Mark and Mark introduced the sled to me. And it's just like the sled is powerful. So unfortunately it's hard for some people to have that at home. I have a, I have a torque sled at my house. It's this tank sled that you can wheel around. So the torque sled is not on skids. It's on wheels with mechanical resistance. Yes. They came out with a new one that I have. I forgot that it's model, but it's one that you can literally swivel around. So you've seen the tanks where you have to push it, then you have to get to the other side and push.

2:11:19This one, you can push, swivel, and turn, and push. It looks like a little Batmobile. It's pretty cool. Does that allow you to pull as well or only push? It allows you to pull as well. You can hook a cable to it, and then you could also push and pull it. It has magnetic resistance, so you can increase the resistance so that the harder you push, the more resistance it gives you. So it can build to any level of resistance. I have my mom who's 67. I have her come to my place so that she can do the sled multiple times a week. That's why I have her come because it's something she can do and progress without pain.

2:11:48If people can just get themselves to a place that has a sled, it's a full body movement from the feet to the hands. What does a sled workout look like? Or where does it integrate into a workout? A sled can be a very meaty part of your workout if you learn to like it. The reason why I say learn to like, that exhale says so much. the reason I say you like swallowing broken glass I have a piece of equipment for you this thing this slide could be a good first two three minutes to get the knees warm when you're moving forward and backwards or it could be a very metabolically taxing strength building workout that you can do for 20 minutes to get your heart rate up while also increasing your ability to produce force so that's why I say like when you're pushing a sled your heart rate will spike, your whole body will go on fire because you're starting from your feet to produce force forward and pulling backwards.

2:12:44So it'll spike the heart rate, but everything will start to get sore. Your feet, your glutes, especially when you're learning how to stack your body against that weight. Like you'll see it in people who are new on the sled. Some of them aren't familiar with getting their body in the right position to produce force forward. They're too upright. The system's very open. Like so upright you mentioned, right? So some people they'll start pushing a sled, their ribs will be in this flared forward position. Their pelvis won't be in a neutral position. It'll be tilted back and they'll try pushing. They can't produce much force.

2:13:14Just to paint a picture for folks, if you imagine a sled, all right, so it's this, it's a sled, like a toboggan with weights on top of it. But what you're holding onto, imagine you have like two subway poles in front of you that are like, I don't know, 18 inches apart, 24 inches apart. Those are vertical. You're holding onto those, one with your left hand, one with your right hand, and then you're pushing that. Yeah. And so we're talking about like the body position, because this is going to be one of my follow-up questions is like, what is your preferred position for pushing a sled? Yeah. Like, are you bent 90 degrees at the hips, staring at the ground with your head in line with your arms as if you were doing like an overhead press?

2:13:51Is it, I don't know, like 20 degrees off of parallel to the ground with the upper body? Like, what does it look like? Because I've wondered about this because I got a sled based on actually, I think it's Mark Bell, who I owe, thanks for this, a very early, early, early, like Stone Age version of something like the Torque Sled. Was it from Torque or was it in another company? I think it was another company. It was like Xpro, XPRO or something like that. I can't recall. Sorry, guys, that I'm butchering it. But the challenge with that for me always was like, God, I love this hip extension and glute engagement.

2:14:29And if I'm not careful, I feel in my low back. So that's what I need to account for. I would love to get back into sled, but I would love to hear your thoughts on just avoiding probably too much flaring and pointing my titties at the ceiling. It's an exaggeration. You get the idea, guys. If you're kind of arching your back unnecessarily in a simplification. So what would your prescription be? Level one for the sled would be learning how to create a neutral system when pushing the sled through space. So you're inherently going to come forward a little bit. You're not going to be vertical when pushing.

2:15:03You're going to be leaning forward a little bit, but you need to make sure that your rib cage is over your hips. So it's like two bowls pouring into each other. When we were mentioning this open system flared, I know some people aren't watching the podcast. Imagine if you had a foam roller, you put a foam roller right below your shoulder blades, and then you basically bent your upper back to bring your head closer to the ground. Yes. That would be flaring, right? So you cannot produce a lot of force when you have this flared system. It's super common, by the way. People who think they don't do this, take videos of yourself doing very varied exercises.

2:15:37It is so common. Yes, it's extremely common. Another issue is maybe having, this is a little bit less common, but too much flexion, right? So too much bending when trying to push, right? You want to be in a neutral position, a strong neutral position where your rib cage is right above your hips. So can you explain that to me? Because rib cage over my hips makes me think that I need to be upright. All you want to think about is like, for example, the neutral position that we think about when we're squatting down that rib position. Let's now angle the body forward while maintaining that rib position and pushing the sled.

2:16:07That's all it is. Okay. Right? That's going to be the position that allows us to be able to produce the most force while moving forward. Let me also mention this. This is the level one pushing and pulling position that we want our rib cage in. because for me, when I want people to progress what they do with the sled, it's a very powerful tool to allow you to push and pull in different spinal positions. So you start off by pushing and pulling the sled with a neutral spine. Then you can start to push and pull the sled laterally. So like sled is here, you're here, you're pushing the sled laterally, you're pulling the sled laterally while maintaining a fairly neutral spine.

2:16:51But then over time, the strength that you can get with the sled is that when you push the sled, you can push with more spinal flexion when you become more comfortable. So you can learn to produce force with spinal flexion. And then you can learn to when you're pulling the sled, you can learn to almost Jefferson curl pull the sled in deep spinal flexion. You don't start here, but when you become comfortable and you've been doing this with very lightweight initially, you can be comfortable pulling this load with deep spinal flexion. That's later on. And that's for me where the sled has become super powerful because what my goal is for myself and what I've done is I became very strong pushing and pulling a sled with unusual spine.

2:17:34Then I pushed and pulled with spinal extension, purposefully putting myself in this position while pulling and pushing. I pushed and pulled in deep spinal flexion, right? So that I could become very strong in this spinal position. I push and pull in deep lateral flexion. So I'll literally push the sled here with lateral flexion of the spine. I'll pull the sled here with deep lateral flexion on the other side so that I can strengthen all of the positions of my spine with this implement. This isn't something you're able to do with a barbell. You could do spinal flexion, Jefferson curl stuff. You could do some lateral stuff, but the sled allows you to produce force on an object forward, backward, and to the side with that intent of movement.

2:18:20When you are pulling, how are you pulling? I know that sounds dumb, but do you have ropes attached to the sled? With the torque sled, how are you pulling it? The torque sled, there's two ways that I'm pulling. when I want to get into deep flexion, I have this thing. It's something that Mark made. It's called a shake strap. So it's this strap that you're able to, it's kind of like a cable attachment that you can put on a machine, but you can also put the sled. I loop my hands through it, right? So my hands are here and then I'll let my back bend and then I'll start walking backwards in deep spinal flexion with that pulling me.

2:18:55There's a video of this. I can imagine like you reach through a hole and then grab it and it's sort of wrapped around the wrist. And literally, when I'm going backwards, I'm in this position while moving backwards. I'm in this deep spinal flexion position. What about like off the rack white belt version? Neutral spine. That's what I said. You can use either the sled attachment, that whatever sled you're using, or most sleds have something that you can hook onto. And then you can place that attachment and you can still push and pull with a neutral spine. I got it. What does Mark call that? It's called a shake strap.

2:19:32Shake strap. Yeah. It's called a shake strap. And he sells those somewhere? Yeah. Presumably. Yeah. Everything that I've talked about, I put it all in a place called the strongerhuman.store. It's a website. So all this equipment is there, but you can also find this at his website, which I believe is markbellslingshot.com. So for the sandbags and everything I've mentioned ropes, it's at the strongerhuman.store. I was in the middle of nowhere, Italy, and I went to this gym, this tiny gym, and there was a slingshot there. And I took a photo and I sent it to Mark. Those things are everywhere. They're everywhere.

2:20:06That's one of the cool things about that. You'll see them in the most random gyms. But when it comes to that, the basic version of the sled that mom and dad can do, older people, younger people, everyone can do, push and pull with a neutral spine and learn how to produce force. Slowly increase the load. when you feel comfortable. Start introducing a little bit of play in your spine. But when you introduce this play in your spine, don't move the spine out of that position when pushing and pulling. Yeah, and probably drop the load. And drop the, absolutely drop the load. It needs to be light. But let's say, for example, you start exploring with a little bit of spinal flexion when pulling the sled.

2:20:42You get into that spinal flexion. The sled is really light. You start pulling backwards. You're breathing. You're not holding your breath. Your body learns, hey, this is actually a good position for us to produce a little bit of force in. We're strong here, right? Versus when most people get in that position, there's a breath hold. It feels unsafe. Something gets pulled. So for me now, the only reason I was able to progress this was because I worked on those regressions. And when a lot of trainers maybe see some of this, they're like, that's unsafe. You can't just wait a few years. You're going to blow your back out.

2:21:13Like, no, I'm not going to hurt myself because my body knows that this is a good, resilient position to be in. I'm not afraid of this position. So that is definitely key to keep in mind. If you've slowly conditioned yourself to be safe in those positions, there's also just a lot of dogmatic, like never do this nonsense that has no backing. It's like the number of classes I've been in where they're like, don't lock your knees, don't lock your arms. There are these posters that coach Chris Summer pointed me to. It's a photo of this Chinese gymnast beast in a Maltese cross. If you want to know what that is, go check that out.

2:21:53And it just says underneath, lock your elbows. And it's like, yeah, if you're not dumb about it, like our body, we have this full range of movement for a reason. And look, if you're hypermobile and this and that, take it into account. But also it's like, you're allowed to ask questions about the rules. Make sure you understand why the rules exist. And if the person can't explain it, like, hmm, interesting. Well, at least I cross-examine it. One topic that you wanted to make sure we touched upon is soft tissue work. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. So take it away. Where should we start?

2:22:29Again, so many things. I've met Kelly Sturette maybe three times. You know what I mean? I think he's been on the show twice. Can I set the stage for people who have no idea who this is? Set the stage for Mr. Sturette. All right. So Kelly Starrett, famous for becoming the supple leopard, which by the way, I'm not sure if he's ever shown this photo. There's a photograph of him in the gym that he started with his wife, which is him in a leopard print bathrobe pulling a Zoolander. Not sure if that relates to the title of the book. But the point is, high-level PT performance coach works with the highest levels of military, highest levels of athletics.

2:23:07and also this is important to me at least is a practitioner he walks the walk i think for his i think i'm getting this right for his 40th birthday and this is a large man he's a big boy he's got to be 230 240 250 who knows in that range thighs as big around as this table like he's going crazy if he's listening to you say this right now oh yeah no i'm just gonna keep laying it on thick. His legs are ridiculously large. He is a very strong man. And for his 40th though, because you would look at him, you'd be like, okay, that's a meat cube. I'm sure he's very strong in a couple of lifts. However, for his 40th, I think it was he wanted to power clean some ungodly number and he can't really use one of his wrists.

2:23:55So he catches the barbell in this like half salute with one arm when he catches it on the shoulders. So there's that. So on his birthday, he wanted to do that. He wanted to, I believe it was run an ultra marathon and not just any ultra, but the quad dipsy, which is a killer, like a widow maker. You guys can look it up. It's Northern California and do a standing backflip. So it's like, you would look at him. You wouldn't assume all of these things are possible. And yet there you have Kelly Starrett. So that is a back clip. Yeah. And also formerly incredibly high level, like world-class kayaker.

2:24:34So this is an athlete who now helps other athletes and many more non-athletes in addition to that. So I took us on a bit of a sidebar, but you were saying Kelly, I think everyone should own his book. I'm becoming a supple leopard because there's so many concepts. I bought that book in 2013 routine. And so many concepts are things that I've continued to build my knowledge pace on that have helped so much. One thing from that book that was just a small mention, but went a very long way for me was keeping a relaxed face when doing myofascial release or soft tissue work. And when you're doing soft tissue work, and we can just use an example, if you're on top of a foam roller or you're using a hard med ball, Kelly has his harder products, like his supernova product, it's very hard and you roll on top of it, it can hurt because you're now rolling your tissues on top of this hard piece of equipment.

2:25:29The instinctual thing to do is like grimace and make faces. And what happens? Like even when I did that instinctively, I tightened up right here. And those tissues, they bind up to try to keep you safe. You hold your breath, you tighten your face. You're not able to get as deep into the tissues that you're trying to work and help become more supple. So Kelly's advice is like, get rid of your pain face. stop, right? Because inherently, if you just try to get this loose, get this relaxed, you'll start to probably breathe. You'll start to get deeper in those tissues. The soft tissue work will work better.

2:26:01That's the goal of that. Why is the soft tissue work important? The soft tissue work is important because what I've found is that when you have certain tissues that are too tense, earlier in our conversation, we were talking about not holding the breath so that you're not holding onto too much tension. But what tends to happen for many of us is we have different areas of our body that hold more tension than others. And what soft tissue or self-myofascial release does is it helps you search for areas. Like you're tacking down certain tissues, that feels good, that feels good. Ooh, that feels gummy.

2:26:33You're doing work on that, whether it's with a med ball or a body lever, which is the leverage tool I showed you. And when you're able to breathe and work through those areas, what you'll find is when you, again, work through that and it's not as painful, you go and you move again, you might have extra range of motion. You might have less joint pain and a joint that's lower or high of the area that you were just working. And a goal of this is to have that tissue state that you create after doing soft tissue work, have that be your default. That's the goal. Yeah. Let me mention just a few things here too.

2:27:08One is going to sound super bougie, but I'll say it anyway. Even when I was driving around in my POS hand-me-down minivan and making next to nothing out of college body work. And again, scale it down. If I had to go drive into the most dangerous part of San Jose to the most sketchiest massage place just to pay for a 30-minute massage that I couldn't afford anything, I would do that. So body work and soft tissue work is something that has just been a non-negotiable for me forever. And it doesn't fix everything. It's not a panacea. But just to get into the microdosing movement. You can also microdose massage in terms of self-soft tissue treatment.

2:27:52So before bed, pretty much whenever I'm at home, certainly before bed, I always roll. And that is not just to work on the tissues. It's also to down-regulate. And I'm not sure if there's any science to back this, but it feels like it helps me shift into more parasympathetic state, helps with sleep. And I literally, it's five minutes, I would say, probably no more. Typically lower body, not a lot of upper body stuff. But as a result of that tiny, tiny continual dosing, it's like when I do get body work, it's very common. They're like, wow, you're like, your muscles are very easy to work with. Like, what is the story here?

2:28:34And it's like, It's just flossing, right? It's the daily practice of doing that soft tissue work. I haven't used it yet, but I'm excited to use, you know, the person who owns this product. So they should maybe in quotation marks just call it the nutcracker because I think of a nutcracker. What is it called? The body lever. The body lever. The body lever. It looks like a giant nutcracker that you can like with your arms use to compress your leg or your abdomen, or you could brace it against a leg and use it to like benevolently crush your arm to do forearm stuff i mean it looks very very flexible rock climbers have used something i think they probably have rebranded it now called the arm aid just specifically the for the forearm stuff i think there's a company there's a maybe rogue they had this thing that you could open up and clamp down on like your legs and arms like yeah these let yeah very very similar idea so i'm looking forward to using that i remember i saw you maybe it was in the same video but you were in a sauna with a proper Banya hat on with the nutcracker on your leg.

2:29:35And I was like, Ooh, I want one of those. And I actually took a screenshot and sent it small world to Kelly Starrett. And I was like, Starrett, where do I get one of these nutcrackers? And lo and behold, full circle. And now I shall have my nutcracker. It's here today. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Amazing. All right. Look at this. Christmas comes early. What other types of, Because when people think soft tissue, there are right and wrong ways to do this, right? Not everything delivers the kind of benefits one might hope. So for me, I mean, this is very 101, but it's like, if I find an area as I'm rolling out my IT band or like my vastest lateralis on the outside of the quad tends to get very, very tight.

2:30:16And if I find that like gummy, painful spot, it's like, okay, you don't just gloss over that. Like, let's sit on that for a while. also using vibration like even like uh now they have theraguns and stuff i used to use a hitachi magic wand for this funny enough wait what people know popular lesbians uh you really

2:30:40okay i could see that working yeah yeah yeah yeah so multi-purpose you know but using percussion devices for sure yeah also on when i've located through foam rolling like that painful spot going to it with a theragun or something like it a million different devices you can choose from any other particular types of soft tissue work that you like to do let's just start like with probably some of the easiest that you can manage people like gua sha you can get yourself a gua sha tool you could pull out a butter knife yeah right you could pull out a butter knife, lotion up an area that you want to work.

2:31:16Let's say that you do a lot of gripping and your forearms are tight. Pull that out, get the area lotioned up, and then start to work those areas. Concepts when doing soft tissue work with any implement is number one, you have to breathe. The thing that I think makes it hard for people, makes them not want to do it, is they do it, they feel tension in a certain area, they hold their breath, they tense up. It doesn't loosen enough because they're too tense and it's a bad experience so they don't come back and do it yeah so just like we were talking about how when you're doing exercise you need to regress it to your pain-free level just gonna say the same right it's not that you regress your soft tissue work to a pain-free level but you regress it to a level that you can breathe and try to relax while dealing with the pressure you're putting on yourself so if you're putting so much pressure that you just have to go like that, you would decrease the pressure.

2:32:09You're not ready, dog. Which is also true with manual therapy if you have somebody working on you, right? Like if you're bracing or holding your breath or making a pain face, it's too much pressure. Absolutely. Way too much pressure. So that's something that can help you actually make progress with the practice because if you can keep that as your North Star, try to relax my face, make sure I'm breathing, and put in as much pressure I can manage if I'm keeping these two things in line, you can progressively overload the amount of pressure you place on your tissues. Yeah. I mean, just to pull something out.

2:32:40This is from, I can't remember who told me this, but it's from Thai Massage. I mean, who knows if this is originally from classic Thai Massage, but a very, very, very good Thai Massage therapist, which is an incredible art form, incredible, said to me, like, there's no such thing as too deep, only too fast. You can get really deep with a lot of pressure. You just can't get there too quickly. and you can apply that to self-massage. Also, there's a guy, Jason Niemer, co-creator of something called Acroyoga, amazing Thai massage therapist also. And he'll just use his forearm and his elbow on his own arms, on his own legs.

2:33:18You don't necessarily need a whole magician's kit full of tools. You can also just use your forearms. Tennis ball at home. I think some tissues that people really leave out of the mix are their feet, especially the bottoms of their feet. I was just going to say, this looks like a tennis ball called Rubs, R-U-B-Z, but it's got little nubs on it. Super hard or is it sock-ish? It's pretty hard. Super hard? Yeah, it's pretty hard, but I will travel with it. And it's like the amount of relief you get systemically from rolling out your feet. I think who I picked that up from is Ed Cohn, actually. Okay, okay.

2:33:55Yeah, yeah. He talked about decompression, a certain type of hanging. He has a very particular device. And then I'm pretty sure he talked about rubbing out the feet because he said it helped with his knee pain. I was like, huh, I think I'm going to try that. I'm really happy you mentioned that about Ed, because when it comes to soft tissue, there are many people within the sphere of fitness, especially on the evidence-based side of fitness, that when people talk about soft tissue work, the only thing, the only rebuttal they have is like, well, there's really no research to back that up. And it's probably placebo and it feels good.

2:34:26Go ahead and do it. But there's nothing to really prove it works. And the frustrating thing about not just that, but many aspects of evidence-based fitness is that there's a waiting game to wait for a paper to tell you something works that's probably been done for centuries in many different cultures for a long time. Massage and soft tissue work has been a panacea for so many different groups of people around the globe. But we have people in exercise science that want to discount it because they don't have a paper that proves this efficacy. So that's why, like, I don't get me wrong. I'm not saying evidence-based work isn't helpful, but don't allow evidence-based studies to block you off from trying something that might just be really beneficial for you.

2:35:13That's all. Yeah. Let me add something to that because this is definitely a nerve for me as well. It's like, all right, look, science is amazing. Okay. Scientific method is a structured way of not fooling ourselves. Incredible tool for humankind. I mean, indispensable. responsible and Western medicine, I'm going to say, and this is going to be controversial, like the most effective healing system ever devised on the planet period, full stop. Like if you look at like infant mortality and reductions in infant mortality, the advent of antibiotics, I mean, this is an incredible system of healing as are many others.

2:35:48All of that said, as someone who has been involved with supporting early stage science now for more than a decade, science is fucking expensive and it's really slow and what that means is also right within the realm of exercise science it's like you don't want to fool yourself so you should be scientifically literate yes you should pay attention to the literature if you can yes by the way that takes some training to get to the point where you can actually read something like that properly however there are so many incentives that will prevent most studies from ever getting done that you could be waiting forever.

2:36:28And especially in the realm of exercise science where it's like you're not experimenting with a speculative type of invasive brain surgery in some far-flung third-world country. It's like, no, try some soft tissue work. Who cares? The downside risk is so minimal. See how you feel. Learn to trust your body again, which is another reason why I more and more so, and it's not valuing it more so, but increasingly value movement because it teaches you to get reacquainted with the subtleties of feeling your body, which autopilot linear movements in the gym do not automatically do. And then you can become a better gauge.

2:37:13And look, this isn't to like pat myself on the back, but like, as you do more of that, it's like when we were doing the rope stuff this morning and I was like, Oh, I feel like I'm flaring. I feel like I got a little too high on that right foot. And And then when you have, and look, I'm not, again, I'm not Brishnikoff or I'm not a surgeon with the most delicate hands in the world. Can't read Braille. But as you develop that, you can then trust your body. It's like, all right, you'll begin to pick up patterns. And also, I'm like, I think I had too many exogenous ketones, but lots of personality.

2:37:46I'll keep going for a second. The other thing, and this came up through my archery in the last like six months. So I was training with amazing guy, Jake Kaminsky, two-time silver medalist, one of the most successful archers the US has produced in the last 30, maybe 50 years. And he, like me, takes meticulous training notes, including soft tissue, so that if he had a problem, he's like, this rib is slightly out, which is a really common issue with archery. He could be like, no, it's not the last workout. He's like, he identified through patterning because he shot a million plus arrows easily. he would look back and he's like, it's usually five or six workouts back.

2:38:24And I could identify either what helped me or what the problem was. And similarly, it's like just experiment, take good notes, try not to fool yourself and keep what works, ditch what doesn't. But man, the soft tissue stuff, it's so incredibly helpful. And I wanted to add also, just because I mentioned the pre-bed, not to totally hijack this, but so it goes. You mentioned rope flow prior to bed, if I'm not misremembering. That was not on Mike, but do you do rope before bed? Yeah. I'll do some nights. It's maybe three or five minutes. Some nights it'll be just flowing for 20 minutes outside my house, just relaxing.

2:39:08And you were saying that also it helps to alleviate the morning stiffness the next day? Yeah. You know, okay. I'll come back to the soft tissue thing in a second, but Mark and I were having a conversation early last year. And we were like, man, what can help us just like get rid of waking up in the morning, just feeling that morning stiffness, not morning, you know, wood morning, just body stiff. Don't want to fix that. I don't want to fix that. You want that. That's a good sign of hormonal health. But the general morning stiffness where you just kind of like get your body, you, you know, you got to wring out your body a little bit.

2:39:39So we thought, I thought about that for a while. And then I just started doing rope flow before bed. And the first night I did rope flow before bed, which wasn't something I usually did. I usually just like, you know, I'd come home, work, maybe take a walk, go to bed, wake up, do rope flow, feel amazing. Did rope flow before bed, woke up the next morning. It was just like, ah, like really, I just felt like I didn't need to, my body was already lubricated. That's what I felt like. And I was like, okay, maybe this is just a one night thing. But I then noticed that the nights that I didn't do some rope, and all it is, is rotating before bed.

2:40:16Let's just call it that. If you have something that you can get some natural rotation in before bed, cool. If you have the rope practice, cool. But getting that natural spinal rotation in before bed will help you feel better when you wake up in the morning and your back will not feel as stiff. It's huge. So the reason why I know it works is because I have nights where I don't do it. And I've also told many people in the stronger human community to try that and let me know what they feel. And everyone that does it wakes up feeling better in the morning. So I know that it's one of those practices that if you have a practice where you do some soft tissue work, don't stop the practices you do.

2:40:52Just add in three minutes. Do two to five minutes before you go to bed. Two to five minutes. Yeah. Scale it down. If you're like, I don't have 10 minutes. It's like, okay, do one minute. Everything is like, oh, I can't do one minute. It's fine. Do three passes on the IT bed on each leg on a foam roller. Come on. It's like, There will be a point at which you have no excuse. And I'll add one more thing, which I guess I accidentally omitted from my mind as soft tissue work, but it's definitely soft tissue work. And this is something that has stuck for me big time. And I've passed on to a lot of friends also to give credit where credit is due.

2:41:28So my mid-back was bothering me. I had this really old injury and my mid-back was really spasmed. and I was doing hand balancing practices a hundred years ago with a guy named Andrew Bondarenko. And I didn't train with him much. I mean, the guy is a phenom. He is a, or at least at the time was a top Cirque du Soleil performer, famous for one-armed hand balancing, like one-arm handstands. He's not a big guy, right? Who knows? He probably weighs 130 pounds, maybe 140. 40, maybe of people I've met personally, the most incredible combination of strength and mobility that I've ever seen. And what's his, I'll get his name after I need to write that down.

2:42:10Yeah, yeah. Andrei, A-N-D-R-I-I, Bondarenko. And I think his Instagram is just Andrei Bondarenko. Excellent teacher. And we did some hand balancing stuff and I was explaining my back issues and he's like, oh, you need to get one of these mats. and the mat was, I ended up getting the Nayoya Acupressure mat. And is this over to Shakti? It might be the same thing. There are a bunch of imitators too. There's one called Betta Nails. The basic idea is it's like a thick towel with plastic golf cleats covering it. And then there's one for the neck and it fucking hurts. And even to this day, I've done it hundreds of times.

2:42:49Like if you're a little sensitive, especially if the tissue's inflamed, it hurts. if you stick with it past like three or four minutes then your body chills out and i typically stay on 10 minutes the reason andre introduced it to me is his coach when he used to do team acrobatic competitions which is a big thing in like eastern europe and other parts of the world where you have it's almost like if you could imagine like cheerleading plus plus plus plus plus where you'd also have like male only teams female only teams where you'd have like a flyer someone who's doing crazy acrobatics. That would be Andre who would get shot into the air with guys who would make like a kind of, they call it a basket with the hands.

2:43:29People can look this up. All of those guys would just be beaten to hell. And the coach would make all of them lay on one of these 45 for 45 minutes after every practice. And I started using it and I was like, okay, I have no idea how this works. All I know is man, does this work. And before bed, especially with a lot of my back issues that is non-negotiable i'll give one trick for folks also if you have low back issues specifically traveling with the whole kit and caboodle is kind of a pain in the ass just take the neck attachment travel with that that'll fit easily into most suitcases and then you can like lay on that for your low back on like carpet in the hotel or whatever 10 minutes before you go to bed resolves like 50 of my low back issues for sleep it's incredible incredible.

2:44:17So the cool thing about this is like, it's really simple as to why this all works. Blood flow. You bring pressure to an area, you drive blood and nutrients to that area after pressure is relieved. So when you have that on your back or you have that on your whole back, because I actually have the same thing at home. I have it in a box. I need to bring it back out because I did it for a while and I was like, oh, it's cool. I like it. It helps me relax, but I didn't keep it. So I'm going to bring that back now that you mentioned it. But all these things, they're driving a bunch of blood to that area, which now when you get up, You feel relief in those areas that you brought a level of pressure to.

2:44:49And that's why it's so good for healing of specific areas. And that's why when it comes to soft tissue, I don't just do the hot areas that most people would think about, like maybe the quads or the forearms, et cetera. I hit my whole body throughout the week. So I'll do tissue work on my head. I have like a tool that I'll use. And while I'm in the sauna, I'll get on my temple. I'll get on my head. I'll get on the back of my neck. I'll get here. Let's make people comfortable. This is not like a public sauna. sauna at home. But when I do go out to the public sauna, I do take a gua sha tool and a body lever with me and I will hit that stuff in there.

2:45:21And usually people are like, what are you doing? That looks like it feels so good. So I'll give them the gua. Yeah. You know what? That's not so bad. That's not so bad. I mean, I've been to some of the OG Russian Turkish bats in New York city. And there are these old guys from the old country who are like shaving their chest in the sauna. And I'm just like, bro, you can, that's not, you shouldn't be able to do that. okay. It's not okay. I've seen it on multiple occasions. So point I'm making, nutcracker, fine. I'm okay with it. Absolutely. But that's the thing. You're bringing blood flow to all these areas.

2:45:54And if you can, going back to what you were mentioning about learning how to heal yourself, that's what this is. Body workers are essential. They're great. I have no issue with them. But I think that if you're someone who you go to a body worker and it's usually maybe a two time a month thing, because that's what most people can afford. Usually it's like once or twice a month. Now you can go to a body worker multiple times a week because you are your own body worker. You learn to find the areas that, first off, you learn when you put pressure in a certain area, you get released somewhere else.

2:46:25So you take a mental note. And at this point for me, I know that when I'm feeling a little something in this upper part of my glute, I know what to hit. If I'm feeling something in my wrist, I know what to hit in my forearm. I have these reference points of how to heal myself because I've become familiar with pressure my body. And you learn these things, you know what I mean? And anyone can learn this. You don't have to have a degree with a bunch of schooling on this. You just have to touch yourself. Yeah. That's it. You just have to experiment. Another one, and I actually owe Dustin Moskovitz, the thank you for this, co-founder of Facebook, now Asana, has the worst branding, which is why I always forget the product name.

2:47:08It's like the back buddy. It basically looks like a very tricked out, like pimp my Theracane. So like Theracane would be like a plastic candy can that you allows you to get to points on your back that at least I am completely unable to touch. Right. And then there's one that looks more like an S. Yeah. Okay. That I'm pretty sure it's called back buddy. People can look this up. If you just search Dustin Moskovitz back buddy, I'm sure the right name will come up. And I have one of these everywhere I go as well, because there's no way. In terms of soft tissue work, me doing good work on my back is going to be a little tough for getting very focused attention.

2:47:50All right. Anything else to add on the soft tissue side of things? In terms of equipment, Amazon has med balls. So you can get yourself a med ball on Amazon. Med ball meaning medicine ball? Medicine ball. Yeah. Because that can allow you to... And they're inexpensive. So you can roll on top of it, on top of your hamstrings, your quads, your, you can do some torso work, but it's like, it's a good inexpensive tool for you to get yourself some soft tissue work. And just for clarity, you are rolling on top of it or you're rolling the medicine ball on top of your leg, as an example. You're on top of it.

2:48:24Yeah. You are on top of it using your, the pressure from your body to put into that ball. So I would look at these as like different, these are different types of pressure. The med ball allows you to put your own pressure into that implement. So there's that. I think there's this woman called Jill Miller. She has on Amazon, tune-up fitness balls is what they're called. I like those specifically because they're not extremely hard. They have a tad bit of give. They're hard, but they have a bit of give. So you can really sink yourself into it with that pressure. So I would suggest instead of like, because most people, they want to get the hardest balls.

2:48:56But the thing is, is like hard, hard instruments, especially when you're pushing or pressurizing into them, they can almost make most people back away from that resistance. Most people need to use a slightly softer implement to ease themselves into this soft tissue work before moving towards like the Kelly Sturette supernova or his peanut or any of these harder implements. So that would be some type of pressure. The body lever allows for a leverage type of pressure where now you are pressing two things into each other and you're finding that type of pressure. And then it also allows you to kind of need, like you would like at a massage with a masseuse, you now can use that pressure to need.

2:49:34And then as far as other implements, there are gua sha tools that you can get from different companies, Amazon or whatever, where again, it's this rubbing pressure. You want to have these implements that provide you different types of pressure so you can do whatever it calls for on any given day. Let me ask, just because I have to ask, or my OCD will not allow me to proceed, or at least not land the plan on this conversation nordic curls what are nordic curls and what does your resume look like with respect to nordic curls the nordic hamstring curl is something that i started doing again after i met my buddy ben patrick i wasn't able to do a nordic curl when i first met him okay so explain what a nordic curl is a nordic hamstring curl this is also something you should not just run out and try without supervision.

2:50:25Don't do it. Don't do it. Regress it. If you try Nordic curl, most people will pull their hamstring. There's a way that you could do a Nordic curl would be like, let's say there's a flat bench. Let's imagine that you have your knees on the bench. You could strap your ankles into the bench. And the goal is to lean your torso down, almost kind of like, just like you're leaning your torso down, all the way down and then come up with the strength of your hamstrings. So you're not slamming down. You're not just falling. You're going down slowly and your hamstrings are going to be the, the hamstring strength is going to be the limiting factor.

2:51:00If you are able to control yourself down or bring yourself up. Yeah, exactly. So just, I mean, it is hard the way you describe it and it is even harder. I have a Siron X machine for a Nordic hamstring. Yeah. I haven't touched it in a long time. It's a little dusty at this point, but imagine I'll give another visual for folks. So imagine that you had like a nice thick, like memory foam at the edge of a pool. So you could put your knees down without your knees hurting. And then a really fat friend came behind you and just sat on your ankles. So now you can get to like your max height on your knees.

2:51:41Your knees are in line with your hips, which are in line with your shoulders. and your fat front is sitting on your ankles, but you're comfortable in the memory foam. And then without breaking at the hip, keeping the knees, hips, and shoulders in line, you put your hands behind your back and then go all the way down so your nose touches the water and then come all the way back up. It is so fucking hard. Okay. And then how does this fit? Why the hell am I asking you about Nordic Carlson? There must be some historical reason. so i saw that um a few years ago i saw that like tyreek hill did a certain amount of nordic curls all right who is this person tyreek hill is an nfl player i i don't watch much football so i forget the team he plays for but he's like people see him as like uh he's one of the fastest he's not the fastest player in the nfl yeah and one thing and a trend you notice amongst a lot of guys who are very fast is that they also have the ability to do a few if not many nordic curls one thing about the nordic hamstring curl there has been some research to back this up but it's not doesn't mean you have to do nordic curls if you want to build resiliency and sprinting but they progress nordic curls on athletes that sprinted and these athletes all have less occurrence of pulling their hamstrings because of the amount of strength that you build in your hamstring at length because you notice at the end range of a nordic curl your hamstring is at this lengthened position with stress on the hamstring which is why If you're new to movement, you need to regress it because you could pull your hamstring in that position.

2:53:10It feels - Yeah, pull a hamstring, by the way, is not like, ouch, that hurt. Let me sleep on it. Now I'm okay the next day. Yeah. Typically. It's not one of those. It's not. It's not. It's not nice. So when Ben talked to us and told me about the Nordic curls, tried one, couldn't get it. And I was like - What did this NFL guy do? Oh, I forgot how many. I think Tyreek did maybe 12 or 13. 12 or 13. so what I wanted to do is I wanted to progress in order curls and when I saw Tyreek's video I was like I want to do more than Tyreek so for me to progress in order curls man I started at the basic regressions like I started first off having a bench higher and going with limited range of motion so not going all the way down finding where my body would not be able to handle the pressure and going to that range repping that out slowly lowering down took me a few months to lower down to a flat bench and I was able to finally do one Nordic curl.

2:54:04Then I would do a curl where I would go down and push myself up and give myself assistance. And over time that built. And then I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in the video I managed to do 18 Nordic curls. I'm not sure if I did 17 or 18 Nordic curls. Something like that. I mean, look, I'm relying on some deep research here. So let me take a look here. I mean, I think we should, pull up the tape we'll have the video here we'll have some footage here like deep research says that the previous record tyreek was 10 and you did 15 there we go yeah but the point is like the differential was substantial right from a percentage standpoint yeah right you did not just like eke out barely beating the record you beat the record substantially yeah and this isn't like a world record i think there's a guy who he's much lighter but i think he managed to do like 25 Norder curls or something like that.

2:55:02So it's like, I'm not the guy in the world who's done the most Norder curls, but I wanted to beat Tyreek. If I'm going to beat Tyreek in one thing, because I'm not faster than Tyreek, it's going to be doing more Norder curls than him. But it's one thing, like a strength coach who I respect so much, and he's taught me a lot through the show and through what I'm able to see him do with athletes, Ian Danny. He's someone who, I love his work because he's someone who takes everything that we've managed to talk about here, and he applies it to different athletes he works with. So he'll have certain athletes that he progresses like a lot of Nordic curls with.

2:55:36He'll have athletes that he does different soft tissue work with. He has athletes that he purposefully has them do certain types of static stretching, which certain people are like, static stretching isn't good for you, but Ian knows when and where to apply these different modalities. Rather than saying, that's just bad, we shouldn't do it. Ian is someone who understands how to use all of these things holistically to make progress. That's something that I really think most of us should try to do when it comes to our personal physical practice. All right. So bone density. I have lifted most of my life and in certain segments of my body, I was shocked to find, I think partially due to the back injury and reducing certain types of loading, but I have below average bone density in a few segments of my body, not all.

2:56:22it's like the average is fine but averages can be super misleading right you got to be careful with averages so the average on dexa great but in certain segments way below average so i was like i've been thinking about bone density a lot for longevity and health span you want sufficient bone density yeah and there are different ways to catalyze the adaptation right of increased bone density, compression, lifting in parentheses, tension in parentheses, isometrics, impact, jumping, right? And then rotation, which is certainly for me and I think for a lot of people, whether they consider themselves athletes or not, that is an obvious omission a lot of the time, right?

2:57:10And that could be mace, kettlebell juggling, rope. Yeah. And that's more so pulling at the bones so that that rotation like it's it is rotation but it's also pulling these segments like that's so okay so you need more attention so rope may not be actually a great example but the kettlebell would be since it's at like the end of a kinetic chain that's getting elongated or at least yeah stretched in that sense okay got it all right aging insurance certainly this is something i think about a lot with aging parents as well and really trying to like you know talking to a doctor I know really well. And he's like, yeah, I call my parents trainer.

2:57:47And I just say, when I see, he's like, I just say, make them cry. You have to make my parents cry because they need the bonus. Like you have to load. It can't be comfortable or at least overly comfortable. Anything else that you'd like to just add on bone density? Oh, also another one, just because the one place I'm happy to spend a lot of money is on very, very, very good doctors. And I'm fortunate to have really good doctors. You have to ensure you have adequate calcium absorption and that you are not taking things that could over time interfere with calcium absorption so in addition to the stressors you got to pay attention to what you're able to absorb on my youtube channel i have a video that i made it's like 40 something minutes on bone density that goes into everything all right it goes into all of this so like if you guys want to spend some time and go and watch that video that's it's going to be worth it for you but one thing I want to mention, I'm happy you mentioned the jumping thing because jumping is something that we just literally stopped doing some people.

2:58:49It's something that I stopped. I was a soccer player for years. And when I got into a certain form of practice, there was a point where I didn't jump for years, unless maybe I was just doing a random box jump here and there, which I ended up being really crap at because jumping is something I stopped doing. And what happens to many people is like, because they slowly stop getting off the ground, there comes a point where they never jump again. And then they're 40, 50, 60, they jump, they pull something. And then they're like, I can't do this because they can't first off, they don't have the strength to propel themselves off the ground, but they also don't have the elasticity to be able to land and handle the force from the ground.

2:59:26Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's not the jumping necessarily. It's the problem. It's the landing. It's the landing. Yeah. So I think something that can be a great investment for many people, including those that are older, is a rebounder. You know what a rebounder is like a mini trampoline you can have at home. Yeah, a little trampoline. There's many brands. Bellicon is like the Rolls Royce of rebounders, but there's also - Bellicon sounds like the Rolls Royce. Yeah, there's also like lesser expensive brands, but I love the rebounder. I have a rebounder. And the reason why I like it is because like, it's something that I can just keep in the backyard.

2:59:56And when I go outside, I can just hop on it real quick. It feels pretty meditative, but like there have been quite a few studies to show, especially in older adults, that rebounding helped them build bone density because of the low intensity jumping that it causes for them. Why? I can guess at the answer here, but why is that better than say jumping rope or just jumping in place? It's a regression. It's the regression. You know what I mean? Because many people, they try jumping rope. Many people, their feet will get beat up a lot. It's something that you absolutely can and should build the capacity to do.

3:00:30I look at jumping rope as like rebounder, light hopping. 30 seconds to a minute to two minutes of jumping rope each day or every other day. then over time, you're going to get to a point where you can jump rope for five, 10, 15, 20 minutes. But the thing is, is the ability to jump rope without certain muscles and areas getting taxed more than others is a full body build of elasticity from the feet all the way up to the neck because everything needs to have the right amount of tension, but not too much tension. So what a lot of people notice when they start jumping rope is that they're like, oh, my calves got super sore, right?

3:01:07And experienced people who jump rope, It's not their calves that get super sore. It's like everything just kind of starts getting tired out because their whole system is just popping them off the ground very lightly. Whereas when you're new to it, that impact and even your feet are too weak to handle that impact on the ground. You don't pop off. So that's why a rebounder is going to be super good. Then regress jumping so you can have your hands on something and start jumping. Then just literally. What do you mean by hands on something? Put your hands on a table, hop. Use that to help you have a softer landing.

3:01:38initially you might have a lot of weight in your hands so that you because like maybe you can't handle that landing but over time you're going to be able to put less weight in the hands and then this is where i got my mom so hopping aka basically emulating what you do kind of jump roping yeah you could do that like lightly you can also kind of transfer from leg to leg light hops but the goal is to again do not be embarrassed with how low you have to regress to feel comfortable with this. Don't just try starting to jump with a jump rope immediately, because if you do that too soon and your body's telling you signals that you're not ready for it, whether you're getting a lot of impact in your lower back, your knees, your feet are feeling really beat up, you need to listen to those signals and regress the hopping.

3:02:20I'm telling you, if you can regress hopping, do it a little bit, doesn't have to be every day, could be every other day, just a little bit, you will get to a point where you can start jumping rope. If you want to see an example of what not to do. People can search for the Tim Ferriss experiment parkour episode where I went from like no jumping to let me try to learn parkour in a week. Yeah. Don't do that. Yeah. Yeah, do not do that. Yeah, basically just like blew apart my entire body like Forrest Gump's braces. Uh-huh. Not a good idea. Yeah. So yeah, regress. But the reason why I think that that's so important, it's great for bone density, like what we were saying here, but I think it's like it allows you to bring back that skill and never lose it.

3:03:02Because once you're able to start hopping and it's now an effortless thing, just a little bit will allow you to hold onto it for the rest of your life. And if you have it right now, do the low intensity jump rope. Just, you don't even need a jump rope. Just do some hopping each day so that you maintain that ability to just propel and land. That goes very far. And a majority of the population can't do it anymore just because one day they stopped and they never did it again. Yeah, I can't remember who told me this. I'm inclined to say Kelly Starrett because I get a lot of these from Kelly. So Kelly, I'll give you credit for this, even if it's not you, but I think it is Kelly who is quoting a famous Russian sports scientist, as I recall it, who said, once you stop jumping, you start dying.

3:03:44I love that. I yes, dude, that's true. There was this video. Maybe I'll be able to find it by the time this comes out, but it literally showed this young man and it showed all of his relatives that were over 40. He had something up there and he was trying to have everyone jump. No one, even actually there was a few people in their thirties, everyone tried jumping and they couldn't, they could barely get off the ground. It's such an awkward thing. And he's someone who trains jumping. So he was able to like go super high, but it just shows that like, once you stop, it can go very quickly. But I want people to understand this doesn't mean you can't get it back.

3:04:21It just means that you got to treat yourself like a kid that's learning to walk again. You got to start with the basics, be okay with that taking a while. your feet have to adapt to the stress your body has to adapt to handle that force could be a year could be two could be whatever so what does a rebounder session look like how long would you bounce on it literally you could bounce on it like again just kind of like the rope you could do a minute you could do 10 a rebounder takes away a lot of the impact that you're going to have from like the ground because it allows you to go in and then you're able to use that energy to pop back up so when you become like there are rebounders like the bellicon i think other rebounders also, they have these handles that you can use if you find it difficult.

3:05:00I've seen this. Yeah. They're all tricked out. They're like the Batmobile sled. Yeah. There's a whole fitness trend of people on YouTube that do rebounder exercises. It's a workout for them. And I think this is a great thing. Some of them are heavier. That's powerful. Somebody who is, let's say they're 100 pounds overweight, 150 pounds overweight, but they can actually start jumping again and they can start bouncing again. But then over time, they can transfer that to flat ground. So that's why I think it's super powerful for everyone. And if you find that jumping, you can do jumping. Rebounding is great.

3:05:35Now, I also like rebounding too, because it's something that I feel kind of decompresses my system a little bit. I like it because when I get into the air, there's just like this, I can't replicate this floaty thing that happens in the air where I'm just like, it's just like you're weightless. And when you become experienced, you can really go down into the rebounder and just get super high and just, you're just literally going down and floating. When I come off of the rebounder, my body feels similar to when I finish a swim. I feel this global decompression everywhere. So it's one of those practices that I look at that makes the body feel better afterwards than before.

3:06:11It can be a workout if you want it to be. I don't look at my rebounding as a workout. I look at the rebounding as a recovery practice that feeds my body and allows me to do more hard work later. I look at the rope as that too. It feeds my body and allows me to do more later. It's healthy for me. And it's just fun. I think a big thing here, all this stuff for me is fun, man. It feels like play, right? So that's very important for me. playing the long game it's too boring or too punishing ultimately it's got to be sustainable right i'm excited to try a lot of what we've talked about so where can people find all things in sima me and my producer owen carr we make videos on the youtube channel which is just my name and sima iang so you can if you want to find the bone video, the traditional strength training video.

3:07:08That's at my YouTube channel, which is just my name. Sima Eang. No, just to note for people, there's a silent N in there. So N-S-I-M-A-I-N-Y-A-N-G. Yeah. If you say my name wrong, trust me, I ain't going to get mad at you. Don't worry. Okay. So don't be scared. Over at my website, thestrongerhuman.store is there's ropes, sandbags, kettlebells, the body lever, pretty much everything that I use, it's over there at the Stronger Human store. And then if you want to learn rope flow for free, I have a rope flow foundations course that has like 55 modules and like over 50 videos that go in depth, taking you from being someone who can be basic with rope flow to someone who can now flow with many different movements.

3:07:50That's in the Stronger Human community, which is on school.com slash the Stronger Human. And I also have stuff there where you can learn kettlebell flow, how to do soft tissue work. pretty much. School.com is spelled like normal school? S-K-O-O-L. S-K-O-O-L.com slash the stronger human. Thanks for that correction. My goal for that place is, first off, there's a great community there of over 12 ,000 people right now. I love how these people bring in their different expertise with what they're doing. Not everyone is doing all the exact same things that I do. So it's cool that I get to learn from them too, but it's just a great community of people that are all just trying to become stronger and build their own personal physical practices.

3:08:26And my goal for myself there is just to put everything that I've learned there. I want to mention this, Tim. Your podcast is a podcast that me and my best friend, his name's Brian Belaya, we were listening to your show back when I was 18 years old. We were listening to your stuff back. Actually, no, I think I was 20. The 19 and 20 is when we were listening to the show because we would literally go on calls and be like, okay, dude, what'd you learn from this? We'd get the books that were referenced in the show. I think we you've read the way of the superior man because of something you mentioned on one of your shows.

3:08:57Somehow it came up. Yeah. So that's what got me on the path of self-development and learning, constant learning. And Brian would say the same thing. Me and him are going to go crazy because like, oh shit, we just went on Tim Ferriss. So it's cool. So I want to say thank you because honestly, dude, I've listened to so much of your show, so much of your show. And it's taught me so much through the years that for me being here right now, it's literally insane to me. I'm just happy that I was able to stay kind of chill during this show because this has been really cool. So I want to say thank you because you literally, man, your stuff has changed my life.

3:09:34Seriously. Amazing. Makes my day. Thank you. Thank you. So glad we got to spend time together. And I'm very excited to see what you do in the coming years. How old are you? 32. I turned 33 this year. You got some runway. I cannot wait to see. The fact that you're doing Masters, I got to talk some shit. I also compete in adults. I don't only compete in Masters. Okay. Because Masters starts at 30, right? Yeah. And I remember this past winter, someone's like, yeah, you should do some Masters competitions in skiing. And I was like, what's the lowest age that one can be Masters? They're like, 30. And I was like, oh, I see.

3:10:16So people who just stopped competing at the highest levels, I know. I'm not going to be like a mop for those guys. But there's like ranges of masters. There's like masters one, which is what I did. Right. So I compete in adult and masters. So I'm on my way. But there's also masters two and three. So like they do it from like 30 to 33. Then 34. Yeah. So it's not like I'm competing against some 60 year old. Just sandbagging. You're like, take this guillotine, bitch. No, they're all around. They're all around the same age. I'm going to come your arm off. Oh, yeah. Don't look at me that way. But I also compete in adult.

3:10:53Take your walker and get out of here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, so. Oh, man. Well, very, very, very fun and super, super informative to spend time together. And very inspiring because as you're talking about these things, and I'm sure I'm not the only person, I'm sure people are listening. you do a very good job of making it seem which it is right not just tangible but achievable scale it down right you're not going to walk in and do 600 700 pound 800 pound deadlifts tomorrow if you haven't been deadlifting you don't need to do that you shouldn't even attempt to do that you shouldn't even attempt your one rep max and the payoff that you can get from layering these things in, learning to feel your body, learning to then trust your body, becoming familiar with the map that is your body and how it changes over time.

3:11:53The payoff with this type of microdosing of movement, the microdosing of soft tissue treatment, it does not need to be and turn your life upside down, change everything transformation overnight. And it shouldn't be because that's going to fail. And from experience, I can tell you whether it was with training with Jersey, back in the day or training with coach summer back in the day. It's like these little things done consistently. If you are consistent and you add some progressive overload, doesn't mean a lot. Doesn't mean slapping on 20 pounds every time you go to the gym with extra weight, micro progressions that are sustainable.

3:12:34So you're not getting injured ideally, right? Those things will happen. Little Nixon bruises along the way. What that can add up to when I look back at some of those experiences, it's just unbelievably impressive and more important, fulfilling. And you can actually fully inhabit this body that by the way, like mind body, there's no separation. It's just one integrated unit. And like we are evolved to move our bodies through space. That's why like the idea of a brain in a jar doesn't really work. Like uploading consciousness. No, like it's all integrated into the movement of the body. and I think you are an incredible ambassador for it.

3:13:17So thank you for that. And you're a very, very, very good educator. And that is hard to do. That is hard to do in a very crowded media landscape. And I saw that video and I was like, huh, interesting. And then Mark's name popped up and I was like, I think I recognize that fucking mutant. Hold on a second. And I texted Mark and here we are. So I'm glad it happened. And we will link to everything in the show notes, folks. We're going to go get some food, which I'm very excited about. And show notes, as per usual, tim.blog.podcast will link to everything. And I can guarantee you, if you search for this episode in SEMA, N-S-I-M-A, there will be one and only.

3:14:06It's hard for me to imagine getting a collection of those. and as always folks until next time be it just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself very important compassion that doesn't include you is incomplete as jack cornfield would say and thanks for tuning in till next time hey guys this is tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

3:14:47Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

3:15:26If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Sleep is the key to it all. It is the foundation. Many of you heard me talk about how today's sponsor, 8sleep, has improved my sleep with its pod cover. Well, they just launched their latest product, the pod 5. I cannot wait to try it out. And here's why. The pod 5 introduces 8sleep's latest product, the blanket, which uses the same technology as the pod's cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body.

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