Mark Bell's Power Project - How The Top Elite Athletes Train, Rest, & Recover || MBPP Ep. 1025

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

In episode 1025, Ian Danney, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how Ian coaches professional athletes and reveals secrets on training, recovery and even supplementation. Follow Ian on IG: https://www.instagram.com/realpep_az/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! The Athletic/Casual Clothes we're wearing! 🕺 ➢ https://vuori.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   💤 The Best Cooling Mattress in the GAME! 🛌 ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Best STYLISH Barefoot Casual/Training Shoes! 👟 ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   Best 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      You Need Greens in your Life 🥦 ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

You know, I saw you working with, I think it was a running back for the Detroit Lions. The exact kind of move that you're talking with him about in the gym, he ends up performing it right on the field. What we're working on is just the ability to generate force and project your center of mass when you're stopping and you're breaking a cut. I absolutely just test ladder drills. I think they're 100% a waste of time. How do you train speed? You have to start producing force before you get on the ground. I think in terms of tissue quality, in terms of being able to be strong at end ranges to protect yourself, that stuff is crucial.

I have seen poor ankle mobility mess up more people's backs than a lack of bracing. You've got to be careful as a coach. If you want to learn and grow, questions are more important than answers. How do they know when they're maybe going too far when it comes to the strength? I'm at super training, so this is going to sound like a sacrilege. Any strength you take to an extreme will become a weakness. Power Project family, we've had some amazing guests on this podcast like Kurt Engel, Tom Segura, Andrew Hooperman, and we want to be able to have more amazing guests on this podcast and you can

help it grow by leaving us a quick rating and review on Spotify and iTunes. If you're listening to the podcast, just go ahead and give us a review. Let us know how you dig it and help the podcast grow so we can keep growing with y'all and bring you amazing information. Enjoy the show. I think it'd be interesting to get your perspective on this. There's some players like, you know, get someone like a Barry Sanders who barely missed any games. And then you have – you got guys like Tom Brady. I know Tom Brady was out for a bit.

I think he might have missed like a season or half season at one point. There's some players that missed some games here and there. But the great ones seem to be pretty resilient. And maybe it's just the fact that like some of the guys that get hurt, they don't get an opportunity to show their greatness. But all the years of working with all these athletes, what is something that – is there a way to prevent injury? In some of these sports, I mean, especially professional football, there's a lot of shit going on. And you're not just dealing with ground forces and so on. You're dealing with somebody else running you down, tackling you, and so on.

What is your thoughts on that? Do you think it's like resilience, luck, giant combination of 8 million things? Or what do you think? It's a combination of a lot of things. My answer might surprise you, but the concept of preventing injury is actually pretty difficult to do in that type of sport. Some of it just comes down to bad luck. Some of it comes down to all types of things. But you can do a lot of things to become more resilient. And most importantly, you can do a lot of things to help you bounce back from the injuries quicker, which

is probably to me a better focus than trying to prevent the injury to begin with, because that's a lot trickier thing to do. I think, generally speaking, there's two different types of guys that get injured. You get the guys who get injured on contact, and the guys who get injured getting to contact. So that's like running to get there, pulling hamstrings, tweaking stuff. Then there's like on contact, like getting knocked out, separating shoulders, all those types of things. And generally, the guys who get injured getting to contact have issues with elasticity and tissue elasticity and springiness and those types of things and quality of soft tissue. and those types of things and quality of soft tissue. And the guys who get injured on contact generally have problems with what we call compliance or being able to create good system stiffness

and have certain strength and stuff like that. So if you know guys have one of those two problems to begin with, it can address how you might approach their training to solve those things. So that's a big starting point. And then just having good overall broad systems approach to getting the athlete ready. Sometimes we get too focused on just what does the athlete need for the sport? Like what are the demands for the sport and how can we train those demands? But we also have to look at what is the athlete's level of competency to be able to train for the demands of the sport.

And if you don't address their level of competency and change it, then you're asking for potential injury problems. So that's the first thing. You have to make that delineation. Are we training to this athlete's level of competency with no regard for what his demand for the sport is, or are we just going to straighten it? These are the demands for the sport. That's what we have to do.

And that's a middle ground. That's kind of like a little tension you have to manage all the time. But that does contribute to injury prevention for sure. When it comes to strength training in general, I saw you working with, I think it was running back for the Detroit Lions. And you were working on some movements with him. And what were you kind of working on exactly with him? And Andrew, if you can try to find the clip on Ian's Instagram, it might be cool to try to bring that up.

Instagram. It might be cool to try to bring that up because I thought it was amazing that the exact kind of move that you're talking with him about in the gym is that he ends up performing it right on the field. Yeah. So what we're working on is just the ability to generate force and project your center of mass when you're stopping and you're breaking a cut. So a lot of guys can stop their feet quickly or start their feet quickly. But if you're stopping and you're breaking a cut. So a lot of guys can stop their feet quickly or start their feet quickly. But if you're not actually moving, gaining direction and where you want to go, it doesn't necessarily make you a harder target, you know, because you're not creating distance between you and your opponent. And so that is a thing that it's, one is it's intent. You have to set up to know that's what you're trying to do.

And it's a mindset thing. It's getting out of that whole fast feet or slow feet don't eat. Come on, just move your feet quickly. And learning to like you have to apply force quickly and project your body. And that was just one of the things that we're working on with him because he had a tendency to like move his feet really quickly but not get his body going. And a lot of that is understanding it, intent, strength relative to your body weight is a huge factor, orientation of your force so you get to go in the right place is another factor. So just working on all those things. And so for him, obviously, it's paying off. He's doing well and he's more conscious of that.

So for these guys that are doing ladder drills but their feet are like super quick even though they're staying in place, generally they do have fast feet do you think it wouldn't be too difficult for them to now learn how to transfer that force in one direction or the other because there's some athletes that are doing ladder drills where they're just like their feet are slow as fuck but there's some that it looks really impressive although like you said it's still very static yeah so i absolutely just test ladder drills i think they're 100 waste of time okay they do multiple bad things like they they encourage fast feet movement over force production okay force production in a short period of time is what has to happen okay so fast feet eliminates all the force production and just it just considers time time. The other thing it does is it makes people change how they see things.

So if you watch someone doing ladders, they're focused on what their feet are doing and where they're going. They're not looking at what that's happening. In real sport, great performers are differentiated by how long they can keep their eye focused on a certain thing and move and read and use their eyes to make their feet go where they want to go doing a speed ladder completely detrains that aspect it takes that away from you looking down at your feet looking down at your feet and not moving reacting to something that's happening

okay that's a commonality in all sports where you have to be able to do that. So really good eye discipline, let's call it, dictates a lot of what you do with your feet. And then even if I move my feet well, and let's just say I move my feet well and I produce the requisite amount of force, if I don't go in the direction I need to go because my eyes aren't taking me where I want to go, it's not helping me that much anyway.

So I believe that when you're using a speed ladder and you're taking away that concept of using your eyes, it ruins a lot of things. So when you think about it, you have two major inputs into your body, your feet and your eyes. In terms of interpreting what's happening on the force on the ground, how you should move, it's like your body is this computer, your feet are the keyboard, your brain is the CPU. You want to get as as clean input as you can from your feet going in so that that that's not just a technical thing that's like a structure strong feet stiff ankles all those types of things but you're putting all the input in and your eyes are the other input so to me the speed ladder is detraining your eyes and it's detraining your feet because it's not focused

on producing force in a short period of time it It's just chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, move as quick as you can. The other thing is almost everybody can move their feet quick. They're not – the differentiation between how fast you move is linked to how much force you can produce in a short period of time, not just how fast you can move your feet. And if you look at something that's – if we break it down to even simpler, just straight linear sprinting, the thing that differentiates the elite guys from the developing counterparts is literally the amount of force that they produce and the time they spend on the ground.

So even if you took out a guy who's like pretty fast, like say a really good high school sprinter that runs like 10, 8, 400 meters, which for your average person, that's like very, very fast running. The difference between that guy and the guy that runs 9.8 or breaks a world record, the difference shows up not in frequency. It shows up in the time that they spend on the ground. So the average guy spends more time on the ground

where the elite guy is running over the ground short current contact time covering big distance the elite guy is able to generate more like i guess power or force into the ground and react to it differently react to it quicker get his foot off the ground whereas the other guy he's is generating a lot of force he is running a 10-8 which is flying but he because of that force that he generates downward, his foot stays on the ground a little longer. Because he can't do it in a short enough period of time, produce a big force in a short enough period of time. Sometimes he can't produce enough force or sometimes he can't do it in a short enough period of time. But the key is still, you have to produce a certain amount of force quickly to do it. And when you take away the

force component of it, you're not really training anymore. So quick application question for any coaches that are like working with high school footballers or soccer players, because I remember when I played soccer in high school and college, they still have us usually on ladders sometimes, right? What should they do instead? Combs? Or is there like, I know it depends on what they're trying to build. And usually when people are using ladders, they're trying to improve the athlete's ability to have good footwork, right? What should they do instead? Practice the skill of their sport. Okay. So you should use things like plyometrics,

sprinting, lifting, all those things to develop those biomotor abilities, and then go practice your sport. Do the right drills. Do them with real reaction to other stimuli and other things where you're going through that, and let that take care of the stuff instead of trying to make these little drills to mimic it that are not going to get close enough anyway. Yeah.

But are going to create some type of change that takes you farther away from what you really want to do in the sport. How do you train that? How do you train speed? How do you train somebody to have their foot on the ground less? that how do you train speed how do you train somebody to have less have their foot on the ground less yeah that's a that's a that's a whole podcast in and of itself i mean i think like you know if you think about like we could like squat and get stronger that way but it's like it sounds like it's a multi-factorial we got to get probably stronger and better in multiple disciplines for sure so strength relative to your body weight is a big factor.

But also the rate of force production is a huge factor, like how fast can you produce that force. What's an example of that? Something like a rack deadlift or something, be like an example of somebody being able to produce a lot of force or power in a short period of time? Or is Olympic lifting like that? Olympic lifting is a little bit more like that.

Throwing an object, jumping, jump squats, things like that would do a much better job of doing that. Jump squats? Yep, jump squats will do that. Okay. Like what kind of jump squats? Well, we'll come back to that for a second. Okay.

So the idea of being able to produce the short force in a period of time first you got to be able to produce the force then you have to have um you want all the things to be reactive and reflexive to be able to do this fast so in other words um you have to start producing force before you get on the ground so all like in running we call it front side mechanics all the stuff you need to do to drive down to the ground. So all like in running, we call it front side mechanics, all the stuff you need to drive down to the ground, that's where you got to produce a big amount of force. Then once you contact the ground, you have to have extreme stiffness, particularly at the ankle joint, so that you don't have these energy leaks and everything bleed. And then from there, just now you're just getting off the ground type of thing. And so you got to be able to generate

big force. You got to be in a short period of time. Then you have to orient those forces where they need to go because if you're not directing them where they need to go, you're only going to get some vector component of that force taking you where you want to go, which is going to be less. And so how that force is applied, just for example, does the force have to have a more vertical component or a horizontal component?

That depends on what you're trying to do, where you are, all these different types of things. But you have to learn those things, understand them, and train specifically for them. But I like to tell people, look, at the very basic level, it's not too complicated. It's try to move big weights fast, sprint okay sprint jump and throw heavy shit okay okay and then again how you do that like what percentage of what you do the sequencing of it the volume of that is much more complicated but the basics but those are really the basics of how you develop that type of stuff in my opinion and then uh you you were mentioning the jump squats like what kind of jump squats are you talking well again a jump squat like people

will look at a jump squat and call it like a plyometric activity but i don't really see it that way i see it more in the same way as a throwing is it's almost like a ballistic activity because it's just it's uh it doesn't have that same quick reaction, short turnaround ground contact time like regular jumping does. But it's really good for working explosion right through the whole and rate of force production right through the end of stuff. Now, when we do things like, say, a squat, a certain percentage of what you're doing is decelerating the weight because you're not jumping right through the end. So the end pitch, you're slowing it down. And so the lighter the load,

obviously the bigger percentage of the period where you have to decelerate that stuff. But as we try to go through that, what we're doing is we're doing something that doesn't really happen in sport, whereas at the end range of motion we're slowing down where we're normally going as fast as we can through that end range motion in real life so by doing something like a jump squat you're more closely mimicking what happens which is full force high speed right through the end of the range like someone taking

someone down or someone tackling somebody or whatever. For sure, or jumping or throwing or whatever the case may be. You're not slowing down at the end range. You're going as fast as you possibly can through the end range of motion. And so doing something like a jump squat will mimic that. And so that helps translate in many ways, and it also helps with the brain and firing frequency and coordination of firing and all those types of things. And so for that purpose, they can work well.

It's not necessarily the be-all and end-all. It's not as good as straight jumping and reactive plyometric activity for things like developing elastic potential energy, like how the muscle can just store energy and spring it off. And a lot of that just has to do with having stiff tendons, letting tendons do a lot of work. There's so many different components to what's happening here. And so that's why you want to have different modalities to train all these things, because one thing won't train. And what happens with a lot of people is they get stuck in the one thing.

And it could be the strength thing, because that's a rabbit hole that I've gone down and a lot of people have gone down and made the mistake of overemphasizing how much the strength is. And I mean, like I'm at super training, so this is going to sound like sacrilege because the adage here is strength is never weakness,

weakness is never a strength, right? But any strength you take to an extreme will become a weakness. I mean, that's just life. You know what I mean? Say that again for us. That's great. Yeah. Any strength taken to an extreme will become a weakness.

And I think that's not just training. That's life. You know, like as an example, you want to be ambitious, right? You want to go after stuff, big goals, change things, be super. But when you take ambition to an extreme, you'll never be content. If you're never content, you're never going to be happy. You know what I mean? It's just life.

Anything that you see as a strength that you take to an extreme will become a weakness. And in training, sometimes that happens with strength training because it feels so good and it's easy to get addicted to it and you can see the gains and feel it and measure it and do all types of things. But you can find yourself spending way too much time on stuff that is not going to take you where you want to go in your sport because you already have a sufficient level of it. And getting better at that is not going it's not going to help you anymore. And you're wasting training energy. You're adapting your muscles in a way that's more compliant and less elastic. There's a lot of things that go into it. And so you can do that. For a lot of people, that's not the case. They're just weak. But I mean, that happens, you know,

and it can go the other way. Can I ask you something? Sure. How, because this is great. You know, when we, we mentioned you on the podcast before, and when going through a lot of your stuff, it's, you use a lot of different modalities, but you don't overemphasize strength as you just explained in a great way. Like, yeah, too strong. You're not going to be able to move as well. This is where people talk about they're getting stiff and unathletic, but a certain level of strength is necessary. You have your athletes do so many things. When it comes to strength specifically, how would an athlete know, an athlete specifically, not like a power lifter or Olympic lifter or bodybuilder, but an athlete, a sport athlete, how do they know when they're maybe going too far when it comes to the strength?

Because yeah, like you mentioned, you can see the gains, but there's going to come a certain point where you're getting diminishing returns and then at some point negative returns for how much strength you're building. That's a great question. I mean, it's hard to know that other than experimenting through training and seeing what certain values are doing for you.

And you have to have specific KPIs, key performance indicators. And if you don't see those changing as the strength goes up, then you have to ask yourself the question, is this working? And is there a requisite amount of strength? And then there's also the whole idea of what is the amount of strength that's needed for that sport? So if my sport is required to be to run or jump, it requires a lot of strength. It's not going to require the same amount of strength as if I got to throw a shot put.

So right away, I already know that I'm in a little different category that I'm dealing with there, right? Even if we look at something that you'd say, say Olympic lifting is a great example, because when they're lifting, they're actually practicing their sport, which is another differentiation that we can come back to. But even in that case, you can look at that and say, okay, I need to clean and jerk 200 kilos. Obviously, I got to front squat 200 kilos or I can't get that up. So I want to have some reserve. I want to front squat 240, maybe 250 kilos, we'll say.

kilos we'll say but once i can do that there is no point in me trying to front squat 300 kilos when i when my pull is not as strong or i'm not doing other things as well i want to be able to like put my training energy into other things that are going to help me right and so in that particular case because it's so quantifiable and you're doing the actual support when you're lifting it's easy to measure but in other, it's not as easy to measure. But the idea of knowing what that limit is and looking at KPIs to figure that out is crucial. You've got to know that. How do you examine that, like when you're working with an athlete directly?

So we'll look at different things. I like to see, okay, first of all, what is your basic strength to body weight ratio? How much can you squat relative to your body weight? As an example, if the person is a good squatter, you can look at that. And then, okay, what does your standing broad jump look like? What does your standing three jumps look like? What does your overhead backwards with a 16-pound medicine ball look like and we're we're trying to see where this person um lines up in

terms of relative strength versus reactive strength versus explosive strength versus starting strength all these different types of things to see and then figure out what is that how does that apply to his sport or his position and what do we need to work on most and then we also have to look at like what is this person's gifting, right? Because I've had some guys who literally like I could not get them to do a – I mean eventually we did. But I couldn't get them to do a full body weight squat like Ashtagrav's full body weight – full squat with double their body weight. It was just an impossible thing to do. But I can get him to broad jump 11 feet, four inches. Okay. So that's an elastic dude. Okay. And that dude is going to be able

to do a whole lot of things, even though he doesn't, he's not as strong. Now, when I focus on getting a dude like that strong, he makes a big difference in all kinds of things. But when I got a dude who can squat two and a half times his body weight but he can only broad jump nine feet eight it's a whole different thing that I'm dealing with in terms of what I want to train and how I want to do it so you just have to expose them to different types of training and testing activities that stresses different components of the strength that you're that you want to do and then figure out what the weakness is, figure out how that matches up with their gifting,

figure out how that fits the demands of the sport, look at their level of competency, and make some decisions just how to fix it. And the other thing I will say is that's an ongoing process. It is like a huge everyday is a new assessment, look at it, see what's going on, and then dial all that in. And then in addition to that, you have to figure out how his soft tissue quality is affecting all of those things. Because every one of those things is drastically affected by your level of recovery and your level of soft tissue quality.

recovery and your level of soft tissue quality so sometimes guys respond to strength training in a relatively negative way in terms of tissue quality just in terms of the amount of work that it gets not all guys but some guys do they'll get stiffer easier takes a longer time for them recover their tissues tend to get more like compliant which is sometimes you want and less elastic sometimes and even when we train through full ranges of motion, that can still happen. And so you've got to be mindful from that from a therapy point and from a training point. But it's a big factor.

You know, it's the quality of the tissue determines how elastic and reactive that you can be. And in athletics, reactivity and elasticity is huge. Kyle Prochok and I, we talk about beef and meat all the time on the podcast. That's why we partnered with certified Piedmontese beef. But did you know this, that 85% of all grass fed grass finished beef in the United States is imported from other countries, 85%.

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links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes fuck yeah are you big on checking out like a bunch of matrix from like people where you know wearables and checking hrv and anything like that do you mess with stuff like that no i don't really um hrv has a place i don't use it a lot and wearables are extremely unreliable in terms of the accuracy of the information and even the how repeatedly like you know how repeatedly accurate they are too so i don't i don't rely on any kind of wearables rely on just interaction you see the guy coming in you worked with him yesterday his eyes are down and he's like not looking at you and he's kind of hiding in a corner with his hoodie on like you know that maybe yesterday was like a rough a rough workout for him where he's not in the same mood to train as normal and then

maybe through some of the warm-up is where you do a little evaluation on exactly what's going to go on for the day. That's pretty darn close to it. Yep. And so what happens a lot is we're doing some type of call it therapy in the warmup. Okay. So we're going through stuff, we're seeing stuff and we're putting inputs into the system as we do it. That input might be some type of hands-on stuff. It might be some type of stretch stuff. It may be body tempering. It could be a whole bunch of it, but we're putting inputs into the system and seeing how the body is reacting to it, okay?

We're also getting a chance to put our hands on soft tissue and feel the quality of it. You know, you can sometimes put your hands on a guy's hamstring and be like, oh my goodness, this thing is stiff as crap. Or like this feels like butter. You know, you can get all those ideas. And then you do some work on him. Then he moves. He gives you feedback. You do some work on him. He moves again. And you're sort of dialing in the system

as you go, putting different inputs in there and having him move in real time to see what it does. And it's fantastic for getting an idea of the athlete's readiness for that session and what you should do. Should you scrap the session altogether? Should we change it? Should we, like, how would we address volume and intensity? Like, you can get all that information from that. And then doing that repeatedly over time, you're learning about the athlete. You're teaching the athlete how to learn about himself to communicate that to you.

how to learn about himself to communicate that to you. And you're essentially creating a roadmap or a guideline for what specific inputs work for that athlete for these particular situations. And over time, as you learn the athlete's body and he learns his body, you can figure out this is the best way to recover. This is what we do best. This is how we, when we're not recovered,

this is what helps us the most. This is, okay, we did this volume of training yesterday and holy shit, this is what his body's like today. We probably did too much volume yesterday. Let's dial that back the next time and see what we're dealing with and all those types of things. Or maybe there's some environmental stressors

that we're not taking into consideration. How are you sleeping? How are you eating? All those types of things. It's just a constant communication and evaluation of what's happening. And then we go from there. As a young coach, when you were starting out, is this something that you didn't think about as much? Like how happy or unhappy the guy is or the psychology of things?

You might have just been like, we're going to do a five by five. We're going to do box squats because I heard those were good. Yes. As a young coach, there was more of that. I mean, I was very blessed to have some really good mentors when I was younger that kind of taught me the ways about that and how to evaluate these things. And so I wasn't as far behind. And even when I was really young in high school and stuff i i had some coaches that were like eastern block defectors

and they were like the stuff that they were telling me i didn't realize what the gold was at the time that i was getting until i kind of had to go away and see some other people and i was like you guys are morons like this doesn't make any sense to me and then i kind of that that was my first realization of like oh wait a minute this is like there's different ways to do this and there's some people out there that really have knowledge you know what i mean what kind of stuff was it i'm just curious like what like what was it that you're hearing that you're like that's crazy well just the idea of um for instance like the amount of volume that they wanted to do for training, especially as related to running training, as opposed to like technical stuff and intensity stuff and just teaching techniques, little things like, you know, setting up starting blocks and how you come out

and what you do. It's like, they just, they didn't really have a clue about the science behind it. It was just, this is kind of what somebody told me. So I'm going to show you how to do this and that, and this is how it's going to work. and they didn't have like a real good understanding of it and a lot of the training was run straight turn left keep going you know the more we can pound you the better it's going to turn out with any without any kind of real solid understanding of what was behind it whereas the the the eastern block guys they were a lot more like technique first short to long get explosive then do the other things. It wasn't the mindset of just mindlessly doing anything wasn't really there, you know?

And so that is something that I realized, you know, pretty early on and just, you know, I guess I was just blessed in a lot of ways. I mean, there's, this is a funny story. I was like probably, I don don't know 13 years old maybe and um at that time i was like in a little catholic junior high school and uh it was like the extent of the sports was hey tomorrow is track and field day next week is track and field day whatever we got and so i was pretty good at track that so you'd go out you'd run the um the school thing and win that and then go to regionals win that zone city win that just keep going on run the school thing and win that and then go to regionals, win that, zone, city, win that.

Just keep going on through the whole thing, right? But so I decided like I was going to train, okay? I didn't know shit about training or whatever, right? I had this Runner's World magazine that I bought and it talked about some guy doing 100 rep squats and this and that, right? Yeah. So I didn't know. I'm in my room. I'm doing 100 rep squats and I'm reading this magazine, right?

And my dad hears something's going on, right? So he comes down and he says, what are you doing? So I kind of explained to him. I told him, he's like, he looked at me. I don't know what he was thinking at the time, but in my mind, it was a look of disgust on his face. He's like, what are you doing? I go, no, no, no, no, no.

Ten minutes later, I was in his little dinky weight room we had there with this old Joe Weider cement weights with all that shit down there doing split snatches and squats and all that stuff. He's like, that's what you gotta do if you want to run fast. And I was like, yeah, at the time I thought he was crazy. But I look back on that now and I'm going,

that was pretty cool. He knew how to do some Olympic lifting even? yeah oh yeah because that's what he did back in his day so it was like literally i was doing split snatches probably 10 minutes after that it's pretty funny wow um who were some of your mentors well charles pollock was a big mentor for me and uh dan paf a great track and field coach, was another huge mentor for me. I think in terms of my philosophies, I would say those two guys are the biggest influencers for sure on me. And I think I'm probably a blend of their two philosophies and just adding in pieces of what I figure works and doesn't work as I kind of move along. I'd say they're my two biggest. What do you think some of the things that someone like Marinovich had right and maybe what are some things that maybe he had wrong

they have some really cool training methods yeah I mean you're talking lots of the plyometrics and the jumping and stuff like that I think I that stuff is great I think it can be overdone but introducing that early I think is is super good there's a a common belief in especially in america that you have to have a certain amount of strength before you start doing plyometrics and it's commonly thrown out there like you got a body weight squat or squat your body weight two times before you start plyometrics or do this and that and that's like that's so bullshit it It's not even funny. If you go to any playground in America,

you're going to see kids doing plyometrics all over the place. They can't squat their body weight and they're doing great. Like we kind of underestimate how strong you have to be to start doing that type of stuff. And just the kind of breaking down of that and getting in and doing all that explosive work and all the jumping work and all that. I think that stuff, that's a great thing um the volumes of stuff that those

guys did i mean i think it's it's hard on a lot of people i think there could also be more of a just a straight up strength training component to that you know um and then it's also it can't be a one-size-fit-all you have to figure out how much that stuff is used and who to use it for and those types of stuff. But I think in terms of pushing forward the idea of like using elastic strain energy and getting tendons strong and dynamic for sport, I think it was great for that type of stuff. What about training with like a tempo? I know that's a big thing of like Charles Poliquin. What about training with like a tempo? I know that's a big thing of like Charles Poliquin, but I think sometimes when it comes to training for a sport, we get a little confused. You know, you're like, well, why would I really do like a full range of motion squat if, you know, the knee's not bending that much in almost every sport? Like I'm not getting in that position. Sometimes people think that way. And then also like Charles Poliquin, he would have a tempo a lot of times with a lot of things.

But there's specific reasons for it. So I think we get confused. What's some of your process? Do you go in with like an intent? Like I'm going to, this person's going to do this full range of motion squat because it's going to equal this and this person is going to be utilizing a tempo specifically for this movement because it's going to equal that?

Yes, sort of. So first we'll deal with the full range of motion. I think in terms of joint health, in terms of tissue quality, in terms of being able to be strong at end ranges to protect yourself and also being strong at end ranges so that you sort of disinhibit the nervous system from trying to protect you when you have to be fast at those end ranges yeah that stuff is crucial you know what i mean and if you never get there then you're you're going to miss a big piece of it. Now, there is a space for doing other things like lower box step-ups, half squats, all those types of things. But I like to use that stuff later in the season. It's way easier to recover from that stuff.

It's specific. You can get strong. It's great. But the big range of motion stuff, I like to keep in for long periods of time, start them early and get people into those positions. It also challenges you from a mobility perspective and it forces you to fix certain things and exposes you to certain things that you may not even realize you have an issue with. And it can change your mindset on what you need to focus on too. Like, example, squatting, for instance, at full depth and doing those types of things.

Um, it can really open up your eyes and realize the level of ankle mobility that you don't have. Me? I noticed that a while ago. And what you need to do. And like, it's funny to me how people focus so much on bracing for squatting and bracing for deadlifting and doing all this type of stuff. But they – not they ignore it, but they don't put the same type of emphasis on what ankle mobility does. And I have seen poor ankle mobility mess up more people's backs than a lack of bracing has ever done.

And the funny part about this is we know this intuitively. Just think about it this way. How many times have you took a person who's having trouble squatting, said, let's go over here and let's work on some bracing techniques. Bing, bing, bing. Do a couple of things. And come back, put them on the squat rack and go, holy shit, I can't believe how good that looks. That's happened zero times to me ever in my life. Okay. back put him on the squat rack and they go holy shit i can't believe how good that looks that's happened zero times to me ever in my life okay how many times you've taken the guy and said you know

what let's put some wedges on your heel and you go holy shit you can squat and you can do load right so right there you already know intuitively how important that is but people don't focus on it and the lack of mobility in the ankle is going to lead someone to move a different way right they can no longer lower themselves the way they need to and so therefore they may lean forward or do whatever they need to do to try to get low enough exactly right which is going to cause more issues then i can't be fixed by bracing you know and so i mean little things like that get exposed when you start doing all this full range motion stuff and it forces you to fix a lot of things, which ultimately have carry over to other things, right? So, you know, at the end of the day, being able to be in an accelerating position with your knee over your toe on the ball, your foot driving requires a ton of ankle mobility, which can be trained by doing full depth squats

if you're properly addressing the ankle mobility as you go. So there's carryover in that sense, even though you might not see a carryover from a specific hip and knee angle, but it all matters. And like I said, the progression should always be full range of motion to a partial range of motion. The other thing is in terms of hypertrophy, you're talking about stretch media hypertrophy, which means you need to go through a full range of motion. The other thing is in terms of hypertrophy, you're talking about stretch-mediated hypertrophy, which means you need to go through a full range of motion to create that stretch. Hypertrophy is not always the goal, but if it is the goal,

that's definitely something to consider. And then when you're talking about sports where you're going to be forced into positions of deep flexion, big extension, whatever the case may be, you need to protect yourself. So you need to expose yourself to those things and expose yourself with load

so that you can properly protect yourself. And that's a huge factor for range of motion training. There have been multiple times where you've mentioned soft tissue quality. I hope we spend some time on it because one thing you notice is, even if you like athletes that are maybe they're super focused on powerlifting and you touch their muscles, there's like tension. It's like it's hard.

You can't get anywhere, right? So some people will take that and be like, okay, well, if these athletes lift too much, they become too stiff and then they can't be a good athlete. But you mentioned something where there's certain athletes that have a different response to strength training. You work with athletes that they can lift a lot, but their tissue quality doesn't change. And then some have a bad reaction to a lot of strength training. So first off, how can an athlete tell if they don't have good tissue quality if they're an athlete? How can they improve their tissue quality? And what do you notice with athletes that have bad tissue quality?

I asked too much shit there, but we'll be able to talk about it quite a bit. So what I see most is, well, before we even get into tissue quality, let's go back to the big stiff guy that you're talking about. So part of that is a specific adaptation that he needs to do what he needs to do. He needs to be stiff. So if we look at the best power lifters in the world, they're some of the most dysfunctional people out there for anything else other than doing what they need to do. But that's the specific adaptation to that, to a sport. So some of that is going to happen. But now coming back to the soft tissue thing is I see it show up most in reactive stuff.

When you have to be reactive, like bounce, jump, run, those types of stuff, because the tissues need to be able to like contract and then relax as quickly as possible and repeat that process over again. And you need to be able to use reactivity to assist in that process. So let's say, for instance, I'm going to go like this. I'm going to bang my finger down on the thing like this as hard as I can go and go as many times as I can. I can get pretty good and I can go pretty fast and try really hard, but I'm never going to be able to go as fast or as hard as if I can do this. Okay? Yeah.

So that is loading the tissue, storing energy, and then having it be elastic and make it work. Okay? So now imagine if this tissue was like, say, a rubber band, but the rubber band was cold. It just came out the fridge. It's not going to do this very well. Could snap. Could snap. It's for sure not going to do it as well as if band was cold. It just came out the fridge. It's not going to do this very well. Could snap.

Could snap. That's for sure not going to do it as well as if it was warm. Bad tissue quality is like having this thing cold. Okay? If I have to go like this with my bicep, okay? If my tricep is super tight, I may as well have a weight in my hand because I'm overcoming the stiffness in my tricep to do this. Now, when that becomes a multi-joint system of a whole bunch of things moving in a huge agonist and antagonistic setups, then your ability to relax antagonistic muscles so the agonist can

fire better and then switch back and forth between those two things, it's crucial to developing fast and reactive movement. And so part of that is a skill thing, no question, it's crucial to developing fast and reactive movement. And so part of that is a skill thing. No question, it's a nervous system skill thing. But part of it is dependent upon the quality of your soft tissue. And the more your sport demands that type of movement, the higher the premium on the soft tissue quality. And then you'll notice it show up in those types of activities a lot more than you'll notice it show up in those types of activities a lot more than you'll notice it show up in weightlifting type activities.

And so that's one way to tell is how are you doing on other things. Can slow training build speed? Slow training, what do you mean by slow training? Like a four-second eccentric on a squat or something like that? Yes and no. So a big part of speed training is the eccentric component. And it's a, the hard part about training the eccentric is that it's stronger than the

concentric, right? So how can you get enough load on to do eccentric training properly? And one of the ways to do that is you can't. you slow you put over a long period of time that's a great way to start off it's a great way to uh to start building all that eccentric stronger there so have more of a stimulus by just slowing it down a little bit yeah but then you need to go into something that's a much faster eccentric action for that to really carry over you you know? And what's interesting is certain types like yielding plyometrics, or sorry, the yielding isometrics, where you're like holding the weight, not which overcoming, but you're holding and stopping it from collapsing.

More and more research shows that that actually is behaving more like a very fast eccentric contraction. So those things can work really well to do that. And then doing things like we talked about before, where there is a fast stretch shortening cycle, like the plyometrics, the sprinting, all those types of things, trains that eccentric activity really quickly.

So having a long time under tension is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And it's a great base to start your eccentric training from. And it's also a good hypertrophy stimulus. But in terms of having really good speed carryover, you have to progress to a way faster eccentric load. You know what I mean? That's no different than sometimes people will use bands to yank them down

through a really fast eccentric and try to bounce out from it. Or having weight releasers so that you can overload that eccentric with load rather than with time. And then all those different types of things. It's another way of getting a faster eccentric going, if that makes sense. Improving your sleep quality is as easy as shutting your mouth. And what I mean by that is putting some tape on, breathing through your nose will increase your sleep quality.

It's no longer just something that only the bros do. It's now been researched and people understand that if you can breathe through your nose while you're asleep, you'll have better sleep quality and you will wake up more rested. Hossa's tape is also really awesome because I know what I used to do. I used to use a little bit of a cheaper tape

and every time I'd wake up in the morning, the tape would be somewhere else on the bed or on my face, but it wouldn't be on my mouth anymore. But hostage tape, if you have a beard or if you don't, will stay comfortably on your mouth all through the night. And if you're someone who has a problem breathing through your nose, hostage also has nose strips. So you can place those on your nose while you're asleep

or if you want to be like one of those Hermosi guys, you can wear it during the day. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at hostage tape.com slash power project where you guys will receive an entire year supply of mouth tape and the nose strips for less than a dollar a night again that's over at hostage tape.com slash power project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes um is there an advantage of having hypertrophy, like having bigger legs? Will that potentially help you run faster, help you move faster? Or is it more about being stronger and more elastic?

Yes, having a bigger leg can help you run faster, but it has limitations because you've got to move all that weight. You've got to move all that weight. You've got to fuel all that. But in short, yes, because you have cross-sectional area of the muscle and then you've got the nervous system innervation of that. So you've got how well the nervous system communicates in terms of firing frequency, coding and synchronization, all these types of things that are happening,

how fast are you going to send the message there? How coordinated is the message? So like I'm going to tell my arm to do this. So I send a message to my biceps. Okay, boom, it does this. And then there's the other part of it, whereas if I've got thousands of these motor units. So let's just say that for simple purposes,

there's only 10 in my bicep. So I'm sending this message to these 10 guys. I'm doing it really quickly. But now I need these 10 guys. If you look at it as a tug-of-war, the 10 guys have to all pull at the same time for that force to sum it for me to get the maximum. They're not in time.

So I've got to get all that lined up. Then I've got to worry about,'ve got to get all that lined up. Okay. Then I got to worry about, okay, while I'm doing this, am I relaxing the backside? So I'm not fighting against each other. All those things have to train.

So you have all these nervous system qualities that you're training, but you're still going to be somewhat limited by the cross-sectional mass you have. So both of them are factors. It's just a matter of where you are. If the athlete already has sufficient cross-sectional mass and it's a nervous system problem, adding more mass is not necessarily going to help him. The other thing is when you don't, even if you have some mass but it might not be as

much as you would like to have, it puts more stress on your nervous system because you just have to do more work that would be easier if you had more cross-sectional mass. Here's a classic example. When I was training for a bobsled, I was pretty light and I was always trying to get heavier and heavier and heavier because that's just kind of the way I started out. And one of the things for me was I didn't have enough mass on my legs at the time, but I was extremely dialed in and wired from a nervous system perspective. Okay. So for me, if I was going to go to the gym and say we're going to do a back squat. Anything less than probably double my body weight was a waste of time. It just wasn't even really work for me. So the amount of load I would put on my nervous system to get a workout was huge.

Once I gained more mass and I had more cross-sectional area to do that, it totally changed how fatigued I got from doing those workouts, because now I had more cross-sectional area like helping me do that stuff. It wasn't as like super nervous system intensive to move all the weights all the time. And so my strength to weight ratio slightly diminished as I put on more mass.

What did you weigh? I mean, I was as light, the very first bobsled camp I went to, I was 177 pounds, tiny. Squatting 400 easy? 500. 500. Yeah. There you go. And so, that's funny.

I don't know if I ever told you that story. That's how I first met Charles, actually. Did you know that? No, I did not. So I was making the transition to bobsled. It was 1994. And I went to Calgary to do this camp that kind of got sprung on me, right? I didn't really know that it was coming. The night before, I met Charles at his house. We were talking and stuff like that. Obviously, I knew who he was. We got into all kinds of science stuff. We were like bro-talking. It was pretty cool, right?

Yeah. And then I was there with another guy who was also going to try out. He was like a big dude. And he's probably like big. He was probably only like 220. But to me, he was big at the time, right? And we both came.

So the next day, he had to leave to go to Montreal to do some contract stuff he had. So he wasn't there for the testing. So they had had some modified testing. And we did back squats that day for some reason. Well, in every area of the test, there was always a front squat. So that day, I was 177 pounds. And I back squatted 500 pounds, classic 401 tempo type stuff like you had set up for all the testing, right?

Ask to grass type stuff. And then they sent the results out to Charles in Montreal. And Charles called back the next day and said, hey, wait a minute. Was this the little skinny black dude that did this or the big white dude? This is confusing. I don't understand what's going on here. And they're like, no, it was the little skinny black dude. And they're like, okay.

He's like, give me his number. And that's basically how we started. He's like, I need to know this guy. It was pretty funny. Yo. Plus that tempo. You were going down for four seconds. Yeah.

He was pretty strict about that in testing, yeah. Well, I'm curious about this. Mark did ask about it, but what do you think, if applied correctly, can be the importance of tempo for people? Because the reason why I ask is like, I noticed when some lifters lift, there seems to be no intention with the way they do their reps. So it's kind of like they're just going through the motions and they're not maybe really feeling certain things

where they could be or like feeling tension where they could be trying to like get some tension. So how do you think lifters should think about using tempo? That's a great question. One of the things that's good for is reinforcing position and technique. And obviously, especially under a load, if drop as fast as you can so that you can get some momentum to go, that almost always fails because you lose position. That's when you have to get slow and tight and be focused on exactly where you are all

the time to go. And slowing the tempo down really helps you do that. So it teaches you a lot of stuff. It's great. I think also if you're doing a lot of other training outside that's very fast and eccentric all the time then this is a another alternative way to get a stimulus to make it work and um i think those are the big benefits of it you know and obviously the hypertrophy stimulating effect yeah is there a little benefit to just having less weight you know because it might

just be like less over trained and maybe the body's not getting – it's still challenging. It's going to make you sore and stuff like that. But maybe there's less stiffness because now you have 20 or 30 less pounds on the bar because you're moving it with intent. Yeah, but that is a good point. But I think what you'll find is the longer and longer you train with those types of tempos, it doesn't work that way. You can handle huge weights and sometimes more weight when you have that slow tempo control. So it doesn't quite work.

In the beginning, it does, but after time, it doesn't really work that way. What you got going on over there, Andrew? We've been talking about so much. And, I mean, you are probably the best coach that I can even think of. You know so much about so much. He's overqualified to be on this podcast. You can just say it. I don't know about all that.

Well, yeah, I would agree with you more, to be honest. But you said something in the gym, and it kind of blew my mind. And it was almost heartbreaking. But when you were kind of saying, like, if you were a young coach, and if you wanted to be successful, this is what you had to do. Can you reiterate what you were explaining? Yeah. I was saying that if you're a young coach now, like you really get it now, and you want to become successful. And we define successful as doing well financially, being well-known, however we're going to define that success.

doing well financially, being well-known, however we're going to define that success. The simple truth of the matter is that your path to being successful is going to be infinitely faster and probably ultimately higher if you focus on learning everything you can about algorithms and social media than sports science. And that's just the sad truth of where we are. You know what I mean? And that concerns me for where the future of this goes.

But I guess the flip side of that is maybe it's some good information that might reach a whole lot more people. So I guess there is some tradeoff there, but it's definitely a concern. Yeah, it'll probably be easier for the coaches that truly love to coach to be able to like – I don't know. People will eventually be able to read through the BS and they'll be able to see like the phonies and the fakes because as the likes start to dwindle or whatever, they kind of fade off. But the guys that are still instructing really good information are still going to rise to the top no matter what. If they get the audience.

I would say maybe sticking on that topic a bit, who are some coaches that are a little underground that maybe more people should know about? That's a good question. Because a lot of the coaches are, especially track coaches, it seems like they're really buried under. And I think maybe some of them want to be hanging out down down there but are there a couple you can kind of think of that we should be checking out i think that um since you mentioned the track coaches and the

speed coaches type thing i think the i don't know if these guys are so much underground but i think certainly in many communities they are is altus and they have uh they're like a track type based group but they do all types of uh speed type work for and they're like a track-type-based group, but they do all types of speed-type work, and they're really based on coach education. And they do some really good stuff there, and obviously Dan Paff is the guy who's really behind that, but now Stuart McMillan is really taking it over and running it. Dan's kind of packing it in a little bit but he's still really involved and i think they

do a really good job in terms of uh unpacking the science and and teaching people the right way to go about learning about things in terms of um speed as far as speed development goes i think they're they're really good at that and i think that's something that someone is interested in that would go and i think they do a lot they do i I think that's something that if someone is interested in that would go. And I think they do a lot. They do a lot. I think I know they do internships and those types of things, which is really good. And I think that is another key message I would say for the young people is you got to get out there.

You got to find mentors. You got to do the work. You got to spend the time. You got to sacrifice some money in the beginning and just learn what you got to learn because it's not as easy as you think it is. And what happens now is people try to create a system for everything and a checkbox for everything because those things become scalable and they become saleable. But in real high-level performance coaching, there isn't really a system and a checkbox. It's learning the underlying components so that you can create systems to fit athletes and learning how to manipulate those and manage them in real time and going through. That's a big factor. I think it's – you just have to say, okay, I realize that what I want is a 10-year internship to get where I want to go and I can't get it from a TED Talk. That's just how it's going to be.

I got to put in the time. I got to get it. That's that. And the other thing that I would say is that – and I try to do this a lot. that, and I try to do this a lot, as a strength coach, as a speed coach, whatever, I sit back and I say, okay, what is it that I think I know that I'm sure about? This stuff is immutable. This is what it is. And then I spend time questioning that because that's where you go wrong, right? It's the old Mark Twain. It's not what you don't know. It's where you go wrong right it's the old mark twain it's not what you don't know it's what you think you know that just ain't so right and so it's you got to be

careful as a coach if you want to like learn and grow questions are more important than answers okay and i've had some people come to me and do internships over years and stuff like that and some of them love it some are really frustrated about it because they always leave And I've had some people come to me and do internships over years and stuff like that. And some of them love it. Some of them are really frustrated about it because they always leave with more questions than what – instead of answers. And I think that's great. Some of them get real frustrated because they wanted a cookie cutter. This, I can go back and apply this.

They might even see something that you're doing and they might ask you and say, oh, okay, this is how we do it. And you're like, for now. That's exactly right. This is the best I got for now. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's a, like, got to be acceptable and good answer that you kind of have to learn. So I do try to spend some time, and it's hard because you're married to these things and you've got your own confirmation biases and you've got to try and work through those.

But you can go a long time running up this ladder and find out it's leaning against the wrong wall. You know, and that's just not what you want to do. And I think that happens a lot in our industry. And there's just, there's also a pull between like, Oh,

we're this evidence-based guy and I'm science, this and that versus like, this is what's really happening and stuff. And you got to follow the science you got to be with it but that stuff is 15 years behind what people are really doing like so you have to be mindful of stuff understand it like really respect the opinions of some of the science stuff that's coming out but you also have to know okay i've seen this and i've done this and this is what it did for this, and understand it. So like this example I use all the time.

I know grass is green, okay? So if you want to talk to me about studies that tell me that grass might not be green, I don't give a shit what you got to say. Now, if you want to tell me that, oh, the whole idea of chlorophyll is not right. That's not why grass is green. I'm ready to listen to all that stuff. But when you start talking about stupid shit that says it's not green, I know. And honestly, sometimes some of the stuff that comes out from the science evidence-based part of it is really that. It's trying to tell you that grass is not green. And that you have to be able to say, like, nope, I know what I know.

But then there's other stuff where it goes, hmm, I should really question why this is happening. And that can get me other answers. And it's key to evaluate that and understand it so you don't go chasing down the wrong rabbit holes. I'm kind of all over the place here, but those are kind of how I think about the world, I suppose. No, that's really well said. It's hard to figure out what's, you know, it's hard to figure out what's, what's true or what's real about a certain thing. I mean, we see so much in fitness, it's changing all the time, which is a great thing. And we see a lot of people, you know, doing more like, you know, functional stuff. What are some of your thoughts on

people just, they're not, they're not really lifting the same way they used to. There's memes now like of showing the gyms from the 80s versus showing some of the stuff that's going on today. And I think maybe some of it is – it looks like some people are trying to maybe instill some more athleticism, maybe bring some more movement into their lifestyle or into their fitness. But one thing I have noticed is that there seems to be more people doing it because it does seem to be more inviting than a bench squat or deadlift. Well, I think what you're seeing is a swing in the pendulum. It's been so far the other way, and people have pushed the whole, you need to be strong on these lifts and they fixes everything, you know, like, you know, squat double your body

weight, look, your cancer doesn't matter. Just like, whatever. It's just that it will. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, people have gone the other way and they've gone too far. You know, I think that's, I think that's normally how we work. We have these, something goes too far, you see it. It might be politics, it might be whatever, something happens.

It goes too far one way, then the reaction to it is it's so far the other way. And some of the stuff you're doing, you're seeing, okay, it's great. It's highlighting the fact that we've been missing a component of training that's very useful for what we want to do, but it's gone so far the other way now that it's made its point, but now it's gone into craziness. It's just not applicable. But I will say this, though. If some people just like doing that and they gravitate towards that and it's great and it gets them going,

do it all day long. I don't really care because if it's being sedentary or doing that, then do that. But when it, when you're talking about sport performance and, you know, ideal setups, then you have to get into a whole different category of what that stuff can can do. You know, so it makes sense when it comes to like some of this stuff, it's great for a lot of people to get in. It's great for a lot of people to, especially if they haven't been moving their body, they can start moving. But when it comes to like an athlete you're working with, an elite level athlete, college, high school, NFL pros,

it may not be enough stimulus for that individual. It may not be enough stimulus, or it may be the wrong stimulus. It may be the wrong stimulus. You know? And so it's just a matter of, again, it's one of the things that some of these things can address is increasing the athlete's level of competency to be able to do things. Okay.

So when the athlete is missing some of that stuff, it can help with that. But in terms of training for the demands of its sport, it's going to do very little to help that. So you kind of have to make that differentiation and see what can help you the most from that type of stuff. Kind of curious about, you know, one thing that we've gotten into a lot for the past few years has been like breathing. We started getting into like nasal breathing, like back in 2016, that made a big difference for my endurance of jujitsu and recovery and sleep. But I'm curious when your athletes are lifting and the reason why i ask this is because i know it's when a lot of athletes lift whether they're

new or whether they've been in the gym for a while it seems to be like there's there's movements where they're really holding their breath a lot i know like need to create stiffness but i wonder do you pay attention to the way your athletes breathe when they do things under load do you give them any cues in that or is it or not really yes for sure we pay attention to it from the perspective of like you said creating stiffness but also from creating the ability to relax and the ability to recover and so that's another thing we talked about like um the sort of core stiffness or the bracing component versus ankle and bleeding stuff One of the things about all the stiffness core bracing type stuff is it doesn't travel well.

So in other words, it's great for squatting and that's about it. Okay. So you can't have somebody running 100 meters who needs to have a high degree of stiffness for sure, but they can't brace the same way to run 100 meters as you're doing trying to squat because you'll burn out by 30. It's a whole different – you'll be too damn stiff. It's a whole different – but there's still a need for bracing in that sense. So – and part of that is a breathing thing.

And part of it is can you breathe properly not just from a recovery perspective but so that you can have a certain level of stiffness that you need but still be able to like function like for long periods of time and get in the air you want to do. And then there's also the idea of breathing in the recovery phase and how, you know, how that works too. Like, can you become a better nose breather and will that help your recovery? There's all those types of things. And then there's even breathing in soft tissue for me. So like if I'm, let's say I'm on you and I've got a 135-pound roller on you and I'm tempering your quads and we're going through a spot. And it's like you're in a brutal spot. If I say, okay, wait a minute. I'm going to start rolling this thing.

We're going to do some box breathing. You're going to breathe in for a five-second count and you're going to hold it for a five-second count. And then we're going to breathe it out for five seconds. But I'm going to roll this, and I want to make sure that I get this temporary tool to the point of where it's the worst for you as you're trying to hold it. So we go, we roll to find that spot. That's when you're holding, and we leave it on there, and then you relax, and you breathe it out. We just go through it straight as a box breathing, moving through that type of soft tissue work. That can have drastic effects on how quickly your muscles soften up. So breathing from that perspective is a factor too. Stretching, like learning how to breathe while you're going through stretching,

whether it's static stretching, dynamic stretching, whatever, all those types of things respond to breathing. And so, yeah, it's important to cue that and use it the best way you can. It gets tricky when it's like a super complex, fast-moving type of stuff because you can't be thinking about your breathing at that point in time. But if you've practiced it doing enough low-level things, then it can usually carry on.

And it can become kind of like second nature if you've done it enough. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It becomes second nature if you've done it enough yeah become second nature for sure and then maybe even if you had a reason for it you can breathe like during an exercise right like you're doing a squat you could hang out at the bottom if if it's appropriate weight let all your air out and right i mean 100 if you have a reason for it you're trying to uh have more

mobility or you're trying to have a whatever desired result you're looking for you know sometimes uh what you're looking for is just better range of motion like just do the lift better do the lift differently or squat a little deeper and a great way to squat deeper is let some of that air out for sure like let's not forget that's not new 50 years ago we were doing breathing squats and pullovers you know yeah super setting them to to get an effect you know so it's it's expanding expand the rib cage for sure yeah i was actually gonna i wanted to ask kind of about what mark mentioned there because i do some of i do a lot of that stuff where i'll like squat with a load and i'll breathe at the bottom while also maintaining stiffness enough where I don't lose position and I come out because in grappling you

need you're never going to hold your breath in grappling you do that you're fucked like you're really fucked what are your thoughts on like how that could be beneficial like and what benefit it could bring or maybe why it might not be so useful like what are your thoughts on doing that type of stuff in general? Well, I think learning to differentiate sort of breathing muscles from bracing muscles is a key thing. You can work with that in that. It's just when you don't want to do it on a huge load. If it's on a huge load, you want to be protected maximally.

But trying to do that is an ideal thing. And I think there are many ways to do it. I also think you can use your breathing to control your state of arousal. So if you need to get up, you're going to breathe differently than if you need to relax. And that could be for a lift. It could be after a lift to recover. All those things are affected by breathing. And so if you learn to control that, you learn to understand what the response is to that

and what your stress response is to that, then you can learn to breathe those things away and breathe yourself into a certain level of readiness, whether that means you need to come up or you need to come down. Because some guys... When you say up, you mean like nervous system or like coming up from a squat?

No, nervous system. N coming up from a squat no nervous system and some guys are naturally one way or the other too so like for instance um i'm the kind of person who i would need to calm myself i can just sit in the chair think about competing and raise my heart rate 40 beats it It's like I'm very excitable. So for me, to do stuff that excites me is counterproductive. Because if you look at it as like an inverted U-dose curve, where there's a certain level of excitement and performance, you get too excited, it starts to come down the other way, right? So for me, I would have to really sort of calm myself down. And for other guys, it's different.

They got to get up and go. And so breathing, how you breathe can help you with that too what are some examples of that because like i think there are some people that can probably be like oh yeah i'm definitely the always excited one and there are some people like me who's like i'm always the chill one right and i'm like it's really hard for me to get myself revved up for shit how do both athletes maybe need to handle their breath when it comes to that it's great so i think that um focusing on like long exhalations like just breathing stuff out for a long time and slowing your breathing and doing those types of things are going to be really good for sort of like calming you down and centering you and getting there. But then just being like a quick type stimulating type breathing can,

you know, help you get the other way too. So it's a matter of learning like what, what works for you the most. And first of all, learning like who you are, are you, are you a really excitable guy that needs to calm down or are you the opposite way around, you know? And that, that bleeds into like supplementation too like how are you going to use like some things that you might want to think that would really get a one person up might take the person up too far and take them down the other side of the curve so there's that to figure out in there as well but i think learning and utilizing breathing techniques can really help with that gotcha paparazzi family we love wearing vr clothing for such a long time now because

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project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes for there's some ways to get your breathing uh kind of the way that you that way that you're mentioning um through you were mentioned the tempering you know so there's some way like if you do tempering that might get you to breathe uh quite a bit right yeah it might it might teach you how to like breathe through like pain points or and then get your brain connected to like how breathing affects tightness in your body you know like sometimes you can change like your overall resting muscle tone just by like how much you breathe like just laying down and intentionally doing certain types of breathing can just totally relax you to a point where you kind of get up and start moving again

and you're literally looser you haven't stretched, you haven't done anything but you just have overall less tension in your body and there's some weird shit you can do too like physical manipulation that I know you and Charles and some other people have gotten into where you rub the chest

or you do something painful to somebody like pressure points in the face and stuff like that right charles pull your earlobe those are yeah yeah yeah charles pulling on my earlobe and taking the pen cap and digging into my thumb those are stimulatory things that you get in yeah yeah again you're just you're putting more inputs into the system and the body responding to it in different ways and that happens with pain too you know There are certain things. It's funny because we think about when we're doing soft tissue work or other things that we're doing that we're going to relieve some pain by putting something into the system that changes tissue or changes movement,

does something that's going to reduce your pain. But also there's ways to put inputs into the system that are that might just be distracting inputs okay so a good way to think about it is like this um like i'm sitting around here i'm standing now i've been on and off of planes i've had enough movement my back is kind of stiff i'm not really in pain but i have like some sort of stiffness now right if i said andrew come over here and hit me over the thumb with a hammer, my back's not going to hurt anymore, right? Because now I'm distracted by this here. Andrew's a doctor, right? I can fix it. Yeah, exactly.

So when we're putting something, obviously we're not trying to create pain somewhere else, but by putting some type of distracting input other places, it can reduce your perception of what that pain is doing there. I think that's going. I mean, I guess we're going off on tangents now, but so much of this pain stuff is people underestimate the emotional and mental part of pain and pain as it relates to training, pain as it relates to injury and all those types of things

but it is huge you know i mean i'll give you two examples okay if you've ever raised kids you know this okay you got a two-year-old kid normal he runs around he falls down laughs he gets up it's not a big deal you take that same kid when he's an hour late for his nap and falls down and does that, all of a sudden, it's a nightmare. It's like you just dropped him off a cliff because he's tired, he's in a whole different spot. We don't lose that as we get older. We just internalize it and handle it.

So when you're tired and you're fatigued and you're hurt, shit just hurts more, right? Or here's another example. I see this hurt, shit just hurts more, right? Yeah. You know? Or here's another example. I see this all the time with football players, right? So we play a Monday night football game, okay? It's a knockdown, drag out. It goes to overtime and we take like 80, 90 snaps, okay? We win that game.

Shit hurts a lot less than when you lose that game. That's just how it is. That's a total emotional response to how these things are happening. And I think you see that with recovery too. You win that game, you recover faster and better than when you lose that game. You have mental stress going on. You have all these things going on. It changes what your body's doing.

So that stress, that emotional stuff, all that stuff affects your recovery and your preparedness. And so whatever you can do to manage that stuff, it's so much more than people give you credit for. Like it's a big component of managing training in my opinion. That's overlooked. If they lost Monday night football, then maybe when they come in Tuesday to work out, you just order some pizza, sit down, no training for the day. I don't know. I don't know. That might work.

I don't know. But definitely, you definitely got to know. And like when I, even when I write programs for guys that are in season, it's a tricky thing to do because you're not there. You don't know what's happening. You're communicating with them, but I always write two versions. So this is what we're going to try and do for our leg day early in the week. Say it's on a Monday after the Sunday game. But this is what you do if you feel good and feel good you can do multiple tests to

figure out if you're feeling good and this is what you do if you don't feel so good and never try to do the one never feel you know like and some guys you gotta dial back all the time you know like you're gonna go like a james harrison he's gonna want to do the month no matter what i gotta you gotta literally try and stop him from doing that stuff you know but it's really important if they if you don't dial that stuff in over that stuff will catch up to you fast you know you'll burn out pretty quick so that's kind of a way to like if an athlete doesn't feel necessarily good or if they're on a constantly losing team sometimes they're not feeling good those not feel good workouts can give them a win because they're not crazy hard for them.

A hundred percent. Yeah. Okay. A hundred percent. And they're still getting through it. They're still maintaining or having some type of stimulus to try and maintain that strength as you go through. Another like interesting segue into this too is with injury stuff. Okay.

So people will get injured and they just get into the rehab and they're going and they're going and everything is let's recover let's get this let's get this fixed let's put all this time into this and what i find with those people is so much of that is negative energy because it's associated with this injury coming back from injury but if you let them go balls to the wall hard on a workout completely unrelated to that injury, that makes them feel like we're actually doing something and accomplishing something now, that significantly accelerates how fast they can recover from an injury. So let's say you've got like an MCL sprain that's going to put you out three weeks,

you're going to come back and you're just hyper-focused and you're doing the rehab. The guys who like dial in and like, wait a minute, I got three weeks to get my upper body as ridiculously strong as possible. And they work super hard at that while they're going through that rehab process. They get better faster than the guys who don't do that and they just focus on the rehab and i think it's just a matter of you need to give yourself that positive accomplishment of i've been able to do this type thing and it helps you recover better do you think any supplements are helpful when someone does uh have a knee injury or have you noticed uh you know people talk about like curcumin and uh i don't know there's all kinds of different supplements out there i know you know a ton about them anything seem to help with like recovery from certain things like that

well you mentioned curcumin so we can start there that's a interesting molecule that does some pretty cool things and um what's nice about it is it it rolls around in your body in a conjugated state so it's bound up it's not really necessarily that bioavailable but the um the chemicals that deconjugate that are overexpressed by inflammatory tissue so when that stuff comes in contact with the inflammatory tissue it can deconjugate it and start making the so it's almost i want to say magic bullety but that that type of concept and somehow it can work it can work great. I don't actually like to use that chronically all the time every day, but in spurts it works really well. And it works nicely in combination with Boswellia, the two of them together, because Boswellia works more at the higher up level, the modifying cytokine responses.

modifying cytokine responses. So it's almost like you get a combination of the general and the foot soldiers working together in this army fighting the inflammation and the issue from the injury. So that can work really good. I think another thing that's overlooked is just high protein and the demand for essential amino acids and high protein when you're coming back from injury and trying to rebuild things. So that's another big thing I would look at with athletes that are coming off an injury.

Like having even extra protein on top of what they typically have? Yeah. And then also another one is, especially when it's soft tissue stuff, is magnesium. It just has just such a big effect on the tissue quality. And so many people are deficient in magnesium to begin with specific type glycinate is probably the best one some people will be able to take multiple different types of magnesium and not have an issue with it and other people it'll just be a laxative the safe the safest one it's probably glycinate you know it can work really well and I think obviously if you're on that all the time, it's great. But sometimes increasing that dose when you have a particularly soft tissue injury

can really be helpful with that type of stuff. I think certain enzymes can also be really good for breaking down some of the byproducts of inflammation. I like to use those. You know, serrapeptase is good. Natrokinase is good. Even bromelain can be good. These are like pills?

Yeah, you can get them in pills. Supplements. Supplements, yeah. So, I mean, again, it can be relatively specific to the type of injury that you want, but generally those things can work pretty well for injury. Red light therapy, cold plunging. Yep. I mean, used correctly, all those things can work pretty well for injury red light therapy cold plunging yep i mean used correctly all those

things can work well what's red light therapy infrared sauna cold contrast hot you have a lot of the stuff at your gym all of it yeah you know pimp all these types things can work um just a matter of applying them correctly and for the right type of injury. And then also seeing the response of them. Because some people respond differently to different things. And you have to know. But again, it's just a matter of playing with it. And really, another huge factor with some of these injuries is compression. You know, like people underestimate how much compression helps a ton.

And even in the prevention of injuries too, in the warm-up for injuries, compression can be huge. Oh, yeah. People have no idea how good an elbow sleeve or knee sleeve can feel. It can totally change the way that you're working out if you have a little bit of an issue with the elbow or knee. 100%. And the extreme compression like flossing and things like that,

that can be fantastic for a lot of stuff. What can like mild compression do over a long period of time? So let's say somebody has like a, you know, something, an elbow, wrist or whatever, and they choose to use some mild compression during the day or during workouts. What does that do? That's a great question. In terms of the underlying mechanism of action of how it works, I'm not sure that we fully understand that, but I can tell you this. Having that compression on that area, low compression for a long period of time, can do wonders. And sometimes it can work better than high compression for a short period of time. And I'm not exactly sure why that is. Part of me feels like when you put that compression on, it right away feels good. Like it feels like this is locked in where it's supposed to be.

It feels cozy. Yeah, it's exactly right. That's what it feels like. And then your brain, over time, it starts to disinhibit. You're more aware. Yeah. Something is happening here, and this thing feels better. So whatever type of protection signals I'm sending, whatever type of governor I'm putting on that thing right now, I can getting some afferent feedback here that's telling me,

hey, that thing that was biting, that thing that was reacting is different now. And wait a minute, it's still different 10 minutes later. And two hours later, it's still different. So wait, maybe I don't need to protect this person as much. Let me dial back some of the governor that I have on there. And that's how I think it's working. Although I can't pull out a scientific paper and say that's how it's working. Yeah. I would say, I think there's a few other things going on too. Like, especially if you're talking about like a, like flossing and you're talking about really wrapping it with tighter

compression, then I think you got those like sliding surfaces and it's a little bit like if you were manually doing doing like art on somebody in addition to that i think what an elbow sleeve does is uh it kind of in a weird way uh makes your arms bigger so if you can picture like if you had a half inch bigger forearm and a half inch bigger bicep well now we got more like we got more compression we got more torque just as if you had more muscle or more fat i mean part of the reason why a power lifter gets fatter or bigger uh is because a bigger muscle a lot of times it's a stronger muscle and a uh compressed muscle a lot of times will be a

stronger muscle so in my opinion you also have that little extra a little extra cushion for the pushing kind of thing because when you do something like a bench press, you're dropping your forearm onto your bicep. And that, even though it's just neoprene, it is supportive. All the way to the point where sometimes some of these guys will wear sleeves that are so tight on their knees or on their elbows that they can barely bend. And it will be that supportive sometimes. Yeah, for sure. I agree with that 100%. I think I was referring in the previous comments to like the long-term leg compression. But with the flossing compression, that's all those gliding surfaces that you get to move against each other and crush that out.

It's great. And in addition to that with that is you're also getting a huge restriction of blood flow at that period of time. so what happens is is you're going to get as you're breaking down all these adhesions on these sliding surfaces when you take it off blood is going to come back in to pick that up so it's basically a garbage out groceries in type stuff when you get that so what i like to do a lot with that is like extreme compression and really yeah you've wrapped me before yeah done some stuff to me before where it all hurts really bad until it's done go ahead can you uh dive into that adhesion thing just a little bit just because uh and it's great it's kind of like a theme now where we've had multiple people because there's a lot of people in fitness that are like you can't break up adhesions the adhesions aren't a thing that like that doesn't exist.

Myofascial release doesn't do that. And then there's people who are like, we had a guy who worked with cadavers for 30 years who was like, adhesions are a thing. We've had a body worker that's worked with people for like over two decades who's like, I break up adhesions all the time. And now you have worked with people, athletes for like fucking four decades maybe. And you mentioned adhesions. So what do you mean?

I mean, in terms of what the actual like morphological structure of adhesion is and whether that's what it is or if it is really some kind of neuropathic thing in nature or whatever it is when i use the word i use it to mean some type of blockage or interference in the way normal um anatomical movement should occur. And so when we're saying we're breaking down adhesions, do I literally mean that we're breaking down a piece of connective tissue? It doesn't always mean that way. Sometimes it could simply mean that we are like fascia

is made up of a lot of microtubules that are full of water. And sometimes they just get so dried out and worked out. Literally the fascia is sort of dehydrating. And sometimes what we're doing, we're just compressing the crap out of this and we're opening that stuff up. And now it's going to get some hydration back into this thing that it hasn't had in it for a long time. And so is that – are you breaking down an adhesion? Was there an adhesion in there? Was it just less pliable?

What are you doing? I'm not really sure, but I don't know that it matters. I think the concept of doing the work to get all that stuff happening is the point. And whether or not that's truly an adhesion or not and how we define an adhesion to me is not important. Gotcha. Yeah. or not and how we define an adhesion to me is not important gotcha yeah um i've uh when i went to your gym uh you were explaining to my wife and i her shoulder was bothering her from swimming and you were talking about the fashion you were talking about how the body kind of has this like

sling pattern to it and how it's very common that uh when somebody has like a left shoulder, sometimes the right hip and so on. Can you explain some of that to us? Yeah. So that's relatively complicated stuff. But yeah, the fascia does work in slings that communicates to each other. And this whole series of microtubules, how they actually communicate to each other. And some of that communication can happen faster than what happens within the central nervous system. That's how good the communication is.

So when you have things that are out of whack or things that are tight in one place and fascia is not moving well, it creates a problem throughout the whole sling. And that creates a sort of a movement pattern deviation or a movement aberration. And then over time, if that aberration is causing problems, then that can also be a source of irritation in addition to just the state of the fascia as well. And the whole thing just starts to add up. And like addressing those things is, it's important.

It's not, I think if you address all the things individually, it should add up to changing the whole thing on this thing. But having that knowledge to be able to back up and take a little bit more of a macro approach and see what's going on is really helpful with addressing that type of stuff. And that's kind of what we try to do with assessing movement. And that's one of the things that coaches

and even sometimes therapists don't do very well anymore is analyze movement. Because in order to do that, you first have to have a mindset of we need to analyze movement of all types of things in real time. of things in real time and then you also have to have a like an understanding of the mechanics of the particular thing you're trying to analyze within real time and that's not always there and what's happened is over the years we've developed things like functional movement screens and all these other types of things like that, that are taught to young trainers and young therapists as this tool to have this big global analysis of what's going on. But to me, I guess you need some type of tool for someone to have some idea of where to start from.

But ultimately, they have a major downside, and that's twofold. One is almost all of these things don't involve speed and load with the testing things trade drastically with speed and load and here's the crazy part elite athletes get better with speed and load you'll test them on some shit where they look absolutely dysfunctional then you add speed and load you're like that's not the same guy okay and so you can get into all crazy things the other thing is when you have this set movement screen that you're going to it doesn't force you to learn how to observe movement and see different things because just hey this is my movement screen these are my five things I go to that's what I do instead

of saying okay buddy we're to spend hours and hours, month after month, watching people move and understanding what's happening and understanding, okay, what I'm seeing happening now is a result of what they did two or three steps before this and figuring out how that's changing and just learn the process of observing movement, looking at it from a macro perspective, then dialing into a micro to see what's going on, going back and forth and doing this over and over again. It's a skill.

And it's a skill that you, it takes a lot of practice to be able to figure it out. You're going to get it wrong a bunch of times and you're going to eventually get better and better at it. But if you go to the standard, this is my movement screen, you're never going to get good at observing stuff because it doesn't force you to do it. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Do you notice any type of trend? Because like you mentioned, you've worked with Sidney McLaughlin, you've worked with NFL athletes. Is there a trend in the way that these athletes breathe? And I ask that because you see in some sports, you see it a lot in lifting where there are a lot of people who may get away with breathing shallow, you know.

But I feel like you can't get away with being a good athlete in a, whether it's a grappling sport where you need to be able to breathe well all the time or on a field or on a track. You can't get away with bad breathing unless maybe you can. So is there a trend there or have you run into super elite athletes who are always shallow breathing and you've had to help them with that? Yes, I've run into that. But here's the thing that I'll tell you. There's some things that super elite athletes do that they just do. And a lot of that is breathing. The really good ones, they already inherently understand what breathing can do for them.

And they do this naturally without you even having to tell them to do it. And so at the super elite level, most times you don't see that. They kind of really, they don't even understand what they're doing, but they're doing it. It's usually the guys that are not at the elite level that you've got to feed that information to and sort of teach them how to do it. And that's common with quite a few things, not just breathing. You see that a lot and they just, they're good because they inherently understand those things. So what does like good breathing with easily athletes, what does,

what does it look like? What is it? If like, if so that people can like understand how they're breathing into their diaphragm, et cetera? What do you see? Well, the key thing is your breathing has to allow you to have rhythm and balance type of the whole thing. So for instance, let's say running, for example, like hard sprinting or something like that. for instance let's say running for example like hard sprinting or something like that there are very specific periods of time where you want to be breathe like have be breath held and there's other periods of time where you have to breathe out and breathe out slowly and relax and breathe back in and at high levels that will actually get modeled so this is where we're holding our breath intentionally this is where we're going to exhale this what we're going

to do and it corresponds to a relaxation period where it's almost like the nervous system is recharging a bit while you're doing that. And so if you try to run the whole thing with no pattern, no breathing setup, no modeling, you just go, you're going to burn out really fast. But once you learn how to breathe at the right times, you can find that you can go hard, have a small break for your nervous system to relax, go hard again, and sort of recharge that battery. And so you can use breathing to do that in that example. the amount of relaxation when other things are moving fast is really going to dictate some of how you're breathing because you have you can't there's you can't be in a very stiff breath held position and and move other things around you very quickly it has you have to be way more relaxed than

that so i mean the trick with that type of stuff is being able to breathe at the right time. So it's no different than I hand you a jar of peanut butter and the lid is stuck on. You want to open it. You're going to go, you're going to hold your breath, get a hand and turn it and do it, right? But then once that job is done, you're going to relax. You got to go, you got to get it right. And so if the idea is to open 10 of those things in 30 seconds, you're not going to hold time.

You're going to crack one, you're going to be, you're going to go through it. And like in sport, a lot of that is the same way. Or even like I'm running and I'm running like I'm a safety and I've turned and I'm running on a ball and I'm going 20 yards to try and close space and get to there. And I'm running, I'm breathing, but at the same time, I'm about to smack you and I'm going 20 yards to try and close space and get to there. And I'm running, I'm breathing.

But at the same time, I'm about to smack you when I get to you. At that point in time, I better not be breathing. I better be having my breath held and be stiff and ready to go. So there's all that aspect that happens in sport. And some of it is just autonomic. You kind of just get it and figure it out. But some athletes need to be taught that. Like, hey, you need to relax.

You're like, you're to relax you're like you're you're you're you're working too hard you know yeah and like the other thing that breathing helps with is let's say we're driving a car we put our foot to the floor we press the thing as far and that's going as fast as it can once the pedal is on the floor it's going as fast as it can if i push with 6 000 pounds of pressure and try and push my foot through the floor, the car is not going any faster. But in real life, if you continue to push like that, you're just blowing off energy and you're going to actually slow the car down. So what breathing can help you with is when you get to that point where the foot's on the floor

and it's there, like breathing and then relaxing can help you maintain the right amount of output to just keep the foot on the floor and not put it all the way through the gas. You know, like it's, or if you're wrestling and you're holding someone, you're going like, you got to hold them for long enough to submit them, but you can't gas yourself out holding them either.

And if you're like, you're going to gas up before they gas up, you know? So you got to be able to like breathe right, hold them, and apply what you want to do at the same time, if that makes sense. What are some practices that you have for yourself to stay fit and to stay healthy and to stay out of pain as we age? So for me, it varies from the time of year,

because sometimes you're on the road a lot when I'm home. But I just I try to move a lot. And that like I'm typically on average and then 13,000 steps a day type of thing, just moving around. That's just sort of my average. There's times of the year where I'm up at like 30 or 35, depending on what's happening. And we can come back to that in a different topic. And I lift. I move around a lot and I lift.

I don't really run anymore. And some of my lifting I do is somewhat dynamic because I want to be able to like walk into the weight room and demonstrate a perfect power snatch with teaching type techniques. So I have to be able to lift a certain way to do that. Yeah, even when you were showing us stuff in the gym you still move really well you were moving explosively which gets your attention you know if if it's me trying to explain how someone should move explosively and i'm moving super slow or funky then that's not going to really get anybody's attention yeah that's that's partly true so you got to keep up some of that stuff so i try to do stuff to do that but one of the things that i do is i try to find ways to make a load harder without increasing the load

because for me i don't need to do that anymore and so and it's just going to cause problems in terms of nervous system burnout injuries all types of it doesn't matter i was just talking to andrew yesterday about like we just think uh all these weights are so low like uh we think 40 pounds is super light and it kind of is depending on what you're doing and how you're asking yourself to do it but you could make 40 pounds very difficult you could make it very challenging and i just think it's just because i think we're used to kind of the main lifts and those main lifts are exercises that you work on you master and you're able to put more and more of those 45 pound plates on there and we get so desensitized to hearing somebody say like oh i you know i did this exercise with a hundred pounds you're like, that's not that much. But it's like a 100-pound dumbbell.

It's fucking heavy. Yeah, hell yeah. It's a lot of weight. Yeah, for sure. And so I do things. There's something I do, and I sometimes use this in a rehab phase with guys too. When it comes to sport performance, really you want to worry about pushing the load. But for me, that's not there.

So I would do things, what I call 20 the hard way. And I do this quite regularly, which is example, squat. So I'm going to do a squat. Like there's no point to me putting huge load on squat. And especially if my back's already sore, you're beat up or whatever, but I can put a reasonable load on my back, maybe 90 kilos or something like that. And then I can say, okay, what I'm going to do the first five reps, I'm going to do a five second eccentric and a five second concentric. Then the next five, I'm going to do a three second eccentric, five second pause in the bottom and then come up. Then the last 10 reps, I'm just going to do a three second eccentric and come up. Boom.

You've got for 20 reps. You're done. You're tortured. But I only had 90 kilos on my back. You know what I mean? And so I find ways that I wouldn't use that and expect to get faster from doing that. But at the same time, just in terms of me and my general health, that's a great way for me to make a load that's light feel really heavy without having to tax myself. Send a signal to your body to keep that muscle. Yeah, keep the muscle

and work in my conditioning and do all that stuff and not strain my musculoskeletal system to an extent. And I can do it faster. Like if I wanted to go and try and squat way bigger weights for triples or something, I'd have to spend 45 minutes warming up to be able to get there you know what i mean um do you still do drills and stuff like that like you know track drills and like running drills and like even though you're not like running running do you still mess with that yep not as often as i probably should but i still do them because i need to be able to demonstrate them and stuff like that and do them pretty well and And those are also great when I do do them. I feel like, man, I can't believe I haven't done this in a while

because you feel bouncy again. You're going, it gets you going. You mentioned the pendulum swinging with certain things, like it's swung in terms of functional fitness. And you mentioned that you use some stretching in terms of what you do with your athletes, right? There seems to have been a pendulum shift where now a lot of coaches are talking about how

static stretching is horrible for athletes. You see this a lot on the functional side. You see this a lot for strength coaches. But there's context with how you use stretching, any type of stretching. So when it comes to static stretching, because there's a video on your page where you talked about you do stretch your athletes. How do you use it so it doesn't end up being a net negative for the athlete's ability to be explosive and strong and stiff so first of all unless you're doing tons of static stretching and doing it like right before a training session i don't think static stretching is a problem okay i think for a lot of people, doing static stretching after workouts and when they're sore can make a big difference in how they recover and how they feel. In a good way?

In a good way. Okay. And also, I like to do static stretching in conjunction with some type of body work. So it doesn't have to be a real body work. It could be as simple as, excuse me, I'm going to do stack stretching for my quads, but I'm also going to foam roll them for a minute. So I'm going to foam roll them for a couple of minutes. I don't love a foam roller, but let's use that as an example. We're going to foam roll your quad for a couple of minutes. Then we're going to do a couch stretch. Then we're going to foam roll again,

do another couch stretch. So you're getting the benefit of getting those tissues compressed, do another cow stretch so you kind of you're getting the benefit of getting those tissues compressed maybe breaking down adhesions putting some type of input into the tissue that makes your brain want to say okay i'm going to relax this thing and let you stretch it and then you stretch it again that's a great way but when i was younger i would have been in that whole idea of static stretching is terrible like you don't need to do that. But as I got older and as I started to use it on more and more people because I was like, what we're doing is not working. Let's try to do some more static stretching. I saw really good improvements with guys in doing it.

Now, I'm not saying we're going to go and do 20 minutes of static stretching before we sprint. But as a standalone, it's great. And at night, just at home doing extra stack stretching I find it works great for people to just lengthen their tissues you know calm their resting muscle tone a little bit I think it's great and when you're when you're helping these athletes I'd imagine that you're like manually stretching them a bit right yeah a manual stretching them and can

you feel the difference like you know you work on them one week to the next. I don't know. You can feel the difference 20 minutes later sometimes. You know what I mean? When you stretch them well, you know? And when we do, like, say we're for a speed session, it's almost all dynamic flexibility. But there can be a component of static flexibility incorporated into that, especially if there's a tightness or the athlete's feeling something.

We'll stop and address that. And sometimes static dressing works well. Yeah, we have a tendency to box everything in so much. And even if you were doing a sprinting workout, if you wanted to static stretch a bunch right before it, you certainly could do that with the upper body. You could. You would probably have no negative cost to it at all.

You probably wouldn't. And again, if you did some static stretching and then went back to doing some dynamic before you sprinted it would be fine anyway tell us more about tempering because tempering can be pretty brutal tempering my understanding is you're just taking something super heavy and just putting it on an area that's tight and you're just kind of rolling it out. Yeah, pretty much. Like I think the level of compression that you can get on tissues and how deep you can get into them is huge with tempering and you can't really achieve it with other things. Again, if you have someone who's

really skilled with their hands and they're going to work on you, that's going to be better than anything. But short of that, tempering works fantastic. And I believe that one of the reasons it works so well is not just a huge amount of compression that you're getting in there, but I think the nervous system message that happens when you're getting that level of compression on you, it's almost like, holy crap, I've got to adapt to this somehow. And you go, and you go through it. And then when it's, when it comes off, it's like, oh, we're okay. And then it sort of relaxes you and you go on it. And for me, it's crazy. When I get tempered, I, I hate, I love, love, hate relationship with doing it before a workout because it gets me so loosened up and kind of ready to go. But if I have someone temper my quads for, say, six, seven minutes,

which sometimes I really need, I literally could take a nap. I feel like if someone would come and do that before I went to bed, it would be great. Roll and temper me up because it changes my tissue quality that much. Like I'm that relaxed. I feel like I want to go to sleep. Now, as I move around and get ready, I can go and get the workout done. But the change in that nervous system state for me is enormous.

It's that big. So you could probably use something like a kettlebell. But what are some tempering tools? Do you know some companies so people can kind of look some of this stuff up? Well, so Donnie Thompson, he's the grandfather of all the tempering stuff. And he's got Rogue making a tempering tool for him now. And there's several guys out that custom make stuff. And you can just get pieces of steel, five-inch diameter steel, 24 inches long is going to give you 135 pounds.

And then you can get smaller diameter ones to do what you need to do. There's also – We have – he calls it the ex-wife. The ex-wife. We have the ex-wife in the gym. It's like 200 pounds. I'm going to go fuck with the ex-wife a little bit. I haven't.

Oh, dude, you get someone to put that on your hamstrings, it's crazy. Or you roll all the way to your calves and shit. What I love on the hamstrings is static tempering. So literally, you pile, you take those, the 135, the ex-wife, you take four of those and line them up from the top, just the crack of your butt where your hamstring shuts all the way down to your knee, and just lay them there and just sit there for five minutes.

It feels so good. That sounds brutal. We do have something else in the gym too, I think, that you can put weight on, right? We have one of those. Okay. So Kabuki Duffin. He makes one that's loadable and has decreased stimulus. That might be the one we have, yeah.

And then he also makes the pain pill and the boomstick, which can be used for tempering. Yeah, those are great. Yeah, the pain pill. It's a big old fat chunk of metal, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that one's 44 pounds, and it's got a rounded end, so you can tip it up and do different things with it. Just use whatever you can, right? I mean, you could use a plate if you needed to.

It's like a 45-pound plate or a 25-pound plate. Yeah. Use kind of the edge of it and just whatever you can get your hands on to start. Yeah, you can roll like crosswise across tissue with a plate and stuff like that. You can do what works great on like calves. You side lie, you get a – it's a barbell. You put a plate on the end of it and you have one end like jamming to a corner in a landmine or something. So you're just rolling the thing along your calf.

Oh, wow. It works fantastic. Yeah, the sleeve of the barbell a lot of times does work really well. I forgot about that. And just even taking a barbell. And if you're new to it and haven't ever tried it before, I think it's something that everyone should give a try to. What have you noticed in terms of tightness with athletes?

Have you noticed any sort of real particular trends where it's just like, especially these athletes that are explosive and powerful and fast, are they typically tight in the quads or tight in the lower back? Or is it kind of just all over the place? Well, the ones that are really explosive and fast, they're not really tight anywhere. I mean, they have their own little idiosyncrasies that they have to watch out for to get tight. But for what you and I would consider tight, they're not tight anywhere. You know what I mean? But what you will see though is they're dynamically more flexible than they are statically almost always.

So it's not – Something like touching the toes might be not great, but they're really flexible in motion. Right. So like bending over and putting your hands on the ground might be difficult, but standing here and kicking my foot this high in the air is not that difficult. You know what I mean? They did have a better dynamic flexibility than static flexibility.

You see that. You also see that they'll develop certain issues where they get tight in one spot, usually from overwork, sometimes from compensation, whatever it may be. And you'll see that. Like somebody might have great mobility and great soft tissue throughout their entire legs

except their calves. And that's just their weak spot. And you've got to stay on it all the time. That's common in those elite people to do that. And I mean, I use the calf as an example, but it could be anything. And then you have to know that, okay, that's their problem. Let's get after it. Sometimes you'll find that virtually every problem that comes up

comes from that one thing that they can't stay loose. Now I'm having a problem with my hip. Well, it's still coming from your calf. And go back and fix that. They have a lot of tells with that. What if you are a Roger family? It's time to step up your barefoot shoe game. Now we talk about foot health all the time on the podcast,

but the winter months are coming, and Vivo's come out with some slick boots. These are their Gobi boots, and they have different colors on their website. Now, these have a wide toe box. They are flat, and they are flexible, and they are stylish and sexy as boots. But obviously, Vivo's awesome because they not only have boots and casual shoes like their Novus right here, which, again, wide, flat, flexible, so that your foot can do what it needs to do within the shoe. And you're getting the benefit of having your feet improve while you're walking around in shoes. But they also have shoes for the gym, like their Motus. Again, flat, flexible, wide toe box,

along with their Primus Light 3s and all the classics that you know. They also have shoes for running and for running on their website. So again, for all barefoot type shoes, Vivo is your one-stop shop for pretty much all the types of kicks you need. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at vivobarefoot.com slash power project or for the entire month of December, but December only you guys will receive 20% off your very own Vivo barefoot shoes. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash power project links. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Barefoot stuff has become super

popular and a lot of people have noticed that their feet are weak. But what do you notice is maybe the positives of it and potentially the negatives of it? Okay. So the positives of it are huge in terms of strengthening the foot. Okay.

Getting good proprioception. I think we mentioned earlier about your body works like a computer. Your brain is the keyboard. Sorry, your feet are the keyboard. Your brain is the CPU and the processors. So you want to get clean inputs in. The cleaner the input, the better the output, right? And so training barefoot helps you with that. It's great.

So it has a kind of usefulness in that sense. Yeah. However, you can't use it for everything, because there are other areas where you don't necessarily want to expose yourself to, say, impact. Like, if you're going to jump off of a 30-inch box and do, not a lot of people have the capability in their feet to be able to do that type of stuff

and it's probably not a good thing to do that. So for that, I wouldn't necessarily want to do something barefoot. I also see a lot of times people who do a lot of barefoot training, they don't have the ability to grip the ground in the same way. So you can't work your muscles the same way. Like I can't accelerate out of a dead stop on grass and get into the positions that I want to get into without having a certain amount of grip.

I would fall, literally, okay? Or if I'm upright running and I'm coming through, I have to be able to kind of grab the ground slightly fall yeah literally okay or if i'm upright running and i'm coming through when i cycle it might have to be able to like kind of grab the ground slightly to be able to like grip and go and i can't do that on a bare foot i mean i can do it i just can't do it like i can in a cleat or a spike right so what if my sport demands that i have to do that when i go back to doing that i'm going to be potentially i see it at risk for injury because now you're working that thing like crazy and just not necessarily doing it as well. So in that sense,

you know, that's not a good option for barefoot. But again, it's like anything else. It's a tool. And if you use barefoot work as a tool, it's great. And if you try to make a one fit, one thing fits all tool, you're probably not going to be as successful with it. Yeah. And I think that for everyday moving around activity, it's great to be barefoot with that and then be selective about what barefoot things you do that are highly active and sports-specific. And that's a great way to do it. Gotcha. specific and that that's a great way to do it gotcha let's uh let's take a break just for a couple minutes and we'll come back because i think uh there's still a lot more to talk to him about i

need to use the bathroom but maybe you need to as well just take a take five let's talk about that sled dragon stuff first there's a sled dragon sled dragon yeah you can kick it off and sammy you're asking him some questions about it oh shit, shit. Well, we were talking earlier and you mentioned that sometimes you would do 20-minute sled drags, which I don't know how many people talk about. 20 minutes straight? 20 minutes straight. Yeah. So when it comes to using that with athletes, I think I've seen, when we talked, you do sled work with athletes a lot different than I hear most coaches do. When we talked, you do sled work with athletes a lot different than I hear most coaches do. Most coaches will use that as a warm-up before a workout.

But you take them through a lot of ways of using the sled. Yeah, for sure. So to me, it's just good GPP. So we'll drag that thing with light loads constantly. Sometimes for heavier guys that we want to get some metabolic stress to without really stressing them out just to get some work. It's great because there's no eccentric. It's easy you can load it up pretty well we're just walking forward walks backwards walks crossover walks just continuous moving without stopping 10 minutes 20 minutes at a time i personally when i do them i like to stick to one style of walking

for a long period of time because i also get a localized fatiguing effect, which I like. But if you just want to get good blood flow, work on some movement, get a cardiorespiratory response type of thing, then you can just change the movements and just keep on walking. And it's very little impact on your recovery. And sometimes it really will help your recovery,

loosen you up a lot. We typically do them at the end of sessions, though not at the beginning of the sessions. Oh, okay. About how much weight you got on there? It's typically about three plates on the sled, two or three depending on, sometimes some of the heavier guys will go four plates on there.

And you've seen it help lean some of these people out too? A ton, a ton, yeah. And then what about like maybe, sounds like it's like restorative in some way, like it helps kindative in some way. Like it helps kind of restore tissue a bit and stuff like that. For sure. It'll make you feel a whole lot less sore, get blood flow going everywhere, especially when you're using all different types of motions with it.

I find it to be really effective for that. I know you've been big on the post-workout shakes and stuff like that and even intra-workout shakes, and you have your own supplement brand, your Optimum EFX. And you got your essential aminos and ketones and all these different kinds of things. And I went to your gym. You were handing that right to the athlete, sometimes when they got done with a workout and sometimes even during the workout. What are you trying to accomplish with that?

What do you think that's doing? What have you recognized or noticed that stands out about that practice? Well, for me, the key window is more the intro workout window than the post-workout window. And so just when you start to work out, you're going to have a whole ton of blood flow that gets increased, obviously. And so I see that as an opportunity to deliver nutrients to the muscle. to work out you're going to have a whole ton of blood flow that gets increased obviously and so i see that as an opportunity to deliver nutrients to the muscle and i'm going to move this this way

just a bit sorry yeah so i see that as an opportunity to deliver nutrients to the muscle in a way that you can't always do that because you're not going to have that level of blood flow when you're not exercising so if you're sending the blood there anyway you may as well send it full full of all types of nutrients that can help you with that workout and also help you with recovery and stimulating, you know, protein synthesis, you know. And so using a well-curated blend of essential amino acids does that really well. And obviously I use a leucine-rich version of those essentials so that we get that signaling, use a leucine rich version of those essentials so that we get that signaling that mtor signaling but you also have all the the mechanical stretching and breaking down of the tissues which is also a a stimulus for protein synthesis so um you get that going at the same time as you're fueling

these aminos are saying the signal it just it helps helps you to process that stuff, incorporate it and get the best use of the time of that workout, you know? So I find that recovery is through the roof. Like it's a big difference. If you use enough of it, it's almost hard to get sore after a while, you know? And so it just, it makes a big difference. I also add, youulline malate, betaine anhydrase, carnitine. All types of other amino acids are in that mixture as well. And we'll go as high as 30 grams of EAAs in that window, depending on how big the person is on a leg day. It might get that high.

But really nobody kind of works out without it so you were telling me that it helps with uh the accumulation of fatigue a little bit 100 it does yeah so i mean it helps that in multiple ways i think some of the other ingredients outside of the ea's that are in there are probably more responsible for that but even the idea of if you're doing like long extended stuff even people that are running, say, like your mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell that's doing all this energy production work for you, they're made of protein. They need amino acids to be replenished and repaired and do all those types of things. So that aspect as well leads to an endurance effect. But the combination of all these things, it's a really palpable difference on endurance. And obviously you get a, it can help with a pump as well because of

some of the ingredients in there. But it's not specifically a pump product in any way, shape or form, but there's enough sutraline in there that it can help you with that type of stuff. You said this is the Optimum EFX EAAs? No, this is the amino matrix that we're talking about, yeah. When it comes to supplements, like over-the-counter supplements, what are some ones that you are a fan of? I don't use a ton of stuff outside of what I have. And what I do is I have a lot of raw materials where I can curate kind of whatever I need based on what the athlete wants.

And so we do that a lot. So we'll make things like if you need some magnesium, I'll grab magnesium glycinate, weigh it out, combine it with, if I need to combine that, if I'm making an electrolyte mix, I might combine it with other electrolytes. If I'm using that, I might combine it with some glycine for a relaxation effect. I just do different things. I kind of custom blend all that stuff all the time.

And you have a sleep formula. I really like that one a lot. Yeah. The Neuroff, yeah. It's got glycine, inositol, ashwagandha, magnesium in pretty big doses. Then it has a couple of nervines, so valerian, passionflower. And it's great because it doesn't just help you. It can help you sleep, but it's not going to necessarily make you sleepy. It kind of relaxes you. It calms your racing mind, takes away that sort of anxious edge that you might have, and just puts you in a relaxed state.

So if you want to go to sleep, it helps a lot. But it's not a product that will necessarily knock you out. So I really like that. And when you wake up, you don't wake up drowsy. It works really well. It's actually the product that is the least sexy of anything that I make, but it's the one that once people try it, they buy it again and again. It's the one that once they try it, they buy it again and again. It's the one that once they try it, they use it all the time. It's hard to get them into it, but once they do it, they're like, man, this stuff is great. How about Neuron? Because I'm a huge fan of like nootropics and stuff, and I've seen it has a good amount of some good stuff in

there. So please tell me about that. So Neuron is, that is by far my most popular product. I can't keep that thing in stock. And so many guys, so many professional athletes use that and they're like, when they don't have that, it's like a problem. So what it's really designed to do is increase focus, alertness, and neural drive. So one of the problems with many neural drive products is they rely way too heavily on caffeine so there's super high dose caffeine stuff that's only going to get you so far and then they don't have enough variety of products that work by multiple mechanisms of action on your brain and nervous system to get you going so they're just

they're too one-sided or individualistic in their approach. So my approach is to, I make it with caffeine and without caffeine, but I use a wide variety of greens, some that work by increasing production of acetylcholine, some that work by inhibiting acetylcholine esterase, some that work by elevating dopamine. esterase, some that work by elevating dopamine, and so some that provide substrates for fuel. So it's a multimodal approach, and it's not a one plus one equals two. It's one plus one plus one equals like 10. And so your level of arousal and alertness and focus and neurodrive is high, but you don't have that jittery anxious overstimulated caffeine even the one with caffeine

it's only 150 milligrams of caffeine then the caffeine free one obviously has zero and there's a caffeine free one yeah there's a caffeine free one and um a lot of people like it's really interesting because what i find is if you divide people into two different categories, decision makers and non-decision makers, generally speaking, the decision makers do better without the caffeine. Okay. Say that again. The decision makers with this type of a nootropic product do better without the caffeine. And then the people who aren't just have to run through walls, they'll do better with the caffeine. Okay.

Okay. the people who aren't just have to run through walls they'll do better with the caffeine okay but um i mean that's a broad distinction and it's not necessarily always true but generally speaking i definitely find that just thinking my wife makes all the decisions and caffeine has like zero impact on it so yeah so that is definitely um i use that product a lot for just focused studying reading not even really for working out and i love it for that i have like some of my athletes now that were on it they're retired and they're now like uh broadcasters they don't even do a they don't do a broadcast without it they're scooping it going because they feel like they're so focused and dialed in and stuff like that so it's really good many of the ingredients in it also aid fat loss because they help you mobilize fatty acids so that's a

nice added benefit for it as well and it's uh it tastes not very good because many of the well first of all we're not using anything like sucralose to sweeten it and then all the stuff you have um has a different taste to it. Yeah. People should know that. But it's because you're not using artificial sweeteners and a bunch of other stuff that you don't believe in. Right. And because the dosages are big.

So it's like, you know, you go out and you get a product that has tyrosine and it's got like 500 milligrams of tyrosine in it, which is okay. But then you get, once you go to 2,500 milligrams of hyaluronidine, and then you go to 2,500 milligrams of acetylalcarnitine, and then you go to like 1,200 milligrams of alpha-GPC. After a while, you can only mask that stuff so much. When the dosages are like four or five times the dosages or what are in your competitors, you know what I mean? And so that's part of the reason it works well,

but it's also part of the reason that makes it difficult to flavor when you have that much stuff. It cares about flavor when you're trying to perform better right that's what i say i got the neuron in the cart i got the you know matrix in the cart tell people the flavor of neuron is called greatness that's what that is i always wondered what greatness tastes like. Tell these grapplers over here, tell them what would be best for them to take maybe during a workout, during their jiu-jitsu sessions. Well, I think taking the Neuron before the workout would be great. And then taking the Immunomatrix during the workout would be fantastic.

That's probably the best combination of the two products that will work well for you. Maybe throw a little salt in there, some sort of hydration of some sort. So there's salt added to both of those products. Oh, okay. Smart. But extra salt doesn't hurt for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I got this.

I'm getting the stimulant-free neuron because sometimes I grapple in the evening. Sometimes I work out in the evening. I'm not trying to have caffeine in me at like 6 p.m. That's excellent. And there's not very many good nootropic that you can use for pre-workout that work well that still allow you to sleep after. But what works great is if you do that in the evening, you just take the Neuroff after that too.

Neuroff? Yeah, so Neuroff is the opposite. Switch on and off. It's the opposite of Neuroff. That's how I kind of designed that to be like the yin and the yang for the nervous system, kind of get you up and then bring you back down. And so, I mean, that idea came to me years ago.

I was working with some track athletes and just consulting with a few of them, and some of them had some really good success, but they weren't like super at the top. They were world class, but they weren't good enough to be fighting for medals so you'd you'd like you'd run rounds at world championships or something and then you'd you'd be like you'd run a pb you'd make it to the summary file and you're like you're on cloud nine but you got to come back the next day and it's like you just did something your body has never done before you're emotionally hyped because it's the best thing going but it's the best thing going. But it's not over.

You got to come back the next day. What I started to realize is until you get back down to level, like until those catecholamines are back under control and you're at a baseline level of excitement, the recovery process doesn't even really start. So the faster you can get back down to like that ground zero of excitement, the faster you're going to recover. So I wanted Neuroff to do that. And then it had an unexpected – it should have been expected, but it was kind of an unexpected result in sleep quality. So boom, we started using it for that too. And so quite often we'll have people take it, um, after the workout. And then again, before they go to bed, if the workout, it's a super CNS intense workout. Is the near off what you were mentioning is the sleep formula or is the sleep formula

something different? No, it's that he was calling the new off the sleep form. Okay. Okay. So that was, um, so it's pretty cool. It really works well as an up and down, that yin and yang type of a thing. And I feel that if you don't address both ends of it, you're missing something. You always, anything that goes up has got to come down. You know, we got to go and, you know, sometimes I use the analogy of like, we're not a NASCAR or Formula One. Okay. We got to go from zero to 60 and then back to zero and do it again over and over and so that's where the the two component piece comes in to be able to get up and get back down so you can go again you know yeah i find it super interesting that things like uh dopamine and

serotonin and all these different things going on in our brain uh can impact our levels of strength and can impact uh the central nervous system. I remember when I was going for a 500-pound bench a while back at 220, you helped me come back and be able to get that bench probably just maybe six or eight weeks later. And you were describing, you know, hey, if you take these supplements before every workout, it's going to give you, like, this is a tiny amount, but some of these things, even stuff that's over the counter, can really fuel somebody and actually make a difference, right?

Yeah, for sure. And for some people, they can make a pretty significant difference if they have deficiencies in those things. But we're talking small differences. We don't realize a 1% or 2% increase in certain sports is a difference between victory and not even making the final. So if you could get 1% or 2% out of it, that's fantastic. But on everyday stuff, the focus, the concentration,

the ability to recall, that type of stuff is it's noticeable and the thing that i really like about neuron it's instantly perceivable it's not like you know not i'm not mocking fish oils i like fish oils but it's not like you take it you don't feel anything it's just kind of going on it's like you take neuron and 20 minutes later you know some shit is happening like you can feel it you know yeah and so i like that aspect of it too that's sick so how much um like alpha gpc does somebody need to take in order for it to actually be effective because i'm pretty sure like um like alpha brain and that supplement made alpha gpc really popular to where now drinks and every supplement is like, oh, this is a cognitive enhancer.

We have alpha-GPC. But then you look at the label and it's like, I mean, sure, they sprinkled a little bit on top before they closed the lid to say that they can have it in there, but it's probably not going to do anything. Pixie dusting, right? Right. So to answer your question in short, 600 milligrams. Okay. That's what's in this right here.

600 milligrams. Oh, nice. All right. There you go. Wait, seriously? Yeah, there's 600 milligrams of alpha-GPC. Really? In the MindBullet team.

I did not know that. That's why that one hits different. Yeah. Damn. Alpha-GPC is a great product. But going up to around 1,200 milligrams probably hit most people, right? 100%. Yeah. You would never need to go more than 1,200.

And then so earlier you said that something along the lines of an acetylcholine inhibitor. Why would you want to – or maybe I heard that wrong, but like why would you want that? Okay, so you're building acetylcholine, which you want. But acetylcholine esterase is the enzyme that breaks it down. So acetylcholine esterase inhibitor inhibits the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine so you can keep acetylcholine higher for longer. So there's two ends of it. You're increasing acetylcholine by providing substrates to make more acetylcholine and you're inhibiting the breakdown of acetylcholine by inhibiting the enzyme that breaks it down.

Okay. Interesting. down of acetylcholine by inhibiting the enzyme that breaks it down. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And vitamin B5 is very heavily involved in that process too. So there's some B5 in there as well.

So in doing that, then something like as simple as eating eggs would be more effective once you inhibit those, right? I mean, yes. The levels of acetylcholine or choline that we're deriving when we're taking, you know, 600 or 1,200 milligrams of aphlogy, if you see, is a whole different level than choline from eggs. Yeah. But yeah. Okay. Just making sure.

Oh, man. That's exciting. I can't wait to try it. How did you start to learn all this shit? Because this is like, this is a huge, this is way different than, you know, some of the stuff you learned in track when you were younger. Yeah, for sure. different than, you know, some of the stuff you learned in track when you were younger.

Yeah, for sure. So I took a real early interest when I was super young in just health stuff in general. When I was actually in high school, there was a guy that introduced me to the old school Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw life extension type stuff and all the stuff that they were doing. And so I started getting into that stuff and it was pretty cool and I started reading about it. And then, you know, when I went to school, obviously studying, you know, biology, biochemistry, that was sort of where I was at. So my brain was already thinking that and everything was like, how can I go and where can I go? Really sparked my interest in trying to get more, well, backing up too, I also got introduced to nootropics around 1990 in the form of puracetam or paracetam, nootropil. And that really sparked my interest in seeing stuff. I was kind of an early adopter of all that stuff.

You know, it was nootropil, hydrogene, those types of things and just seeing what they were doing. So I got interested in that early. It was neutropil, hydrogen, those types of things, and just seeing what they were doing. So I got interested in that early. And then I started getting a huge interest in how can we get the nervous system to play a role of arousal that's so profound and so automatic that it's changing. And I thought about it from this perspective. Like, think about somebody comes around and they sneak up on you and they scare the shit out of you. You're like, whoa!

Think about how you react to that, the speed of that reaction and the force of that reaction. Our nervous system is capable of doing some crazy stuff. Now, what if there's some way that we can create a chemical mixture to duplicate that reaction for an athlete in the starting block? Okay.

That is like something that's incredible to be able to do. I don't know that we can do that. But the whole idea with all this sort of nootropic stuff enhancing the functioning of the central nervous system, that's the holy grail. That's what you want to get to. So I started playing with different things with that stuff early on and then i started also playing around with amino acids early on with um there was an australian company that we used to get stuff from and um back then it was like these things were expensive we couldn't get them in decent amounts and they all tasted awful.

Didn't really know what the hell I was doing, but we knew enough to be dangerous and started fooling around with different things. And then as I got more education and learned more stuff, I started to recognize stuff. And when I saw there were some supplements that were coming out with different things, but they were missing things. Like some people came out with some EAA type things, but they were calling them EAAs, but they didn't have tryptophan in them, so they weren't, they weren't real actual full spectrum EAAs or things were underdosed or, you know, I just realized that people, they were running a business and in order to do that business, they had to create a product that had enough margin to get to the general population that had some stuff in it.

But they weren't trying to make a product that a super athlete was going to take. And it probably was a bad business strategy to try and do that anyway. And so I had to kind of figure out how am I going to source things, get some raw materials, put some stuff together, and start experimenting and do that. I didn't really expect it to become a business per se. I just wanted to be able to get the ingredients that my athletes needed and play around and turn basically the facility into a lab in terms of, you know, it's great because I've got all these guys. I'm controlling their training.

I'm controlling their recovery. The ones who listen, I'm controlling their diets. So I got all these, when I start manipulating things, I can really see what I think is working and not working and getting feedback. It's not obviously double-blind, placebo-controlled, gold-standard type study, but it's getting me good, valuable information that's better than that in some ways.

And so I was able to just play with that stuff and keep going. I've got a keen interest in it. Now, that's super effective because you're seeing what works on athletes. You know what I mean? And then these people have to go out keen interest in it. No, that's super effective because you're seeing what works on athletes. You know what I mean? And then these people have to go out and perform in games. They have to really perform in training, not just go in and have fun in the gym.

So that's pretty awesome. For me personally, I use protein. I use creatine. There's some supplements that I use based off of my blood work, but I don't really use anything like what you're talking about right now. So I just got some of the Neuron SF, the essential aminos, and the Neuroff.

I'm very interested to see kind of how my body feels with that stuff because I can feel stuff pretty easily. So this is going to be, I'm pumped. I'm anxious to get your feedback. Yeah. I think you're really going to like the Neuron especially. Sick. What are your thoughts on, are you still using ketones?

Yep. We use ketones from time to time for different reasons. In your case, like when you're using it with athletes. One thing they don't do is fat loss. A lot of people believe that ketones are a fat loss product, but that's not really what they are. The biggest effect I find they have is on cognitive function, like focus, alertness, that type of stuff. It works quite well on that. And then obviously they're an energy source, but they're a better energy source for longer endurance type activity than they are for like the explosive type activity. But maybe explosive stuff repeated over and over. There's

some stuff for that as well. But I think what they're really good at is the downseam signaling effects that they have in terms of whether that's mitigating oxidative stress, endothelial function, brain function, all those types of things are signaling the effects they have from that. They can be used for that. Almost signaling fasting in a way, right? Yeah, for 100%. The same types of things that would happen with fasting. So I think those are really great. I don't utilize them a lot, but we do use them in certain cases. I think there are some people who use ketones for therapeutic purposes and that's a whole different world and a whole different thing. There's super cool things that you can do them for that purposes from my perspective they're nothing more than an energy source and a potential

signal molecule and um i feel that they have their use but you you gotta uh they're not they're not a magic bullet like some people try to sell you you know you take ketones and it's pretty much the same as you know you're and it's pretty much the same as, you know, you're going to drop that. It's the same as going low carb and you're going to get all the same effects and that. And that's just really not the case. What are your thoughts on a carnivore diet? Love it. Love it.

I think that a carnivore diet is fantastic for gut health and cleaning up your gut. carnivore diet is fantastic for gut health and cleaning up your gut. It's great for obviously getting huge amounts of protein, which is king and very important to do. And it's also really good at satiating you. Like it's, you know, for, I love carnivore. The hard thing for me about carnivore is eating enough of it. The hard thing for me about carnivore is eating enough of it because I just have a harder time eating that much meat. And I love meat.

I enjoy meat. It's just that if I'm on the go and I'm running, I can get 50 grams of cottage cheese in my face in about three minutes. It's just that simple. If I'm going to sit down and try to eat 10 ounces of steak, it gets old after a while for me, even though I enjoy it. But I do think it's a great diet. I'm not one of those people that's like, because you're carnivore, then you have to be anti-vegetable or anti-fruit or anti-onion. I think you can blend it well. You can have a semi-carnivore diet and have some fruit in there.

And if you like some vegetables, have some of those in there too. What I've seen with me and with a lot of other people is they don't do as well with the vegetables as they do with the fruits mixed with the meat. And for a lot of people, cleaning up their guts requires removing a lot of those vegetable-type things to get their gut cleaned up. And I can't put my finger on exactly why that is guts requires removing a lot of those vegetable-type things to get their gut cleaned up. And I can't put my finger on exactly why that is. There's a lot of people who have theories about that, some of which are very sensationalized in my opinion. But whatever it is, I feel that it works well. So like, I mean, obviously this is graphic, but if I'm on carnivore, it's like I know that my gut's going well.

And this is very anecdotal, so people that are like evidence-based don't want to hear this stuff. But I'm on carnivore, and I take a shit. It's a perfect dark tan log that results in a ghost wipe every time. That's it. What else do I need to know about how my gut is working when that's how I ghost wipe every time. That's it. That's fucking, like, what else do I need to know about how my gut is working when that's how I shit all the time? You know what I mean?

And then as soon as you start adding other stuff, it doesn't work like that. So I'm like, for me and for other people that I've used this for, it works fantastic for that. You know what I mean? And even things like if you try to do carnivore and you're on the road, that's trickier.

And then you get shitty meat. And it's not even the shitty meat, but they cook it in bad oils and all that type of stuff. And then right away you can tell it's not doing really good stuff for your gut and things of that nature. And when I say bad meat, I don't necessarily mean that it has to be organic or 100% grass-fed all the time, but there's a big difference between even non-grass-fed, decent-cutting meat that you buy in the grocery store and grill up versus the Philly cheesesteak shit that you get in the mall when you throw away the bun and just eat the Philly cheesesteak, you know what I mean? And so with that, I don't think it would be a real good idea to use those types of meats for carnivore, but it works well.

What about lowish carbs for some of your athletes? Is that something that you prescribe? I know Paula Quinn seemed like he was pretty into that. I love using low carbs in athletes. I'm of the view that you need to earn your carbs all the time. And so depending what the demand is and what your situation is, that's what dictates how many carbs that you need. So there are certain times a year where I'm doing 30,000 steps a day

and half of those steps are kind of like jogging around or dragging equipment or demonstrating stuff and doing all those types of stuff. And when I'm doing that and squeezing a workout in, I can eat whatever carbs I want and I'll just get leaner. It doesn't matter just because my activity level is that high and I'm doing that and squeezing a workout in, I can eat whatever carbs I want. And I'll just get leaner. It doesn't matter. Just because my activity level is that high, I'm earning all my carbs. There's other times where you're closer to sedentary.

And if you eat carbs then, you're going to be messed up. And I just think if you take the approach that you always earn your carbs, you're going to be great. And that might mean you have to be low carb, depending on what your activity is. But that's what you have to be low carb depending what your activity is but that's what you have to do and i feel that there's a lot of noise in terms of calories in calories out you know the whole that that equation versus the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity type thing and there's a big there's a big battle and there's this whole like diametrically opposed people that want to fight about the whole thing. And I'm just like, you guys can both be right about this whole thing. You know what I mean? Because the calories in, calories out from just a plain physics,

when you look at it and you understand it, it makes sense. It's hard to say that that's wrong. understand it, it makes sense. It's hard to say that that's wrong. However, my problem with just simply stating that is twofold. One is most people are terrible at understanding how to count calories, how to track them, don't want to track them. And understanding what your basal metabolic rate is and how your activity affects that to try and make this magic calculation to track your calories, most people have no idea how to do that. Even well-trained people sometimes don't know how to do that well.

So that makes that harder to do. And most people just don't want to do that shit anyway. And the other thing about it is, and this is, I guess, what my biggest problem with it, it doesn't give people what I feel are actionable steps that they can use to help them stir health immediately. So let me look at it like this. Let's just say that we get a meeting with Warren Buffett and we get to sit down and ask him about all his stuff. down and ask him about all his stuff. So boom, we got the man in front of us. We say like, tell us, how do you get all this money? And he says to us, well, it's simple. I just spend less than I make. You'd be like, thank you very much. What am I going to do with that fucking information?

Right? That's the same calories in calories out to me. Now I understand that I get, well, what am I going to do with this information? And so most of the people in that crowd don't provide other information because they're so harped on being right, which they kind of are, that they're not presenting other methods. Whereas some of these other models, even though they may want to ignore part of the calorie calorie thing at least their

their recommendations to follow that lead to some actionable things that people can do and in the end even if those actionable things are really just resulting in them lowering the calories at the end of the day it's an easier action plan to follow for a lot of things yeah and you know like here's an example. Have you ever heard anybody say, dude, I'm so stressed out right now, bro. I just need to eat a steak and some broccoli. People don't do that shit.

People go, I need a donut or whatever it is. So they're going to overeat those types of foods easier. So by somewhat restricting those or making attention on those, you're kind of winning the battle in that sense to begin with so i find that that approach is a little bit more helpful um and then i think the calories and calories up people like to discount the role of hormones in this whole process and the role of what your body do with the thing which i think i understand their perspective in terms of looking at this.

We're still looking at the overall equation of this whole thing and you can't dispute that. But at the same time, like you intuitively know that the hormones play a huge factor. It gets back to that whole, okay, I know grass is green. So if you want to tell me different,

I don't want to hear it. If you want to tell me why, we't want to hear it if you want to tell me why we're talking about that but as an example if you go on a diet that and you go on a diet yours is exactly the same as his internet like in terms of you're in a 500 calorie surplus proteins stabilized and accounted for between the two of all, all this stuff, then you're both on identical diets. Then I'm going to put you both on identical training. We're all going to do all this stuff, okay? However, I give you 600 milligrams of test a week and you don't. That sounds like just right now.

Real life. So in 10 weeks, who's going to fare better okay so i mean all other things being equal right so you know intuitively hormones matter people know these things right but like to what extent and what happened but you can't just discount that all together and poo-poo the whole other side of the argument when you already know good well that they matter, right? And so to me, it's pointless getting into the argument of that whole thing because both sides are kind of right, really right, and it's just a matter of,

I hate to see the overall message that can improve a lot of people's health being diluted or not getting out there because the two sides want to argue more about who's right as opposed to like let's just get some good information out to people so that they can make good dietary choices to get to where they want to go. And I think that little battle confuses that a lot and it's kind of sad. That little battle confuses that a lot, and it's kind of sad.

Do you find it helpful to share with people that they can eat natural foods? If you stick with natural foods, it's kind of hard to go wrong, as long as we're not blending them and doing a bunch of shit to them and making them overly processed? 100%. I tell people all the time, protein is king. That's the first thing. Get a whole lot of protein in and make it the first thing that you eat and make it a priority every time you eat. The next thing is don't eat sugar.

Don't eat processed stuff. Obviously, you're going to fall off sometimes. It's going to be what it is. But that's generally what you want to do. Some people, when you said don't eat sugar, they're like thinking, oh, I shouldn't eat fruits either. What do you mean when you say sugar? I'm talking sugar, processed sugar. you said don't eat sugar, they're like thinking, Oh, I shouldn't eat fruits either. What do you mean? I'm talking sugar, processed sugar.

Gotcha. Don't, don't eat that sugar. Yeah. And then the other thing is never let your diet and your training go at the same time. If you're going to have a sloppy diet, keep your training high and don't mess that up.

And if your training is going to go, make sure your diet's tight because you can survive for fairly decent periods of time messing up one or the other. The minute you start messing up both of them at the same time, you go downhill really fast. And so if you follow those three simple rules, and I guess the fourth rule would be earn all your calories. Sorry, earn all your calories, like, sorry, earn all your carbohydrates. So again, you got a big activity day, you want to eat more carbs, that's the day to do it. You know, you're going to travel, you know, four hours and work sitting on your butt one day. That's not the day to eat your extra carbohydrates, you know. But those, if you just

follow those rules, life gets a whole lot simpler. You know what I mean? And you can make really good gains. If you want to step on stage type ready, those four rules aren't enough for you. But for the vast majority of the population, including elite athletes, that works. Do you think protein is an energy source? It can be. It can absolutely be an energy source if you need it to be.

Through what, the amino acids or something like that? Yeah, exactly, through gluconeogenesis. You break down the proteins and make glucose. It's not ideally necessarily what you want to do, but in the end, eating a high amount of protein or the amount of calories that you need to sustain, where you'd need to get some gluconeogenesis from protein is a better option because that end fate is still a productive fate. Overeating the fat or overeating the carbohydrate,

its end fate is not a productive state. And so I would say there is not really a danger in shooting, overshooting on the protein side, like there is danger in shooting overshooting on the protein side like there is a danger in overshooting on the fat and the carbohydrate side so that's why oh another reason why I say the protein is king and you need all those essential amino acids to be able to run virtually every function in your body so having that helps and then there's also the um the cost you know thermic effect of food or a specific dynamic action the cost of metabolically processing that protein is so much higher that it helps your metabolism you know and so although for all those reasons that's why protein is king how about nutrient timing do you like have your athletes eat a

certain time close to training like do have your athletes eat a certain time close to training? Like do, are some, are some athletes affected negatively if they eat close to training? How do you handle that? It depends on the workout and it depends on the person. So I always like to have some type of liquid intra workout fuel for the workout, but some athletes will eat a steak and be fine, you be fine 45 minutes later to go run. Other athletes, no, they need like two and a half hours sometimes before they do it. Also, if you're just going to kind of go lift some weights in the gym, that's a lot different than if you've got to go to the track

and run like six times 300 at high pace on short rest and stuff like that. So you really have to dial it in for the athlete but in ideal world you want to be you want to go into the workout relatively fueled already and then have some intra workout and then feel again after that sort of peri workout window so before during and after if you can get a lot of your nutrients in there, it's a great time to do it. And for me, I love getting stuff in there because that's when I have control. Like when they leave, I don't know what, I mean, I can make recommendations. I can give you a chef, but I can't stand there and put the stuff in your mouth, right? But when you're there, then I can.

So that's those three periods of feeding where i literally can have control of what's going on so i take advantage of it with all whatever type of nutrients i can get in get in there and i think also for people in terms of um consistency and compliance if you can stick the majority of what you need for the whole day in that window you just consistently do that window it negates the need to, oh, I forgot to take my this here, and I forgot to take that there. If you can get most of the nutrients in then, it simplifies your life a lot.

Yeah. What does that intra-workout shake look like or that intra-workout drink that these athletes are drinking? Maybe it depends on the workout. It depends on the workout. It depends on the athlete too. And so it's going to have usually some simple carbs. And then it's going to have a lot of amino acids, not just essential, but all kinds of amino acids.

And it's going to have like some electrolytes, salt, all types of different things like that. Gotcha. And the amounts will vary for the athlete. Okay. You said like try to minimize processed foods, but what about protein shakes? Well, to a certain extent, that is a processed food, yeah. And so I don't think that has the same level of deleterious effect as other processed foods do, for sure. And you're also still in that category of protein is king there, but there are definitely some protein shakes that are better than others, for sure.

There are definitely some protein shakes that are better than others for sure. I find that people have a, and this is super controversial, but people have a bigger problem with the crap they add to those protein shakes more than the protein itself. So I get a lot of people that come to me and they're like, oh, I can't have whey. Oh, my so-and-so said I had a sensitivity and I can't have this and whey bloats me. It doesn't. Okay, great.

Fair enough. But then, okay, try this way. And then it's a whey that's pretty much just whey. It doesn't have gums. It doesn't have artificial flavors or artificial sweeteners. It doesn't have soy or thicken artificial sweeteners it doesn't have soy or thickeners has none of that it's really just a bit and all of a sudden the way doesn't bother them anymore i was like well wait a minute was it the way or is the fact that you've never

actually had a way that doesn't have bullshit in it or the fucking oat milk that they use. Exactly right. So I think that sort of in some ways brings us to the whole artificial sweetener conversation in some sense. And I think that's another thing where people are polarized, where it's like, yeah, they're fine, do whatever you want, or they're absolutely tolerable, you're going to drop dead of cancer tomorrow. I don't mind in any of those camps. Like I feel that like I used to use artificial sweeteners at one point in time in many of my products. And I feel that for a lot of people, if the choice is drink a Coke or drink a Diet Coke,

drink the freaking Diet Coke. You're always going to be better off not having that sugar. You know what I mean? But it's not a binary thing. It doesn't have to be that. It's like I think that always having stuff that's super sweetened creates that palate, that sort of sweet palate, and it makes you want to have more sweet things all the time.

Now, there's studies that will disagree with that, but I'm just telling you from what I see and what people experiment, that definitely happens and i think that again i'm not really dealing with a population where they have to have a taste like candy to drink it like a lot of guys are like whatever like shut up you and drink it you know what i mean so it's not as big a deal i haven't had to use it and um so i feel like there is there's not enough literature to say point blank artificial sweeteners are terrible for you however it's trending in that direction okay i believe in four or five years time there will be more stuff has said it's bad for your

and particularly bad for your gut part of the problem with analyzing whether or not these things are bad for your gut is we don't know what's bad for your gut. We don't, we talk about the gut biome like there's a full depth understanding of the gut biome. The truth of the matter is nobody knows shit about the gut biome. And the body of knowledge in that field is doubling about every six months. So even what you think you you know now you probably is not going to be necessarily a fact in a year and you've got situations where they've studied like uh nomadic tribes and looked at their gut biome and stuff like that and they're looking for certain strains that we think are super important and they're absent. They don't even have them. You know what I mean? And so like, again, it's really hard to say, to quantify whether or not something is having a negative effect on this gut biome when we don't even know enough about the gut biome,

which is part of the problem with sorting out what's happening with your gut and some of these artificial sweeteners. So I'm leaning a lot on anecdotally what I see. And of course, the scientific community probably doesn't really like that, whatever it is, what it is. But I see that people have better responses to these products when they don't, especially people who are sensitive to them, when they don't have the artificial sweeteners in them.

But having said that, again, if I'm just a regular everyday person and my choice is eat 70 grams of sugar that's going to spike the shit out of my, or have some aspartame, I'm just going to have the aspartame. Yeah. What do you love about your job? Well, I think the thing that I love the most about my job is I've got the freedom to be creative and try to

manipulate things and systems to create a change in an athlete that I can like see happen like right before my eyes and they can see it and we can all feel it and participate in it and just the idea of people being able to take control over that part and make that change, I think is what I love the most about it. I like a lot of things about it, but that's probably, I mean,

these guys must drive you nuts every once in a while. They must defy like, you're like, like you haven't trained in six and they come in and they just do amazing. They're not eating the way they're supposed to. Yeah, there's a lot of things that piss me off. But here's the really cool thing that happened to me early on with my job. It was an awesome life lesson.

Because you're dealing with guys who are making $11 or $12 million a year. Sometimes guys that have had to make $20-some million a year. But they're doing that. They're playing a game that they love and getting that much money, and they still find shit to complain about with their jobs. And it's not shit that's unmerited

complaining about. It's just the fact is, it doesn't matter what you do. There's going to be some shitty stuff that you don't like to do that you have to do and the sooner you just embrace that fact and get on with it the better life is going to be so to me it was like a fantastic life lesson that's where can people find you that was amazing where can people find you where can they buy some of the supplements and stuff? OptimumEFX.com. You can find supplements.

And I'm like realpepaz on Instagram and pep-az.com. And training-wise, it's the place to find me. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. Appreciate it. Always fun. Thanks for having me, guys. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later. Bye. Bye.