Mark Bell's Power Project - Concepts to Achieve Elite Hybrid Athleticism - Fergus Crawley & James Pieratt || MBPP Ep. 895

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

In this Podcast Episode, Fergus Crawley, James Pieratt, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about ways to build up your conditioning and Fergus and James share concepts to achieve elite hybrid athleticism and share how they trained to conquered some incredible world record endurance feats. Follow Fergus on IG: https://www.instagram.com/ferguscrawley/ Follow James on IG: https://www.instagram.com/wildhuntconditioning/ 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://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://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢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! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 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

Yeah, yeah. You guys ready to go? Ready to rock. All right, go for it. All right, so we got some lunatics on this show today. Yeah, we do. Look at these guys. Running and running and running and doing all kinds of wild feats.

So really cool to have both you guys on the show because and Seema and Andrew and I, we don't know what the fuck it is you guys are doing. I mean, I'm prepping for a marathon marathon but you guys have run at least double that and you've run double that and swam and fucking biked if it makes you feel any better i don't really know what i'm doing either at this point i kind of i kind of i kind of reflect on my decisions and go hmm this is uh you've lost your head yeah you made a bad decision recently what's that what's that bad decision about so my most recent bad decision was to take the 4x4x48 challenge i make it 4x4x4 days so 4x4x96 so four miles of so it was uh i i've had so many people over the years say oh you should do the 4x4x48 but i see the value in that being a really good entry point

for people that might not have experience with ultras to experience some of the sleep deprivation, discipline, demand, and fatigue that comes with it without having to have the conditioning to run the 48 miles in the first place. So for me, it's never really been something that appeals to me because I've kind of experienced that through doing the ultras. So obviously, double it it i double things now

that seems that seems to be the way i approach things because yeah double double ironman distance triathlon and now doubling the 4x4x48 but it was um it was good because i got to experience the the demands that go with it so that when people ask me oh how can i prepare for this i've been through it and then i've been through it again with the compounding effect of having one in front of the other so I think for anyone that's keen to do it it's something I definitely recommend but don't expect it to

be like an ultra would be because it's not it's an exercise in discipline sleep deprivation commitment and wrestling yourself out of bed more than it is a conventional ultra so there's a nuance there. But they're both valuable things.

But I think the headspace that you find yourself in with an ultra is very different to the headspace I find myself in on the 4x4x96. And the following day, I then got on a flight to LA. So that was why it was a poor decision. James, how do you get yourself to do these things? Because a bunch of the things I've seen you do before, you're just out there by yourself. You're not even in a race.

So it's like pretty uncommon for someone to decide to do an ultra and like not have anyone else around. You're not in an actual race where you're – once you sign up for a race, you kind of – you agree, right? And then once you're there and you're running with everybody, people can bow out, but you're kind of like almost forced forced to how are you forcing yourself or are you forcing yourself to do this stuff uh well i started out with i mean you know like the first actually the first my first exposure to endurance at all was the four but i was literally one of the people you're just

talking about um and i was like oh i kind of like can you explain what that is? Just so our, so you're running, you run four hours, I'm sorry, four miles every four hours for 48 hours. Um, I did because I'm, I have whatever, whatever you're afflicted with. I got a little touch of it too.

I did six miles every four hours. I gotta make sure we don't catch this stuff. You got it. You got it. I've rolled with you and run with you. So you guys got it. Um, uh,

and then, uh, I just fell in love with it and I had no running training i didn't even wear the right shoes i was wearing some old like worn out old nike cross trainers and wearing sweatpants and um now i i run a little bit more comfortably in terms of gear but uh and i just fell in love with something for me it was like i have that i'm a former heroin addict so i have whatever that is inside me that, you know, looking for something. And even as a drug addict, you're pretty well wired to put aside your discomforts seeking something else. And so the downside never really registered for me. I felt free.

I felt some weird psychedelic. The payoff is big for you. Yeah. And not only was the payoff is big for you not only was the payoff big but the downside didn't really register like I like feeling beat up for a gauze you know like I've always my entire life whether I was an 11 year old on the wrestling mat like I like that feeling of you know

just being completely wrung out and you know having left everything completely out there so you don't need to give me a medal or a race date or any of that like you can call me as you know you can call me a day before and we'll go run 50 or 100 whatever you want or the day of the day of on a on torn meniscus like 20 minutes 20 minutes beforehand yeah he's like yeah i'm gonna keep repairing my knee occasionally while we're running and he would just stop and disappear and then he'd somehow catch up and I'm like, are you taking an Uber to catch up to me? What the fuck's

going on? Yeah, that I thought, I knew it wasn't, the meniscus was still, had some, you know, was still healing from the tear, but I thought. He's like taking like chips and like rocks and like digging them around in his leg. I'm like, what is he doing? Spells and potions. Dude. But anyway, no man, I just, I like, short answer.

Yeah, what the fuck, dude? Short answer. I just, I like the freedom of it. Like, I like, anyone who knows me knows I'm big on the history stuff. So, like, stories of persistence hunting, you know, like the tribesmen, even the sandbushmen in Africa today, you know, and certain parts of Latin America. Like, just chasing an animal without a weapon or with a knife. And just, you know, you're just running after it for hours or days. You're steering it away from water.

You're steering it away from shade. You're relying on the fact that you're bipedal, that you have sweat glands, and your body can cool faster than it can. Because no one here, not Usain Bolt, he's not running down an antelope or a gazelle. You know, you're not even coming close. It's a joke. And so turning that to your advantage is just staying after them and you just stay staying in that rear view it's that rocky that

goggin sort of mindset and you just don't go anywhere and you know there's more strategy and obviously the hunting part appeals to me but like that that idea is the mindset that i carry into ultra running i just like that freedom that primal, you know, I have nothing else to worry about in that moment or in that time period I can run. I'm, I have one foot in this world and one foot in another world. Everyone that I've loved that's now dead is a step closer. And every piece of myself that I, I tell myself, every, every story I tell myself is under examination in that moment. And, uh, I just, for whatever reason, like, I like that test to me, I've always just been fascinated by will in general, like strength is cool. Speed is cool. Intelligence, all these things. But I've, I've just been fascinated by the guy who just, he won't break. It doesn't

be the sharpest or the fastest or the strongest, but he just won't break. You know, okay. So for everyone listening, we're going to get into things that you can apply into your training because you guys are two wild hybrid athletes and you're a hybrid athlete essentially too oh yeah um but one thing that i'm kind of curious about here is you mentioned these lsd psychedelic effects and in the gym shark video you mentioned you were fucking hallucinating so the thing is that kind of falls into all of this is sleep deprivation oh yeah right and performing while being sleep deprived and we i mean i don't fuck with my sleep and i know you don't either right so what what do what should people be thinking about if they're wanting to get into

these types of 4x4x48 or 96 or whatever kind of crazy shit y'all are doing um but they're going to end up being sleep deprived when doing these things how do you guys perform you want to start with this one so the unglamorous answer is you won't know until you're there which is not perfect not not not not not very clippable sorry sorry editing team but the bottom line is you can build up to these things to the point where you're actually you're less surprised by what it feels like when you get there and i think that's that's where incremental building and training is so important that goes beyond the actual programming itself that's where incremental building and training is so important that goes beyond the actual programming itself. That's where the psychological conditioning comes in

because, for example, when I was training for my first 100-miler, I hadn't ever experienced the bubble psychologically that comes with being in a head torch in the dark with nothing but your feet in front of you. And that's shit. It's scary. It's intimidating. I was out on my own own and i saw in training peaks

from johnny my coach 50 56 miles so it was run from glasgow to edinburgh which is the equivalent of i'm trying to think of an american terms because everything's much bigger in terms of scale but it was run i saw braveheart i saw william wallace okay okay yeah yeah yeah no problem yeah it was easy you did a kilt as well. But essentially it's running from the two major cities in Scotland along a canal. So it was 56 miles and I saw the instructions of start at 10 p.m. And I thought, oh, God, no. That's going to be terrible.

You're good. You're good. Just quick check. Just making sure. Quick check. And I found myself. There's a hamster. I found myself on the train

from Edinburgh to Glasgow sitting alongside students that were cracking open seltzers and having a good time and I was there with a full kit of full bag full of water everything I needed to get self supported and I had nobody there was nobody with me, no car, nothing

just train out, run back and I really wanted to tell somebody I was like I'm fucking running home. Because I just sat there feeling like, this is so stupid. I need somebody to console me in how I'm feeling right now. And then I got off the train, start the watch, off you go. And what happened was everything felt pretty reliable until I hit that point where I would normally be going to bed.

And then you just kind of hit this monotony where you feel a bit flat, you feel your face being a bit droopy, but you can keep moving because you're focused on something. And what I learned very quickly was when I stopped focusing on the motor pattern, like we discussed yesterday with that sort of above a certain pace, you are in this other realm. Once I stopped focusing focusing I could feel the tight tiredness take over me so whenever I stopped to eat it was it was a bit more of a slump and it was a bit harder to get going again which is why the 4x48 is a great lesson in resilience for people that aren't conditioned with ultras in the first place because you've got to get going

again and then about four in the morning was when I really started to be hit with the self-doubt because it was the longest I'd ever run at that point I was at 36 miles it was I was on pace I was ahead of pace actually but what I hadn't accounted for just through naivety was the fact that I was self-supported and I was carrying because no shops open so everything I was carrying was on my person so I had about seven and a half kilos of unaccounted for weight that I hadn't calculated into my pacing. So at 30 miles, I felt much worse than I thought I would have done because in my calculations, I hadn't been basing the fact

that I had seven and a half additional kilos. So that's where the mind games and the tiredness started to combine. And what were you holding, by the way? So it was about four liters of water, electrolytes, carbs, food. I had a tub of pasta that actually froze overnight because it was so cold, which in the video that I recorded was very, very hilariously frustrating because I was like, I can't wait for my only real meal at the time that I factored for a bit of sit-down time, get some proper food on board

rather than these Rice Krispie squares. And then I take it out and it's like... these rice crispy squares and then i take it out and it's like so again like the sleep deprivation coupled with the isolation coupled with these problem solving coupled with the surprise coupled with the fact that there was no one coming to save me coupled with the fact that there were no shops i could access there was no train i could jump on i just put myself in the deep end but i had the guidance of somebody else in the form of my coach Johnny to guide me to the point where I was able to do that and whilst I was fortunate to be in that position I think the broader message is that everybody can build up to a point where they are confident enough to take a step towards being a student and just putting themselves in a position

where they're going to get punched in the face a few times metaphorically because that's where the hardest lessons are learned and that experience i had that night gave me all of the things that a lot of people conventionally don't experience before they go and do their first ultra and that's where it gets tough because when you go into the night when you experience that strange psychological bubble of being in a head torch when you experience nothing to look at nothing to interact with your food freezes whatever it might be all these things that are variables and could happen if you've experienced them before you're better prepared in terms of what to do next and it just means that the the sleep deprivation

is less of a stress because if you're ever tired and grumpy and something goes wrong you snap you lose your head you lose your cool and that's hard to come back from because if you've already experienced the things that could go wrong and you are sleep deprived you're in a better position to know instinctively what to do next but i mean with the double the sleep deprivation i didn't i didn't train for that i didn't do training weekends because all that's going to do is affect my training and adaptation and recovery so all i had to do was prepare for the things i expected to go wrong work them into the plan make sure the people around me in that event were were well briefed i knew i was well briefed i had like a a scribbly notepad so i i had flow charts of solutions of

things that could hypothetically go wrong and then when the hallucination started just had to keep moving forwards because it's very difficult i did fall asleep on the bike yeah i was about to say it's very difficult to fall asleep i did fall asleep on the bike. I was about to say it's very difficult to fall asleep. I did fall asleep on the bike, but that's because I was kind of gliding downhill. I wasn't pedaling. I was just sort of moving downhill about 50 kilometers an hour, so about 30 miles an hour. And a hallucination is just an expectation? It's just like at a certain point you will hallucinate.

I find about the 60 hours or so, 48 to 60 hours is kind of for me when they tend to kind of kick in earlier. I'm 30 plus for me. So I'm a lot sooner. No, I mean, pretty soon. I'm a cheap date. I'm a cheap date when it comes to psychedelics, apparently, in that sense. Yeah. No, it's I mean, the sleep deprivation for me makes it worse.

But it's for me, it's like more like a thinning of the fabric in reality like i don't i don't see cheetahs that talk to me or what uh courtney de walter had a story like that leopards that were talking to her or something i don't generally do that i don't see things i'll i'll see memories kind of play out right before me or i'll feel things that i wouldn't normally feel or people why is this just so fucking oh i mean i guess yeah so maybe i do hallucinate but you know it's all i can still i can function um i know what you mean i know what you mean it's like uh for me it wasn't like oh look an elephant's charging towards me you still know it was i was like looking at a combination of shapes knowing full well it was a tree a wall in the car and i was seeing dick dastardly from the wackacky Racers. And I was looking like... I knew the translations on that one.

Dick Dastardly from the Wacky Racers. I think I know him with the moustache. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like a cartoon character, a very, very cartoony cartoon character. And I was looking at it, knowing full well it wasn't fucking Dick Dastardly. But I was looking at it like, well, what is it?

And then the shapes would separate a bit. Oh, it's a tree, a car, and a wall. Of course it is, because you've done this seven times already on this lap. And then there were moments where bushes would be there, and I'd kind of glance them, and I'd just see it as a wolf's head. And then you'd be looking right at it and like, it's not a wolf's head. But it's not like, like you say, it's not like reality just bends in on itself, but you see things differently,

but you can keep functioning. You can keep having a conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, there it is. There it is. It's like, what? It's like Wario.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I saw him twice. He's chasing you. And the deeper question is, as somebody who's only seen the Wacky Races once when I was about six years old, why the fuck did he come into my head yeah what what happened what happened in another room whilst dick dastardly was younger but anyway there he is the the the cunning man

that he is getting in my head but i know i actually have a question you're the only person i've ever met who's done uh self-support or unsupported ultra marathons what was your take on like the unsupported side of it I don't enjoy supported marathon supported stuff that much because one I don't like the there's a practical consideration which is at this point now making youtube videos I don't like feeling like I'm in impeding anyone's race or getting in the way of anyone practically speaking but i also like the adventure side of it where it's a to b in a i don't want to say wild setting but it's in a it's in a in a setting that requires you to be the the creator and and i'm not very good at drawing i'm not very good at photoshop powerpoint any of these things i'm not very artistically creative but my creative

expression i have found to be the logistical creation and conception of these things from A to Z in terms of, right, where am I going to do it? Where do I want to do it? Where are the stops? How do we get this together? Who do we require? What do we need to buy? What needs to be there? How do we put this together? And then experiencing it as the person doing it and seeing it all come together is fantastic but the things i've done completely on my own it gives you a complete sense of self-reliance that is scary at first because you can't rely on the person next to you to give you the solutions so then when you actually find a way to get to finish like holy shit i've managed to pull this together power project family your normal shoes are making you weak this is is why I partner with Vivo Barefoot Shoes because they have a wide toe box, they're flat, and they're flexible. So with every single step you're taking, if you're taking a 10 minute walk outside or when you're working out in the gym, your feet are able to do what they're supposed to do in this shoe. They have tons of options for hiking, running, training in the gym, chilling and relaxing, casual shoes.

If you're out on a date, you need to check them out. And Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at vivo barefoot.com slash power project. And you guys will receive 15% off your order automatically. Again, vivo barefoot.com slash power project links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. At some point, you need to go hunting. I was going to say, yeah, we'll talk later.

We got, yeah, but he described it better than i did that that that element that i mean and it's complete ownership of everything you know it's it's not a to b you know you're not falling one strand to the next it's you're troubleshooting in real time and you're hallucinating while you're doing it and you you do have a route that you're supposed to be sticking to but maybe you're not on it or maybe on the second night you know what i mean you take a wrong turn and you're doing it and you you do have a route that you're supposed to be sticking to but maybe you're not on it or maybe on the second night you know what i mean you take a wrong turn and you're like you know so it's there's some great runner's goals you know people are like trying just to maybe work their way towards a runner's high but you guys are hallucinating i just the the the sentence of troubleshooting in real time and hallucinating whilst you're doing it is just the most ridiculous combination of words i've ever heard how do you guys calm yourselves down do you try just to stick back to uh like

factual stuff like i have enough water i think i have salt like do you try to you know if you get into a panic like let's say you're running and i don't know you're running that far you get really tired you run into cramps maybe you fall maybe you hurt your toe i mean the smallest thing can really fuck you up if you fall and you're already fragile, like you're going to be in a lot of pain. So I don't know if you guys experienced anything like that, but when things like that happen, you tend to get kind of nervous. And then how do you guys rein yourselves back in? Well, for me, like that, what you just described, that's bear hunting in general.

Like that's the side I'm coming to the athletic side from that side. So that, that has never, like, it's just never really been the current, like the way my brain thinks about it. If it happens, you deal with it. To me, that's the biggest thing is my brain does obsess. Like it's, I have an OCD thing, so I will obsess about the possibility of these things happening. Ironically, if they or when they do happen, I'm relieved because I'm like,

oh, here. So you're thinking about like it's definitely possible when you're hunting that you could scrape your arm on something and gash it open and you could bleed and you have to wear proper clothes and take proper precautions going into it, right? My last hunt, my last bear hunt or my spring bear hunt last year, I got caught in a snowstorm for seven days without winter supplies. Is that when you were gone for like two weeks or whatever? Yeah. So I was like, you were by yourself and shit were gone for like two weeks or whatever? Yeah. Yeah. So I was like,

you were by yourself and shit. I was like, what the fuck? Yeah. Solo bear hunting is, they, they actually, it's kind of frowned.

I came back with a bear in SEMA. But it was, it was a great experience, but I did like, what the fuck? I'll bring, I'll have some more claws for you. Um,

but the, uh, I did cut my hand like very shallowly, but on what I thought was wood and turned out to be rusty metal. And it was in the fire, like the fire pit when I was cleaning it out. And I was like, so I'm doing the math. I'm like, when was your last tetanus shot? You know, like I'm doing the math.

I'm like, do I call it here? Do I go out? You know what I mean? How much time? Like I don't know any of these things. You also don't have like service at the point where you know no no no like i i'm hunting there's a small a small diner 21 miles down the mountain and uh so i'm like doing the math i can make that but like i don't know like i don't have access to like weather services i don't know when

the next storm's gonna hit and i can't get caught out in that because i'll just get buried like fitness aside i'll just get buried and Fitness aside, I'll just get buried. So I was like, the most prudent thing to do is just stop thinking about this, eat my ribeye, go to bed, and address it tomorrow morning with a fresh brain. And I woke up and I was like, let's go hunt. There were wolf tracks outside, so I started chasing wolf too. And that kind of distracted me when I came down. Then as soon as I got back down to California, I got a tetanus shot.

I'm like, I don't want to think about that anymore. So for me, that's the issue is just overthinking. But I'm out there to turn it off, to be present, and to enjoy it. And so that's what I try to do and not try to get in my own way. How about for you? If something happens, how do you calm yourself down? Well, it feels a bit silly and trivial now, given the bears and wolves aren't involved but essentially a good example we spoke about a bit yesterday was when my bike failed on the double and i was on the side of the road for an hour and a half there were i could feel like it it's like in movies when you

see somebody's about to die or there's a tension point and you see these little beeps and it's like a flat line that that's how my emotions felt like i was calm, okay, there's nothing you can do about it but I can't fucking believe this is happening and I was like, just okay let it settle, let everything calm down you're in a nice setting, you can drink your water you can have some food, you can front load some carbs but what the fuck is this about? It was just, it was moments

like this and I had that for about an hour and a half and it did just get to the point where once I'd ridden that wave and you're in a position of, you accept there is nothing you can do, like you will have done where it's like, okay, all I can do is either go down the hill and risk a storm or stay here and deal with this in the morning and actually come at it practically.

You just look at the situation as it is and then make a decision moving forwards. But that's not what we are hardwired to do as human beings, so that's something that needs to be trained and that's where i see the biggest crossover from ultra endurance training and really put yourself outside of your comfort zone in the outdoors that's why i feel there's been so much translation from my training to my day-to-day life when i get something catastrophic go wrong in terms of an invoice that wasn't paid on time that was business essential for whatever it might be

then i know okay look at this in the same way translate the experiences you've willingly willingly put yourself into elsewhere and then apply those to this situation and i come out the other side stronger and again it comes back to the only way i can learn these lessons is by willingly exposing myself to them so it's a case of keeping calm is doing the reps over time to put yourself in situations where you're forced to confront the desire to not be calm so that once you come out the other side with a clearer strategy when things do go south you've experienced it before you've experienced those emotions you can sort of marinate in those feelings for a moment before you decide right this is what i'm going to do and it does sound a bit trivial to say, oh, fitness, ultra endurance has given me those skills in day-to-day life.

But it really has. It really has. One question. As far as mindset goes, you see different people approach ultra endurance. And I imagine Ironman stuff the same way. Let's say maybe like your Goggins type who will psych and they get themselves fired up. You know, it's all fire. And then you see some other people who it's ice, it's do you where do you find yourself on the spectrum when you really have

to start digging i'm spoke about this yesterday i just become bitterly sarcastic um i rely on humor yeah humors humors are bread and butter me and johnny it's what it's what we've always relied upon and um he's currently doing a 250k ultra in the arctic circle and he as of about five minutes ago will have finished the fifth stage so tomorrow is way to be there for him bro mind you it is about the same temperature here today in uh in california so yeah no so he's um he's he's very experienced in these things as well. Tomorrow he's got 15K sprint section in minus 40 degrees Celsius. That's going to be fine.

I actually think Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same in the minuses beyond a certain point. It's not. It's cold. It's all cold. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so he's the same. I think he will be struggling at the moment

with the fact that he can't turn to the person on his left that he only met five days ago and say something that would probably put him in prison if it was said in a public setting, whereas when me and him have done stuff in the past, we just act like children, and that's really a good coping mechanism for us. I approach things very calmly

because I don't know, I think it's a practicality thing where I like to be in a controlled state of mind to be able to tackle a problem in front of me. However, that's why I enjoy lifting so much at the other end of the spectrum because that is full-on hard line, send, head down, get aggressive, smelling salts, get slapped in the face

by the person nearest and then go for a heavy deadlift or a heavy squat, whatever it might be. But sometimes I find myself blurring those boundaries when I'm training at the home gym, which i find interesting because if i'm doing a big endurance block then i find that my mindset becomes quite zen i become quite calm and then when i go to lift a heavy single i'm in the wrong headspace for it so it feels a lot heavier than it should yeah and i almost need to go through a heavy single to remind myself oh fuck yeah you

need to get amped up for this otherwise it's not going to move quickly because they're at total other ends of the spectrum but that's where i see the value in lifting alongside ultra stuff because it gives you a full range of the emotional capability that comes with putting yourself in these different situations and i love going into the gym and knowing i'm about to put x amount of weight on the bar and give everything i've got in that moment versus versus, right, 24 hours, start, you've got to stay calm, patient, and deliberated, and see it through. And there'll be moments where you need to tap into

that sort of scrap mentality that comes from the lifting, in the same way that sometimes with lifting, patience in terms of putting two and a half kilos on the bar as the years go on is the same sort of deliberated patience that comes with the endurance stuff. So I think they really do complement each other on premise obviously when you're pushing things at both ends of the spectrum you're going to be impeding your strength development and vice versa but there's no reason the two can't coexist and i think people would

be better viewing training for things other than just the numbers on the bar or the the stats on strava and actually the intrinsic thing than things come from it, because the skills it gives you and the appreciation it gives you for the actual mechanism of training itself is really enriching as a person. Hope you guys are enjoying this episode. We continue to produce this content for free. And if the podcast has brought value to your life, it would mean a lot to us if you could go to your favorite podcast platform, whether that's iTunes or Spotify, and give us a star rating. It'll help the podcast grow and it won't take you much time. Enjoy the episode.

I think as you go over like an 80% range, I think we should shift into like talking a lot about lifting right now. And then we can kind of go back into some of these other things. It's okay if we go a little all over, but I'd love to focus on lifting since both of you guys have a prowess with lifting as well. on lifting since both of you guys have a prowess with lifting as well. What happens when people start to go over 85% with lifting is the percentage of time that they actually do that lifting is reduced significantly. So somebody going over 80%, it starts to get in like the 20% range that somebody would perform 85% of their one rep max and so forth as you go higher and higher. I think that people don't really understand all that well. And I'm talking even about like, not warmup sets, but like working sets. But I think with running and with lifting,

I think that people don't really understand how much can be accomplished with probably around 60% to probably right close to that 80 to 85% range. Like there is a lot of improvement that you can make. And if you're new to lifting or if you're new to running, you can hang out there for a long time and lift very safely and make great amounts of progress. What do you guys think about that? Well, the whole Wild Hunt system is based off that exact premise. And it's like you do your functional

stuff, maybe the lower end of that range. And then we do a lot of stuff right at that 85% door because progressive overload still applies to 85%. You don't need to do 99% max every time to put weight on the bar. You know what I mean? Progress is progress. But one thing we see also is in addition to that hanging out in that range also allows you to train multiple methodologies simultaneously and still see gains across. Because the general wisdom is that like you can only, I mean, I don't subscribe to it, but for a long time people said you could only make progress in essentially like one physical capacity at a time or maybe like a little bit of something else. Whereas I don't find that to be true at all, particularly if you're setting up like a symbiotic system where one thing supports the next you know like I just did an Instagram post on like a study that shows that aerobic capacity building aerobic capacity increases hypertrophy strength output and even fast twitch muscle it was kind of interesting because they literally had

it took a group male and female young healthy minimal resistance training background and they had the entire group, everyone in the group for six weeks, six or eight weeks cycle, a one legged cycle with one leg. So they conditioned one leg aerobically while not conditioning the other at all, the other state as was. And then they had them do, I think a 10 week block of resistance training after that. And then they took muscle biopsies throughout the entire process for both legs and measured all sorts of different things. And the, uh, the gains in both hypertrophy strength output and fast twitch muscle fiber in the condition leg were greater because there were more capillaries per muscle fiber, greater transport of oxygen and nutrients. You know what I mean?

So it's like I think there it doesn't, you know, doesn't have to be one or the other. I think you can find the balance. So you personally found that it's not true that you can only gain in one area probably because you are not overdoing it in one. I mean maybe occasionally you overdo it here and there. We all do, right? We all go into the red, right? Yeah. But you're in a 75% to 85% range in a bunch of different things and you're able to spread your disciplines around without feeling like you're gonna you're able to recover from your workouts pretty much

because i just look at me objectively i have no athletic background i mean i grew up bear hunting and i wrestle and stuff but i'm just an inmate you know i've done inmate fitness stuff nothing crazy and as an ultra runner i can deadlift triple triple my body weight. You know what I mean? I can train functional strength. I'm still doing sparring and multiple martial arts disciplines throughout this whole process. I'm nothing special. I'm just someone who looked at this closely

and wanted to find a way to balance these different capacities and develop them simultaneously. And am I going to out-deadlift the guy who's, you know what I mean, putting 100% of his training into deadlifting and it has my same genetic size and dimensions and age? No, of course not. But I'm still getting consistently stronger. I'm 35, you know, just over 35. Maybe if he's not in like a peak week, maybe you will catch him.

You never know. The way that those guys train sometimes. Yeah. But it's like, shit, for an ultra marathon runner, I'll take a, you know, triple my body weight for a deadlift and a, you know, 300, what i mean for bent you know like works for me i generally agree with the 85 60 to 85 range being the sweet spot for a lot of things i from a experiential point of view know that i do a lot better with volume than I do intensity lifting and running and every discipline whereas you've got people like Tom Martin in the UK who can deadlift over 90 percent three days a

week and still I mean he's always done that when he was up when he's a sumo puller no he's not that's a man what's his name again yeah what, what was it? Tom Martin. Tom Martin. He's unbelievable. He's got a background in sprinting, interestingly, and he does not look in any way like a sprinter. And kind of doesn't even look like a great lifter, but he's a savage. I'd love to see his pep two fibers.

He's an absolute savage. He's actually gotten a lot bigger over the years. Yeah. He didn't used to have this size. So he's a great example of, he's the example I always use because if I deadlift over 90 once in training i then can't deadlift i can't deadlift 80 from the floor for about two and a half weeks well a lot of people won't recognize

that about themselves and i think it's really important i think the other thing that's really important to observe is efficiency yeah when somebody's really efficient and smooth it doesn't matter what we're talking about if they're efficient and smooth at wrestling or jujitsu or running, lifting, they're going to be able to have a capacity to do that thing more. That's it. That's it. And I think that's why execution is so important and why I think so many people, when moving into a new area, coming from an area of competency in something else, assume that they will have the proficiency and efficiency to be able to execute that at a higher volume than they can perhaps

tolerate which is why when you get lifters going into running and they work a little bit too hard too fast their gait their positioning their tendons everything's not going to be in the right the right efficiency consistency to be able to repeatedly do that thing without some exposure to potential for injury or higher levels of fatigue that then impact their lifting. And that's normally about the four week part, that four week point where lifters will go, oh, I can't do this. I'm just going to go back to lifting and abandon what they tried to do. So from our methodologies point of view, we will program low, low volume intensity over 85%, but then the vast majority of our work is done in the 60 to 85

range whether it's lifting or whether it's running and i think at this point it's really important to mention from a running point of view how much i encourage people to not work in arbitrary number ranges because the 220 minus age is a heart rate metric is so vague. Yeah, I agree. And the challenge there is that it's a good starting point to give people a good way to work into a zone two. But I think the best area to start with for people that are coming into running or coming to endurance training at all is the talk test or nasal breathing,

which I know are two things that you bought into. But essentially, if you go on a run, you should be able to have a conversation with the person next to you, or you should be able to use nasal breathing as a form of throttle control more than anything else rather than any of the sort of pertain benefits that are spoken about elsewhere.

It is a throttle control. And then once you have the ability to run for 30 minutes, that's where we would recommend a lactate heart rate threshold test because an LTHR test is 30 minutes max effort run and you take the last 20 minutes average HR and average pace and that gives you your threshold numbers to work with so you have a pace and you have a heart rate zone to work in and then zone two is 85 to 89 percent of that figure and that is where we tend to do most of our work with our athletes and you can even dip down into zone one because a slightly higher

zone two than you might get with the math method or with 220 minus age because in trained individuals they will often have a higher heart rate and especially in trained individuals that are carrying a lot of muscle mass because the shuffling of blood and oxygen around your body in terms of volume demand is so much higher that to make an arbitrary guess that actually we can apply the same formula that we'd apply to the recreational runner is not the way to approach things. So I think far too many people rely on the arbitrary number of 220 minus age as what their heart rate is when that number was pulled out of thin air in reality. So the sooner people can get to the point where they have the ability to do a 30-minute max effort test and give themselves those metrics to work with,

that's where the work can really start to become more specific in that range and that's where i think a lot of mistakes are made because people do the work in it's like to put it in a lifting context it's like guessing your 1rm or basing your 1rm off a set of eight if you did 200 pounds for a set of eight and then assume that your top set was 315 you might actually just be very conditioned to volume rather than intensity. You might not be able to squat over 300. And it's usually way off with someone who's like neurologically inefficient. Exactly.

They don't have the ability to really tap into their nervous system really well. Exactly, because it comes back to that efficiency point whereby top singles, top triples, these things come down to neurological efficiency. And at the other end of the spectrum, you can condition yourself to be very efficient with volume. So that's why I think in training training it's really important to have baseline metrics that you work from rather than working arbitrarily within ranges that you think for the general

populace might work because it really hones in on making on making sure that the work you are doing is with intent which is important across the board but if you're trying to balance disciplines it's essential otherwise you're stabbing in the dark and you might end up over spilling what you can recover from and then you're all doing minimal volume in two disciplines over spilling your recovery and therefore not adapting which means that you'll be standing still rather than being sensible the way that you put things together and i think efficiency is the name of the game across the board because efficiency is just in in terms of movement patterns is something we strive for but efficiency in terms of the combination of programming programming adaptation and recovery are the sort of the three things that ultimately underpin how we move forwards

as athletes and i think recovery as a buzzword in the industry has spiraled somewhat out of control i think programming people spend a lot a lot longer than they need to on the finer details rather than just doing the basics really well and adaptation is where looking at the finer details and isolating where the junk is where the key sessions are and what the intent of those sessions and how they are formulated to be those are the things that should be focused on rather than the nuances of a lot of what i see online being spoken about in more detail than is required. And I'll be as bold as saying I think a lot of people spend too much time focusing on trying to make things perfect, rather than just doing the work repeatedly over time.

180, isn't it 180 minus your age? I'm not sure if I have that correct. That's the math tone. Right. Aerobic threshold. So 220 minus age is max heart rate. Max heart rate, okay. Yeah, so that's the one that i find most people come to us saying that's what they've been working off um but i know that the the maf2 mef is quite popular over here as well but again it is a it is an arbit it's not arbitrary

because it's obviously based on data and statistics but it is a number that is not specific to you that you are then working for it's a number that uh the creator of it came up with via like working with a lot of athletes and he kind of just, and then he has a whole book. So if people want to dive in and look more into it, you can go on YouTube and you can look into his book and you can, he has other like recipes, but to your point, it could just be as simple as just nasal breathing. Cause when I was running yesterday and I think this is a good thing. My heart rate was between one 25 and one 30 the whole time. Nice. I ran for seven miles. And so it was like 90 minutes. I mean, I'm going slow. I had to like slow down a lot of times just to, to kind of keep

my heart rate in that pace. And then just to like, I don't know, be able to breathe properly in and out of the nose and not, not feel like I needed to switch to mouth breathing. But that accumulation, have either one of you guys messed around with, like, nasal breathing to kind of? I'm actually, so I'm dabbling. My nose has been broken a bunch, so my breathing patterns are horrific. They always have, like, to the point even people roll in with me, like, dude, you okay? You know?

So it's like, if anyone needs nasal breathing and breath work, it's me. Sound like a bulldog over there. No, I sound like my dog. But so for this last one,

when I broke the world-weighted running record in November, I really started to pay attention to it. At first, I explained that real quick. World-weighted?

World-weighted running record. It was an accident. I wanted to see. So talking about unsupported running, I wanted in the sense of freedom, I wanted to just put a full size pack on my back, loaded up with food, water, medical supplies, phone, you know, recording stuff, a power bank. So, you know, I wouldn't run out of power and just like see how long I could run nonstop. Okay.

That was my only intention. I wasn't aware of any record. I didn't know anything about that. So the pack on my back, water was – I cacheted water along the way. That was the one thing. A variety of ways, like tying a ribbon to a big bottle and hanging it from a tree on my – like all sorts of different things. But so the pack started out at like 35 and a half pounds and as i went on it got heavier

because i ate through my food and therefore more of that space went to storing water and so i finished at like 37 and a half pounds the run itself was non-stop no i didn't break locomotion once there was no support no check stop no team no nothing and i ran 116.2 miles with that 35 to 37 pound load. And it took a little over 33 hours. So it wasn't like a super fast pace. I was just, my thing was like, I want to stay every hour, three, three and a half to four miles an hour for, you know, the whole time was my goal. Fergus is writing this shit down over here. No, it was fun. The meniscus started to be a problem a little bit early, but I've done enough of these now to know that problem or not,

my brain is not going to be aware of it. Like it's going to come and go on its own anyway. Like, you know, and I had already kind of decided I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I swear to God, he's like picking up dirt. I'm rubbing it on his knee. You know, it's like little wood chips. You know, like on that Davis Arboretum. He's like rubbing up dirt. Rubbing it on his knee. You know those little wood chips? Davis Arboretum.

He's like rubbing shit in there. Just fill into the holes. I love this shit. Y'all are some savages. Keep on. The old mountain man wisdom. From my pappy. And so I went through the night.

Took a full disclosure. Took a micro dose of mushrooms as sun was rising on the second morning. It was not a large dose. It was like, I mean, more than micro. It was like half a gram. Okay. So that second day was awesome. People are like, dude, when you finish, you look like really good.

So I go finish i actually i run out i run my full route i thought 100 miles non-stop not no break not stopping once would be enough to break me i felt great i went to 116 i finished my route i went i did another pre pre planned running route that i use that i know is eight miles out and back to 16 miles. I finished and I felt better than I have in my life. I mean, like we were talking about off air earlier, like you can't really try, you know, with like the longer you run, the less you can trust how you actually feel as far as a reflection of how your health and physiology is. How do you feel?

I feel great. Great. Your voice always changes. I feel great. You're bleeding from an eye socket. I mean, so to be fair peaks and valleys you know i'm ending on a peak i'm on mushrooms and everything i feel like i'm like yeah i'm pretty sure i can just do another like you know maybe we just fucking we'd go back and we break this you know whatever um so i stopped there i got my pack i do 10 10 squats talk some shit into

the camera go inside eat two slices of pizza as I'm texting my buddy. Like, man, I feel really good. Like, I think I'm ready for Moab. Like, I don't even got to train. Let's just, you know what I mean? Let's just go full send from here. And then before his reply gets back, I'm asleep on the couch just like this. Everything's locked up.

I get up two hours later. I go in and Janae's like, I don know you're not looking good like I think you should take a COVID test because she had just gotten over COVID she'd been home from work I take the COVID test positive as fuck right there hadn't seen anyone in 33 hours so I knew that I contracted

it before the race to be full disclosure I didn't notice it much like everything hurt after a certain point like I had a weird cough that did get worse through the second day but it wasn't like I didn't feel like it was keeping my like damaging my lungs it was just annoying like in my throat uh that next day was rough for sure because I had all the telltale ultra marathon recovery stuff plus the torn meniscus plus I had some fractures in my feet from running with the weight and then the covid stuff, which was pretty, you know, just the stereotypical COVID

stuff. Um, but I got one, like, so it's always the same when I finished an ultra, I didn't, I sleep maybe two or three hours that first night, a little bit of food, but I'm not hungry. I'm not tired. I'm wired. I can't turn it off. Um, the next day I feel miserable. The second night I sleep 12 hours straight uninterrupted, which is twice my normal, you know, about twice my normal sleep load. And from there, I'm like, I'm pretty, you know, pretty sore, but pretty good. And that happened this time. And so I got the second night, the second day was COVID and the body, everything was pretty messed up. Second night, I got a good 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep. And I woke up the next

day and the body was still messed up, but the COVID was pretty much gone. And then one of my buddies was like, dude, that's got to be like a rucking record or something. I was like, no, dude, people like ruck across like the Sahara. Like that's not, you know what I mean? It's not a record, but I didn't know weighted running is a thing and that there was a world record for it. And so I guess a few years ago, some Australian guy had run 69 miles with like 30 pounds. So I guess a few years ago, some Australian guy had run 69 miles with like 30 pounds.

And so I ran 116 with 35 and then also the nonstop self-supported angle. So I guess that technically that became or is a world record now. Not something I'm super concerned with. Like the competition side of this, like I said, I didn't even know. I just went out to be free and to run and uh have a good time and it was uh okay you've run wrong uh american river sacramento river fulsome lake so that was the circuit it's beautiful to run there were trash cans i only had to shit once and it was nighttime and it was a solid shit so uh it was like there was no awkwardness as i was running you know shitting on the move with a like stuffing a bag back there and trying without stopping.

No, I don't think anyone saw that. Watch, there's going to be an only fans account that pops up with, but it was a great man. It was great. Like I, I kind of didn't really get what I came for, which I wanted to break myself. Like I'm, I'm not looking for the challenge I'm going to succeed. I'm always searching for that one. That's just going to be too much. And I'm gonna have to come back to it and chip away at it and conquer it i thought that's what this was but it really just showed me that like dude i there's so much more to give i'm i'm starting to look at some uh

long-term look at some like 200 plus stuff too because i'm i'm intrigued now at the the next level beyond where i've been operating one i want to ask you both this, and you too, Mark, because how have you guys kind of restructured the way that you look at strength training? Because both of you guys have done, like, I think you did a 500-pound deadlift. What was the lifting and running thing that you did specifically? There's three in-the-same-day elements that I've done, which are 500-pound back squat and sub-five-minute mile in the same day.

A 1,200-pound minute mile on the same day. Yeah. Nice. A 1200 pound powerlifting total the same day as a sub 12 hour Ironman distance triathlon and a 600 kilo powerlifting total the same day as a sub six hour, 60 kilometer ultra marathon. And you. I just want to point out how weird that is. No, that's all super cool shit. Just for a second, because like running under a five minute mile is wild. You really don't have much of a running background right nope my background was uh i mean you did play rugby yeah but i used to get the piss taken out of me for running without really lifting my knees at all i uh

so i used to run like that just a not very fast blur and then you were a power lifter then i was a power lifter yeah but i so interestingly we actually had this discussion yesterday about training partners and i was thinking about this this morning and in the shower just to you know spice things up and in all our heads there dick dastardly and me in the shower they are everyone yeah so i that was during covid so i was actually staying at my parents house where we had a home gym because my brother my brother's also a professional cricketer uh so he's followed in my dad's footsteps and he has always been very focused on his on his fitness and his essence and supporting his his training as i've always been focused on training alongside my sports and then training for the sake of training so we've got a gym at the house fortunately and we we

basically piled to my parents house for for covid because they they had space and they had a gym that was the main thing i didn't have a gym where i was staying at the time and obviously training is a huge part of my life so me and my fiance moved into my parents house for a little while yeah and i'd always had the 500 pound back squat and the sub five minute miles something in in the sort of back of my head that i knew i i wanted to train towards because it was crossfit level one the ideal crossfit athlete would be able to do this that's what greg glassman's original statement was show me someone that can squat 500 pounds and i'll show you a guy that can't run i think i said six minute mile and then he said vice versa the same way so show me a guy that can squat 500 pounds and i'll show you a guy that

can't run a six minute mile it was it was along those lines yeah there was a better version of the cool man there was a statement along those lines and then i saw there was a garage gym reviews post being like someone had done 500 pounds and a 527 and then a whole load of people tagged me in it being like oh is it time to give it a go fergus could do it and i'm like maybe it's time and then i saw there was somebody over in america that was giving it a go as well and he well and he sort of publicly said I'm going to give it a go and I thought oh well if somebody's actually going for it I've always had it in the back of my mind it's something I'd like to train towards

not really thinking that anybody else was thinking of giving it a go and then I saw somebody's got some skin in the game it might be some fun to sort of go head to head and see where we come out so that ended up happening Adam Klink from virginia did it he's a guy that's with nick bear oh yeah so he did it we we were we were sort of neck and neck the whole way through um and then he did it the weekend before i did i believe i actually don't

think anyone's done it since so it was just this strange period in 2020 but the bigger point here is that whilst i was training for that, my 19-year-old brother was training for a 500-pound deadlift and sub-five-minute mile on the same day as well, just for a bit of fun. And he's a cricketer, might I ask. So it doesn't really make any sense. But at this point, there's an obvious genetic predisposition to...

Something in the water over there. Yeah, yeah. Me and my brother have never been excellent at any one thing in terms of outputs and still aren't arguably your brother's a fucking professional you said yeah it's skill-based sport skill-based sport so there's nothing there's nothing there's nothing in terms of physicality there's no wattage there's no outputs that he can be measured on as an absolute genetic savage so yeah uh what's your brother's name jamie crawley he just fucking roasted the fuck out of you yeah and he's uh he's allergic to the sun

he's actually he's actually over in new zealand recently having knocked himself unconscious getting a run out in cricket so he basically caught the ball down here launched it like that and then bashed his head off the floor and then then actually woke up as the cyclone in new zealand that was been tearing the north island apart was going on so he's been stuck in a hospital with a very severe concussion for a week and has only just made it back to his house so anyway i digress i digress um so we were training for that together and we essentially i've still got the whiteboard in my parents house of the program i put together for him which was essentially very similar to the way that i was putting things together for the squat

on the mile but we had this real real focus where the track wasn't even open so every monday night after we'd done a lower body session so our quality focus session for the week was our top end singles or top end singles, our top end doubles and triples, him deadlift, me squat. And then we went straight to the track to essentially mimic doing that, the hard efforts under fatigue.

And we had to hop the fence. So we always had the track because the track was closed. So this was during COVID. We had to hop the fence, both of us. I ended up cutting my leg open, probably in the back of my head was thinking,

when was my last tennis show? Great minds. um we had the track to ourselves which is which was great and that we got used to that so when i went to a track that wasn't to ourselves i thought i don't like this very much but having somebody to train for for something that was so physically demanding was very very valuable because some of those sessions training for the 500 pounds back squat and sub five minute mile were the most unpredictable demanding sessions I've ever had. We were chatting about it yesterday

and on paper, I had 210 for three sets of one and I'd go in and wouldn't be able to shift 190. So for example, three sets of one at 480 pounds and I wouldn't be able to shift 450 for a single. And this wasn't fatigue that you were able to calculate? Nope, no, I felt okay. I felt no different that Monday than I did the previous Monday where the squats moved great.

And then I'd go to the track, and my 400 was absolutely flying. It'd all be 65 seconds. I'd feel great for 60 seconds rest, and I'd leave the track swaggering away and then thinking, oh, I need to get over this fence again. So the following week, the squats then might move like butter, and I'd go to the track and absolutely fall apart and it was the unpredictability of it that meant if i went back in the messages i had

with johnny every week there was some panic being like i don't think there's any way i can do this how on earth am i meant to be able to see this through and then the taper and the drop off of fatigue that came with all the work that had been done the nerves that i felt going into the day that we'd set aside because we had to borrow us we had to borrow a combo rack drive it half an hour we had to bring up my power bar from the northwest of england which was like a four hour drive we had to go to johnny's gym to build the power rack to use the bar because there were no gyms open that would allow us to go in and film because it was still peak sort of covid just as things were sort of you could move and interact in society but gyms weren't open yet but it was the thought that i i don't i didn't think i could do the squat

and we've done all this effort and if i don't get the squat then the day's over and then the squat flew the squat felt really good and that's where the confidence started to come in because i thought okay well actually you had so much self-doubt as a result of how difficult the training was but the training was difficult so the event could be well-executed. And I think that's what I lost sight of in the process because it was so, so difficult. But it was meant to be difficult. They're two very opposing ends of the spectrum.

But they're both very high intensity within their opposing ends of the spectrum. So the challenge there was huge. And then the mile, I will hold my hand up and say it's the most difficult objectively thing I've ever done in my life by some margin because i was 210 pounds at the time so a 458 mile is is not really something that makes much physiological sense because of the the sort of oxygenation and blood and the amount of muscle mass that needs to be shuttled to especially with the fatigue of the back squat in the morning there was a bit of a headwind on one of the uh one of the exposed corners of the track which made things a little spicier than they needed to be and with 120 meters

to go so corner four of the track if you'd asked me at that point what is absolute rpe 10 full send nothing left in the tank you are done it would have been at that point with 120 minutes to go so the moment of decision i had in my head where i thought oh it's game over or you can get your head down and just see what happens is something that i'm very proud now to have made the decision to keep moving forwards but also i only got the opportunity to make that decision by pushing myself to the point and creating the environment like i said that creative expression to be able to do i carry on or do i call it here and and sort of take take a take a seat here bench myself yeah and then across the line tripped over the line trying to stop my watch there's footage of it it's very entertaining it keeps my friends and family very happy and i was on the floor for half an hour

throwing up instant headache couldn't get up if somebody tried to pull me up my body just felt like i felt like i was um like i was seasick and couldn't get off the floor for about half an hour throwing up instant headache couldn't get up if somebody tried to pull me up my body just felt like i felt like i was um like i was seasick and couldn't get off the floor for about half an hour and then finally got up and okay and then because adam had done the 505 the weekend before i thought well because this was a whole thing that was supposed to balance disciplines me doing the same thing from a pushing fitness forwards point of view because i've got the ultra endurance background why not add in a 50k as well so after throwing up and feeling as bad as i did i went out and ran a 50k that afternoon too which the plan was for it to be sub sub five hours but i got to three hours and my legs just just it was it was cramping and fatigue

unlike anything i've ever experienced and have experienced since and i think it came down to just the total physiological shock that my body was under as a result of having done the mile and the squat the throwing up and then it was just the case of yeah that so i was fatigued i was i was cramping my doctors i was cramping my glutes i was cramping in places that didn't feel in any way like they should be cramping my salt balance was all correct yeah but my body just essentially said stop we've had enough and i so the irony was i had to be at work for eight the next morning as well which is a very very poor poor use for sunday what's up paraproject family it's time to stop dressing like you're a f***ing preschooler

and step your game up by checking out Viore clothing. Now, I'm not one to talk. I wear a f***ing pink hat that has a dog on it, but at the end of the day, at least my shirt and shorts are popping. So head to Viore because they have great stuff for your top and your bottom. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you guys got to head over to viore.com slash power project. That's V-U-O-R-i.com slash power project and you guys will automatically receive 20 off your order links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes let's get back to the podcast now james i'm curious about yours too but the thing that i wanted to know here is there's a lot like almost everyone in the audience lifts and and

they love the gym they love the iron which is Um, and with these feats that you guys did, it's like 500 pound this, there's a number and a it's impressive. Right. But the thing is, is like, if you're going from lifting, bodybuilding, powerlifting to starting some Brazilian jujitsu or starting to getting ready for a marathon or getting ready for any type of endurance feat, there's gonna be some, I guess, letting go of the identity you had as this person who could lift this amount of weight. So my question to both of you guys is, do you guys still put an importance to, I want to still be able to deadlift 600, 500 pounds. I want to still be able to have this number. Is that important or is the stimulus to

your body, your muscles, your performance is the stimulus the more important thing? Because a lot of people have a connection to that number and when they miss that number, they're not hitting it like they used to be. They're like, ah, fuck, this isn't for me. I can't do this running shit or I can't do this jujitsu shit.

I find I'm maturing from A to B because it's hard to be able to pick up X amount of pounds and then not be able to pick up X amount of pounds on your ego. But unless it's your job to pick up X amount of pounds and that's your sole objective, why is that number so important to you? And also, I really don't believe you have to sacrifice that much, particularly if you're coming into this as a – like if you're a powerlifter or a bodybuilder who's done powerlifting has legit strength you can you know you can still you can move that needle forward a little bit by a little bit but you're not like you're not going to sacrifice a just to get b that's not how the human body works i mean it can be if you're overextending in too many directions but it's like you've been powerlifting for 20 years and

like mark can still bench 500 you know 800 however many pounds and it's not a focus of his training anymore you know but it's like well what do they say it's a 80 effort to you know to reach a level and only 20 to maintain it or you know something such but so i find that that uh that that sense of identity is also like just taking it extrapolating it from fitness to the rest of your world like you're not what you do man like you you are, you're how you interact with the world, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, whatever your thing is. But it's like what, what you do is more, you know, like you're, you're a being with thoughts and feelings and nuanced opinions and experiences. And you're more than just that. Like, you know, so maybe challenge yourself to think about how you think about, you know, for me personally, I'm attached more to the stimulus,

being able to get the stimulus. If I can get a good stimulus, I don't care that much about the weight. Yes. It's nice to get weight on there. Um, depending on like how I feel in a particular training session, I might be like, this is a great opportunity to add more weight or something might not feel great. It's a good opportunity to do another exercise. You know, I should go do something else. And I can get good amounts of weight many, many different ways. I could also like drag a sled, for example, and just take that

X distance. And that wears out my hamstrings and glutes similar to a deadlift. I think if I was to go in the gym right now and deadlift 315, I think it'd be hard. Like it would probably feel heavy. I haven't tried to pick that up in a long time, but it's just not a focus of mine right now. It's not anything I'm really overly concerned with. Now, my ability to do things like a single leg and single arm and like a lot of that stuff has been improving a lot. So I lost strength in some areas, but gaining strength and others. And the only reason why I lost strength and deadlifts,

cause I'm not doing it. Yeah. But if I was, if I was doing it in concert with my running, I would be able to keep some sort of strength. But at the moment I'm, for me, I'm like,

I can do a bunch of different things that represent a deadlift that still get a good stimulus to the lower back. Like what's my weakness for running? It's not my lower back. You know, it's not my lack of, it's not like I haven't spent enough time deadlifting so I could run better. You know what I mean? So my focus right now is, is a little bit more so on running, but of course I still want to keep, uh, some aesthetics and stuff. So again, I'm going to find different ways to overload the body. So I get that bone density and I, I continue to have a good strength to weight ratio. So I might do something like I shit I haven't done in years. I haven't done shrugs and I don't know how long, but you know,

I grab 80 pound dumbbells and I'll do some shrugs with them or farmer's carries. I've never had any sort of focus on the traps. They just grew from squats and benches and deadlifts. But now I'm like, well, it's nice to keep the traps. So let's do something that gives them a stimulus. So for me, I'm kind of a little bit more after the stimulus than I am worried so much about the actual weight. And one thing to think about with all of this is like when you do, like if you're going to pick up some running like both of you guys, when you do back off of the engine volume a little bit, right? If you ever really wanted to train yourself back, if you wanted to get yourself to a 500 pound deadlift it would take you four weeks yeah like or less you know what i mean that that that's exactly that that's i'm somewhere between the two of you i guess

where i have certain baselines that i always want to be able to maintain as a minimum but the numbers i focus on are being confident that i am within three months of being able to hit x y or z and those numbers for me are a 220 kilo squat so it's a five five plate squat three plate bench and five plate deadlift because my squat and deadlift are about the same so those are the numbers that i won't be able to hit all year round but i know that if i wanted to and adjusted and turned up certain dials and turned down certain dials i can get back towards there and that's not an ego thing it's more a standards for the level of hybrid athleticism that I like to maintain but also knowing that I like to be able to hit those numbers I enjoy lifting the heavier weights and there'll be moments where

it's not the right thing to do to lift the heavier weights but I know that there'll be a point where I'll think you know what I want to go in and lift some heavy weight and I don't want to go in and get folded in half by four plates because that will make me feel like I've done myself a disservice. Because I've – yeah, exactly. I like the 90% rule for stuff like that. Like if my max deadlift is 550, like when I'm actually deadlifting and focusing on that, then if day-to-day walking around I can pick up 500 pounds off the ground,

then I'm, you know, like you said, how many weeks, how many weeks do you get to 550 from there, if that's my capacity? So 90% of, you know what I mean? For me, and there's no science behind that particularly. That's just about as much as my ego can take, I think. Yeah. There doesn't need to be, though.

There doesn't need to be science behind it. It's what works for the individual. I think that's what I think we should make crystal clear at this point is that all these things that we're saying are from our own experience and there's no standard that if anyone's wanting to get into running from a bodybuilding or powerlifting background, you need to be able to maintain X, Y, or Z. You're not working hard enough.

You're not doing well enough. And I think the important thing to really flag, and this is something people really struggle with on a week-to-week basis, and we see it with the athletes that we look after at Omnia, is fatigue masks fitness. And especially so when you are training across energy systems, across disciplines, your fatigue is going to inhibit the numbers you can output in a certain training session that doesn't mean that you are not capable of hitting those numbers it means that the fatigue that is here is stopping you from executing your capability here which is why i mean i i taper so well even when i was powerlifting i've always been the same where if i could pull 230 in the gym with a taper i knew in competition i could pull 260 which is which is big yeah by those standards but that's what I've figured out works for me over the years and in the same way my approach to

volume and training especially the mile was a great example the best mile I ran in training was 507 and it just about killed me was it 505 whatever it was it was 505 and it just about killed me and I was somewhat sort of tapered for that. But then when I actually turned up and did it, the first two laps felt really quite smooth and it's just that confidence that when you're in a state of training, you need to be comfortable with seeing the numbers fluctuate when you're training different disciplines

because the disciplines impact the other as a result of the compounding fatigue more than it would if you were just doing that individual discipline in isolation. So a really hard effort, a four-hour run on a Saturday is going to impact a heavy deadlift on a Monday. That doesn't mean your deadlifts got weaker.

It just means you're more tired. And that's something that people really struggle with on a week-to-week basis that they're so used to having progressive overload as their main metric. Obviously, that comes with experience. If you've been powerlifting for 10 years, you're not going to be looking at

putting numbers on the bar week- week but for intermediate lifters for people that want to see progress week on week that people are doing things just for self-development it's important to understand that you need to look at training within its context and that's why i think goal setting so important because the journey of unpacking the fatigue masking fitness and how you respond to these things as you go is contributing to the end result that you're aiming for i think there's a balance too of uh you know if you want to make significant change you got to change a lot of behaviors but maybe changing all of them might might not be something that you like might not be something that you enjoy so um i still like to throw on a slingshot and hit up some bench pressing just

makes me feel good i I love doing it. It feels good. It doesn't hurt anything. I'm able to do it. No pain in the elbows, no pain in the shoulders. It's a good way for me to overload my body. On the other hand, if I do a squat or a deadlift, I'm like, how much more squatting and deadlifting do I feel I really need,

and is that helpful towards some of my goals with running? Right now, I feel like it's? And is that helpful towards some of my goals with running right now? I feel like it's a, it's a, I feel like it's a step backwards for me. I don't feel like it's an enhancement of my gate. I don't feel like it's going to help me to flow better when I'm running. So I'm like, that's a lot of the stuff that made me stuck together in the first place. So I don't think at the moment for me, I need more of it because I'm trying to, I'm trying to push into the running stuff more and leave some of the traditional lifting that I've done for so long behind. But again, I still like my curls. I still like my shoulder presses, some some variations of bench pressing.

But you're also going to see me doing a bunch of twisty weird stuff because I feel like that is something that is in my best interest at the moment. And it's something I'm interested in as well to see what the fuck it does, like to see what it works. And I love what you said in the beginning. You have almost like a scientist mentality. You want to see, is my body not going to work for me? Is my body going to fail me? I'm going to test.

I'm going to put to the test all the training that I've been doing. I'm going to put all the test all the training that I've been doing. Right. I'm going to put all my knowledge to the test. And if this challenge is right, I'll be fucked during this workout. I think that's amazing. I think that's really interesting. Everyone seeks success, but there's merit to seeking failure because then you are forced to examine where did I come up short? What broke first?

You know what? Going to San Jose. Right. Going to San Jose and rolling with guys that have a lot of experience. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Down there. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. But so it's, I mean, you know, there's something to think about, but it's very, it's natural. In fact, it's instinctual to stay within your comfort zone, even for people who push your comfort zone, to stay right at the edge of it. I lived a lot of my life like that, and it doesn't interest me anymore. I want to get past that little threshold into that last 1% or 5% and see where I fuck up and how I can be, how I can, how that can make me a better human being or a better athlete or a better bear hunter.

Assuming it's not a bear that eats me ass first and I don't get that second shot, but you know, setting aside there. Thank you. Thank you. How much, how much lifting for you guys and how much running like let's just say it's just i don't know ordinary week uh you don't have anything

like super scheduled like you know there's not like an eye on the prize with anything in particular is it three or four days a week of lifting is it three or four days a week of running what do you guys usually do i think uh might be worth mapping out what my training looked like for the 600 kilo total and sub six hours 60k because that was actually athletically when i have felt at my best in the past four years i was heaviest i was leanest i was strongest and i felt really good on my feet and that was because i wasn't on the bike in the pool as well to be honest so it makes sense The way that we structure everything at Omnia with how we manage volume and intensity is we peak intensity at the start of the week and peak volume at the end,

and those invert as the week goes on. So heaviest lifts, hardest efforts earlier in the week, longer, slower stuff at the end of the week, and you've got sub-threshold work, strength endurance work, assistance work sort of midweek. And that allows us to monitor how intensity impacts volume and how volume impacts intensity, and we can adjust the sort of dosage as we go in terms of what's being prescribed in terms of training so monday is for me training for the 600 kilo powerlifting total which is

what about 1250 pounds ish something like that yeah north of 1200 yeah 1250 ish. That was 1,212. 660 is the pin post on my page. That one there, yeah. This one? Yeah. So, yeah, 220 squat, 140 bench. That was late. Yeah, I felt good. I felt good at the time.

So, yeah, 220 squat, 140 bench, 240 deadlift into a 556, 60 kilometer. I like how you dipped that one side down lower than the other. It was nice. It's almost like you tried to touch the plates on the the the um pretty cool the jawlock collar on the left was actually really old and loose and i'm just messing around no no no no no but look look you see you see me look because i think no i can see it i think i've misloaded the bar so yeah i'm glad you picked up on that because it i i watched back the videos i wasn't nearly as obvious as it felt but i thought i was going oh no oh no oh no um and that would have been a

good start to the day so yeah mondays mondays were heavy that was where my heavy work was done so that was my heavy squats my heavy deadlifts and like minimal assistance work so i would be doing singles doubles triples would be would be the top end stuff and it'd be around the sort of 85 to 90 percent maybe 92 and a half percent range across the board and i'd essentially be holding on to the top end strength i have and just conditioning myself a little bit neurologically to that top end strength i would then do sets of six to eight assistance work stiff lead deadlifts rdls single leg work that sort of stuff and then i thought maybe five exercises or so even less yeah mine was less yeah and then the monday evening would be sort of four by one k moderate pace not full send if i was training

for something that required a bit more pace it'd be full send but the four by one k was essentially there to open up my gate improve some of the sort of nutrition partitioning things you mentioned earlier on just get my legs turning over a little bit more and a little bit more running volume tuesday would be heavy bench press work with a little bit more assistance work relative to the lower body stuff wednesday would be sub threshold running which for me at the time was about 163 heart rate so i'd be moving at about seven minute seven ten seven ten minute miles going pretty hard yeah pretty hard like so so sort of if i started talking i'd run out of breath but i also didn't

feel like i was blowing and could focus on other things so that was 45 to 60 minutes thursday would be lower body assistance and an easy run friday would be upper body assistance and then saturday would be my long run and for that i essentially just built 30k week one 40k week two uh 50k week three um 20k week four as a deload week five was back to 40k so training marathon and then 60k the following weekend so it was essentially an eight week prep with a bit of running at the front but i was running i was lifting four times a week and running four times a week but essentially all of my volume was on the saturday because i was consolidating the work into one session so that i was essentially getting used to the fatigue at the end of the week having compounded

so that i was going into my long runs already fatigued meaning that when it came to experiencing the fatigue of moving a certain pace of the 60k i was very acclimated to what that felt like and i'd have confidence where I could push the pace, where I could scale the pace. But if I was just training for an ultra, I'd spread my volume across the week a little bit differently rather than doing it that way.

I like how you organize your energy systems output too. You're not just like, you know, a lot of guys, they'll focus on a movement pattern or they'll organize push-pull legs. You know, it would be the most, but you're actually, it seems like you're organizing your aerobic anaerobic and cp systems pretty well that's that's how we focus things because it just allows us to see going back to the tom martin example is we've learned how to adjust my intensity over the year relative

to volume because we've ordered things that way and that's how we put things together for all of our athletes we've got we're lucky to have a very very large data pool with over a thousand athletes worldwide which means we get to be the scientist seeing how people are responding to these things and there are what you're doing ultimately is managing fatigue and managing recovery without like a ton of recovery methods like you're i know that you probably have recovery methods but both you guys your training programs lend themselves to people being recovered. Yes, and manipulating fatigue. So conventional S&C is trying to encourage athletes to go into their strength and conditioning sessions

recovered from the previous session, whereas that's not necessarily possible within the context of having to fit X amount of demand within a week, training for X amount across different systems. So you're going to go into most training sessions with like a 20 pound weight pack, weight backpack. You're going to go in a little, a little, a little tired probably,

right? A little, you're going to have some fatigue, but you're not dying. That's what it feels like. Yeah. So we, we actually,

for triathlon specifically, we have worked in concepts. We worked in a concept that we, we essentially called pre-fatigue. So it's not dissimilar to traditional bodybuilding, pre-fatigue, some flies into a bench press, but we've been taking the approach of essentially isolating where a person is weak

and using myself as an example, holding my aero position in a triathlon for a long period of time was really taking a big toll on my upper back and sort of my triceps and things. What have we got, Zurcher carries for that? Yeah, my favorite. I don't know, i was just thinking like what else yeah yeah so so so we actually carry some fucking logs or something i had a friday session that started off with three sets of five zirka squats straight into 400 reps of 24 kilo kettlebell

reverse lunges to failure every time i stopped lunging goblet squats to failure into this position when you're fatigued sorry did you say front loading so front front reps so 400 reps total that was the session so 400 reps 24 kilos reverse lunge every time i stopped lunging goblet squats to failure then you rest then you go again so it was just relentless it was fucking horrible and i actually built up from 350 400 450 500 and anyone doing a strength and full distance triathlon plan will have experienced this for themselves. So what it's doing is it's putting you in a really compromised position where you're doing a lot of work.

And then the second you finish it, you go out and run for half an hour because you're running on exceptionally tired legs. It's forced. Yeah, the workout just started. Get outside and run for 30 minutes. Yeah, it's a very strange buyout to the workout. But it's essentially forcing you to run under fatigue improve your economy under fatigue and learn to know what it feels like running when you feel absolutely battered as you will do in a race but we don't want to put you in

a position in training where you reach that point with your endurance training because that means you'll be out on a bike for six seven hours running for a long time to reach that point that's a cool thing too is that because the person's already got the shit beat out of them in the gym, they're only going to be able to run so hard. Exactly. It's kind of auto-regulating their recovery for their run. It's mental training, too. Yeah.

She should be hanging out in the suffering pocket a little bit to get yourself used to that so it's not such a shock when it actually happens. My approach, overall pretty similar, different flavors. Lifted three days a week, bench, squat, deadlift. I wouldn't squat or deadlift heavy in the same week. That was pretty much my only rule with that. But three lifting days, bench, squat, deadlift. I would ruck once, sprint once, and then have one long run of usually about,

I mean, I do that anyway. I try to run an ultra every week when my knee's good, 30 to 40 miles, nothing too crazy. I like Thursdays because I can clear the schedule. General health, maybe people should do something similar like per month maybe, like get a long run in or a long walk, a ruck, right? Yeah, whatever's relative. I love rucking.

That, again, the bear hunting thing, I'm used to moving with weight on my back, so that always feels good, and it's just a good excuse to get out there. And I utilize that mostly as active recovery. So we have three lifts, your basic power lifting three-day breakdown, sprint day, ruck day, a long run day of 30, 35, 40 miles, and then I would do jiu-jitsu about twice a week. One of those days would be like actual training.

The other day would be, I mean, it'd be training, but it'd be like. Stay on microphone a little bit. Oh, sorry. I'd be picking flow rolls with, you know, other guys as opposed to hard wrestling. It's a roll, but keeping it at 85% to stick with our. Is it tough to do that? Like, does that, is it like when you. Depends on the partner.

Depends on the partner. Are you like crampy and stiff and shit? Not really. I think when I did this, I was a blue belt with a wrestling background. So it's like I was able to more or less control a lot of positions that maybe like a new white belt wouldn't have been able to. And they would have been, you know, as far as pace and output and pressure from their partner. So it was a little easier with that. I did have some mobility stuff. One thing I did notice, and this could be specific

to me, uh, I don't like roll. I didn't like rolling the day after I sumo deadlifted, um, something about it, like with my, my hips or my, I don't know, there was something that didn't feel instinctively felt wrong. And I follow my instincts pretty religiously in situations like this um so that was one thing i avoided but other than that like my training stays pretty consistent whatever i'm doing uh i like to lift three days a week i like to do the sprint long run and ruck and then i like to roll a couple times a week um i might you know i increase the volume like when i was getting for that, what turned out to be the world record run, um, I would increase, I would just kind of sneak in a lot of little like three, five, six mile runs in the morning as active recovery, you know, justifying in my head as active recovery.

Like, oh, you squatted yesterday. You need to recover, bro. You know, cause I don't, I don't do any like the fancy stuff. I think improving your food, improving your sleep and improving your active recovery are going to check most of the boxes for most people. Um, at least in my experience for me, that's what worked best. So it's pretty easy to find, you know, 30 minutes to go out and run three miles at a real light pace with a little, you know, quick warmup and quick cool down. And then I would also like hold myself accountable. Like, all right, if right if you're gonna go run you got to

do some sort of like active recovery protocol cool down so some some tibialis v's with the band or what you know what I mean just basic single leg calf raises or banded neck rotations or side bend you know some little accessory thing as like a you know like if you're gonna go out and play and have a little fun on the trail when maybe you shouldn't and you got to pay the price and do all your pt stuff so you know keep this shit moving forward but um other than that i like i i really like the model of one long run a week and then you sneak in whatever light you know lower intensity volume you can throughout the week have any of you guys uh this is for anybody any of you guys noticed any difference with uh lifting before jujitsu or lifting before running? What are you guys prescribed to?

What do you think? Or running first or I don't know. General perspective from our end is unless the lifting is entirely to support another sport, then the lifting should always be prioritized in the context of the day because the degradation that comes from the fatigue of endurance training translated into lifting is significantly more than the other way around because if you think of running as effectively again let's talk within the context of heavier heavier people with lifting background

here if you're a heavier runner every stride is a repetition it's a repetition yeah and if you're doing loads and loads and loads of repetition imagine if you went the other way around to conventional lifting and you did a set of 160 kilos before you went and did your top single. That makes no sense. Agreed. So it's the same premise in reverse, whereby the quality emphasis that comes with the lower rep demand of lifting means that we would always recommend prioritizing that

with the caveat being, two caveats actually, the caveat being unless the lifting is only there to support the priority sport of the person in which case it's pure that's there to support the endurance training or within the context of somebody's week from a practicality point of view they can't lift first thing and they need to do their endurance training because doing the training first and foremost is more important than worrying too much about the interference effect which is something that has seemed to become a bit of a scapegoat as a phrase in the word online that

people just throw out there to just justify being lazy yeah well sometimes there's like uh some legitimacy to it for example and it's an entirely legitimate thing. You can also get a training benefit from it. But just as an example, so like a snatch takes a, it's a skillful lift, right? It's something that we can agree like has a level of skill involved with it. And if you were to do, you know, bang out a bunch of pushups and bodyweight squats beforehand, it would quote unquoteunquote retard your ability to perform the snatch well uh same thing with you wouldn't really lift or uh ride a bike necessarily uh you know stationary bike for 30 minutes and do intervals and stuff like that before you did gymnastics like gymnastics is too high skill. However, when people do stuff like this, it disproves what we thought previously every single fucking time.

So while it might mess up your coordination and it might, let's even just say before you bench press, you do pushups. Let's say you do 150 pushups before you bench press every week. you do push-ups. Let's say you do 150 push-ups before you bench press every week. Over a period of time, there might be an adaptation that occurs where when you go back to regular bench pressing and you nix the push-ups,

you might be stronger. So we see a lot of this stuff, but I think that that's where most people are coming from. It's like they don't want it to mess up maybe the skill. And I was just curious on what your guys' take on some of these things are. I think the previous misconception, the interference effect is a thing. It's entirely legitimate. It exists.

But I think the conventional understanding has been it's an on and off switch where it blunts mTOR or downregulates AMPK. And it means that therefore no adaptation can occur. And that simply isn't the case. I mean, if you look at the way that crossfit games athletes trainings put together it it just doesn't it doesn't in any way lend itself to those that are shouting the loudest about the interference effect because they put things together in a way that is getting the volume that they need to do within the context of the week done and whilst yes it means that maybe they haven't adapted as much as they would have done had they done that

training session in isolation they're still moving the needle forward slowly but surely and i mean the interference effect came from a study that effectively i mean the idea came from the there was a researcher who was a powerlifter and he wanted to impress his his research manager who was a professor halosi who was a runner so he started going on runs around the campus with him just to sort of get close to him and work his way up the corporate ladder of the academic setting. And he found that he was getting weaker. He was getting smaller and he was getting weaker because he wasn't taking certain things into account.

And that made him fascinated about why this was the case. He had a discussion with Helosi, his research manager, and his first research exploration was in exactly this. And there were three groups. So there was A, B, and C. A was doing a basically squatting and leg pressing five by five focus b was doing running focus sort of a 30 minute 40 minute hard effort run twice a week and then c was doing both so they're doing 100 of a and 100

of b and they were doing that together and then then they found that the sort of point where fatigue really started to hit a point where numbers dropped was week seven. And that's where the findings of the study said interference occurred, and this is where all the research on the interference effect has since come from. But if you actually look at the context of the study,

yes, it's opened up some fantastic questions and allows us to figure these things out for ourselves as well as opening up new studies since there's a meta-analysis but the way the study was put together is the exact mistake that most people make when trying to do this for the first time which is they take a hundred percent of a running program a hundred percent of a lifting program and go like that and then suddenly wonder why after two weeks at 200 output they're feeling beaten up and sometimes also what about just convenience that's it yeah you know and that's convenience you know goes into compliance and if you can have the convenience to keep the compliance

then that's probably the best thing for you to do that's what that's why the second caveat i gave is if if somebody's work schedule means that they can't lift before they go to the track, then that's the case. The most important thing. A sustainable athlete is the better athlete. That's where you've got to start with most people. Yeah, if you can't get to training. But also, not just that. It's like a lot of the guys,

our system was developed with primarily tactical athletes and combat athletes, so people who fight, right? So that, well, going back, that skill acquisition when that's a priority not too different with any sport you want to do like same thing we want to lift before we do our long endurance training right but the reason will be different like the technical that like that blade my point being sorry that blade cuts both ways so yes if you want to prioritize your skill training you want to prioritize your skill training, you want to prioritize your skill training, you don't want to burn yourself out before you come into the gym by running 50

miles and then coming in for your deadlift day, right? However, you have to look kind of the other way too, that it's like, on a real life situation, am I always going to be perfectly rested and prepared for this? Or should maybe my body be used to operate like specifically with the martial arts stuff or with the firearms training? So do introduce some deliberate fatigue you know of any specific energy systems for those same situations but yeah generally speaking we're doing the exact same thing and for you know different subtly different flavors but we found the same results as well and the big question is how much are you doing it? The only other thing I would add is the dynamics change and you can do quite a bit more if you can, not everyone, not

all athletes can do this, but if you can get schedule wise and physiology wise, you can get them to take a nap and, you know, 30, 20, 30 minute nap, even up to 60 minute nap and a small meal, carbohydrates and electrolytes in that training window between those two. And this is talking about the AMPK and mTOR relationship and that they've seen it in the same studies that analyze both that showing the introduction of glycogen, you know, replenishing after an AMPK heavy workout, you know, prepares you, et cetera, et cetera. But it's everyone wants it to be all or nothing. They want it to be a switch that, you know, you can't run and lift. You can't do that.

And it's like, dude, it's a nuanced thing. This is physiology. How much, when, how are you doing this? How are you organizing this?

How are you recovering from this? So, you know, it could even change within a week, right? Like one day you could lift and then, and you can run after and the next day you could switch it if you needed to or wanted to, or just like doing that.

Yeah. And yeah, people train for enjoyment. So fucking stop wasting so much time arguing about this on the internet and get training. It's kind of where I always come to this conclusion when I get drawn into this conversation too much online. Yeah, I agree with you. It goes back to, I think, I can't remember whether it was this podcast or the previous one. I think spending so much time trying to find the perfect training program that's

perfectly in line with the science and ticks all these boxes won't happen because science is so variable and ever-changing but the basic principles that underpin it are largely irrefutable so if you just get to work and figure it out as you go build the wings as you fly and then take the lessons and adjust them over time you will have more context on yourself and the individual athlete if you're at a coaching capacity on how the knowledge that is out there applies to that individual context. But training is trial and error. Training is trial and error within an imperfect ecosystem. People have jobs. People have kids. People eat different food.

Things are within context that need to be borne in mind, and I think there's so much time wasted on looking at things in isolation when those things in isolation are so massively affected by the external stresses that need to be considered as well. You see so many people stressing all of their energy on that last 1% to 5% when they haven't nailed the first 95% to 99%. Recovery is the buzzword that really has lost its meaning in that sense because if you're doing too much training in the first place,

the very expensive recovery metric that can save you one percentage point isn't going to be the thing that brings you back from the proverbial dead so ice baths are fantastic massage guns can have their place once you've got the basics nailed it's a pyramid and a in-building recovery and recoverable volume into programming i I think, is the pillar that really people should focus on a little bit more. How fucked over do you think people should be on a day-to-day basis? Like, should be walking like this? Or like, you know, how sore? What's the goal?

I don't know. What do you guys think? Depends on the goal. Some of the goals that you guys have had, I'm sure you've had to push pretty hard, and I'm sure at times you also learned that you may have pushed too hard. Like what do you guys think is a good balance for people to still make progress? Like I said, it depends on the goal. When I was doing most of this stuff early on, I was also working construction.

So I was pretty much as miserable all the time. I would not recommend that for ideal athletic and physiological adaptation. But there's also like that's not the only factor, there's mental stuff, like sometimes it could be good for a person for their life for their daily habits, just suck it up and go for three months and live like your version of Goggins or whatever, you know what I mean? Some people need that. But yeah, if increasing your athletic performance is the top priority, then I mean, one of my mentors, Jack Taylor, you know, he always says that your strength conditioning program should make you feel better, not worse. That should make you feel and perform better in your athletic practice, you know.

He was a rugby strength conditioning coach. And he's like, so you shouldn't be so beat up from German volume training that you can't, you know, cut a corner or, you know, run a lap or do any of that. So, I mean, for me, I tend to subscribe to that same line of thinking. But, again, I like feeling wrung out and beat up sometimes. And I like, I like being able to just leave everything there and then go sit in a hot tub and, you know, watch South Park when I get out or do something completely that requires nothing of me at all. You know, I think the ideal is to be as lazy as you can possibly be for the maximum adaptation. Yep. Which means that so many, so many people often this is where and i

don't want to go down a rabbit hole of of causing beef but this is where crossfit at a recreational level can get it wrong because sweat is such a dominant metric or hard work is such a dominant metric when in reality six metcons a week where you are judging your success or failure in that session by how sweaty you got is the wrong way to approach things because that is just going to burn you out quite quickly whereas intentional programming executed well should be the focus if you are working towards a specific end point if you're just training for the sake of training and you enjoy getting sweaty and you like feeling beaten up all the time then all power to you but if there's a goal that you're working towards

there's a balance between knowing when you're beating up and knowing when you're doing too much and i think yeah you should you should be doing the minimum effective dose for the maximum maximum effective return yeah and that's all based on the maximum recoverable volume within the context of a week which is a pie in the sky phrase it's not a metric we can focus on or track on smart watches or anything but it comes from that trial and error and when i when i feel fucked day to day is triathlon training alongside strength work because it's just so relentless and the amount of volume required with the context of week eats into your sleep it's just very difficult to manage and training for the double was when i felt most beaten up on a day-to-day basis but most of the year i only really feel beaten up in the immediate dehydration after

certain training that can then be recovered in the short term i don't know if i'm feeling beaten up day-to-day that'll be a bit of a red flag for me to monitor my training volume i don't want to feel too battered um dom's always comes back if i ramp my training volume back up in the gym but then after a couple of weeks i've adapted again and everything's feeling smooth and solid but i am i think generally speaking we shouldn't aspire to be feeling absolutely tanked on a day-to-day basis well that brings up another question because it's like look at say you and i train pretty similar in terms of our output and our measuring these things and trying not to just be you know full rabdo like some other guys we know, six days, six days a week from brutal CrossFit workouts. Yet, you can squat 500 pounds

and run a five minute mile, I can deadlift 520 and run 50 miles back to back. Like those are pretty, there's a lot of adaptation involved in getting to either of that level. So it makes you think like, you know, what is necessary and what is not necessary and at what point at specifically what point you're hitting diminishing returns and the individuality of it as well that's what's so often forgotten for sure what works for one person yeah what works for one person won't be the next yeah we're all fingerprints decent time constraints for these goals obviously yeah not rushing yourself towards either of it but one of the most basic things when it comes to especially what you guys do is the amount of time you guys are on your feet. So you're wearing barefoot shoes.

Fergus, you're wearing Vivos. So what was it like for you guys? Because actually you've been on your feet forever. You've done wrestling and all that. But what kind of importance do you guys put on that for newer strength athletes that are coming into running and this type of stuff? Because they're probably, many of them will be spending more time on their feet than they ever have been. And a lot of people, when they start doing stuff like this, they start getting foot pain. They start getting all this pain that they're not used to.

And partially it's because there's a weakness there. So how do you guys tackle that? I've always lived in. So how do you guys tackle that? I've always lived in. So a big part of my training has always been GPP, general physical preparedness, weighted carries, sleds, et cetera. I do all of that barefoot. Always have.

When I started doing it, fighting was my focus. My logic then at the time, I was not nearly as educated in strength conditioning stuff. But my logic was I fight in the cage or on the mat barefoot. Why am I training with Nikes on? You know? And also it's just like you get your toe caught in a gi or something. You know what I mean? Like it can be brutally painful. You're pretty aware of that stuff. So I just, I do everything barefoot in terms of my carries, my weight. I like to lift, squat and deadlift, do everything barefoot. I wear barefoot shoes day to day. I run in ultras that are, I think the

second lowest profile shoe they make second or third low one of the lower profile ones they have but there's still plenty of sport it's still legitimate ultra marathon shoe and i don't particularly have any issues um i think that weight training background can actually be helpful if they leverage it right and use those skills to squat deadlift and do gpp barefoot they're going to sidestep a lot of those issues from the get-go i also know there's guys like graham you know the barefoot sprinter who's a specialist when it comes to mobilizing you know your digits and tarsals and all you know all the the tissues of the foot i am not an expert in any of that stuff i just find that living you know living and conducting resistance training barefoot is going to armor your feet and present a lot of these

issues before they happen and mind you in some gyms you might not be able to go barefoot no you so you might also mind you that i'm a guy who just broke both his feet in multiple places running with 35 pounds on his back so maybe just disregard everything i said just now as a as a powerlifter there was so much time spent on youtube looking for what the best shoe to lift in was when I was younger. And the consensus was generally Converse or Vans. That's what I started in, Converse. My feet were too fucking wide for Converse. Yeah, but we don't realize it's a really morbid thing to say, but shoes now feel like coffins to me in the sense that I put my feet into my feet into a pair of boots for example that are

conventionally built and they just feel it just feels wrong it just feels unnatural and i don't want to go too much down the natural versus unnatural angle because it can get a bit zealot like in some corners of the barefoot community but the bottom line is there's a there's a practical element from lifting which is it gives you a solid stable base a way for you to embed yourself into the floor get much more proprioceptive feedback which means if you're sumo pulling you can screw yourself in if you're low bar squatting there's no sponginess at all

because even converses there's that little bit of sponginess they're flat but there's still about that much between you and the floor so if you're removing all of that it gives you a solid stable base which allows you to groove the movements better and therefore do a lot more work in the optimal position. I squat low bar in them as well. I will walk around in them day to day. And there's a study that came out of Liverpool University in 2021

from Krista Uth and a wider team there that has indicated if you wear Bevo Barefoots for six months, you can improve your foot strength by up to 60%. Just because you're walking more. 60 percent because you're walking just yeah because you're walking without the interference which means that your fhl the muscles in your feet the tens in your feet there's over thousands of nerve endings they're getting used and that just train it's the same it's the same premise as if you've got a cast on your arm yeah and then you take your arm out of the cast and you start using it again yeah that's the exact same thing that's

happening in our feet and conventional footwear was not designed with the foot in mind it was designed with performance technology for running and with aesthetics and comfort in mind from a day-to-day point of view but it hasn't accounted for the actual functional application of the foot itself and how that fits in the kinetic chain so a drop will immediately take you from flat and a line like that to just tilting your hips forward. You'll get a little bit more height, but everything is then forwards, which means that you are moving.

And when you're talking about drop, you're talking about the heel lift that's in most shoes. So most running shoes are about an 8 to 12 millimeter drop. Most work shoes, dress shoes are about 8 to 12. Same again. You get some that are 6, you get some that are 10. There's lots of variability, but most shoes have a drop from heel to toe and then they have a layer of sponginess or a layer of rubber beneath them and that is interfering with your foot doing its

natural thing which is getting the way with your hips interacting with your feet and your knees and your alignments all a little bit which isn't inherently a problem there's thousands of people that walk around the world without any issues but i found that my feet are significantly more reinforced just by walking around in them day to day when i'm running downhill when i'm running trails i can i can basically snap my ankle and it doesn't snap whereas previously it would have been an injury my the whole ankle structure is strengthened and more reinforced where i can be much more confident and nimble on my feet and get a lot more proprioceptive feedback and know how i'm moving which makes me feel much more robust from an injury prevention point of view

but there's no why would we not want to strengthen our feet it's the base on which we walk and just by wearing a pair of vivos for one task seeing how you get on with them and then maybe working them in for another task i think what people often do is they think oh i need to run in them a lot sooner than they otherwise should and this is where the class action lawsuit with vibrant was i'm born to run and people just disregarded it because if you take away that drop you've suddenly got that much more range of motion with every rep of a walk every rep of running and that's going to put a lot of strain through your through your achilles through your calves and that could catch up with you yeah so it's i encourage people to dip the toe in pun intended with a a shoe for specific tasks see how they get on with that and

then work it in for more tasks or then decide you know what i'm going to wear these on a regular basis and if you then decide you want to build up your running volume then by all means do and i know vivo have some educational tools on that but the one thing that i found very useful for heavier guys getting into running with vivo specifically as a tool or even just being barefoot is most of the injuries that come from running are not necessarily as a result of heel striking but as a result of over striding which is essentially where your impact point is in front of your shoulders and your hips as you make contact with the ground yeah and that essentially means the transient impact of the ground upwards is sending all of the force from that impact into nowhere because your knee isn't there to set up your body so

over striding is the cause of most running injuries and heavier guys heavier girls can coming from a gym background can often find themselves over striding because they're not used to the skill of running so rather than just thinking right i'm going to lace up my running shoes and go out for a run if you're looking to get into this putting on a pair of vivos and going outside and running on concrete for 10 yards 20 yards 30 yards because you're going to slam your heel on the floor out in front of you and there's nothing there to protect it the cushioning isn't going to disguise that feeling and you're going to think oh shit that doesn't feel good yeah and it's going to force you to drill getting your feet a little good. And it's going to force you to drill,

getting your feet a little bit underneath you. It's going to force you to improve your cadence and get sort of smaller steps. And it can help you feel how to not overstride. And therefore, before you even start building your running volume, you can have experienced a more efficient running gait. And then by all means, I still run in cushioned shoes. I wear some Sauconys for the carbon benefit carbon benefit the foot plate there's technology there it's

going to make me faster i'm going to take it and i do all of my ultra stuff in in ultras because whilst i can run in vivos for long periods of time my feet are nowhere near at the tolerance of volume that the rest of my body has so the cushioning essentially allows me to manage the fatigue over a long period of time a lot better while still allowing my foot to splay out and do its natural thing in that sense. But if you put me in a pair of vapor flies or something, I'd want to take them off straight away. It just feels completely wrong to me. Paparazzi family, how's it going? Now we talk about meat a lot on this podcast, which is why we've partnered with Piedmontese and have for years now because they have some of the best beef

on the planet. All right. Piedmontese beef has cuts that are fattier have some of the best beef on the planet. All right, Piedmontese beef has cuts that are fattier in terms of their rib-eyes, and they have also cuts that are leaner in terms of their flat irons, but you can get cuts for no matter what diet you're on. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yeah, head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com. Check out EnterProboCode Power for 25% off your entire order.

And if your order is $150 or more, you get free two days. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Yeah. It's a big thing to think about. It's like all the volume you have outside of the running you're doing, you know, all the walking, you're doing everything you're doing in the gym,

the going back and forth between the offices, all the little things you're doing that is volume right so if you can get that volume in utilizing either barefoot shoes sandals whatever um that will pay off because like as a heavier person if you start running with barefoot shoes that shit is not a good idea to do immediately that's why like those ultras mark has like those nike super shoes those things on runs if you have a if your gait is good it can be super beneficial to allowing you to get in some decent volume without fucking yourself up everything's a tool everything's a tool that's that's all everybody wants to attach themselves to a box of i i live the barefoot lifestyle i do

this i wear this nike's are the best i bleed vaporflies just appreciate the variety and appreciate what different things serve different purposes is the way that i like to view things i think um i think the the real benefit of barefoot shoes is that they can be different parts of different people's lifestyles and don't need to have the previous association that they once did of being this incredibly out there, bohemian way of existing. It's the only way to live, bro. Yeah, no, I agree. I think even if you're not a heavier person,

you shouldn't just get into running barefoot to begin with. Wear them around your house, then wear them around your life, and then wear them on walks, and then maybe a ruck, and then a short run, and you know what I mean, microdose and go from there. I think one thing that actually is super underappreciated and everything that we've mentioned we've mentioned a little bit is rucking like great man it's for bigger yeah for bigger people just putting on a weight vest put on some barefoot shoes and just go walk for a distance if you

haven't been on your weight and on your feet much rather than getting into running immediately yeah put some load on and just go walk yo it's hard to find a better core and neck and upper back exercise too especially if you're not used to loading weight on your back i uh they have and they have special stuff to like the special packs and weights and stuff now i'm kind of old school i just throw i have like a 62 or a 70 pound kettlebell that i'll wrap i'll put a towel in there for a little padding and just put it in my pack and just go for a walk. But they got like special stuff now for civilized human beings. The Rogue Tactic vest is much more comfortable. Probably that.

There you go. Yeah. Is that the one with the white plate? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The plate in the front and the back. I do know that the vests and plates you can carry a lot more weight and still feel pretty good when it's not all loaded on the back or the front or, you know, whatever.

But I love stuff like that, man. I think rucking really, like, I don't understand why it's more popular. Like, I sing the praises. Josh Bryant talks about it. Tom DeBlas, who's in the jiu-jitsu community, talks about it. But there's not a lot of other guys talking about it, and I can't figure out why, especially because that's a social media video waiting to happen. But it's like get your cardio, get your strength training in, no impact, doesn't matter if you're overweight, don't need an athletic background, don't need special equipment, don't need a track.

Well, your heart rate needs to be higher than what it would be with walking. Yeah. Maybe for someone who's like very out of shape and hasn't walked or practiced much of anything in a long time, maybe they can get their heart rate up decently with just a walk. Sure. But in general, I think you need, I think it would be really wise. If you think about like a lot of your average people that maybe don't exercise, you know, when's the last time they had their heart rate above 110 or 120 for like a lengthened

period of time? Like, let's just say like three minutes. like a lengthened period of time. Like let's just say like three minutes. It's probably been a long time. And you might be able to get that with just a weight vest. And especially if you have any hills or stairs to go up. Hills are invaluable. I'm very fortunate around where I am. But it sounds things where you are as well,

having them at your back door. It's one of the most effective ways for hybrid athletes we'll call we'll call the community that this applies to in this context to essentially spend more time in a certain heart rate zone without accumulating the impact volume that would come from pounding pavements so in the same vein of rucking can get your heart rate up to x you can improve your aerobic economy, essentially, by manipulating how you get there. And whilst, yes, it's not the exact same specific motor pattern you're mimicking, which means that the specificity of the application isn't as clear,

depending on what stage of this journey you're at, there are many ways to sort of skin this proverbial cat. But great for your hamstrings, calves your glutes and then uh running uphill is also just a lot safer yeah so we mentioned that we mentioned some bigger people getting out there for a run if you weigh you know maybe above 220 and you haven't run in a long time try to find a hill and don't even run just jog up it at first get used to that and over a course of a couple weeks you can add in a little bit more and you can run a more aggressively over the weeks and months.

I, as everyone knows, I'm obsessed with history. And so the stories of Jerry Rice and Walter Payton were both two guys who loved hill sprints and both were just, and it's, it's one of the like few remaining methodologies that I can use where I can actually like hurt myself. I can go and be like, my aerobic system is actually an anaerobic. Everything's lit up right now. So I like it a lot.

It takes the impact out of it. And it's just, again, I think Joe Rogan talks about it. That's the only form of running he does. He just puts on music, he takes his dog, and he just hurts himself on a hill over and over again but i i tend to like that uh the more simplistic applications of stuff like that because it's it's easy to over complicate or to get pulled in by you know all the this or that and like man if you want to build cardio and you know become a better sprinter than hurting yourself like jerry rice on the hill over and over again it's a good way to do it what you got over there, Andrew?

I got a couple things, but in regards to the hills, how do you get down them? Literally, because you can run up pretty fast, but running down, I would imagine you've got to be careful. Yeah, ever since I was a kid, I did it the same way. So I lived for a while next to a recently retired NFL cornerback. My mom had lived in a neighborhood, and he lived across the street, and he had a system where he would sprint up and walk down the hill we lived at the top of.

Oh, sorry. The hill we lived at the top of, he would sprint up and walk down. And it was like a good 250. It's like that Lacta Kel, that middle range of 200 meters of just straight uphill. Just a little too long. Just a little. It was too long to be a sprint, but too short to be a run. It's like kind of perfect, but you're kind of mad at it yeah exactly and by the end you know it's like your cp you can feel the throttle just drop off those last like 40 meters you're just

you're digging harder than ever and just um so he would just sprint up and walk down uninterrupted and uh you know your basic like tempos you know there's a million different models that what is the uh fartlek you know that they that they vary the windows or the durations and stuff. But I find that and I still I'll drive over that same hill and do it now. It's also actually along my. So you just walk down it basically. Yeah. Sprint up, walk down, sprint up, walk down.

And it's along the route. It's about six miles from where I live now. And it's along my ultra training route, which is 15 out and 15 back. So if I'm feeling a little spicy, then a good five or ten hill sprints each way going out on a 30- or 40-mile run. And then coming back is always just a brutal—I mean, it's, you know, because I'm 20—I'm a marathon or more in. And then hitting hill sprints then, I mean, the the performance is terrible so you just got to kind of put that out of your mind and you know

you don't don't time anything don't time anything this never happened but yeah I like I like them a lot man it's that that basic you see the Dagestani

wrestlers doing hill sprints and they're carrying stones and kettlebells and all sorts of stuff you know logs and it's how the Gurkhas trained

yeah the savages too are you into history at all like the history of physical training yeah yeah yeah not as much as you by the sounds of You know, logs and... It's how the Gurkhas trained. Yeah, the savages, too. Are you into history at all? Like the history of physical training? Yeah, yeah. Not as much as you by the sounds of it. The Gurkhas have got a very special place in the British military forces' hearts, generally. So it's hearing how they train and just making use of stones.

So what are the Gurkhas? They were Indian troops that fought for the British Empire. Nepalese. Excuse me, Nepalese. Yeah, I'm not Northern Indian. Nepalese troops and they had these knives called kukris. I have one at home and they were known as just some of the most fearless savage conditions and they were obviously used

to that elevation and a different way of living and I'm certainly no expert in them but I know they're still around they're still formidable and dating back more than a century they've been there's actually uh there's actually some controversy at the moment because i don't know exactly what it is but it's something to do with residency in older gurkhas and the uk so essentially they're being poorly treated for a service that they should not be getting poorly treated for at all i agree with

there's been a lot of campaigning for their their well-being and their well-deserved recognition um but yeah their their physical training and their testing was very much hill and carrying x amount of stones focused so if you went to selection one year the way the stones and the way all saturday back could be completely different to the other and things like that so yeah it's just fascinating to hear how people have made use of X, Y, and Z that we now have in a fancy Ivanko set of plates, for example. I've always said that, like, that's one reason I'm so interested in the historical fitness research is it's thousands of years of data that we have access to that most people are just walking right by. Like, you know what I mean? You can go back or you go back 100 years.

And even 100 years ago, they had pretty decent ways to measure and understand some of these things. I mean, you see, I think we talked about it last time I was on like the PEDs and ultramarathon running 100 years ago. They had cocaine and nitroglycerin poppers and stuff. So it was like they would have to, they would do these. I didn't know that. That's hilarious.

I got some stuff I can show you. Imagine running on cocaine. Oh, no. So that was the thing. They would do them on a wooden indoor track, just doing lap for 24, 36 hours straight. And then just die. Literally. And then they'd have, like, you'd be like, oh, he's falling asleep.

One of the trainers would send a boy out, and he'd be like, you know, and you'd be like, whoa, and keep going. And then eventually they kind of started to phase it out and it became like low-key so guys would be like sneaking stuff and then there was like one guy when america i think he was an american who was running a race in britain he got stripped because it came out that he was doing like a hallucinogen but it turned out that everyone else was on like worse stuff but he had nitroglycerin and cocaine were very common peds there's any time that somebody should be using cocaine it's in these situations that you guys are in it's better than fucking hallucinating on a bike and you know it's going off a cliff to me you've made some

interesting points yeah he's like i mean you know i'm sold yeah if i'd fallen off that bike i think i would have uh would have been much more pro the ancient methods. Well, speaking of the Nepalese, though, it does increase your tolerance to elevation, they say. That's why the Incas chew coca leaves. And even they have like, if you go, they'll give you one and tell you to chew it. I think they used to hand them out at the airport, actually, in Cusco.

And you're not getting, like, coked out. But yeah, it's like, you know, it's the actual way you chew it, and it's really supposed to help with altitude sickness. we have so many rules here in america nobody hands us cocaine any uh any tricks for running downhill um if you can find someone that has a cable car then that'd be ideal cape town they're table mountain in south africa if you just did 10 hill sprints all the way up you get the cable car down but no generally walking i think that the best recommendation is because quality is a focus as well and it really forces you to stride start with 10 by 20

second hill sprints and you take as long as you need to walk down even if you need to crawl down and then run back up again because the down is essentially it's the eccentric portion of the lift in this sense where you don't need to put any focus at all so you can drop your deadlift get your way down you can build up to 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, 60 seconds, but you can do this on a treadmill as well. It's a good place to start if you want to from an accessibility point of view. But I think going back to the Zone 2 side of things

is a lot of people will be surprised at how little demand they need to place on themselves to find themselves in Zone 2. But so many people actually don't find themselves in Zone 2 on a day-to-day basis, like you said. So it doesn't take much to have a huge impact from an aerobic point of view and i'm sure you guys have spoken about the physiological and health benefits of zone two to no end but the psychological benefits of spending time there as well is massive

and it goes a long way to to actually just developing you across the board because it really doesn't underpin all other energy systems um for someone's just starting out um because i know in my like for myself i my goal was just like i just want to be able to run two miles without feeling like i'm going to pass out um should somebody's goal initially be uh distance or time time i think okay i was just gonna say actually neither okay i think you just get off my post. You should be seeking. I don't know if they should be. There's a million ways to do this.

What I personally enjoy most is to not pay attention to any metric for the first four or six months. And just get out there. Find a way to enjoy it. Find a mental state you enjoy. Go somewhere where it's nice, where you like the surrounding. It's safe. You're not worried about stuff. And just challenge yourself to get a runner's high that should be your only goal and then once you have a little bit of a runner so how long can

you stay in that zone and then as you naturally come in and out of it you know so you get to learn to you learn to get in that runner's zone a runner's high you learn to stay there and you come out and then you learn how to get back in it and over and over and pretty soon the volume it treats itself like if you're enjoying the process that all adds up on the other end and i'd give you the same advice with jujitsu too just learn to enjoy it and then the rest will fall into place and yeah like if you want to take it to a high level you can nail down the technicalities of everything as you go but if you don't have a base and understanding and an appreciation and a presence and connection to what you're doing, you know. Makes sense.

But, you know, like you said, it's what works for you. Completely valid. I don't disagree. But I think with time as a metric, I think time over distance because distance sets people up for potential disappointment because they go out with the intention of covering X, but in reality they achieve the stimulus with Y. So time means that you can move at a relative pace and work within those parameters rather than necessarily going too hard for a mile when you

wanted to do two and finding out that actually you've maybe overestimated what you could have done in the first place so a really interesting way of looking at things and the metrics to focus on is is if you just heart rate run until your heart rate hits 140 i will use an arbitrary heart rate here just for the sake of argument but run until your heart rate hits 140. I will use an arbitrary heart rate here just for the sake of argument, but run until your heart rate hits 140 and then walk until it goes back below 100 and then run until it hits 140.

Do that for 10 minutes one week, 20 minutes the following week and then you can build from there and you're not actually running a huge amount of distance, but you're working that heart rate range that you're getting used to what that feels like and then you can start to build from there.

Because running two miles doesn't need to be a difficult task, but a lot of people wanting to get into running will make it much more difficult than it needs to be by going too hard, too fast, too soon. Amen. So arguably, the best place to start to prepare to run two miles is to walk more

and to walk more at a higher heart rate, which is where things like hills yeah i like that weighted vests uphill on the treadmill once you get used to that heart rate you can just condition yourself to be a little bit more tolerant to that that's when you can actually start to run because like we were discussing the swimming if your running skill isn't developed enough to be able to execute the internal efficiency that you might have then you're not going to actually be able to move at any sort of intensity and apply it in the same way that like you were saying is you're

concerned about getting in the pool but before you can even apply and develop any intensity in the pool your skill acquisition your skill execution is going to stop you from even getting to a high enough heart rate to be able to do that so correct skill first intensity second so the skill of running and the development of an aerobic system can then be applied to running and i reckon building the blocks up towards being able to run two miles the first 60 of that isn't even running related that makes sense and then uh just real quick for like the heart rate and stuff um is like just a garmin watch going to be sufficient enough to really kind of zone in on that yeah yeah to start with i think people can go a long way with just wrist-based heart rate and then when you start to really look at higher intensity stuff and you want to monitor the heart rate data a chest

strap is is quite advisable because the high fluctuations you want to be closest as possible but for day-to-day stuff i've got this on at all times and you use it for use use i'll very rarely use heart rate off my wrist when i've got access to a heart rate strap but the discrepancy in zone two of a strap versus a wrist isn't very high the discrepancy when you're doing 200 meters or 400 meters can be quite high but again within the context of this discussion that should be a long way off so if you're doing so what you're saying is if you're doing like zone two and it's off by like five or ten beats probably not a huge deal but if it's you want to be more accurate the more intense you're going i think that makes sense yeah but also sometimes you don't need to be that accurately intense because if you get into zone five then you're blowing and you don't really need the data you'll

know if you were there or not so i think it's just the case if for example if you're doing four by 800 meters and you're doing that you still want to be hurting yourself maybe you're overdoing it in zone four and you're trying to stay lower if you're aiming for if you're aiming for threshold rather than zone five for example then that's where that information could be useful but if you're doing it in a reps format often risk can be a bit slower to catch up in real time which means that if you get annoying yeah it is you're like i've actually never tracked mine um i've i've seen people i've heard that complaint though with track like with intervals and stuff that it's like all right you wait and then you got to wait so many seconds then your next interval is all fucking you're like what good does that do me it's like three minutes later yeah that long but i've always just kind of used you know

the talk test or you know various different methods are measured you know obviously every time i get a physical or i get checked i have the resting heart rate checked i know that likes to hang out around like 40 ish a little a little higher if i'm on nicotine but um but i really it's something i haven't paid much attention to that I probably should pay more attention to. So Johnny, my business partner, who's out in the Arctic at the moment, he doesn't like real-time metrics. He's just, I don't know, whether he's old-fashioned or just...

He's probably been doing this for a long time. He has been, yeah, he's 47, but he just likes, so he's using a manual watch, so he's essentially using a new model of, it's kind of an internal chronograph, so it's got two different timing mechanisms within it he's using like the sun and the stars yeah that's my that's my sort of guy right there i also uh after hearing so much about johnny i'm starting to put together

the fact that i think this is like a fight club thing i don't think johnny really exists you guys kind of you guys know what i'm saying? Johnny's in. Johnny's in. He's like, that's my name. I'm Johnny. Very Edward Norton Brad Pitt in here. I think we all got one. His background is in MMA, so the relevance is ironically very spot on. He sounds like an awesome guy

man he's he's pretty broken in in old age he won't mind me saying that now i was kind about him but we need to bring you back down to earth at this point i knew i liked him my type of guy that's funny thinking about the uh the athlete that's not necessarily on their like marathon journey they're still maybe chasing some numbers in the gym do you guys think you'd be so comfortable pulling away from the weights if you guys didn't all four of you if you guys didn't already hit some pretty good numbers in the gym like james you were talking about like at any point i could deadlift three times my body weight and see my you'll play around and deadlift 725 or something like that mark records dude and you did the uh was like 12 and 12 yeah like that 12 65 yeah i mean that's fucking impressive

it would be pretty easy for me to walk away from weights as well but for this person that maybe isn't quite having a lot of money it's not a big deal yeah huge cock and you love the people but yeah i mean i know it's kind of like uh right we got to figure out what the goal is but maybe for that person that hasn't quite hit the uh the total that they want in the gym yet, but they do want to incorporate some of the running, like how can they necessarily balance that? And I think it's more like a mental thing, but I don't know. What do you guys have any advice for them? Well, use, I mean, my advice just at the surface level would use the running to fuel your lifting. Use the running to become a better lifter.

You know, if you have a good aerobic system, it doesn't have to be be insane but if you can just do basic you have a basic aerobic base you're going to be able to do more lifting you're going to be able to do more gpp you're going to benefit all those benefits we referenced earlier you know that we were talking about with blood flow and capillaries per muscle fiber and etc etc so it's like it i think people just get really dogmatic and uh trying to bear down in one thing or one box like, you know, we were talking about. And it's like, man, these things, they don't have to exist in vacuums or be opposed or, you know, and you don't have to overdo it either. And Seema? Dude, just get yourself to a point where you start paying attention to the stimulus.

Like the amount of someone asks you how much you bench or how much you deadlift, it really doesn't matter. And the only people that ends up mattering to are people that pay attention to weight in the gym. Outside of people who like workout, people don't have any context of like what a 315 bench is or what a 500 pound deadlift is. It really doesn't fucking matter. Like it doesn't matter at all other than mainly to you and your gym bros. And that's why it's like stimulus matters. and your gym bros. And that's why it's like stimulus matters. So especially if you're trying to seek different things and the gym's already something you've been doing and gotten decently proficient at, you know, if you want to get better at something else, be okay with putting the goals there on the back seat for a little bit, or like we kind of mentioned earlier,

increasing the amount of time you're going to give yourself to reach that goal. Instead of being like, mentioned earlier increasing the amount of time you're going to give yourself to reach that goal instead of being like i want to deadlift 500 pounds for the next three months just give yourself give yourself eight months give yourself a year it's gonna come don't rush it yeah mark you get excited about you know something new and you get fired up and you're thinking man i want to see that five plates on the deadlift like that means so much to you and then you're like that's 495 i might as well make it 500 505 sounds kind of cool so maybe i'll just put a five pound plate on there it's hard to find the two and a half exactly but uh to your point i think uh it was really well said when you talked about being able to run two miles um one of the things we kind of forget about in some of our

goals is that you can get to you can get to some lower level goals, even though they seem like higher level goals, such as something like a 275 deadlift or something like that. Or maybe it's, I don't know, one and a half times body weight deadlift or something like that. Some of these numbers, while they might seem really far away for you right now, and it might seem like a really far reach, it's not going to take you that long to get there. And when you get there, it would be nice if you did it and it was kind of easy. Be nice if you did it and you were like, your friends are like, hey, man, I think you could have done like two or three of those. And you're like, shit, okay. You can get to your goals a lot easier than you think. And so, therefore, I think it's okay to be excited about it.

I think it's, you're, you're fine being fired up and everything about it, but you don't have to be so attached to it that you can't do anything else. Now, if you're, this is where it gets really weird. If you're really, really high level, you'll never get so attached to it. It probably won't matter because you're just that fucking good. And you get a response from like a John Jones, how'd you get so good at striking? He's like, I watched a lot of YouTube. Like, fuck, he just took a giant dump on everybody.

But a lot of guys, they develop a skill set. They don't really think much of it because they love what they're doing so much uh and then they end up in this spot where it's kind of a mixture of like genetics hard work over a long period of time being the right place the right time uh finding the right program that really worked well for them but i would just i would just advise people to do your best to kind of chill the fuck out a little bit. It's going to take you a little bit of time.

And what you said about running two miles, like one of the best ways to get there is to walk. Obviously, we know that you can't get to a two-mile run with just walking, or maybe actually you could if you changed your speed of walking. But with regular walking, it wouldn't be enough, in my opinion, to get you there. But if you walk and you periodically jog and you take your time and you're not really worried or concerned about doing this by the end of the year, not only when you go to jog two miles, is it going to be easy? But again, you or

a buddy that ran with you would say like you and I ran like eight miles that day or six miles that day. And you didn't even really recognize it just because I was encouraging you to keep going. And at that time you had like a little bit of running circled around that and you were just starting jujitsu. So your cardiovascular was a little bit better. So I think you can get to your goals a lot easier than you think. Just make sure that you really just try to take your time with it.

It sounds very overly profound and a British phrase to use is wanky. But find a way to enjoy the journey, not the destination, because the destination will always move, will always move the goalposts. I will be happy when I earn X amount of money. Oh, but I could get this car if I earn this amount of money. Oh, interesting. Well, we've got a second kid on the way, so I'll be happy when I earn this amount. You'll always change it.

It's human nature. And like you said, 500 pounds. Well, 505 is more than 500 pounds. So then if the guy that only can deadlift 500 pounds, I'm stronger than him. And this is where rifts form in sport because the problem I come up against online is mostly triathletes

that just don't understand why I enjoy lifting. They only see it as a way of inhibiting how fast you can be at triathlon. Whereas I enjoy doing triathlon and i enjoy lifting and that's all that really matters to me so i think be ruthlessly honest with about what you enjoy and what you get from the things that you're doing and ask yourself why are these numbers important to me in the gym and if the answer is not clear then there's no reason to not start doing the thing that you would also be interested in doing so i think that the crux of the question is if somebody hasn't yet got the strength base to give them the way

to build themselves alongside running, should they get to a certain point before they start working? And I think the answer to no is if you enjoy doing both and that's more valuable than the person that's chasing this fountain of life that never exists. I think also if you've been working on yourself, you'll have more than just lifting. Yeah. I know that sometimes for some of us, you could be at a particular point in your life where that is all you have. All you have is maybe your job or all you have is your work or your girlfriend or your dog or whatever. Like we can get in compromised positions. But if you're paying attention and you are viewing lifting or running as like personal and self-development and you're

paying attention to how you made yourself better and how much improvement you made from the start, you should be able to sink your teeth into understanding that you're going to be able to be proficient at just about every single thing that you like to do. Maybe not every single thing that's out there to do, but most of the things that you like to do, you're going to be able to figure it out. How did you figure out how to get good at lifting? How'd you figure out how to get good at running? It's going to be the same process for business,

same process for these other things. So for me, even when I was lifting, if something would have happened when I squatted 900 pounds, that prevented me from getting closer to the weights I wanted to squat ultimately. And my wife just maybe she stepped in and said, you're at the gym too much. I need you at home. We have two kids and we're starting a magazine

and you don't have time for that anymore. I wouldn't have been cool with stopping. I wouldn't have wanted to stop, but I would have been able to stop because it wasn't all I had. I had two kids, wife, other responsibilities, other things that I love and that I'm passionate about. So I think that's another thing is it's not always easy to have multiple things that you're passionate about, but if you keep your eyes open and you pay attention and you understand the process that you are making towards being better at this lifting thing, you're going to recognize

the recipe is the same for everything else. Progress, not perfection is the buzzword I always come back to. That's popular in jiu-jitsu, that very phrase. And look for all the little pieces of progress because you're starting something new. There's going to be a ton of fucking PRs. Easy wins, easy wins, yeah. Like it took the guy 35 seconds to tap me today

rather than 29 seconds real talk though that's an actual metric bro i can't how many i've soothed my pride driving home tears wiping away it was only 16 oh it's gonna stop light and you see another guy next to you like oh he gets it another another fellow white belt for sure now is that it and yep that's all i got all right take us on out of here all righty thank you everybody for checking out today's episode uh please drop those comments down below because we heard some more crazy shit today and make sure you guys go back and check out fergus fergus ferguson fergus fergus my bad i thought it

was fergus and all of a sudden fergus valley from check out his episode you know previous episode ago because that was really really deep and we got we got uh pretty serious on that episode so make sure you guys go check that out hit that like button and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed follow the podcast at mb power project all over the place and uh powerproject.life for everything podcast related my instagram is at i am andrew z and sema where you at and sema any on instagram youtube and se YouTube. And Seema Yin Yang on TikTok and Twitter. James Fergus, where can people find you guys? Wild Hunt Conditioning on all the main platforms.

And I'm also releasing a book on April 10th about the history of physical fitness. So if that's your thing, come check us out. When's it coming out, you said? April 10th. Oh, nice. A History of Physical Fitness and Training by James Fergus. I'm an author now, guys. I love it.

It's great. Nice. I am Fergus Crawley in most places except Twitter because that is where dreams go to die. Good. How about Omnia Performance? Omnia Performance for all hybrid coaching-related activities. We are fortunate enough to have over 1,000 athletes

across products all over the world, lots in America, lots in the UK, lots in all other parts of the world and then the modern mind uk is the podcast which is where we discuss matters like we did in the previous episode so more the people the mindset the resilience whereas omnia is all hybrid athlete focused and then youtube is where you can see all the stupid stuff that we discussed today documented in 4K mostly. James, you said you got a bear hunt coming up? So the next one, oh, we got spring hunt coming up. So May will be May in Idaho and then October, November in Oregon. But California is not, I mean, there's some bear hunters who do pretty well out here, but I'm exclusively archery.

I don't use hounds, don't bait any of the stuff, and I'm a solo hunter. So it's— So crazy. He's a heroist. This is all exceptionally illegal. He makes the bow and arrow himself. Although that's— Exceptionally illegal.

That's exceptionally illegal. I like that. I'm used to being a criminal, so that works for me. But no, I would like to actually start. They call them trad bows or traditional archery bows. I know of a guy who this last year, he's like an old school Arkansas mountain man that runs around with Steve Rinella. He killed a bear with a wooden bow and a stone tip. Damn.

It took him about five years, but he got it done. You got to make the bow and arrow off of shit that you It took him about five years, but he got it done. So you gotta like make the bow and arrow off of shit that you find in the woods to kill the bear. I think maybe I'll just go see if I can just kill one by submission. Catch something. Hey look, we know how that's gonna end, but you know.

What happened? I tried to get the Ezekiel. Bro, you shot that single and it was after that it went bad. It went real bad. Like, what happened, man? And like, the bear didn't have a gi. That collar choke didn't work. Why didn't Leonardo DiCaprio just heel hook the fucking...

He should have. Really, that was his bad. That was his bad. He didn't shrimp. That's his first problem. Yeah, he didn't shrimp. No shrimp. Fucking white belt.

I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.