Mark Bell's Power Project - Bodybuilder Teaches the History & Hidden benefits of Pilates - Ryan Doris || MBPP Ep. 954

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

In Episode 954, Ryan Doris, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about Ryan transitioning from Pro Bodybuilder to Pilates and the benefits and challenges he's faced while learning Pilates.   Sponsors mentioned in this podcast: ➢ https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! Follow Ryan on IG: https://www.instagram.com/thenattypro/   New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Recieve a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs! ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   ➢ https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off Mind Bullet!   ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box   ➢ Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject   ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin!   ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢ https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢ https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

You've been working on some mobility and agility and all kinds of stuff, huh? Like most. I thought I knew everything about muscles. Learning a lot of Pilates. He's a pro bodybuilder. The thing that sold me was I broke out into like a feverish sweat. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't do anything but pull on ropes. Sounds like the goal is to feel better, which is probably the origin of most workouts. Joseph Pilates was in World War I concentration camp.

He invented all the machines. He invented all the machines. He invented all the exercises. You move what's available today. Every body can do Pilates. You've got these problems. The boxer has these problems. But in here, everyone joins the room and gets in and gets it down.

And you just do the best that you can. That's the magic, is that you take these puzzles, you take these rules, and you say, piece this one together. Because there are no drugs in natural bodybuilding. The means are more unnatural than anything I've ever seen. Hi, Prachit family. Welcome to the podcast. We are 900 plus episodes deep, bringing tons of different experts in fitness, health, nutrition, and business. And we thank you all for your

support. And we're also glad to be bringing these individuals to you. Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast and it's brought benefits to your life, we'd really appreciate it if you left a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. As that helps the podcast grow and thrive and we can continue bringing you amazing content. Thank you for your support and enjoy the episode. You got a Sergio Olivier story for us. Yeah, I got a Sergio story. All right. So I heard this one from my uncle. So my uncle is my Uncle Lyndon. Long time Chicago police guy. Now he's got a search story all right so i so i heard this one from my uncle so my uncle's uh

my uncle linden long time chicago police guy now he's got a desk job sergio came to this country because he was on a weightlifting team cuban weightlifting team they had to meet somewhere somehow sometime and they found an american embassy those guys got left and fucking me and just ran and dived into the American embassy, the American citizens. Yeah. Sergio the Great. Boom. Boom, baby.

He came in and won some Mr. Olympias. I mean, with that kind of tenacity to jump a fence of an embassy and just land on the grass and say, I'm American now. What freedom. He must have saw the opportunities. Like, F it. I'm going for it. That's a big guy to sneak in. And that's the thing, right?

It would seem so obvious that you would say, what's he doing? You know, you wouldn't think he's doing anything. You'd think he's, you know, probably has the authority to be doing it. You know, he's not a guy that big. Bodybuilders today, I don't know if they'd make it over the wall. I don't think they'd have the capacity. Right? You've been working on some mobility and agility and all kinds of stuff, huh?

Yeah. Unbeknownst to me, I didn't think I was going to do it. I thought it was fine. I thought I, like most, I thought I knew everything about muscles, skeletal muscle, I should say. But I've been learning a lot of Pilates. People just shut the show off just right now. He's a pro bodybuilder, guys.

All right. So I should give a quick. Just why'd they shut it off so quick? Before you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on. There's should give a quick – Just why'd they shut it off so quick? Before you go. Before you go. Yeah, hold on. There's a story and there's white women as cool. It's all white women.

That's what I'm saying. It's all white women. It's all white women. Like I've never – like what reason, even familial – And really nice pants too. Tight pants. Dude, they're're like how do i say this so like all right my my fiance's uh she's indian pakistani so she's brown brown brown brown brown everything my girl's 20 pakistan right we just learned that right and so like when i just never really you know i went to school i'm from chicago i mean i go to school with everyone but i never sat for hours in as

comrades as as white women they have a completely different world structurally than the world of the black man you know what i mean like the way they deal with problems like they wait they wait you know like they got time dude they they i'm like so you're just not gonna lay the smack down right dude they wait it out they'll hold they'll hold a grievance in longer until they find the correct answer that is not how i was raised you know like you throw somebody against the turn buckle when you got issues right here right now you know so that's been that's been a secret pleasure is being around white women dude dude, and listening to the world. And then the craziest thing about it, I got hazed by white women too, right?

Like I joined this program and, you know, you got to weed out the weak, right? So my Pilates program starts. I come in and I'm just, yeah, I'm this, I'm that. Everyone's got to introduce themselves. And I don't know. We always try to downplay it, but we physically cannot, right? We physically cannot right we physically cannot and dude i'm not saying anyone uh centered me out or anything like it wasn't like that i was just like the guy you know those those old school marines and they

just got the guy in the back of the pack was um was naming the guy in full metal jacket the guy just gomer pile gomer pile i was g, dude. I just could not clean my gun. I just, so many things that they were doing muscularly, I hadn't had access to, right? So I say white women, but it's really mostly dancers, right? And a lot of people who, at least from what I've seen, have access to Pilates are dancers. And most people who have access to dance are women right there are many male dancers uh there's one dancer i actually learned about a ballet dancer i think his name is baryshnikov in this guy he's famous dude he's like a peacock he's like so strong and i think that was one of the first things i saw from the dance world that made sense because i said well if his glutes are

strong and his hamstring is strong and i can't stand on my toes like that what then what's should i be calling him girly or should i be say there's some missing uh chain in my body that that i can't do so i was randomly going to the gym this one day i'll tell you how this always made sense i got i i train at a performance training center 100 000 square feet like the works like this right everything. One day I just didn't want to go in. It was winter in Chicago. I just didn't want to get out the car. I said, I wish I had a nicer gym, like an Equinox or just some nice shit, you know? And so I go to this gym, it's called FFC. They're in Chicago. There's just like a 12 luxury expensive type gym, right? So I go and I sign up and they do the whole thing. Well, you get two free classes. I'm a blonde.

Two free sessions. And I say, whatever. I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to do that. Never going to do that. And so I said, they said, you can get a massage. I was going to do a massage. They got all the services.

I said, I'll do Pilates. So my fiance and I signed up. We go do Pilates. And the first machine they lay me down was this machine called the Reformer. It's true to its name. It exists to reform your body oh yeah that's that's me and my fiance so that's the first space that we opened it was like it's that space is like it was like 150 square feet so this is the reformer right

so reformer is strange uh you can put yourselves in these weird and odd combinations, and it can do things. So what's pulling me is a spring tension that you kind of see on my fiancés that's sort of attached to the base of the rail of the machine. And what it does is that it will pull you, stretch you, and if you push resistance against it, you can strengthen yourself in those positions. yourself in those positions so what i'm just doing here i'm trying to actually not just do my legs but through all the way from my c1 all the way down to my t1 all the way that starts here in my collarbone and i'm trying to each little part of your spine to move each part of your spine move so you have an assignment in pilates so you can think of pilates less like exercise and more like poses right the same way that uh they have poses that's my younger brother the same way that they have poses in younger brother the olympic jumper oh yeah that's's my younger brother. The same way that they have poses in –

Your younger brother, the Olympic jumper. Oh, yeah. That's my – my younger brother is an Olympic jumper. So look at this guy. He's as high as you can get for an athlete. And the key to this exercise is called pulling a strap, right? I asked him to lift his belly button, to lift from his pubic bone up to his belly button and to keep his ribs from flaring. And he can't do it.

It's not that he can't do it. It's that he just doesn't know how to do it. Just no one. And he can't do it. It's not that he can't do it. It's that he just doesn't know how to do it. Just no one ever taught him how to do it. He's never been that involved. So imagine when you go to bench press. Where's your rib cage placement? Where's your breathing placement, right? So from Pilates, I got on this thing.

Like I said, I got my free session. And the thing that sold me was I broke out into like a feverish sweat. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't do anything but pull on ropes, you know. But I found that it was the ask that they were asking me to, right, to squeeze my heels together, to point my toes. It's a puzzle to each pose, right? So the method was invented by this guy, Joseph Pilates.

Joseph Pilates was a man-man. I think it's a Nazii method right it's not very popular to say but if you look at a lot of the nazis started off as a nazi no it's not it's not let me be very correct right but how should i say it's a it's a it's a nazi thinking method right he was born in germany in 1888 i just think at that time the german thinking and this is not like anything outside of uh how do i say it's not anything outside of the norm it's skeletal muscle right it's just a strange method no different than uh do you feel like it's a very forceful method like the way that he maybe originally designed it no so what he originally called it was contrology so the idea was is that for every skeletal muscle

you have including your diaphragm you should be able to call complete control on the muscle, no matter what muscle it is, right? We should be able to- Almost like when somebody gets a cramp in a very specific spot, that area is twitching, but it would be hard to flex that one particular spot. You would have no control. So you can liken it to, let's say a baby, you have kids, yeah? So they all learned how to walk at some point just like that you just set them down that's how the pilates method works you say okay do this come on do this and you're dumb right you met you don't have the signaling yet right

you have no neural connection so you just you start out like this and they're like curl the pelvis curl the pelvis and you're just like and you got nothing but skeletal muscle rules are skeletal muscle rules frequency works big time right showing up works big time the rules are very fair in skeletal muscle right so you show up man and you just keep doing these things and eventually your body starts moving like butter right you start to be able to roll the ribs down one at a time you actually start to get a sort of a mapping of what's going on here internally. I came from bodybuilding and powerlifting. And real quick though, the thing, the funny thing about what you're saying is because when bodybuilders talk about the mind-muscle connection, the way they just try to describe

it is kind of like they want control over these different parts of body. Like a pro bodybuilder flexing on stage, when you hear Arnold or any of these guys talk about that, they want to have control of their muscles in these different positions. But what you're talking about is deeper. Uh, well, I think it's deeper because of where it goes, right? Like, uh, if, if we were getting into, I can say, let's, if you look at bodybuilding and powerlifting, it's a lot like NASCAR, faster, bigger, stronger, faster, right? But that's, that's where we go, right? And eventually that always leads to a collapse in a Rome-like fashion, right? Yeah, and a bodybuilder is looking – a bodybuilder is a little bit like the Terminator.

Like Arnold as the Terminator knew so much about the human body because he was a killing machine. And a bodybuilder wants to be able to tap into those muscle fibers to cause as much damage as possible kind of as quickly as possible. I like that. Right? I need to get – I like that. I need to write that one really recruit those recruit those muscle fibers but in something like in some other practices something like pilates you're it sounds like the goal is to we can get into what you feel the goal is but it sounds like the goal is to feel better which is probably the origin of most

workouts but everything has kind of gone sideways at some point well i think that's the end result right and so uh back so okay very clear joseph pilates was he was born in 1888 germany they didn't think um self-esteem then they didn't think the method is cold dude and that's what attracted me to it was that they were willing to kick you out of pilates school they were willing to not give a fuck about i love that about i love that these people it was difficult and they know it right because i come from the like us the world of sports you make the team you don't make the team you get cut dancers come from the same thing dude if a dancer gets an injury they don't get to call a timeout they keep dancing dude i think that's ridiculous you know

you just should at least be able to call a timeout. So they come from this hardcore culture, and I think they've done an amazing job at keeping up Joseph Pilates' practice. But ultimately, the thing needs, like all skeletal muscle, difficulty, right? The method is extremely difficult. It's slow in control to the reprises of motion, but you need to call on that muscle with, force would be the wrong word, with as much recruitment as possible, right? We're not putting out a lot of force. And the depth is unbelievable, right? Every exercise has to end in eventually a full body exercise, right? So the system has an order. Joseph Pilates would do it like this, right? So there's a few, he invented all the machines, he invented all the exercises. So folklore says he invented in a concentration camp so joseph pilates was in a world war one concentration camp he was doing circus performing i believe

uh and then he literally somehow got caught in england and they said hey you german guys here's where you're going to stay so he did that fenced some methods i think for a while in the world war going on he's thinking about exercise. He's like us. He's one of us. He truly is one of us. He's the Sandow. He's one of the many.

So he's an inventor of a method. This guy was hardcore. He invented this method. He went back home to Germany and actually eventually had the war ended. Before World War II started, he came to the States. He's kind of a crazy guy. He had a family there and everything. He just got on a boat and left.

He came to New York. I believe his studio was on 8th Avenue in New York, close to Central Park. And he said, that's an American dream. This is where I'm going to be. And he did it. And that was his studio. He did it right out of that studio there. And he invented all the machines.

He invented everything. And he would just work him dude he was rude look at him dude he's brutal he's you should be strong he said joseph pelage used to say you bring the electricity you bring the electricity you function the machines right his whole purpose is to get you as strong as possible through everywhere he demands look at the dorsiflexion he's asking of right like The foot thing you were talking about before the podcast is huge. This is called, what he's doing right now is called footwork. So that's a football on the performer that he just puts down. And so now you can grab these handles, which have spring tension,

and she's doing what's called the hundred, which is the warmup. So you're in a pelvic, I don't want to call it a tuck, so to speak, that lower ab is pulled up and you're pumping those arms as fast as you can from the core. So imagine when you go to run and sprint, you're sprinting as distally, I'm sorry, as proximally as you can. So the method holds true. Any method you do, any exercise you do here, he's going to ask you to say, all right, recruit it as center as you can, from the core as you can.

And the better you get at it, the more of a stillness comes in, right? And so on the reformer, you have a series of exercises that make sure that you go through everything. This exercise is called rowing, and there's rules for everything. So even if we were to look at what she's doing now, let's take simply, what are the rules of the scapula to the humerus, right? If we were to look in space, right? If I were to take my, where my humeral head points, and I would put my arm forward, my scapula has a constant relationship to it, right? I am seraped forward and around. If I were to take my arm back, like I'm going into a coat, that scapula has to tip or else I'm anteriorly tipped, right? I have to go backward this way. So what Pilates does is she's a master in these videos. It tells you how to go through

all these movements. So you learn where does the scapula go? Where do I push it up? Where do I squeeze? Where do I tip it back? Like jujitsu, like running, like powerlifting, you can do, in powerlifting, what do they call it, right? They call them box squats, pauses. So you can take the method down much, much, much slower and do things. So these movements require an extreme amount of detail in how the individual system works and then a complete tying into how everything works within the system. I mean, and this is old. Look at the guy.

He's got no shirt on and, you know. How old do you think he is there? He looks like 60, 70 something? I would say this had to be probably, and I'm not a Pilates expert. There are many experts. I would probably say he was probably closer to his 60s. I know he died, I want to say his 80s or 70s or something like that. They knew how to get the views back then.

He's like, I'm going to train her in my underwear. It's going to be awesome. He would do that every day. He would train every day in his studio in his underwear. He was a crazy— He looks like a swimmer or something. He looks like he's in good shape. Dude, he was, man.

But this was the only method he believed in, right? He only believed in his method. Like, look at this crazy scapular control she's got here. Like, that's all in her scapula. In Pilates in general, is there no, like, contact with the ground kind of? No. So Pilates has many ways to do it. Okay.

So the exercises, they're all very similar but different. And they all call on something else. And everything fills in a gap. So this is just a reformer. You can do the complete method with no equipment on the floor. So that's called mat Pilates. And so you do movements like these on the floor, let's say, so to speak. Clearly, you've done these before.

These are something like bench dips. But instead here, on this, it's called a long back stretch, right? You're tucking your pelvis and you're trying to get it to move forward through the pelvis. So you start off with some rudimentary version of the exercise. You just go for it, kind of like a baby walking. And clearly, the first time a child walks, they're not going to get it, right? They're just not going to get it at all. I like how she's going through these movements that we're watching on this YouTube video.

Yeah. just not going to get it like how she's going through these movements that we're watching on this like youtube video yeah and she is doing a movement like it seems like a way that she's like selecting maybe he's shouting something out to her and then they're adjusting as they go i've always liked to do that when i was doing certain exercises i always like to let me move in this range oh now let me move in this range yeah a big thing that i think one of the one thing one of my instructors always says is you move what's available today. Right. Weather, barometer, pressure. There's there's many reasons, sleep, recovery.

And so Pilates says, well, let's take what's available today. And you continue to train with that availability. But as we all know, that spectrum changes of what's available. The more you continue to show up. I love you said that partially just because, you know, a lot of people, the reason why they maybe they don't start jujitsu. One thing I've heard is like, I'm not mobile enough. I'm not flexible enough.

Start where you are. Same thing with Pilates. You see what she's doing right here. That takes humility, my friend. I'm not mobile or flexible. If you start where you are, what exactly you said,

what was the phrase? Start where? Take what's available. Take what's available. Take what's available. Take what's available. Take what's available. Yeah,

but that, but that's not a lot of people's intention, right? They see Smiley on 800 and they want 800 too. They don't want to go through what he – they don't know. They don't know what basement he started. They just want the glory. They want the stage and they want it pretty quickly. And I would say this is – if I had to call it something at least within the realm of what we're doing, it's purely foundational work, right?

Oh, yeah. Thigh stretch. The reverse Nordic as we call it something at least within the realm of what we're doing, it's purely foundational work, right? Oh, yeah. Thigh stretch. The reverse Nordic as we call it nowadays. Oh, yeah. People have been doing this shit, man. There's no new body, right? Right? So like how many hominid versions are this called snake and twist?

So even the Neanderthal moves something similar to me. My chassis, my stock version has been pretty much the same right it's only as of recent that we make discoveries for its potential right i think that's the beauty of the body and particularly skeletal muscle its depth right it you see people dedicating obviously athletes a life to these practices and it doesn't matter what anything what she did right there is just the inversion like that's something that people do in jujitsu all the time but the fact that she's doing that on a reformer right you wouldn't see somebody doing something like that in a gym but it's so cool that absolutely look absolutely andrew that's just a complete control

so you see controlled it all the way from her cervical complete control complete control complete control so that's the idea. And so, like I said, I wouldn't, you know, when you think about these as exercises, they're funky. I think this guy thought pretty, like, very straightforward, practically said, how can I get this to extend? How can I get this to flex? How can I get dorsiflexion here? I think he thought purely from less trying to look sexy, less trying to look good. I think he was looking purely for what it's almost like if you were to draw out the formula for movement, this is what it would look like mathematically. believes in no hypermobility in his method right he it's not healthy for a joint to be hypermobile we've known this for a while you know you actually you can get hurt more often that's actually something i see um back to kind of the white women uh thing we were talking when we started

is that everybody has an interesting set of problems right like uh you see when she has some exercises when she's in a plank like position right there's a million plank like exercises you do. Or even that tendon stretch when you saw she had her arms behind her and she was going up. Or even where she's at right now, she's pressing her arms firmly into that carriage. She's like pressing down very firmly. They have a lot of weakness in their upper body just because generally women don't have the same strength in their upper body. And then in particularly, right, I would say the average American white girl, her body language isn't exactly stabilized her elbows.

There's a lot of hyperextension in her elbow. And it's just a cultural thing. It's not even a notable thing that you would really notice. So I like seeing how every body can do Pilates. So though I say white women and I joke, it's been interesting to look at them up close and say, you've got these problems. The boxer has these problems. This person has this. And it's been interesting to see the body through the lens of just a body, period. See how you can move, not look at someone and think, oh, you're fucking small.

I'm not going to listen to you. There's a bunch of crazy blurred thinking. But in here, everyone joins the room and gets in and gets down. And you just do the best that you can, absolutely. Is it okay to kind of say that it seems like sometimes you lift in an advantageous way and sometimes you intentionally lift in a disadvantageous way? Oh, that's very interesting. Because I saw this woman going through these exercises. She's doing things with momentum here and there, but it's still controlled momentum.

And then she's doing things the exact opposite way, which kind of makes me think of like a lateral raise. So if you lean into a lateral raise, that changes the spectrum of where the strength curve is. If you lean away from a lateral raise, the changes the spectrum of where the strength curve is. If you lean away from a lateral raise, the same thing is true. And if you just stay straight up and down, it has a different impact. So I'd imagine some of that's going on. But yes, and I think even another layer before that is the intention of the exercise. A lateral raise is clearly to laterally work the deltoid and that lat.

And that's the purpose. That's how the exercise was designed with some type of weight in your hand, a dead weight. Pilates is not designed for that. It's designed to say, okay, on every movement, your entire spine needs to be functioning, right? So whatever she's doing, it may involve – I'm just making something up. It may involve her laterally raising her arm but also having some lateral flexion incorporated to it as well, right? As well as making sure that her midline is squeezed. Midline meaning that, I forgot that, I'm sorry, I forgot the name of that muscle that goes,

what's the one that makes the six pack? It splits the six pack in two. Yeah, it's a tendon that runs from here straight down it makes a six-pack split it's it's a tendon that we're basically connected to sounds good right but you squeeze that thing and you don't start just squeezing it from here you squeeze it from the hip so for instance put your thighs together right now right and get the full length of your thighs together full length of your thighs and squeeze those and try to squeeze it all the way from the knee to the pelvis. Eventually, you'll feel that lower ab wants to start recruiting in on the squeeze. Keep going. Go up to the rib cage and close it. Close your system entirely. Now, put your arms up

in the air. Keep squeezing. Inhale. Keep it down as you inhale. Un-shrug, un-shrug, un-shrug, un-shrug. Yes, and get your neck taller. So it's a reaching method. It's a stretch. Yes. And so let's add some spring tension to you. Right. And so that's the magic is that you take these puzzles, you take these rules and you say, piece this one together and no one's going to like a baby. You're not just going to walk up. You got to crawl before you walk, got to walk for you, for you run. And that's what the method is really and truly. It looks like nothing. And I think the reason why dancers take this so well is because dancers are literally trained for multi-dimensional movement. They literally, they literally ask for their muscles to do things that I don't do, right?

They that's dancing is a skeletal muscle movement. Right now. I know you're looking in the mirror. You're getting ready for your nephew's quinceanera. You have a long sleeve on that looks horrible and your pants don't fit right. That's why we partnered. I don't know why you're laughing. That's why we partnered with Viore clothing. You see, this is the boulevard shirt jacket. Fits great. Stretchy. Feels amazing. It's the best long sleeve in my closet. And one of the biggest things that we love about Viore is that they have clothes that you can wear to parties. They have clothes that you can wear in the gym. Like I said, your nephews can see it. You can look great wherever you go if you step your fashion game up.

Plus, this stuff feels like baby skin on your skin, which is kind of creepy. But at the same time, it's kind of nice and you know it. Andrew, where can they get it? Yes, you guys got to head over to Viore.com slash Power Project. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash Power Project to automatically receive 20% off your order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I think that what you mentioned there is one of the coolest things and why Pilates can be something for everybody. Because what you said, like, how would a dancer be able to train the ability to move in such a graceful and dynamic way?

Again, they're spinning, they're kicking, they're jumping. Absolutely. And then they're landing in such a graceful way. It'd be great to do some strength training, but something like this that can allow you to exercise while getting in all of the different ranges of motion. Dancers congregate to this. It's like the normal person doing this would reap so much benefit. And I've always said this, and this is why i got shocked with pilates dancers are the upholders of the method sort of how like how do i say this uh the football the high school

football coach is the upholder of the strength and conditioning method right like he has spread that he or she has spread that message far and wide and this is a method that dancers are selected and i think moreover in america the market select things right when this guy did what he did came to america moved to eighth avenue the dancers chose him right it was a free market choice it seemed to be a naturally occurring relationship so i think it's been hidden buried in dance world and then also in the hollywood world of very expensive pilates and uh I've been exercising my whole life. It's exercise, you know, and that was the thing I couldn't get over was this sort of like mystique of it.

And the mystique is no mystique. It's just it's written in written in dancer jargon. And it was just been hard to encode and learn some of the ways that they communicate and speak. So I think Pilates is for no joke, body type of body every somatic somatic type i think it's for everyone can benefit from learning three pilates moves and incorporating those i don't think you need to do the full method it's as deep as you want it to be you know but i think everyone can learn from these because these exercises are not asking you to get big delts

they're asking though dude look at those look at that flexion in her feet right you'd cramp up on that probably you'd cramp up on that and then control and then look how she lengthens the spine right so the the method does a few things unlike a lateral raise uh so this is called towel so this is called uh i think it's called monkey actually oh i want to do that hey dude if you got to come to my studio me and you just take a week and we i've got this crazy studio i have no plans uh i kind of got the idea from you i have no I want to do that. Hey, dude, if you got to come to my studio, me and you just take a week and we work it. I've got this crazy studio. I have no plans. I kind of got the idea from you.

I have no plans on making a business with it really. I just want to roll people around. I want to roll around and just record stuff. That's my goal with it. So, yeah, it's bad. It's bad. So you see all these different apparatuses. They all do different things and they all fill in different holes, right, Where you can't get a dipping mechanism, you can get this on what's

called, this is called a chair, right? So there's a spring that she's loading on the bottom of that pedal and it helps you raise up this a tiny bit, or you can use some, or you can go against it on its resistance. This is called a barrel, a ladder barrel. Joseph's a bad boy. Look at him, man. He's just tearing her up, right? He's just tearing her up, right? He's just tearing her up. But that's the method, right? In yoga, they're very, yoga is its own method. I'm not trying to be comparative. Yoga is very nice by nature and bad by nature. Not in a bad way, but it's bad in its sleekness, in its uniqueness. Joseph Pilates is straight up, slap in the face your day one of practice

bad and it's unlike anything else I've ever seen in my life everything foot correctors everything toes the neck works in concordance

with the whole body so she has to recruit from the floor in her heels to close that midline like we were just doing and from the floor move that neck

you don't just move your neck right any fool can just move their neck right but the goal move that neck you don't just move your neck right any fool can just move their neck right but the goal is how do you make every exercise a compound exercise every single one right a feat that the dancer does well right that's why their movement is so beautiful and graceful because they do it all in one so uh when i look at pilates at least for me i look at it as some similar to a dancer dancers say i'm a'm a dancer. And what method can keep me? And I think Pilates for me is very similar.

I enjoy, truly, is getting some type of weight in my hand. The clink of the weights. I did leg press the other day with just three plates on there and for high reps. And I just love the noise of it. You know, as much Pilates as I learned, just that noise. Look at this. He's training the breath. It's unbelievable. Diaphragmatic breathing, as you were talking learned, just that noise. Look at this. He's training the breath. It's unbelievable.

Diaphragmatic breathing, as you were talking about, right? Absolutely. Dude, he trains. If you got a muscle, he'll train it. I'm not going to get you very swole, right? That's not his promise. But at least you'll use it. You'll use these muscles.

Well, you're using the whole body in conjunction is probably, and the intensity is not high, right? There's not a lot of weight. You're moving from one thing to the next. So this is where it gets interesting. So this is what's called not high, right? There's not a lot of weight. You're moving from one thing to the next. So this is where it gets interesting. So this is what's called the order, right? So the order starts very simply, right? So you start with stuff like just flexion, lying down horizontally, and then he works you.

He flips you over. He says, now let's do some extension. Then he flips you over again. He says, now let's do some side work. Then he stands you up. Then he puts you upside down. Then he puts you on your hands. And then he puts your head looking inward then he inverts your butt

up then he pikes you he he cooks you well done if you can get through the method but the way he ran it he basically would start with these exercises where let's say something like you lie on your back you get one leg vertical you get one leg horizontal to the ground can you circle one leg pointing that toe reaching long it's called a a leg circle, right? And you just start there, right? And you just start there. So the method is very progressive. So it gets up to, how do I say this? You start feeling like a dancer. Eventually you start incorporating your whole body. You really start, you start to believe that sort of mind body-ness of this kind of whole thing. And it's really, the sort of mind-body-ness of this kind of whole thing.

And it's really amazing. It's really mind-blowingly amazing. I have still to this day, after going to Pilates school, and I'm still in school, I'm still getting my hours, my heart is not for this. I don't love this thing. It's become more of a necessity. Pilates self-defense or something?

Or is he just doing self-defense? Joseph Pilates has had a lot of things. he was you know you're an inventor there's no one thing maybe some things you've made i heard about but i got a lot of shit too you know so he had a lot of things i can't attest to everything he did he had he had ways to sleep ways to shower ways to walk uh but his method of contrology as he called it pilates is what the dancers call it that's what i've taken to so he was a man of uh trying to make many methods many ways to move um and it's it's really incredible and i hate to say it he was just kind of like not as successful probably i think with the method as he wanted to be and i think that's partly because like when i came in

here today dude you share your space it's very warm when you come in here. You've always been nice every time I've run into you, public, private. And I just don't think he was about that. I think he was about the method. I think he was a genius. I think he lacked a lot of those, a lot of things you would expect from a complete genius, right? Solo practitioner. Solo practitioner.

He doesn't have, this is not like bodybuilding where we've had greats add to this or powerlifting where we've had many prophets and teachers. This is the only dude. It's just one dude. It's just one guy. It's one guy. It's one crazy German guy came to America and dedicated his life to this practice. The whole thing is named after him. The whole thing is named after him.

I'm not sure how you'd feel about it all today, but it doesn but uh doesn't matter exercise is exercise doesn't matter if the light was found in you it's it's it's for others so so yeah it's been for me going up and into the how do i say the aging portion of my athletics now a sustainer to my method it's it's been able to keep me lifted and feeling good and uh my how how do I say, my blueprint, my mapping, right? It's sort of like when you hear about a chicken with his head cut off, right? You can gather enough information outside of the brain in the spinal cord alone that a chicken knows how to run, right? And the chicken doesn't need to think about it. You just get it. And it becomes that way with all movements. It's a strange intelligence that the muscles and nerves

sort of have. They're like miniature brains in the spinal cord, so to speak, with memory and stuff. So this has been good. If I had to liken it to anything, PT. I think the closest thing we have to this is PT. In fact, a lot of PTs send people to Pilates. They've been hearing about that lately. And I think what they all have in common is they understand structurally how each joint moves and then the intensities at which they're working. I think those are the two things they have in common. I'm not saying the practice or the method is the same thing. Not at all. If you get hurt, go to a PT. Do not go to Pilates. Beyond getting full function, what do you do? You know, what do you do? You don't even know how to work it. And the fact that we're looking at these exercises and we've never seen them means that we can move this way.

We are possible of it. There's not some – this is not some strange thing. This is just people moving their body, you know, and I think it just looks unconventional in many ways. But it works. It's muscle stimulus. I don't know how – with rules, with rules. It's pretty simple but so complex at the same time. After watching some of this, it seems like you can use your own creativeness to implement some things that might be similar.

So it might not be Pilates necessarily that you're doing. It might not be exactly as it was written and it might not be in the exact pattern of the exercises. But when I see them doing like they're putting their ankles back, I'm thinking, oh, that might be kind of cool to try with like ankle weights. And I know that like the way that they're doing it in particular ways, they got a lot of control. particular ways they got a lot of control but for someone like me that's stiff it's like maybe occasionally having weight on a particular limb or in my hands uh maybe it will assist me the way that he was assisting that woman through some exercise i would i would i would have to i would have to say that would work but it would be sort of sort of a blunt way so the way that the method is taught is joseph's like he's a roughhouser, right? So like when I teach Pilates, it's live.

So as you're moving, I'm speaking to you and your sole voice of movement is the instructor, right? You listen to what I'm saying and I'm auditing you. I'm watching you. I'm putting my hands on you. I'm correcting you and moving you. Throughout the session, you get touched. You get adjusted. So it's like those ankle weights.

It can give you assistance. Or you could just, you know, have someone who knows how to do the movements, you know, and say, push this back a little further. Right. If you can get it on your own, it's so much better, I think, in these movements, is that I'm of the mind that I always want to add too much. I'm a strong guy, you know? And so the part of the temptation is to sort of violate the rules of Pilates. So much of Pilates is the concentric as well as the eccentric, right? Sometimes you might have something that's going on concentrically and then you have a complete stretch in another area, right? So with all the things that are going on completely in the body, you have a complete stretch in another area, right? So with all the things that are going on completely in the body, you can throw something easily out of alignment

if you were to throw on too much weight in the wrong place. I've obviously been experimenting around. So there's classical Pilates and there's conventional. Classical is what Joseph invented. I've got trained in classical in my program. And then there's conventional. You can add stuff. You can add weights. You can add lots of stuff. You can add props, bands. I personally think conventional is going to be the more accessible method. So what you're saying,

I would have to agree with. You know, I live here modern day. Not everyone's going to get on a $4,000 reformer. You know what I mean? And so you're going to have to get this to the people. Does the reformer have weight or resistance in some way? Oh, it's got springs, right? Gosh, I got a video on my phone.

So it's a – think about like an eight-foot wooden carriage, a studio reformer, right? It's about maybe 35, maybe 33 inches wide, and it's just a long rectangle. Within it, it's got these rails, and the rails has that mat that you see that people were laying on. And the rails lay up has this mat, and this mat has wheels, and that carriage, let's say, is attached with springs on the bottom to the rail. And so there's four springs, five springs, depending on the reformer, and each spring has a different load. One spring may be up to, at full tension, 30 pounds. One spring may be up to 12 pounds. And each exercise has a different combination of springs that you would

use. So I think the reason why the springs work so well in this controlling method is because a dumbbell gets a little stupid through space as the center of gravity changes, right? If I were to try to take a dumbbell and do an overhead extension, it loses itself somewhere right as opposed to spring tension uh it works with me it's a little bit like a band like a hundred percent like pts do it right bands right bands are a great way i think you can get pilates done right i think so i think it's going to be my opinion a more accessible method to do some of these things so yeah it's just like a band it's just like a band and that is in his day you know he had he had spring so this is a reformer this is a balanced body reformer these guys are based out of sacramento actually yeah they're like uh the biggest ones i don't want to say the biggest in

the world but probably the most profound the owner of this company ken edelman so i don't know if you remember around 2000 2000 i so i when i went on this journey i googled um any bodybuilders who've ever done Pilates, right? I'm trying to see, am I the first person to step on this dry land of this island, you know? And it turns out, I think I am, you know? I found nothing. The only thing I found was from 2000, I think it was a Charles Poliquin article about, should bodybuilders do Pilates? Of course, Charles Poliquin did that. It was a fervent no no really it was like a fervent it was a fervent no it was a fervent no and one of his biggest arguments was that which i thought was ironic he said that um uh they can't get the they

can't get it together around the year 2000 there was a lawsuit against some of joseph's students and it's a lineage thing right jose Joseph taught his head student, Romana. It's like dance. And Romana taught. And so I was taught by somebody who, in my program, she was, Joseph taught this lady, Romana. Romana taught my teacher and my teacher taught me, right? So the goal with Pilates is how do I get the purest cut of Joseph all the time?

They're always seeking how do you keep it because it's so hard. It's such a difficult method. It's like Kung Fu or anything. The closer you could be to the masters, the better you'd get it. They had a lawsuit, dude, and someone was trying to sue over the use of the name Pilates. And so this guy who made that reformer, Ken Alderman, I don't know what money he put up and I don't know how he did it, but he basically went

to the, went and put up a big fight over this, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court, I think, and the name Pilates is a universal exercise method. CrossFit I think is the only one who has their name. CrossFit owns CrossFit, right? And even Pilates doesn't own their name. Let me ask you a question about this real quick, Ryan,

because, like, the lineage thing you mentioned is a lot like jiu-jitsu. There's like an Helio Gracie and so many of the top jiu-jitsu world champs or whatever, the guys that own a lot of schools now that have their own jiu-jitsu schools, they can trace their lineage back all the way. Right. But with jiu-jitsu, because it's become so popular, there have been so many things that have been figured out, so different types of moves and styles from new people right where it's like it's massively expanded so it doesn't matter if like your lineage leads to helio because there's a lot of cool new shit so so with pilates i wonder like you know is there obviously there have probably been things that are added but it seems like right if you can understand the method and you can understand kind of like the systems you can build something so i i think this is what's interesting about pilates

right joseph pilates was two things if he was nothing else a genius to figure this out in one lifetime invent all the machine i mean you understand you do this stuff it takes it's crazy it takes like you've been at this since you were 10 years old you know he's dedicated his life to this and secondly a solo practitioner right so his opinion is the alpha the omega you know so to hear joseph's version i think it's the best way to understand the method truly and i think if you were to start uh they'd call it conventionally if you were to start more conventionally you you might be missing something, right? So in my opinion, and this is because I'm classically trained, I think if you can at least learn what his original tensions were for the method, you kind of have to play the game to change the game first, right?

You can't just come in freestyling or else that wouldn't be Pilates anymore, right? You clearly see the movements we were doing. If you're an inch off, it ain't Pilates, right? It's wrong. It's wrong. I don't know how to say it it's just wrong you know you should always be getting more smooth more control with these movements um and that's sort of the idea but can you learn pilates like my main teacher kim the one who actually teaches me the one who's gracious to me the one the studio the home studio that i'm in uh she doesn't come from this like crazy lineage world she's just bad to the bone you know she's just good you know some people are just better than others you know

new schools of thought come up you know it's kind of like yeah the buddha kind of came from this whole hinduism world you know and so it's it change is necessary change happens so i would say to get the idea of what joseph for, yes, but at the same time, practically, it's exercise, man. It's exercise. It's just muscles, dude. It doesn't take words. It takes exercise. What does it do? What do you think the advantage is? Why have you been so drawn to it one i think it um it it satisfies the the tenacity to seek right like i think if you're one of those people who always knock to find opportunities are always looking for something new uh one place you can find it like you know you go out you go you live out here you have to eat they got some new burgers some new thing and it's always okay right a new thing is always okay it seems like where i can get best is in the same old thing

with better depth with doing it better with doing it in a better version that is the promise of the method it promises more depth of the model it's not gonna make you jacked it's not gonna make it's just saying that you will be able to successfully use this bicep better than most people like you uh in all your big lifts that you've done. It's not that you're actually stronger than most people. You just know how to use the muscle better, more efficiently, know what position to put it in. And that's what the practice is.

It's similar to a lift. I think at first you see it with these biased eyes and you're like, what exactly is this thing doing? It's repping muscles. I don't know how much more simply to say it it's repping muscles with a new style of rules uh and it's reps baby when you look at pilates stuff they say they literally they say how many reps it's got reps it's got everything it's it's it's muscle work so i think to that its fruit is all its benefits and those benefits are healing. Movement is medicine.

I just don't know how, you know, that's what we've done. So this isn't doing anything strange or particularly new. Just someone figured out, how exactly do I put all this together? That's it. Someone just figured it out. It's been there, lying there for us. And this is a guy who just figured it out. Like somebody figured out like somebody

figured out bodybuilding or gymnastics or anything else someone just put their mind to it so i think this practice uh helps with my ability to continue to stay after it like we were saying out there in the gym floor earlier half the time i spend now is on some type of non-intense work i'm on the floor i'm rolling stretching static stretching dynamic stretching cardio like i'm doing all types of things to keep the appearance of a muscular person but it's more work than than just lifting you know especially if you want to sustain it and stay in the game yeah uh it's 50 percent maintenance work if you got an old 67 shelby dude you're not just driving that thing fresh and young.

That thing lives in a garage. It lives on life support. It lives on oil changes. Like it's more maintenance than it is fun. But that's the beauty of an age thing, you know? So I think with muscle, that same thing happens. If you can move the muscle, you garner in blood flow, you garner in all the positive things about fluid exchange that we know plus breathe the practice of breathing through everything's had a specific breathing pattern for every single exercise uh you leave feeling not only like you've had a mind body connection but you actually have moved a new muscle you actually have gained a deeper respect for the muscle and you posture in posture wise you feel more put together you feel more correct after you're done

right and i think that leads you to go not do anything bad right like andrew was talking about um when he hit his head andrew i forgot the move that you did when you hit your head on there i was just going for a a takedown and instead of keeping my head up and moving around the dude's leg my head went straight into guy's quad and compressed my neck terrible but imagine the scapula was in a different place imagine if his rib was in a different place. Imagine if his rib were in a correct place. I'm not saying I know what happened. But there are many things you can get away with, I find,

when you do them with correct posture. It's like when kids fall. They're so tight, right? Their posture is so good. Every joint is so stable that when they fall, they just go, ah, and that's pretty much the end of it versus me. You know, I'm on my computer doing this. And so when I bump my head into a guy's thigh, I shrug up.

My rib now floats forward. My abdominals float to the side, and I'm like this. I'm in a drunken car crash basically. You know, it's a terrible reality. I get hurt more easy, and we see this go all the way up to hip replacements and hips breaking. We grow more fragile because we actually lose the stability of the joint. We lose the bone density. So this is, I think, foundation laying. If I had to say what Pilates is, the dancers have already proved this. If you want to dance, you got to do this Pilates. If you want to keep moving,

you have to have some type of movement stabilization stretching method. And I think the appeal for me with Pilates is that it's a unified method. The first time I've heard of something like Pilates was Kelly Sturette's book. And, you know, I looked through Stupple Leopard and it promised to me what Pilates promised, right? We're all trying to go after this mobile, long, supple thing. for me personally the the method was too complicated i didn't get it i had to have a voodoo band here and a kettlebell here and then you just got like this crazy graveyard of tools you know and you just don't know what to do or what to apply and i'm not and i i'm not saying pilates is above that but for me what's attractive about it is that it gives what Kelly Starr can give.

It's just movement, right? Anyone can give these things. But it's a unified, solid method. You learn one exercise and you work on that one exercise and it harnesses the power of all those things in that one exercise. And then it's got an element of strength, resistance rep. I just like that rep fucking – I like that rep thing, man. I just, I like it. I like reps.

I like feeling the muscle burn. I like passing out after it's like a crazy deep lactic acid buildup. It's got all the things I like, you know? So it's the one for me, right? And I think there are many for many people, but it's the one I've kind of taken to. And I think it's unknown amongst our community.

Completely unknown. The cool thing I think is like, like Mark, I'm curious your thoughts too. kind of taken to and i and i think it's unknown amongst our community completely unknown the cool thing i think is like like mark i'm curious your thoughts too one thing that uh i've thought about with how i've progressed personally is like i've done a lot of lifting and my body felt good started jiu-jitsu my body felt uh but as i started to you know work on doing a lot of longer range things because the dynamic aspect of jiu-jitsu your body gets in a bunch of weird positions that typically through daily life you'll never get yourself into you'll also never get yourself into those positions in the gym but getting there now my body feels better than ever getting to all these ranges you think you think it's magic or

something but the only reason is because i'm getting to these different positions now with pilates there's only load is the springs on the reformer. And that's a good amount of resistance. But I can, I think that obviously anybody can strength train, but what is the thing that can allow a person to move in all of these difference of ranges of motion? What else could there be? There could be jujitsu,

but some people don't want to fight somebody on a daily basis. Pilates. It's like, it's a great option. And I think the appeal for Pilates too, like, uh, is that is the, it's a low barrier to think and i think the appeal for pilates too like uh is it

is the it's a low barrier to entry not financially i won't say that but the low barrier to entry of all right where are you what's available if you got nothing uh so one of the parts of my practice i have to do is i have to observe mad hours i see all types of people dude oh i see the bodies i've seen i mean you see all ages all types all and you get to you know i've never how do i say this you don't get to look at like an old person's toes up close you know pilates allows you to sort of have this like how's yours move how's your ankle move how's your this move where's your and so you see all these bodies and all these positions. And the exercise – the method starts you at I think the simplest. Lay down horizontally.

That's where the method starts. Let's breathe. Let's get your ribcage in place. Anyone can start there. And you'd improve from just breathing, right? The data on breathing is like – come on. It's like gravity, right not it's not some theory you can change your reality through deep breathing but most people don't even know where to start they do not access these muscles and i think a lot of people

would dream to bodybuild would dream to do jiu-jitsu but they can't have access because they don't have those things available they they're fragile they hurt easy and they've almost lost their function right that great function that you once built up to about six, seven years old, you instantly lose it the second you start sitting at that desk in school, you know? Like, you lose it right away. They sit you in that chair, and it's like, welcome to the rest of your degradation, right? Like, welcome. We have to be institutionalized, right? You just can't have us out here swinging on trees all day, you know? We've done enough of that in our past,'t have us out here swinging on trees all day. We've done enough of that in our past.

It's time for a new thing. So I think what it does is that it makes you say, all right, get like a monkey. We've been seeing this, capoeira, flow. There's been a lot of things that – I'm not saying Pilates is the only method. But I guess what I am testifying is you have to have one if you want to remain. I guess what I am testifying is you have to have one if you want to remain, right? It doesn't matter if it's a combination of what we call colloquially the mobility stuff here in America, right? I think it's all Kelly Surratt's stuff.

I think Kelly Surratt is the Joseph Pilates of the method basically here, right? There's been many and there will continue to be more. This is just an old method that a certain group have taken up and I think it's quite ridiculous that more people don't know about this. Right. It's like it's exercise. Like we should have these. It'd be like if we didn't know about calorie counting or something. Right. It's like this thing exists.

It's real. And we should at least apply a little bit of its of its tools, of its pieces. So it's kind of hard, you know, unless you do um you know uh like franchise something or you know you do like what crossfit did right excuse me i think it's it can be difficult to get people to follow like a method or a technique in particular like with sturette sturette just laid out like here's what you do if your it band hurts you know you take this lacrosse ball you you put it here. Here are these methods.

He talked about hydration and sleep and the importance of lifestyle and those things too. But I don't know what other way you can do it. I think you do have to make it like a program. And maybe that's one of the errors of Pilates is that it's almost maybe in some weird way, it's almost maybe like maybe too available or not available enough. Like there's one combination of the two. I don't know what the answer would be. I don't know how to like solve for that problem.

But you see with a company like Functional Patterns, like there's a reason why a lot of stuff is hidden behind a paywall is to have certain practitioners be able to teach it in a very particular way and to kind of try to keep a lid on some of the stuff that they know and some of the stuff that they do. And I think that's just part of the – obviously we have to make a living capitalizing off information. But I think one thing that I've grown really hip to is just awareness of a thing right like we've seen our america change just on awareness in the past you know 10 years crazy crazy changes you know uh and i think just being aware of something it makes a big difference so uh kind of to answer that i think there's so much more though that at least with polities that I found that goes into a method, right? If a method doesn't have a culture, people are less likely to show up,

right? I'm less likely to use lacrosse ball if I don't have my buddies using lacrosse balls, right? And I think that's what jujitsu does really well. Every time I talk to people about jujitsu, I hear all of the great the great physiological benefits and things. But the thing I keep coming back to is they say community, brotherhood, and they keep coming back to that. And so I think for people to exercise, everyone needs something different. Some need accountability. Some need community. Some need – and so for me, I say thank God there's more than just Pilates, right?

Because let's say, right, it's hard. I think part of the issue with Pilates is teaching it. You have to have, generally, you got to be smart. You got to know where the pelvis is in space, right? You have to know basically the whole body to teach it. So there's a mad shortage of people who are capable of teaching it. But the way I've been looking at it is that if you can even get some of these elements down the people, right, if you can even introduce them, like I said, what is the relationship between your humeral head and your scapula? What is the relationship of your midline, right? So for me, it's like maybe I can use this practice to take some pieces of it that are universal.

This is just muscle and body and joint uh and tell these people and teach these people so that's that's kind of the direction i'm going with it and many have tried i'm sure but uh i haven't met anyone who speaks my particular jargon and does pilates most people who do pilates speak dance uh so they use a lot of visualization they say lift your uh lift up like a pearl a spring you know a string of pearls like you know, a string of pearls. Like I never seen a string of pearls before when I heard that and I was just like, I didn't get it. You know, and I missed a lot of things because

of the world that they live in versus the world I live in. The world I live in is knees out, knees out, knees out, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight. You know, that makes sense to me. You know, and so I'm trying to figure out how to take the jargon and, you know, if you wanted to be a lawyer, you got to speak law, dude. You know, that makes sense to me, you know. And so I'm trying to figure out how to take the jargon. And, you know, if you wanted to be a lawyer, you got to speak law, dude.

You know, that's the way it goes. And that's what it is in Pilates right now. And I think that's the biggest barrier to entry is the language. You just would go there and you just wouldn't get it. You know, it just doesn't make sense. They don't ever talk about biceps. They don't even – they call things so differently. So in Pilates, for instance, in bodybuilding or anybody, right, when you think of the core, you generally think of abdominal wall, obliques, spine, stuff like that.

In Pilates, they call this the powerhouse, right? So your powerhouse starts basically at your scapula, at your shoulders, right? So this is for Pilates where my first source of power starts. And we know that from a bench press, right? There's a crazy amount of power in this system right here, right? And we also know from the lifts, right? There's a crazy amount of stability through the core. There's a lot of power here.

So in Pilates, the focus is to see your body differently. So I would see myself moving as one unit from my, all, all the way from how I, how I, how I open up this collarbone here all the way down to my glutes. So these start moving as one unit. So when I bodybuild, I think of legs on legs day. I think of delts on delts day, but Pilates kind of teaches you to get them all in a function and you can feel them differently and you move differently. And I think the word I keep coming back to is the way I've mapped my body and my brain is changing. No miracle has happened. I'm not getting some crazy, it doesn't exist, right? The only miracle is drugs. That's the only miracle we have in the world of fitness. Like testosterone is a miracle.

Like it's like, it's unbelievable how good testosterone works. It's unbelievable. And nothing works that good. Nothing works that well like a hormone change. So I think it's applying proper movement. And if you're interested in saying, you know, I've always had this problem. So I ran track and I would always feel like a lower back tighten up than when I would lift. I would always feel like i mean it's si thing and i would always see these repeating problems that i had and i didn't know that i just didn't

know how to call on that group though i was very strong in the glute and very strong here they can be one or two things a ticking time bomb to bad reps and i think eventually an injury from missing on things or i think the second thing is that you just end up saying, oh, I got a bad something. And the truth is it's not bad. You're just moving it poorly and it's perfectly healthy. It's not an injury. You're just continuing to move it poor. So I think slowing down, moving a thing correctly is the ultimate practice.

It doesn't have to be Pilates. It's just the art of slowing down and moving things correctly, so to speak. I just want to ask you to pull up some photos from when you were like bodybuilding lean. But also, when you mentioned testosterone, people are going to think that you were on testosterone or something. You're not on. People are going to – well, here's what I – okay. You never have been either. Here's the thing that I say about natural bodybuilding, and this is completely honest about natural bodybuilding.

Because there are no drugs in natural bodybuilding the means are more unnatural than anything i've ever seen i'm talking suitcases full of tuna suitcases full of rice i'm talking decking out i'm dude like my hotel right now is like it's like decked out with like it's like it's like got bands here this here like you you're like a traveling circus when you do this the way i track my food there's not i have a jewelry scale my brother calls it a dope scale i got a jewelry scale when i show there is nothing natural about the means of as to which how i apply i'm nothing like you i don't live anything like you right like if you ever saw how unnatural any of this is you'd be the drugs are the last thing you should it's nothing yeah right the method that the natural bodybuilder takes the protein the carbs and the meal timing the sleep it's the most unnatural way to live for an unnatural

effect but it's it's it's it's it's it's it's drug free that's the best word for it right i wouldn't call it i just naturally look like that i i don't i'm obsessive it drives people to eating disorders even at some times too so yeah that's the result of thinking about nothing else but how to look like this in a photo. Pat Proctor, we talk about beef and meat all the time on the podcast. That's why we partnered with Certified Piedmontese Beef. But did you know this? That 85% of all grass-fed, grass-finished beef in the United States is imported from other countries? 85%.

Damn. But Certified Piedmontese is made in the U.S. from other countries? 85%. Damn. But certified Piedmontese is made in the U.S. of A. America. America. Fuck yeah. So go ahead and get some of the best tasting, some of the leanest, some of the best beef from Piedmontese. Andrew, how can they get it? Absolutely. So you guys can head over to cpbeef.com and check out enter promo code power to save 25% off your entire order and if your order is 150 or more you get free two-day shipping again cpbeef.com links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes fuck yeah just wish the legs were in this one man

people got to see those oh i don't i did it this morning dude oh look i got so that's cleveland talk cleveland oh cle Yeah, he was. Yeah. So I was with him in the overall at this show. Dude, this was back in the day when shows used to have, like, 25 guys, you know, in your class. And you had to beat that class back in the day. And so I found that in these poses. Oh, you got to look at this side of the purple trunks, dude.

Yeah, this, I think, was one of my best forms that I had, one of my better looks. I liked how full dry I was. I think I was 181 in these. I'm 5'7", for reference. Yeah, I like this look a lot. This was a good look. Shoulders are crazy. Dude.

It's all lies. You take that rear delt, right? You take that rear delt, and? You take that rear delt and you smash it against that rib cage. And you open that chest. It's all just unnatural to me. It's all illusion. And of course, if someone sees this, they're going to say unbelievable. And yeah, of course.

Of course it's unbelievable. It is. It's unbelievable. It takes a lot of dedication. it takes a lot of dedication takes a lot of time a lot of time with the meal prep dude it feels you know if it doesn't it doesn't feel like that if it's for you it doesn't it never felt that way it just felt like what else am i gonna do it just felt like what i wanted to do you know i watched on the flight here uh i was watching this david bowie concert ziggy stardust concert and it was good it was like a 90 minute

and then you know after like 40 minutes he was playing music and i said i'd be tired of playing watching this David Bowie concert, Ziggy Stardust concert. And it was good. It was like a 90-minute. And then, you know, after like 40 minutes, he was playing music. And I said, I'd be tired of playing music by now. You know, he's just like doing the David Bowie thing. And that's his gift. This is my gift. I can do this all day. I'm interested in it. It gets me.

I get it. And this is my gift. So I think to say, you to say natty or not natty I don't know it is what it is dude but if you try to live a boot camp like lifestyle and against all your thoughts and beliefs

and dude there's so many temptations that come just in the day with what we do the first temptation, the time you wake up you're always thinking oh I could just do this real quick there's always constant temptation to not do it. So, yeah, I think it's for people who love a process. Those hammies are crazy. Yeah, your legs are wild, man.

I'm not as big as I used to be. I'll say that. Do you still do traditional movements? Are you still benching, squatting, deadlifting? Bread and butter, baby. To the day I die. There's nothing like it. I've done – well well a lot of things i have done that has been different has been i'm more i isolate more because i found um like most people i have a lot of asymmetrical

things going on uh and i find that i give things sort of a better how do i say focus is split you know like uh if i give my right arm a little bit and give my left arm a little bit, I think they train with a different focus. And I don't know. I feel that takes longer. But I think if you have the time for isolated training, like you can really get a better focus on a smaller piece. That row you were showing me earlier today, right?

Much better than a two-arm row and a pen lay in any day, right, in my opinion. If you can really say what's going on with this lap, am I not turning? Am I not opening? And you treat it as an investigation, right? When I go on the train, I take a journal, I draw pictures, I take notes, I say, okay, so this, how does this pulley work? I don't think of it as so much as me getting my pump on, but how does this machine work? And and i'm just i haven't been able to be interested in anything else as much as i'm interested in this that that's really where it falls for me so yeah and pilates just broke the whole thing for me it's like you know it's like jujitsu your white belt your movement white belt and uh i'm just trying to before i

return back to the dust say can i can i really and truly, if this is my passion, say, all skeletal muscle, I can at least wink it. You know, I can at least say, hey, I may not be a master of the movement, but at least I can say, oh, I know how to do it. And so for me, that gives me life. That just gives me a joy. That's like, yeah. Plus you feel better. I feel better. In Pilates, like in the teaching of it

are they against certain types of movements are they against like lifting or doing other stuff i mean side of it okay so this is back to the hazing part that's something about right uh every time every time i this is not everyone right uh but they in the bodies world dude like they don't know anything about like bodybuilding right they'll be, what's that one thing? You kind of pull down thingy. And I'm just, like, blown away. I'm blown away that they don't know. They know how the body moves, but it goes to show, like, the school that you're trained in is really and truly how you think about the body, right?

They have no, dude, they have, like, zero knowledge of weight and strength and conditioning. And I guess, like, if you're a dancer, your strength and conditioning is Pilates. The same way that if you're a football player or a basketball player, your method is strength and conditioning. So there's no reason for me to do Pilates. It just wouldn't be sensible. So I find that a lot of people hate the bulk in Pilates. And I'm obviously generalizing. The word that they use in Pilates is long, lean muscle, right?

Lean, long, lean, right? That's a problematic 90s word, right? But when I think they say long, lean, and I'm trying to always translate the words they use, what Pilates does is that it works the eccentric and concentric equally, right? is that it works the eccentric and concentric equally right so i think instead of just um stretching a lazy passive uh lat on a lat pull you actually work from the bottom of the lat you push you push it up right the same way how like um on a deadlift there's no eccentric portion but on a squat you have to control you have to put strength into the eccentric portion and you have to control and the concentric on the way up, Pilates is the same method, right? It's a compound exercise.

But it calls on different things. It might call for your thoracic to do something. All the combinations come at you crazy. And then once you get it, once you can extend, once you can flex, he'll say, okay, now flip over. We're going to change the center of gravity. Now get on your neck. We're going to change this. So he continues to change the center of gravity in the same challenge. You'd get this from jujitsu, right?

It's literally rolling, right? You're moving through space, finding how to make that connection. And you find that sometimes when you're, they call it quadrupeding with Pilates on all fours, you have a harder time working the spine inflection versus when you're on your back, anyone can do a sit up and flex up, right? So you find you're weak at different levels of gravity. And I think it's a drawing board blueprint stuff. And once you get that down, you go back to the gym and let's say you grab that bar to deadlift. And then you say, oh, I can now sense where my pelvis is centered. I can now sense that I got some lordosis, right? You actually can map yourself. You become your own but just by feeling the same way that if you were walking funny you'd say i'm walking funny today right and you become more aware of everything to me it's it's high level uh muscle

uh connection what's the word we use in bodybuilding muscle mind muscle connection right but it goes deeper it goes to the diaphragm it goes all the way deep as deep as possible everything except the tongue in pilates i think it trains literally. It goes to the diaphragm. It goes all the way deep, as deep as possible. Everything except the tongue in Pilates, I think, it trains. Literally everything. That's like the only skeletal muscle. It has no – I don't know why you would need tongue training anyway. Oh, well, you know. It's a piece of something.

You never know. You never know. Do you – because you're doing Pilates and stuff like that, like do you stand differently? Do you, you know, your different posture when you go to pick something up off the ground? Do you have different thoughts about it now? Okay. So I think it's twofold answer.

The one that's been most impressive to me that I did not anticipate was my, it's my reflex ability. I don't drop anything. If I drop something, I'm like, my awareness in space is now better. As opposed to, like, one day we had this crazy Chicago wind storm come in. And I had this little mini grill outside. And there was no propane on it. So it was light. You know, these things.

And they blew away. So it was blowing. I was outside trying to get all the stuff. And this was, like, probably a year before Pilates. I went to grab it. And my shoulder, dude, it just, like, you know, it just gave me, like, the craziest pain for, like, probably, like, a year before pilates i went to grab it and my shoulder dude it's just like it's just like you know it just gave me like the craziest pain for like probably like a month and a half it's just undiagnosed goes away work around it yeah that was my way of life before pilates right now i i can get an answer right andrew's been saying early he said

i just i don't know you just don't know ignorant, right? And so what I think the method does is says, this is your this. This is your scalpel. It literally, it's like, it's a live living anatomy, right? So my ability to have better reflexes subconsciously has been one. And then I think the second thing is that I'm not better. My posture is not better at all, right? But what I am more aware of is when it doesn't feel correct, right? So at least I'd say I'm not better. My posture is not better at all, right? But what I am more aware of is when it doesn't feel correct, right? So at least I'd say I'm more in a corrective mode every 10 minutes. You have more of an awareness. I'm aware. I'm aware.

I'm more aware. I'm more aware of the muscle. And I just don't think there's any greater gift to that than to the athlete, right? It's because we do our thing. It's actually live for how long is actual training, peak training? An hour, a half, right? It's warm up, cool down on the way, mostly two hours sometimes if you're really trained. And everything outside of that depends on how you slept on the shoulder, how you sat, how you did things. And I think it's those off

hours. It's like nutrition, right? How you treat the body off, how you did things. And I think it's those off hours. It's like nutrition, right? How you treat the body off, how you eat the body when you're off the clock. Those are actually more important than anything else. So I think that's the other thing that's done for me. It's made me be hip to what's what, where's what. Now, if I have a long shift of emails, right, I'm not just like, my shoulders are not rounded forward. I'm more aware. And I think that's been the greatest thing. So like I said, it hasn't made me do anything miraculous. It's just made me have less bad reps. You know, if you can stop, you know, jamming on your brakes, and if you can stop making those rough turns, the car will last longer, right? I think bad reps has

been like, that's one of the things Kelly Sture things kelly is that if you do this a million times wrong it's gonna go on you it is eventually gonna we're like machines it'll it'll go on you so i think the practice of saying what is proper where where is pelvis neutral what is pelvis neutral and you never get the words for it you just feel it you feel it and you get it and i think that that's where the power lies is that it gets in you it's not a talky talky practice it's one that you get in you lock in uh and it just becomes i can't say it anymore a foundational layer to the house that you're trying to build for for anything you want to do so what about your thoughts about the way that you might lift in the gym or the way someone else might lift in the gym has your interpretation of that changed you know like um we're talking about occasionally bad reps versus good reps but

maybe there are no bad reps if the weight is appropriate or depending on the exercise or you know where do you sit with that right so okay so I kind of to prelude that answer I think bad reps when I define a bad rep let's say something as simple as a bicep curl, right? Like there's two heads on this bicep. When we curl it, some people really favor squeezing maybe the outside and then that front delt, they'll lift it up a bit. Bad rep, right? As opposed to a proper rep. We all know how to do a proper bicep curl, right?

Keep the side of your body, lift the bicep. But I think the issue is a lot of people don't have that strength yet, right? So a Pilates exercise would say like, okay, just lay down, just lay down and we'll grab some springs, right? And with the springs, you'll put your arms as close as you can to the side of your body and slowly extend your triceps all the way through. And then they'll say, that is how you properly extend your tricep. So when you go back to do your tricep extensions let's say so to speak right you know where to grab it i was just grabbing a rope you know i was just grabbing a handle so you can grab it in a better place just like benching you grab it in a better place you say all right well i need that inside head to do a

little more work on the bottom here and i need to make sure that this hand stays over when i when i do the press so i think the awareness of doing something slow and steady, you crawl in Pilates, and then when you go to lift, you say, now I can walk. So I think that's what I mean by bad reps. And then the second thing, a real answer that I realize is there is no such thing as an isolated movement. Maybe predominantly the movement exists to stimulate bicep the most,

or it exists to stimulate delt the most. But these things all exist, right? Our bodies don't have air. They're tight spaces. It's dark, it's tight, and there's no room. Our bodies are like New York City, right? So if that delt moves, you're affecting its neighbor, and that neighbor is affecting its neighbor, right?

So one term that I've been using when I teach people and what I've been saying with my reps and bodybuilding and that Pilates helps is be more generous with the muscle. I feel like getting tight, you also get very stingy. So if you were to go and do lateral raise, right, you can start thinking about the delt and you sort of start doing this delt thing, right? You back away, you curl away as opposed to Pilates would say, how does the sca doing this dealt thing, right? You back away, you curl away, as opposed to Pilates would say, what is actually, how does the scapula actually work, right? All things laterally generally work kind of behind the ear. Open the chest, open the collarbone,

right? The collarbone rotates from here. And if we were to lift the arm, this collarbone has to be raising and it rotates with, from the sternum. And this sternum is where my T1 lines up, right? So now you have some awareness of where your back should be. You're not bending thoracically here, right? So what it does is that it takes my positions and it makes them all better. And so now when I go to lateral raise, I start the weight over. I would say, where anatomically, it's not even about Pilates, where anatomically does the shoulder move? Where does it work? And now instead of thinking, delt, delt, delt, do anything and duck away to do the delt, I follow the appropriate rules of anatomy. And now I can lift that delt up more gracefully now.

I can be more generous with using this lat under here. I can be more generous with along my lat that wraps all the way to my – nearly to my glutes behind me to work. I can let my trap be more generous and I can reach in there. So I think you, uh, you tighten up when you don't know how to move a muscle. You think bicep, you think quad and you're thinking too limited, right? It's a system that's moving where we are a moving machine. There is no one isolated thing. So if you're going to hit that delt, yeah, hit the delt, but know that there's a whole gang all the way from your midline, all the way from your abdominals, all your serratuses get involved in this movement, right?

And we don't think about it like that because, you know, it's too complex. It's a body, you know? And so I think that's the biggest thing for me is being more generous, allowing what's around that supporting group to work as well too as well as finding the proper positions in bodybuilding. Now, I will say this, a huge caveat. All of the spinal things in Pilates do not apply to powerlifting, right? Because they put you in a lot of unsafe positions, right? And that's why, so for instance, Valsalva doesn't exist in Pilates. It exists in weight training. It's a needed method in weight training, right? You have more weight, you need more internal stability. What Pilates has,

instead of Alsala, is a moving breathing system, right? So on certain movements, I would say, inhale on the up, exhale on the over, right? So you're getting that intra-abdominal pressure just through a different means. It's the same system. It's just like a different language, French instead of English, and it yields something that's kind of different. But the rules, I think, are muscular, skeletal muscle rules. That's the one thing that I can't get over is that those same rules apply. It's like when you go to a different place,

and sure, they live a completely different type of life in China, but they're still just trying to take care of their kids and go to work. They're still doing the same thing, though it's in Chinese. It's just a different world. So that's kind of how i've taken to it and it's been interesting it's been interesting my goal is to kind of get it and translate it over to a language that's understandable for the strength and conditioning community because the dance language is beautiful they've done a great thing at upholding this practice but no one can speak it i i couldn't understand a word they were saying you know they would say move your side body and lift and move and speak it i i couldn't understand a word they were saying you know they

would say move your side body and lift and move and and i just i didn't get it you know i didn't get it it's like say tell me what to do with my lats i'd be telling me what you know i was looking for body but for body parts so yeah it's it's been a it's been a wild ride so we now have this crazy studio that we have my fiancee and i and we're just i don't know i just want to introduce to people like that's all that's that's my only goal for now i mean i coach full-time so my coaching has been it's been great and i love writing programs but pilates puts me in this weird sort of a student position again you know i'm sort of the master when people come to me online uh and it's boring it's boring to have all the answers it's boring to just be changing macros all the time.

And I need to work, right? I need to work. And I love coaching, but Pilates is like an extra. I call it my golf. I think I'm entering my golf years, right? Just getting out and spending a ton of money on something else, you know, and just going golfing, man. You said what is the average financial barrier of entry for Pilates? Okay. Yeah. I'm curious about that. All right. So the average financial barrier of entry for pilates okay yeah

yeah so all right all right so the average pilates instructor right like okay it's like massage how much would you expect to pay someone who who knows about the body at least 75 bucks yeah there you go there you go right and you know how many hours it takes to train you know you start adding those hours up and you're like oh yeah i got a 500 you know bill from from it takes to train. You know, you start adding those hours up and you're like, oh, I got a $500, you know, bill from this method. It's kind of crazy. It's interesting because is it a lot or, you know, have we just undervalued how much we pay for like a gym membership? I think, and I think that's interesting. Maybe somewhere in between.

Well, I think it's more of a market answer, honestly, right? I think if more people buy knee sleeve knee sleeves get cheaper you know i think it comes down to that simple market idea and i think with pilates it's not i don't know how accurate it is but i just recently looked up the uh u.s department of uh labor labor statistics and i think there's only 14 000 pil Pilates instructors in this country. Really? That's it. There's not a lot. Well, how many dancers do you know? Right?

Generally, people who enter Pilates are dancers. I'm really speaking generally. Obviously, the tide is changing now. Look at me. You know, I'm over here talking about it. And so I think that's it. It's a rare practice. I think Joseph did a strange way of saying, here's my master student and everyone has

to come from this one seed. And I think that limited the spread of the knowledge and slows the spread of the knowledge. I think it keeps it pure, but it's hard to commercialize. So they have some things going on now. There's a gym called Club Pilates and they're doing a version of Pilates that they use all the equipment and they're kind of doing it in a class structure. But you're not getting one-on-one, right? It'd be like doing group jujitsu only or group powerlifting only, which is kind of like a European style of training.

The trainer kind of just goes around and helps everyone kind of lightly. And I think it's effective. But the depth is what gives you the results in anything muscular. It's like why a chiropractor or PT says come back for 36 sessions, right? There's something about what is it? It's volume, frequency, and specificity. Those are the muscle rules, you know, and if you show up once or twice, it's not going to work. So I think the shortage of people overall, the availability of good instructors, and I think that the way the method was spread it

was spread and sort of like this martial arts dancer secret world type thing but i think it's i think it's spread and i've been seeing a lot of pilates it's obviously got to me so it must be spreading you know so um yeah i think that's the issue i think that's basically not enough people and because of that if sometimes dude if you're i see a lot of pilates instructors just being the only pilates instructors within like 100 mile radius they're successful they only have to be good they're just the only one the only one doing it's like the old town doctor back in like the dusty western days you know so yeah what you got andrew uh i'm curious um maybe just like accidentally when you're traveling or just out and about and you're like I said accidentally observing people um do you see the

way people move and you think like oh man if I had a chance to get him on the reformer or maybe do something because you can probably tell like they're hunched over something something's hurting do you see things differently that way and you're like i bet you i could probably help this person because no no no the way i see it is like okay number one killer in this country is heart disease right like people just gotta lose weight you know like there's no none of this is sensible if if if it doesn't matter if you can move well you know if you have the whole domino effect of the the other ills of being overweight and obesity so i think for me i see pilates more as a gateway of like if you would like to get healthy if you would like to ultimately lose that

weight get moving i'm not saying pilates is the only way to move but maybe it's for the first six months don't even worry about your weight just worry about trying to open up that knee. Just try to open up that shoulder. Just try to open these things back up again. And that can get you to something that burns more calories, like maybe running again one day for 10 minutes, if you can figure out how to stabilize that knee and not have sway back and figure out these small things. So I see it more as a gateway to something to help the ultimate cause i i don't i don't look at people and think i would no i think when i look at people i think most of these people don't even know about like nutrition yet like so yeah i'm not gonna act like pilates is some cure when we know that you can just it's calories in calories out man we're

still on that for the most for the most part so uh no but i do look at people and i think like how did he get so bad right like i see some kyphosis people and they're just like right i see i see how bad the spine can get right i see in a lot of um black people in particular black people got for no reason massive glutes just these massive glutes that do all the work and then it just pulls their lower back like up right so that lower ab just sinks down and that butt does all the work and you just see them just like this right and so i i think like oh man if you could just if you could just snap that pelvis up just snap that but i i do but no people just gotta lose weight dude that that's like if everyone just got healthy i don't even think pilates would be an issue if we just kind of live more like more walking and uh you know that that's the basis so

if anything ironically my approach has been for you for these for us high level idiots you know for us who want more and more and more and more and more so i think there's and i think the dancer has figured that out right if you're high level if you do ballet, here's something that's going to take you to be at least aware. I'm not saying it's going to promise your vertical, but at least you'll be aware of how to call upon that hip, extend the hip properly, extend the glute properly, reach up properly. So I think that's a promise of it is its potential more than anything. And I think people just got to get healthy first. And that's huge i think but when it does come to movement though um are you saying that pilates can be like a step one

for somebody like let's say they're like okay i know i need to work on the diet uh these guys on the podcast keep talking about walking okay i'm gonna start doing that but maybe i want to get back in the gym but man everything kind of hurts yeah yeah so you're saying pilates could be that step one i think yoga could be that step one too just any mind body moving any anything right i think and like i said i think pilates is one of the many methods there's many methods out there um but i think if you have trouble moving and you haven't been pushing a while i think pilates is great because dude it's not easy it is it's muscle it's muscles burning it's not easy at all and they take you to where you're available so

there are some so my my my coach kim she's she's just taking me like under her wing she's like a dancer and like i saw the other day and i walked into the studio and she said my baby you know she's like a total dance mom you know what mean? And it kind of feels good to have that in my life. I haven't had that coach in a while. And so anyways, she's like she'll take me and just whoop me at my level to where I need to be. She'll drill me.

She'll ask me questions in a session. And she's hard on me. And then I watch her with someone who well, these are Pilates communities too, right? Most Pilates communities have to be in some busy metro. Sacramento's got Pilates, right? It has to be – 300,000 people or more to have Pilates, right? It's got to have some people there, right?

It's got to be a city. And so you get all types of people. So the people I see her work with, these are working on sit sitting and standing sometimes right these people are just working on uh just sitting up just sitting up uh and dude she does she's she's so bad the way she'll do it like she'll trick someone so she'll start them laying down uh and she'll start them like on the reformer and then she'll just say like you saw how they were grabbing sort of the ropes with some tension so put a light tension uh and you're laying horizontally and she'll just say, okay, just open your arms and maybe just do some snow angels and just get it down. And she'll maybe work through like three reps of this and the person gets confident.

And then on the fifth one live, she'll say now exhale and look at your belly button. Get your chin to chest. So this person's like pushing down and they're like curling down and they're working, right? pushing down and they're like curling down and they're working right so i think the thing about pilates is that you can start with something like stretching or just small ranges of motion and at any given point you can put the work on them or you can take the work off i think that's the beauty of the method is that the dial is very smooth it's not a it's not a switch like bodybuilding is on off on off on off versus Pilates. You get some things that are just stretching. You get some things that are just all work.

So I think that's the beauty of it, right? You get some stabilization, some stretching. You get a lot of stamina, a great deal of stamina. Let me ask this real quick on the stamina side of things. How many reps? Like I know it's different for everybody, but when you say reps on reps on reps, what are we talking about? All right. I got this video in the mat videos.

It's the first exercise. It's called the 100. They call this the warm-up exercise. So the 100 is a pretty straightforward exercise. So I did this yesterday at the hotel, actually. And so what you do, and you can't see my feet too well, is that you lift your feet and you lift your head and my belly button is down into the floor. I'm jammed down to the floor. I'm already mad. That would piss me off. In my arms, I'm pumping my arms a hundred times. Five breaths, I inhale in deeply. Five breaths, I exhale out deeply.

So it'd be one, two, three, four, five, exhale, two, three, four, inhale, two, three, and you're working and you get the pumps harder so as i move my arms i may start to feel it maybe from my chest but as i grow deeper and deeper and deeper i'm curling in deeper so you almost see i'm in how do i i'm hollowing out my rib cage my ribs are totally down to the ground so this is the warm-up this is a stamina exercise it's a breathing exercise and it warms up your core right so this is the is the first. It's called the 100. I don't know if I want to do potty anymore. Do it. How do I say it?

That's the warm-up? Hey, that's the warm-up. That's the warm-up. And then actually play them all quickly. Play the roll. Play the roll. So the roll-up is next. So this is Joseph's order.

And the next is the roll-up, right? So you do that. And so you start with like five flexion exercises. So for the roll-up, you see I'm trying to get up clearly without moving my heels as much as I can. And you see when I go down, I'm controlling it with my ribcage. My ribcage is taking me down, right?

So that's the roll-up. Play the next one. And then you do the roll-over. And so once you get nice at this, he says, all right, well, let me continue to cook you a little bit. So for the roll-over, you lay down, arms flat, and then you curl the pelvis up and over. Try not to throw the hips over.

Throw it up and over. You separate the legs. And then coming down, you exhale and control that spine down all the way down to your start position. No flaring the ribs. No popping the ribs. Legs back together. You squeeze that midline come back up roll over so these are mat exercises there's 34 mat exercises and they work you

all the way completely and so you can see some versions like this so andrew if you can go to those reformer videos actually and so this these basic, they start to roll over into, yeah, let's see, Matt, yeah, reformer, so they start to roll over to the reformer, so play that first one, actually, so this is the same exercise that we've been talking about, that footwork, right, so this is that first position, so you remember the same things that I was doing on the 100 with gaining my belly button down to the spine, right, so at the bottom of this reformer, there's spring tension, right? I'm staying dorsiflex. I'm trying to keep that ankle as high as I can. I'm trying to keep that knee stable in space. I'm trying to keep my hip stable and I'm pushing with my ribs, so to speak,

right? My ribs are doing the work here. It's not my legs doing the work. So can you... So wait, what do you mean? I'm watching this. Your legs aren't pushing? You're not pushing with your legs? Or your feet? Well, obviously they have musculature in them, right? But what I'm pushing with is my lower ab all the way up to my xiphoid. I see. I get it. Yes.

I get it. So think about this. Don't contract the abdomen. Do an eccentric on it. Lengthen it, right? And when you lengthen it you take these ribcage this ribcage here and you corset it in so you're hollowed out right so you should feel it from your xiphoid down in your chest all the way to your pubic bone to the top of your

penis almost actually and you should feel a complete contraction there right and the temptation is to stop breathing because you're under pressure keep Keep breathing. Inhale on the up. Exhale on the down. And it's wicked. And they keep working it. I want to see if I can find 100 on here, but I don't know when it's uploaded. Scroll down a little bit. Let me see.

Play that one. Yeah, play that one. So this is 100. The same thing that I was just doing for the warm-up. So this is kind of out of order. I just didn't do them right. So the more difficult your legs are out straight, your legs are out, obviously it's weight-bearing and your center of gravity changes, right? So I got resistance in my hands and I peel up. I lower my legs from my lower ab. My head is peeled up and I start pumping from my 100. So you see I got spring tension on now. So it's like having bands behind your arms.

So this is always what's called the warm-up. So after footwork on a reformer and after the 100, you can start working. And it takes you to a variety of things. I want to show you that pulling straps. Go back up to one of those videos closer to the top. And so there's an order. And so let's go to pulling. Actually actually play this one to the left where my feet are in the straps. So you can put your feet in straps and get a similar thing. So I'm following all the rules and I'm working the range of motion in my hip socket, right? I'm tempted to in this maybe lean to one side. I'm tempted to lean to the left side. I'm tempted to flare my ribs up, right? So the whole thing is trying to get these muscles to work with

complete control. And this is nothing new. We know how to squat and stay completely rigid throughout the squat. I've seen your plain face squat before. That's what you're doing. Except this is actually not actually to move in a three-dimensional space, right? Play that one where I'm laying inverted. So this is pulling

straps. So there's a whole series where he adds a prop, a box box and you can do things like pulling straps here so i'm following all the things that i was just doing laying horizontally but now i'm flipped over so i was just pulling those straps this way but now it changes my center of gravity and asked me to do a new thing uh let me see maybe like a split go down yeah to that standing side split right there yeah that one's so you work start horizontally and the better you get you start moving vertically right you start going in handstands uh you start going in the splits it leaves nothing untouched uh the method that looks challenging well you got the pigtails going on now that's that's my pilates here

you know i got that from you know i got that from where white girls hey now hey i've been learning stuff man i've been learning it's not all chicago chicago with me man i'm learning stuff out here so of course this right that's got that's what's got to come from your glute that's what's got to come from your glute it's got to come from your midline right uh so in on the reformer like so one i haven't taken my my final yet so one of the things i have to do on the final is i have to run play this uh play that one on the bottom corner uh that one right there so this is a rowing one you saw her doing rowing i have to do all these exercises uh in like 45 minutes and there's like a trillion of them on the reformer right so you see i'm keeping my spine stable My legs are pointing long and my arms reach long. So look at my scapula tucking down, down, down, down, down, down, down.

Keep the scapula down. Hold your breath. Take the arms out directly to the side. Try not to move the carriage, right? And then you come back home and you keep your spine lifted. So it's an opposition game. My spine is going this way within the rules. My legs are going this way, right?

So I'm lengthening my body while I do something else, right? So it's a lot of isometrics with concentric movements and eccentric movements all in different spaces, all in different ways. Let's see if we can get some of that, a Cadillac movement.

So you can, I just want to show you some of the different equipment. Actually play this 945. This is called a long stretch. And you got a ton of videos. It's awesome. a bunch of dude i got so much politics videos right so this is clearly a scapular movement right you're in a plank this is like the ab wheel remember how bad we all were at the ab wheel right but it's like it's like an ab wheel so he thought about

this thing right he thought about a way to do it uh quite some time ago quite long ago right so like my glute can be tucked a little better there you see i'm poking out a little bit so you get nicer as the practice deepens uh and then when you magically go to do a rope pull down you're like oh that scapula feels where it's supposed to be you feel it gliding all over your back right when you bring that thing forward it it should glide forward and go ahead. So let's see some Cadillac. Cadillac's a big dog, dude. Which one's that?

Sorry, go back to the other folder. So there's Matt, okay, and Reformer. Those are the two most popular ones you see. And then this is Cadillac. So on Cadillac, you have a few different things you can do. So go down, let me see. Go to... Let's see what's called Cadillac.

What is this last one all the way on the bottom? Okay, so Cadillac has this one tool called a push-through bar. So this is a bar with one spring, you see that spring on the side, and now I'm going to lift my hips, tuck my glutes, squeeze my thighs together, lift, lift, lift, lift your thoracic up, and I'm holding my breath up there, inhaled. Then I exhale, jam that spine down, and I articulate one vertebra at a time. Pull that lower ab in so I can pull my legs in, and I complete the exercise. And when you get nice at it, you add a variation. You take one leg off and kick it back, right? And it keeps getting more wicked, more wicked, more wicked, and more wicked. It gets more difficult as time goes on.

And then not only that, you can do simple things. Play that one in the middle, the 7-5 one. Let me see what this one is. So this is called a teaser. This is a famous mat exercise as well too, right? So this bar moves in sort of a 90-degree angle, 180 degrees on a fixed axis, right? So the bar is fixed. And then there's a spring tension

here so i squeeze my thighs together get my chin to chest lift my head up and i have to be hollowing out and pulling out getting out of my shoulders right and i stick this teaser and then i have to exhale control everything back down this is similar to that rollover i did when i had to really control it back down so the rub to pilates is you start seeing the method make sense everywhere it starts to become this cohesive thing play seven seven i believe that's a sort of a side bed thing for all of you that are listening i'm sorry you got to come to youtube or go to spotify you got you guys got to watch this so this is uh two exercises in one so these this is me working just that armpit, right? The chest, the lat.

You warm that up, you hold it, you stick that arm over. So once you get it warm, you stick it over and then you reach and shrug over. So I'm in an opposition here. So this is fully depressed down here. This is raised. I'm split in my midline. And i lift from the center i lift from all the way from the pubic bone and i stretch over and i reach over right while keeping solid tension in the shoulder usually when you get busy you fuck around and say i don't know what the shoulder's doing and you just give up on it or you shrug it or you do something so it teaches you under do stress don't don't stop the the contraction right so this is a stretch exercise plus a contraction in one arm plus squeezing together in the middle. So it asks you to do many things at once.

And the only way you can get that, as you know, place 75, let me see what that is, is to do it over and over until it starts feeling like a flow, right? And that's kind of the whole idea. So this would be sort of like an introductory exercise that you would do on something like this. This is called a push through bar. And so for a push through bar, I'm working my C curve here. I'm getting, I'm tucking that pelvis. I'm curling that back hand. And when you get nice at it, you can exhale big and don't move your position and curl even further.

So you get back as far as you can in that C curve. And then when you're here in this dangerous position, he says, now, duck your head. Dive your head down forward. Right? Control it back. Control it up. And so you learn all these new abdominal skills. This is no different than doing a bicep curl.

It's just muscles, man. It's just muscles, dude. You know? It's not foreign to me. I think at first your eyes look at this and think, huh. You know? It's just really strange. I'll play uh 841 so

this is sort of a finisher and this is what you see a lot of girls post in pilates uh so this is another piece that they have right so after you're so so after you're done you do a finish so this is like a half hang to a full hang right so you see my sacrum is just lifted right i'm just simply hanging so the method ends with with these therapeutic like finishers. So after you get worked and stretched and pulled, he has all these crazy ways to kind of finish you, right? And then of course you can come out and you can go over, you can dive and you can do a crazy number of things in Pilates, right? So it's just crazy. It leaves nothing undone, stretched or tightened or pulled from the footwork all the way to this. So let's see whatever I have. What's the other folder I have?

How long does it take to go through one of these workouts? So this is comprehensive, right? So you can do a Pilates workout in short as – I've done 10 minutes, 8 minutes. Sometimes I go for two and a half hours it's just what's available it's what's available so uh i get trained classically in an hour uh but when i was like in school you know it'd be like eight hours you know you're just you're just doing pilates all day so play a barrel so these are the machines so you have the mat which is a floor and this is actually one of my so i I'm an apprentice, and I have to have apprentices under me.

It's like a painter. It's the strangest thing. So I have to teach. So this is one of his events. It's called a barrel, right? So for this, what I'm trying to kind of show with this guy I'm teaching is how to make that C curve. So you know when I was just kind of over that on that roll-down bar and I was really putting that C curve and tucking my pelvis? Yeah.

So now we flipped them over, right? We flipped this gravity over and we said, now use the actual length and size of this barrel to throw your ribcage over and actually learn how to get that curvature. So if you're missing something in an exercise, there's a machine or an apparatus that can teach you, right? So you see with him, I'm hands-on. So you got that black guy butt, right? You see how he wants to tuck it out? He wants to lose his lower ab. So I'm trying to get him to pull that lower ab up,

up, pull his lower ab up, pull that pelvic bone up and curve over that barrel. So this is just an easy version of an extension over a barrel. And then barrel also has crazy shit. These are called ballet stretches, right? So you can literally grab on to the back of that ladder, put a leg up. And instead of simply hamstring stretches, you create some opposition.

So I'm going to curl my body forward like I've been doing all day and pull my hands back with my scapula down. And I'm pulling from that lower pubic bone, right? So this is just taking my spine and going like – it's just like putting on a crazy, because I'm pulling and I'm pulling. So my head is pulling and my arms are pulling. So it's a stretch of oppositions. So they all look like nothing. That's the thing about Pilates that gets me. It looks like nothing is happening, right?

But there are these hidden, strange muscles, right? Power Project family, if you're trying to increase your muscle mass, if you're trying to lose body fat, if you're trying to stick to a nutrition plan, if you're trying to get fit, pretty much if there's anything you're trying to do for your health,

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certain people who like, look at this and strength conditioning and they're like, yeah, but, but there's what muscles are you working right there? What is that strengthening? How's this going to, how's this going to make you faster? Like, but the ability again for you to understand how to isolate these certain parts of your body,

have one thing going in one direction that the ability to put everything together is what a majority of people are missing. If you watch bodybuilders movement and I, I hate kind of saying this because, again, I love bodybuilding. I love powerlifting. I love lifting. But the one thing that sucks is when you see these athletes move outside of the sport,

it's a clunky thing. It's not beautiful. It's a wobble. You can see it in their posing routines. You can see it in their posing routines. And this is not to condemn bodybuilders. It's just the tools that we use are too blunt to get grace and flow. The dumbbell, the barbell, the Cybex machine.

As lovely as I love the nautilus leg presses, right? It's just too blunt of an instrument. I lay down on it. I sit down on it, and I press. I'm never going to gain a relationship with those muscles, right? Muscles are all about relationship building, right? All of the body is a relationship building, right? These are organs, right? What are you doing for, you know, what are you doing for

your heart health? Like what's your relationship with, what's your knowledge of it? And so I think what this does is that it says, okay, you know about your arms and legs and chest, you know about that, right? And they have exercises for that, right? They, they, they help you deepen it, but you probably don't know anything of like when does your lumbar start where does your thoracic end right like and we just don't know anything so i i think what this does is that it maps you by specific movements to do the thing i think the the movements look more like what he's going after what joseph pilates were going after i don't think he was trying to make a movement. I think he was trying to answer the question, how do I access these things?

And they came out looking funky like this. And the machines came out looking, what's the word they use in business? Form follows function, right? So it should look and manifest like what the goal in mind was originally. So I think that's what the practice is. And it looks a lot like nothing. It looks like nothing nothing is happening but i couldn't digest it like i said my first session i did even to this day i could i did i just would just like like break out into these crazy sweats and i'll just be like and i didn't know i didn't know what was hurting i just knew and my teacher but you know you got a pelvic floor in there you got one in there believe it or not right like i have no how no, how do I say it? Like when you, okay, when we go through puberty, like we have like, it's very easy.

Like for guys, puberty is all like, how am I going to gain status, social, sexuality? That's my whole vision. Like women spend time inside when they go through this puberty process. They have to. They've got a whole internal working system. And I think they naturally get more hip to how does the pelvic floor work right how does my kind of body move right like women are like they're more prone to to how do i say do womanly positions that a guy would never do a guy would never you know like like a guy would never be doing. And this is all nothing to do with the human body. The only difference between us is sexual organs and pelvis size.

You know, that's the only difference. A muscle is a muscle, man. So I think for me, I found this method and I said, these are muscles that I haven't trained. How can I call myself a professional at anything if I don't even know how to use these muscles right i may know how to use them on a squat but how many how much how much am i squatting right like even if my frequency was five times a week most of my life is not squatting sitting standing i'm not i'm not i'm not aware of it so i think that's the beauty of the practice is that it makes you become uh this one uh practice is that it makes you become this one, how do I say it? You become a compound movement.

You become the compound movement, right? You move as one. You stop thinking about glutes and this and that, and you start thinking about the unit. And so when I go to bodybuild, though I'm doing a leg press, right? I think where are my hips, right? Is one hiked? Is one down? And I still think about pelvic, and then I have to add things. I got to do the hiked? Is one down? And I still think about pelvic. And then I have to add things. I got to do the Valsalva. I have to do all the things. So it's completely reinvented how I lift. And, you know, like I said, I'm still pretty new at this.

So the fruit of it isn't ripe yet. But I imagine if I stick with it and try to come up with something practical to share this, I think prop and Matt access to this and kind of explaining this will be best. So that's kind of been my current venture. That's what I've been doing the past few years is just reading and stop. I decided kind of like to stop posting too, because I felt like you kind of have to be in this position of like learning. Dude, it's just good to shut up and be a student for a little bit. It's been like the nicest thing.

So, I mean, obviously I'm here. I'm ready to kind of start talking about this. So I'm excited. I'm excited.'m excited so yeah this is the chair we saw the chair too this is me kind of teaching some of the stuff uh you'll like this this one's a little longer so this one so actually what am i doing here oh no i think hold on let me see oh he might go is he gonna go up front okay he's gonna go up front okay so this is an exercise called going up front we all know how to do a box step up kind of right everyone if somebody if i said get on the box and step up you would have something you'd have some sway uh pilates exist to eliminate that going up right so this could be effective for

something that's going up on the stairs so i place him in the center on the top of the chair and he's got some spring assistance and you got some hand assistance and i'm teaching him how to properly load all the way so his knee is even moving a bit load where where does his ankle need to be we do this when we squat where does his knee need to be uh and where does he need to be in his hips right sometimes when we do these we sink into one side we lean into one side, right? So this is going up front. So this gets him stable. So he's just working that one side. And then we add on more variation, the more he starts to get the movement. So he's obviously, he's a student of mine, so he's getting better. So his head, his spine should be getting longer.

He's a little curved in, right? So you see how when he took his arms off, he instantly dipped forward a little bit. So he's obviously got some learners to do. We're trying to get him to do it now with his arms off and his balance is getting better. And so you can work on this stuff on the reformer with like the splits that I was doing. So it starts coming back all circular. So you get them to do this stuff and then you get them to get more stable. And it's really miraculous stuff. So this guy I programmed for, I actually got my MBA with this guy. We went to school together. And I do his programming for strength and stuff then he was deadlifting he's you know getting up to 400 and then he just said my back you know he's just

missing stuff you know uh and so we're getting them strong everywhere that's that's my solution right so now we're going up holding now so now we're stable in the leg and doing some mountain climbers with the back leg right so now he's got to work that posterior segment. So you add on and you add on the challenge and this guy's got a focus. Look at his face. He's got a focus. It's scary, you know? And so, and that, and that's sort of the idea. So I, I have him doing what I do. Lifting weights five times a week, uh, train applies once a week, right? I train once or or twice a week so that's kind of what i've been up to and that's kind of method this is some smaller stuff so look at this dorsiflexion right teaching them how to get that heel hot heel high the heel doesn't get high from the heel it gets

high from that insertion on the on the calf like the heel gets high all the way from the hamstring right that's where the muscle starts everything the biggest rule in pilates is everything in pilates is proximal to distal if you think you gotta move something it's gotta move proximately if if if if you try to jump from your knees to distal you've got to jump from here hips up right it's got to be an explosive movement from center and a lot of us have lost center and i think that's what a lot of these things do so i don't know what he wants to go on to do if he wants to go on to i don't know looks like he could do some with this move but he can do it so for me i don't look at the method and think you got a weak this let me train your this like the general pt approach i have the joseph pilates approach which is you're weak

everywhere you need to be strong he was very intense like you're weak everywhere if you can't do it perfectly on the first try he would call you weak no weak links no weak links so this is a so this might be the last one so this is uh you can't see too good but this is called um i forgot what it's called there's so many exercises uh but anyways he's got his hand now stabilizing his knee so we've cut some joints so we cut some joints out his back has stayed rounded and he's just simply pressing down it's called the soleus press and he's pressing through his soleus so he's trying to get his those metatarsals on his foot to press and lengthen and press and length just through the foot just working the foot while holding his his knee stable so he's

so he's got some extra knee stability uh and so so for chair, reformer, there's a – we didn't even watch all the exercises I had. There's an endless number of exercises. Oh, and the names. And the names, dude. These names. For me, rows and biceps or rows and whatever. Dude, these names, long stretch, down stretch, elephant, seal, mermaid. Like he named these things after a spirit that he was going after.

He didn't name them after kinetically what he was trying to do. So whatever he felt was the gist of it, he named it. So everything that I do, it's still, like I said, still Joseph classical. You can look at a lot of other Pilates methods in their conventional. They got a lot of new stuff. And as it should be, any practice should continue to grow. You know, it's not 1940, know 40 40 50 whatever yeah when you invented this stuff so so yeah i'm glad we got to watch some of those yeah reminds me of like cador naming

the movements after like an animal uh-huh that's pretty dope and you have to think differently yeah when it's that way right like the command for uh shoulder press is simple right you think shoulder and and man hears thoughts and words and he believes he understands he understands not right it's a it's a there's so much more depth than just saying i'm taking my shoulder and i'm pressing he couldn't be more wrong right it's like the first time we see anyone bench press you know everyone's got that story i started with the bar right you were unskilled and this is the same thing we're unskilled everywhere because our who trains you

your parents they taught you how to walk you know like your parents your mom trained you your mom trained your body like that's as far as we've taken it and there's much more depth if interested i don't think you need it i'm not saying you need it but it's um movement and if you apply movement to anything uh it's miraculous right there's a whole medical field after this called pt we know about the miracle of this it's literally miraculous so so that's the practice so like i said you can do it on mat all those machines so i've bought all the machines we went on this crazy like secondhand hunt we found everything we bought was from people who were trying to do pilates but didn't make it didn't finish school there we go I gotta go to Facebook marketplace Facebook marketplace or going out of business uh and I just learned

dude I just kind of learned machines and so I mean I mean that's the thing like I could I could have bought new equipment but I just couldn't justify uh just me wanting to have a practice zone you know just thirty thousand dollars just shit that i show for once a week you know so dude i gotta say it's it's pretty great because like for example like mark's done a bodybuilding show done powerlifting you've gotten yourself into running you've been a pro bodybuilder you got an elite level total i think we have some uh footage of you at the arnold sports festival where you squatted like 640 something like that that day yeah deadlifted 650 something like you you put up some oh this is

raw national 2015 that's raw nuts this is raw this is raw nuts 2015 right so this is a year before yeah i mean for the time so this this year i think was this the year of jesse norris you guys remember that year in the 93s was this that year mark i don't know but no that was unbelievable was this grant yeah this is grand? So this year it was me. I think the top five was Lane Norton, Ellis McClain. Ooh, Ellis. Where is he? Still a big boy.

Still lifting. He's going to lift to the day he dies, too. Ellis McClain, Jesse Norris, and I believe me. This was before the Russ Swole days and all that stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah yeah yeah but you've done this right and now like to go

venture off to something that's so left field that's so like just opposed to lifting right I mean look at this let's look at this squat right would we call this 633 a perfect squat let's look at it am I stable here a little shaky a little shaky. Let's look at it. Am I stable here?

A little shaky. A little shaky, but it's a good lift. Yeah. How many times can I do this until I can't do that, right? I think that's the larger question that I have, right? And so for me, with Pilates, the big thing that I keep seeking is stability. Stability, stability. How can I learn how to activate these muscles so that when I want to go out? Foundation is the best word i can come up with when i want to go out and do these things how can i call on it how can i do it right so that's so that's my big thing so that's your opener was

358 i wonder what your third attempt was for that bench i definitely under definitely under 400 i was under 400 under 400 374 Ben Esco wrote my attempts so you know he's got that win the meet at all costs kind of approach

so but this was a good meet this was a good year look how small this stage is compared to these days now dude how much money

do they get for these contests now they're like I don't know man you miss it there was there was no one watching back then I don't think

do you miss it? There was no one watching back then, I don't think. Do you miss it? No. No, it's over. You satisfied it. Yeah, for sure. You satisfied it. And what else is a man to satisfy things, put them down, and pick up the next? And I think you get involved with all this identity where you got good at that.

And, dude, the second you start sitting on a throne in this game, it decays. The second you sit on that throne the second you say i am king this if the throne starts to just go to shit like instantly like seeking and student stewardship and being a student i think is the game and i've been telling you a whole day since i've been there i i appreciate you doing it because it's scary dude i didn't i picked up this pilates and it's stupid as it sounds my first thought was what's everybody gonna think I'm the natty pro I've been the natty pro for 12 years you know like what does everyone think and you go through this whole thing of you got all this following you got all these people but man good

good style is ruthless good self-actualization is ruthless you just got to say I don't know it's up to them to figure it out and I'm gonna make this change and uh and that's it and then you know if you outwork somebody you'd probably have a little more confidence in what you're doing anyway. So that's it. I'm on to the new thing. I mean for me, it's still bread and butter strength. Let's strength train in different ways. That is my preferred method to move.

I think it's the most accessible one with the commercial gym of America. We're not in the age of aerobics anymore like the 90s or anything you know we're in a new age instagram i go to a planet fitness to do a little cardio in the morning planet fitness dude they got gym shark outfits now and planet fitness it's like it's unbelievable how how much this stuff has spread to the average everyday person i'm really blown away so i like it it. I love it. And, uh, I think, you know, after powerlifting, I would just, like you said, you would just feel like, I don't know, something doesn't feel right. And I couldn't put a name on it. Uh, and it's just glue, man, stability, glue, it's stability. It's getting those muscles to turn on. Um, and it's not that

muscle is off. I know that's a bad name for it, But, you know, like if you were to if you were to put if you were to electrocute a person, you know, put like shock their head. What are those things they used to put back in the day? You could send enough current to a person where they contract enough to jump that muscle off the bone. Like we are capable of that superhuman strength. We just can't send the electricity. That's what they call crackhead strength. Right. You can send like depending on your state, you can send more signal. You can

send, it's electricity, right? And so the whole thing is electricity's training. If you look at how a program works with periodization, it's basically just training electricity. You're trying to get more of a signal to get that muscle more and more and more turned on. But as you reach for that, as your pinnacle, you forget things. You know, you forget things. You say, I'm squatting three times a week. Squatting three times a week. I'm squatting three times a week.

I'm running a program. I'm squatting three times a week. Ignoring that performance pain you have. Now you've got this 10-year sciatic thing. You know what I mean? So that's been it, trying to keep the thing we love, trying to keep to do the things we love. And I think at some point you've got to explore it.

And for me, Pilates is a method that's unified, right? If you do something here, it rewards you in another place, and it all ties in. And I've just been crazy about it. You got to come to Chicago, and I'll take the week off to roll you around and just show you. Mark, you can come too. I know you're busy, but, man, Andrew, that's my goal.

I built it literally for that, just to introduce it to all my freaks yeah thanks for your time today appreciate it thank you guys man i'm happy to be here ryan where can people find you oh instagram dude instagram where everyone's at and uh if you prefer to actually get a message from me email me uh my email is ryan at uh fortiseq.com f-o-r-t-i-s-e-q.com