Mark Bell's Power Project - Make 2024 The Best Year of Your Life By Sculpting Your Body, Bank, & Relationship || MBSS Ep. 53

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

In episode 53 of Mark Bell's Saturday School, Mark Bell teaches us how to sculpt a better life from our body, our bank account and even our relationships   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

We make time for the things that we prioritize. We make time for the things that we really, truly like and we really, truly love. People are really smart. When they say they don't have time for it, they don't mean that they don't have an hour for the day. They mean they don't have the time to embark on this thing that's going to take a ton of consistency. It's not an easy thing to do, and it's not an easy thing to start. But I would say one of the easier things that you'll ever do in your life is just start. Because after that, there's more work. Can the person that's currently fat, can they look a little bit better in a short period of time? Yeah. Where can people

start when it comes to the diet? The best diet to be on is meat, eggs, fruit, repeat. If you're not hungry for meat, don't eat. If the things in your pantry are way more appealing to you, that's fake hunger. You don't actually need food at the moment. All right, everybody. Welcome to Saturday School. I'm your host, Marcus Mellebell. Turn to page 43, because I said so. That's the page that we're on. And Saturday School is an opportunity for me to teach and for you to learn.

So some of you may want to get out a pen or a pencil and maybe take some notes on what we're going to be talking about today. And for today, we're going to be talking about getting in shape and shaping things up and shaping your future, shaping 2025, 24? What year are we in? Where are we? It doesn't matter. Maybe people are hearing this at the end of 2024. Yeah, who knows, right?

Yeah. Anyway, shaping up your new year. And I personally believe that the best way that you can positively impact every single thing in your entire life is for you to work on getting in better shape. It's really, really rare that somebody is in the exact shape that they want to be in. Even somebody that's super lean, even someone that is already in good shape, a lot of times they're like, man, cardiovascular sucks or my strength sucks. And they still want to be shaped up or they still want to be in better condition in some other way. And so I believe that if you can kind of wrap your idea around, if I can get myself better in the gym

by these small incremental steps every single day, I could probably also do so outside of the gym. I could probably also do so outside of the gym. I could probably be a better husband. I could probably be a better dad. And there's no reason to sit back and get sad about any of this. There's no reason to feel like a failure. The whole point is that this is a practice, and this is something that is going to give you some room to grow. The weight room is kind of a metaphor for a lot of it,

or even jujitsu or running. It could be just about anything that you do, but I personally think that it's helpful if you have the practice of going to the gym because going to the gym is literally giving you those reps and those sets with yourself that you actually need. I think in modern times, I think it's really easy to occupy your thoughts and your feelings that are really important and to put your life on pause by having a drink or eating food that is really pleasurable

or watching a TV show that's fun to watch. We're all the way to the point where it's like couples aren't really talking as much anymore. It's like couples, like one couple will ask another couple, hey, what shows do you guys watch? And that's cool. And I'm not against that at all. My wife and I watch shows And that's cool. And I'm not against that at all. My wife and I watch shows and that's very normal. But I also feel, I don't feel like my wife and I's relationship is perfect. There's always room to improve. But I feel like we have a good relationship. We do a lot of

communication. When I come home from the gym today, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab her by the hips and I'm going to kiss her on the lips. Do it pretty much every time. If she's like cooking, I'm going to grab her butt or something. We like flirt with each other. We mess with each other. And then we talk. When we talk, you know, sometimes it's like just conversational.

Like how'd your day go? And she tells me about swimming and I tell her a little bit about lifting and podcasting. And maybe she mentioned some work stuff. And then maybe we talk about heavier stuff, talk about family matters or, um, things that might be going on coming up. And, um, so we have that time to do that, but we also still have our reprieve of sitting there and just kind of like mindlessly, you know, watching a TV show. But the importance of the gym is that it's not mindless, that you're going into the gym and you have an intent and your intent is to better yourself, whether you're trying to get stronger or whether you're trying to get in better shape. And even furthermore, you're trying to have like follow through.

You're trying to have commitment. You're trying to show yourself that even when things get to be difficult, you have the ability to keep going. And so on rep number six of your third set of hammer strength bench press that you're doing at the gym, it might seem meat-heady, and you might think like, oh, I'm just being a dude building my pecs, bench pressing. And yes, you are doing that. But you can also kind of put your mind through these are mindsets.

This is going to help my mind to grow. Not only are my muscles going to grow, but my mind is going to grow. Let me get myself to a number of reps, a number of sets, an amount of weight that kind of figuratively like pushes me up against the wall. Or it's like, dude, I don't know if you got any more left. Like this is, fuck, this is getting F, I meant. This is getting to be really challenging. I don't know if I can do another rep and your arms are shaking and so forth. Breathe through it, you know, have the practice

of breathing through it, have the practice of going deep into the mind and now making it a mindset so that you can get in better shape and so that you can better yourself. Because again, we're not just trying to better ourselves for the gym, although training to failure has been shown time and time again to be pretty great for hypertrophy, and brushing up against failure can be really effective. But we're not just doing it for that. We're not just doing it for the hypertrophy of our muscles. We're doing it for the hypertrophy of our brain, our spirit, our willpower.

You're building willpower, and you, our willpower. You're building willpower and you're strengthening willpower. The only way to strengthen willpower, sometimes you might look at somebody and say, man, I just don't know how this guy does it. He's on point with so many things. Well, he's just had a lot of practice. That's really all it is. The guy's had a lot of practice.

And how is he getting that practice in? More often than not, you're going to see people getting that type of practice and that type of precision comes from training in the gym okay so um again kind of going into the next year and one of the things that happens is people set these new year's resolutions i'm going to go work out i'm going to do this um and it's that's great to do some people go full you, pedal to the metal and then they end up hurting themselves or whatever, you know, stuff can happen when you're not training and then you're in the gym every day for one week at least. But a lot of people will say that they don't have time to go work out. They're already so overwhelmed with everything they got going on

and you just dropped a really dope Saturday school. So the previous Saturday school that is available, go check that out, but it's audio only. And since we're doing video today, maybe you can do like a quick recap on that about like, you know, people will use the excuse of not being able to go to the gym because they don't have enough time to go to the gym. I think you have to make time. And when we talk about lifting, oftentimes here at the Power Project, we don't always necessarily mean the gym, but we kind of do mean the gym. Like you need to build your own gym in a way. And the gym is actually, when COVID hit and all hell was kind of breaking loose and people were super sad about the gyms, to super training because I felt it was like an injustice to a lot of us that weren't able to come here because we didn't want to deal with these

different ramifications. People weren't meeting up for work anymore. And super training is not only, it's also a business. We have slingshot in the same building and so on. And so I said to myself, you know what, if I'm going to shut down the gym, I'm going to shut down my own ability to go to the gym, even though technically I kind of could, because I would be the only one there. And I did that. And the reason why I did that is because I have known this since the time I was a kid, since I first started lifting. Lifting is inside your heart. The gym is inside your heart. You've got to create your own gym. The world is a gym.

Everywhere you look, you can be gymming. You can be fitnessing. You could be turning something in. And I know it might seem like kooky fitness talk, but you see a bench, you can jump on it. You see a bench, you could sit down and squat on it. You see a bench, you could do push-ups off of it. You could do step-ups off of it. You see a bench, you could do pushups off of it. You could do step ups off of it. I mean, you can have an entire workout just on some random park bench that's outside. You could

have an entire workout on a curb. That's all you need is a curb. Maybe a little flight of stairs. Doesn't even have to be that big. You don't even need any equipment. You don't even need stairs. You could literally just do some pushups and some. So you can take the idea of the gym and kind of bring it to just about anywhere. And when you do that, that should kind of pull back a little bit on you worried about so much time commitment because, yeah, it could be 15 minutes to the gym and i personally and i know a lot of people listening like this too i personally like the stuck in the situation time commitment of i'm driving to the gym and then when i get to the gym

i'm going to do gym like shit when i get there. And it makes a lot of sense. And it's 15 minutes there, 15 minutes on the way back. You play your favorite song on the way there. You get yourself hyped up. You work out. Hopefully you have a good workout and everything's good to go. But, you know, I think we just, I think that's like our only interpretation of the gym, unfortunately. And you should be able to make time for it in other ways. And you should also have different interpretations of what even working out is in the first place. Maybe you don't necessarily like to hike. Maybe you don't

necessarily like rucking or something like that, but that is a workout. So if you have an opportunity to hit a trail, you have an opportunity to do something slightly different for that particular day. Now you're getting yourself into doing something a little different that again, is going to, it's kind of cool to do some things that you're a little bit uncomfortable with. And again, if we're just going back to like trying to make time for stuff, we make time for the things that we prioritize. We make time for the things that we really truly like and we really truly love. We make time for the things that we enjoy. And so you're going to have to find like, what is it that you enjoy? And maybe like, I would just even just ask somebody, ask a friend who likes to mountain bike, say, Hey, the first time you went out on a trail and mountain biked,

how was it? Did you love it? Was it awesome? And they'd be like, no, man, I actually fell off. You know, you wouldn't even believe it. Like I tried to take my son. He's nine years old. He was a pain in the ass. He cried. I fell off the bike. He fell off the bike. It was awful. Usually the first time that you do something is not going to be great. of the time that it takes to actually do the thing. You're also taking thinking of the time commitment that it takes to get in shape in the first place or to get conditioned to it, to where it's second nature. If you just pull the bike out of the back of your truck. And I mean, there are a lot of people like, I don't even have any idea how to do this. Like with mountain biking or something, I don't even know how to like transport bikes other than like just chucking them in the back of my truck, you know?

And I know there's like, there's special like bike racks and shit, right? I don't even know how to get to be part of that team and be part of that squad. You know what I'm saying? Like there's all these little things that you have to kind of pick up. And I think that people that aren't maybe exercising and the people that they feel like that. They're like, I don't know. I see these people with these, they got certain shoes and certain clothes when they wear, they're wearing like tight stuff that looks really nice. I don't even know where they get

all this stuff from. And so there's probably so much of that going on in your head. But I think that people are really smart and they have a lot of great intuition in understanding when they say they don't have time for it, they don't mean that they don't have 15 minutes. They don't mean that they don't have an hour for the day. They mean they don't have the time to embark on this thing that's going to take a ton of consistency. And I think that that is probably, And I think that that is probably, it's a smart way to look at it because it actually does make some sense, but it's flawed. And here's why.

If you look at consistency, consistency looks something like this when you first start doing something. Let's take the gym as an example. And you say, I'm going to go to the gym on monday and you finally show up you finally actually go on monday you go in you do a little workout that a friend maybe told you about maybe you follow along on an app and you you did it like you followed the instruction you didn't understand a couple exercises or whatever but you you did your best. And you wake up the next day, you're a little sore, but you go again. So you made it Monday, Tuesday. Wednesday rolls around and you're just like, holy shit, I'm really sore.

I got work, I got kids, I got this and that. Try to kind of make excuses so you don't go on Wednesday. You miss Thursday. Maybe you pick up go on Wednesday. You miss Thursday. Maybe you pick up going on Friday. You had every intention of hitting up the gym on the weekend, but you're snuggled in your bed with your wife and it just feels good. So you don't go on Saturday or Sunday. And then it turns out that you miss Monday the next week and you miss Tuesday. Wednesday rolls around. You feel guilty. Boom, you're back in the gym.

You made it back in there. Maybe you go in on Friday. So week one, you went three times. Week two, you went twice. Now it's week three. Maybe you go two times again. Week four, you go once. Now somebody at this point, they might be ready to quit.

They might say, I just can't get it together. And what I would say is, no, this is what consistency is. This is how it looks. This is how it starts. If I was to ask you to weigh yourself every single day and you weighed 200 pounds and you want it to be 170 pounds, if you weighed yourself every day, the consistency of it, it would look like this. You would weigh 200. You know, I'm giving you this list of food that you should be eating. So day one, you weigh 200. Day two, you weigh 203. You're like, oh, that's interesting.

You know, day three, you weigh 200. Day four, you weigh 203. Day five, you weigh 199. And it just keeps going up and down and up and down. The next week, you weigh in a certain time and you weigh, you know, 195 or 197 or something. You're like, oh, I'm getting progress. But the next week on that same exact day, you weigh 201 again. Like, this is the way that this shit looks you're working on getting your shit together but over time week one week two week three now week four goes on and now you're like oh i was 198 this morning the next day you're 197 a couple days later you're 197. A couple of days later, you're 196. A couple of days later, you're 198. A couple of days later, and it just keeps going up and down enough just to mess with your brain. But if you're really paying attention, you're actually making progress. And that's what consistency will look like when you're trying to, no one else is, no one else is, is, uh, no one else is making you accountable for this.

This is you, this is you versus you. This isn't school. This isn't a work. You know, someone might be like, well, it's weird, man. I don't have any problem being dedicated to work. Yeah. Cause you'll get fired. There's so much accountability there. And I could say, Hey, if you don't exercise, you're going to die. But like, you're like, no, I'm not. And you'd be right. You're not going to, but your health span. You could be, and even furthermore, I think you could be losing access to what you know that you have and what you know that you used to be able to do. And I think that's a really brutal one. I think that, I think oftentimes people are shaping their future off of their past and it doesn't feel good. And they look in the mirror and they say, man, I'm, you know, 40 pounds, 40 pounds overweight. Like I don't even want to look

in the mirror anymore. I'm 50 pounds overweight. I don't even want to, I don't even want to see that. Well, why would you say you don't want to see it? The reason why you'd say you don't want to see it is because you know, the potential that you have and you know where you were before. The body keeps score. The mind keeps score. Your body keeps track. You used to be able to chuck a football pretty good. You used to be able to catch pretty good.

You used to be able to throw a baseball pretty – like you used to do these things pretty good. You could jump pretty good. You could run decently. And now shit ain't working the same way. And so even though you may not like love exercise, and even though that exercise isn't going to all of a sudden assist you in like living way longer, it's going to help get you back some of the shit that you lost. I know that it will. It has for me. it has for me for sure. You have like a, uh, a fitness and athletic potential and you pro and it was probably already pretty

decent at some point in your life for most people. Hopefully you had parents that gave a shit and they forced you to do stuff that you didn't want to do, uh, like some sports and stuff like that. And, uh, you know, hopefully you had some sort of conditioning at some point. And if you haven't, it's still not too late to get, it's still not too late to get to it. But I think there's a lot of people out there, if they could just get back what they had, they'd be really happy. And when you start to think about it that way, it's like, do you have time for that? Do you have time to go from being 45 to feeling like you're

25? Like, I literally feel amazing. This is the best I've ever felt. And I probably have said that more than once, but it's true. I continue to feel better. I have absolutely no pain. I did smash my knee on something like a couple of days ago and I thought I was going to fucking die. And I was in a room of like friends and kind of – I don't even know. I was in the room of like some high-level friends and so I just tried to play it off. And I smashed my knee on this machine and then I had, I walked over to another machine and I'm like, I'm just going to play this off and I'm just going to talk to everybody the way that we're all talking. And I pretend nothing happened, but all of a sudden I started sweating and I was like,

I'm going to fucking, I'm going to pass out in front of these guys. This is going to be the most embarrassing day of my life. But luckily, uh, that shit didn't happen. That sucks, dude. Um, another, I know you've been there a million times. Oh, man. Yeah, because, I mean, being around you guys, being at super training, it's like, oh, no way the smallest guy in the room hurt himself. Didn't see that coming. It's like, no, I'm good.

You try to manpower it. And it seems like the quieter you are, the worse it gets because you can focus on the throbbing. That's exactly what's going on. I just started sweating. I'm like, oh, my God. At this point, nasal breathing while you're asleep is no longer something that just us bros do. But people are realizing that it can make a big difference in your sleep quality, your recovery, and all aspects of sleep. That's why hostage tape

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over to hostage tape.com slash power project where you guys can receive mouth tape and no strips for an entire year for less than a dollar a night again hostage tape.com slash power project links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes so um are you able to tell like everyone like on average from what you've seen how long it takes for somebody to keep hitting the gym where they feel that momentum start to swing and they actually start to get energy from the exercise. Because a lot of people here, fitnessy people talk about, oh, I love going to the gym early in the morning because it energizes me for the day and blah, blah, blah. But like I remember when I first started and I would do that. I would just want to go home and I would do that, I would

just want to go home and go to sleep because like I was done. Like I didn't, I couldn't, I didn't want to face the rest of my day because I was, I kind of wasted all the energy I had. At what point do people make that shift where like the gym becomes something that adds to their day as opposed to pulling away? Yeah. A lot of times that first workout is going to feel terrible. A lot of times that first recommendation of, you know, hey, it would be great if you started out with a walk around the block. Like think about if you were to recommend to your dad or someone you care about that's a little older, say, you know, I know you don't really love working out and don't love exercise, but thinking walk here and there. They're going to report back

to you and be like, Hey, that 10 minute walk felt like shit because it's not used to it, you know? And maybe like one 10 minute walk wouldn't bother them. But if they did multiple walks, they'd say, Hey, you know what? My feet are starting to hurt. My, I noticed my knees are starting to bother me because there is like a break-in period like you're talking about. I think a lot of stuff takes, it takes time. It takes a few weeks. It takes a few months. And it's going to take time sort of no matter what.

And so that's why when you first start going into the gym, I think you should really take your time with intensity. I think that at first, maybe for the first like month, like just get yourself used to some of the machines and some of the people and some of the different things going on there. And I would maybe write down on a piece of paper or in your phone and your notes, maybe two things you would like to accomplish at the gym for the day. And it could just be and I'm talking like just two things, like two exercises. It could just be, and I'm talking like just two things, like two exercises. Like, oh, I saw a guy on a leg press on my way out of the gym last time.

I'm going to try that machine out. So give that machine a try and then, you know, try just some other movement. Like, oh, I would like to start to bench press again. And you hit that movement up too. And then you have a couple of things that you did, uh, that you can like feel good about, but you're not doing so much that you're going to feel awful either. And so I think just the old school style of a couple sets of 10 reps, light, medium, heavy works really well. We're on set number one, you go light set number two, you go medium set number one you go light set number two you go medium set number three you go heavy all the reps look similar your uh last rep of your last set looks like the first rep from your first set so if you did three sets of 10 that's 30 repetitions and the last repetition you do

you want that to look clean you want that to look like rep number one. Shouldn't be a lot of like squinting or making a lot of crazy faces or a lot of grunting. Should be pretty easy. And I know that like there's, it's interesting because I think people, they want it to be hard. They want to go in. They want it to be like tough. They want to, they'd almost rather than listening to the advice we're giving here, they'd rather go with their friend that works out like a lunatic and kind of white knuckles everything. And I would say that there's not really a ton wrong with that, except for the fact that if you're new, it just might not be sustainable. And it's also probably completely unnecessary. You don't need that many sets. You don't need that many reps. You don't need that many reps and you don't need that intensity. You're new. You don't need to use 40 pounds. You can get away with using 20 pounds and still have outstanding results. So if you care about like your joint integrity and your ligaments and tendons, and you care about like a bigger future,

then I think it's important that you really, you really take your time. And I think, I think people have like a warped image of like, maybe how I've done some things, but I've been lifting for so long. Like I lifted for decades before social media ever came along. And then the main stuff that people saw from me was like the, the bigger lifts, bigger squats and bigger deadlifts and bigger bench presses. But if you look at most of those, occasionally in training, you'll find some, you'll find some ugly lifts and you go, oh man, you know, that probably cost them something. But for the most part, you know, I tried to do

everything with as much precision as I could. And a lot of times the weights that I was using, even though they were heavy, they were like 92% of my max, you know, they weren't always like a hundred, you know, they were, they were things I could reasonably do. The 854 bench that I did, that one took a while. And that was like scraping the upper limit of, uh, what I could do. 1080 squat. I actually moved that pretty good. And, and the weight, I don't want to say like it felt light or anything, but I was able to execute the lift, uh, pretty good. Same thing when I squatted a thousand. Um, so I think even, even the people that are more advanced, So I think even the people that are more advanced, people that are more advanced, they'll actually use weights that are very appropriate.

And a lot of times the most advanced lifters I've ever seen, they wouldn't really miss weights in training. They wouldn't go so heavy that they couldn't do the set. I'm trying to make sure out of all the different bodybuilders I trained with, and I've trained with probably about 20 professional bodybuilders. Um, and none of them went so heavy that they couldn't handle the weight for the, for the allotted amount of reps. Like, uh,

if they were like, Hey, we're doing like a set of 12, we would do a set of 12. And yes, there there might they might need some body english on a couple reps uh but it wasn't like oh like he's going like you can see when someone's going way too heavy in fact it's like the opposite way which is interesting it's the new guy it's the guy who's overzealous. It's the guy who's pumped up and excited. He's just trying way too hard. And that's, it's admirable. It's cool. But man, you don't need the weight stack on your seated row, bro. Like you're fine. You're okay. Like just do, do half

that amount of weight and move the weight differently, move the weight better. Like you, especially when you're newer, you just don't need that. So, yeah, I think I think it's important that I think it's important that people just really understand this whole thing is going to take a long time. But for other people, you're just, you're going to have to just really lock in and enjoy the process. Enjoy the fact that it's going to take some time. This is kind of like a weird question, but you have helped a lot of people in person, not just online and stuff. But what is a common thing that people fear when it comes to working out? Like, you know, like I remember for myself, like I just didn't know what the heck I was doing. So I would get really nervous to go to the gym.

Sometimes I would talk myself out of it, you know, like just because I'm like, like I don't want to look silly while I'm there. But just for people who maybe have some, maybe not fear is not the right word, but they have some resistance from going to the gym. And I just want to hear what you've heard the most just so people understand that like they're not alone when it comes to kind of feeling a little bit of resistance when it comes to entering a gym. Yeah, I think one of the fastest ways to overcome fear in the gym is to latch on to a friend, latch on to somebody. And if you feel like you don't really have a friend that's in it, maybe you go to a gym and you just try to latch on to someone's there. A lot of times there's a lot of people that will sort of take you under their wing. You kind of see like the older lifters in the gym. of take you under their wing. You kind of see like the older lifters in the gym, a lot of times, you know, they're with some newer guy in the gym and hopefully nothing too weird is going on there.

Maybe there is, but, uh, you know, a lot of times people will get kind of just like it happens in jujitsu too, right? You know, you got the, and, and the guy, a lot of times the guy that takes you under the, under their wing, it's not like, it's not like, it's not usually the best guy. It's like somebody who thinks they can help in a different way. They're offering their help in a different way. They're not the most built person. They're not the most shredded. And maybe they don't know the most information, but they know enough. They know plenty for you to get kind of started.

So sometimes there's those types of people at a gym, and I think you'd be surprised. There's a lot of people there that are willing to help. And I think the fastest way to get over the fear of worrying about like going into a gym and, you know, I wonder what people are going to think of me. It's an interesting thing for me because I started lifting so young. Um, it's an interesting thing for me because I started lifting so young and then like, I was sort of like, uh, if you can kind of picture this, I was sort of like underground forever because I was in my own gym. And then now if I go to a commercial gym, I almost always get like recognized. So it's kind of fun and kind of cool for me to go to a regular gym.

And so I kind of skipped, I skipped out on some of that process. And then plus when I started, when I was – I started really young. And by starting really young at like 13 or 14, even going into commercial gyms, none of that was there because I just wasn't thinking that way. It's kind of like when you're a kid and you play baseball, you're not really, you're not, if me, you and Nsema were to get up at bat and somebody was to throw an 80 mile an hour fastball down the middle of the plate, I would be nervous and I wouldn't want to really, I wouldn't be so pumped to do it in front of you guys. I would want like practice before I ever do it. Cause I'd be like, I'm just going to look silly. I'm going to like look horrible. I would be self-conscious about it. You know, it's different, it's different

for me. Right. Um, so I skipped a lot of that though with lifting because I went when I was young. If you, if you're, if we're all swinging those bats when we were little kids, I wouldn't care. I'd just be like, Oh, that looks like fun. I'm going to go kind of do what they're doing. So I think, uh, there there's a couple things going on. I think number one is see if you can team up with somebody to go into the gym. Number two is just try your best to relax and just make it fun. Like all you're really trying to do is you're trying to get some exercise in. Everybody at the gym, that's their whole goal. They're trying to get exercise in too, whether it's to get some exercise in everybody at the gym that's their whole goal they're trying

to get exercise in too whether it's to lose some weight be healthier maybe some people in there want to be bigger gain a little muscle mass everyone's there for like a similar reason they want improvement on their body they want improvement on getting in better shape and and back to kind of what we started with in talking about like shaping, like you're shaping, you're sculpting, you're sculpting your future. And it's a difficult thing. And it's not an easy thing to do. It's not an easy thing to start. But I would say one of the easier things that you'll ever do in your life is just start. Because after that, that's where there's more work, there's more time commitment.

Now you started something, and that friend that you're going to the gym with, now you kind of have a relationship with them on going to the gym, and now you're kind of accountable. You're sort of like you got yourself in this little bit of a jam, but hopefully you can use that situation as being something that keeps you and holds you accountable to that. One more thing I want to add too is that when we were talking about time and the time commitment, how long it's going to take before you kind of like actually feel good from exercise. I think it depends on what kind of exercise we're talking about and it depends on

like your conditioning and your shape. But for general terms and general purposes, I think most things, if you start something and you do it twice a week or so, three times a week, it'd probably take about three months. You're not going to feel amazing, but you're going to start to feel what other people are talking about. You're going to go, oh, that last workout was pretty good. I kind of did feel a little extra energy burst. energy burst. And even along that topic, I think it might be important for some people to spend the money on getting like a trainer or coach. Having a trainer or coach with you can really help. It's super interesting. Like if Andrew and I were going to start working out together and Andrew has a goal to like get bigger or something

like Andrew and I are friends so we wouldn't really talk about it much you know like guys just we don't talk that I mean he might mention he wants to get bigger but it's not anything that he and I agreed upon it's not like now if Andrew uh if I was a trainer and Andrew came to me and was like, Hey, I want to, I, one of my, I want to have a personal trainer. I say, okay, that's great. Let's talk about your goals. What, what are you hoping to get from this? Because I want to make sure that whatever money you spend with me, I want to make sure that it's worthwhile and that you get the results you're looking for. And you might say, well, I want to get bigger. And I say, hey, let's write some of this down.

You want to get bigger. What else do you want? Well, now you're writing it down. Now it's in your mind. It's not any longer just stored away in the back of your head. It's now more in like the front of your head. And by writing stuff down, you know, it's amazing. Like I need to practice this more. And I just started getting back into like writing some stuff down, you know, it's amazing. Like I need to practice this more.

And I just started getting back into like writing some stuff down. But writing stuff down can be really important. And it's interesting that it would take like a personal trainer to get you to like write something down because you could just do it yourself. But having that trainer and having that accountability, okay, we have agreed upon a, we've agreed upon something that we want to work towards. We have an aim. So now the whole entire setup of the workouts is way, everything is just became so much actually easier, even though there's hard work ahead of us, because hypertrophy takes time and it takes intensity and it takes precision with even like your nutrition and all kinds of stuff we just made everything way easier the whole process is going to be

way more simple because we have something that we're actually that we're actually aiming towards and so just it's it's funny because it that practice of writing something down is very easily done by yourself. I'm happy that you brought that up because for the first time ever, my wife and I, starting 2023, we have this big whiteboard. And I was using it for writing workouts and all kinds of other random things. And we just took it and we're like, all right, we're just going to write down all the goals for 2023. Again, first time we ever did it.

That's sick. It's so dope because we actually have like the dates when we could check things off. You know, like get the home gym set up or whatever it may be. One of them that I had actually on there was like abs without trying. And, you know, I can write the date when i actually started seeing the abs without me ever even like thinking about it and i'm you know it's just cool because it's like well maybe it's coincidence maybe it's not you know it could also not be that um but when it comes to like the gym and fitness and all this stuff it's really easy for us fitnessy guys to talk about

like how great it is and the benefits and whatnot. But how does getting in shape physically help? Like how does it start to spill over into other aspects of someone's life? It starts to spill into other aspects of your life quickly because you start to just recognize that that dedication that you have to the gym and that dedication you have to getting in better shape, all it really takes is some consistency, you know, some commitment, some consistency, a little bit of time, and you start to kind of recognize that you put a little bit more time into your daughter, you're going to get better results. You put a little bit more time into your daughter, you're going to get better results. You put a little bit more time into your son, you're going to get better results. You put a little bit more time in your relationship.

Now, sometimes we're not like really conscious of this, and that's where it helps to not just be a meathead. That's where it helps to like, you know, think of other people. Because I think this endeavor, you know, that you're undertaking is, it's an endeavor of, of self-exploration, but it's also an endeavor of personal development, personal improvement. And that personal improvement needs to extend outward into other people. It can't just be, I mean, it could be, but you're probably not going to feel great because it would be boxed in and you'll just kind of be by yourself. And I don't think we're meant to like be by ourselves in this world. I think that we need other people and we need love.

We need relationships. We need hugs. We need interactions. We need really good interactions with other people. Maybe not a lot of other people, but we need interactions with a good amount of people in our lives, whether it's your own children or an uncle, a grandfather, a grandmother, a brother, a sister. I think all these things are really important. There's so many hormones attached to all that stuff. Obviously, you have things like dopamine and things like that, but you also have serotonin, like serotonin is like a hugging kind of a drug in the, in the

brain or chemical rather. And, you know, I think it's, it's, it's interesting because having, when you get yourself in shape and you get yourself some of the goals that you want fitness wise, it takes some organization and it takes some skills. You could take some of that organization and some of those skills and bring it into your day to day, but it's not going to happen. Like, like I did mention that it will happen fast, but it also is not going to happen like automatically. Like some of it will happen fast, but it also is not going to happen like automatically. Like some of it will be automatic because you'll feel better about yourself. You have more energy.

Therefore, you'll be able to spend more time or you'll be able to, you'll just have more energy for other people as well because you created a body that's more efficient. that's more efficient. Not to get too technical, but you'll hear a lot of people talking about like mitochondria and how many people, many Americans are metabolically broken. Their mitochondria doesn't work as well as it used to. And just by simply being healthier, by shedding off some body fat, by getting in better shape, you can make your metabolism a lot more efficient. Once that metabolism is more efficient, you're going to have more energy, even though you're expending a lot of energy. And so some people might be like, well, I'm going to be way more tired. Yes, again, at first you probably will be. But when you get your body used to this energy expenditure, you are going and you're consistently eating properly, you're going to have more energy. And the more energy that you're able to put into stuff, I think we think of energy just as like

being like all hyped up. But energy is, goes way beyond that. It's, if you have enough energy, you don't have any problem being diligent. You don't have any problem like taking your time. Like, I don't know how many people watch survivor, but my wife was watching the survivor, um, finale last night. And what they do is they fatigue you in those challenges. And then they have you try to untie a knot and then they have you try to use dexterity. They had this one drill at the end where you had to stack these plates up you're on the beach you had to stack these little tiny plates up but you had to do so via like using this weird stick slash claw thing you would pick you would pick up this

little tiny uh it was more like a disc than a plate. And then you had to walk across the sand. But not only were you walking across the sand, you had to pick your foot up pretty high and put it over top of this kind of spongy style of rope. And if you touch the rope, the rope would make everything shake. It would make all the plates fall. So you had to get to the other side, stack the plates, and back, stack the plates and go back and stack the plates and go back. And if you have enough energy and you have enough strength and you have enough patience, you can get through that activity. And it's not surprising that a lot of women end up winning those events because it's not just like grip your hands and just dig into this with all your muscle. This is a totally different event. And just kind of watching this woman go through it, she just had this tremendous amount of dexterity, tremendous amounts of patience.

But for any of those individuals that were doing that event, if any of them were like low on energy, they would be even less efficient at what they were doing. It would be even harder for them to do it. And so getting yourself in shape takes a lot of organization, getting yourself stronger, getting yourself just more fit is going to be something that if you can do that, just more fit is going to be something that if you can do that, how many Americans can do that? Like how many people do you see at an airport, uh,

at a mall walking down the street? Like how many people do you see where you're like, yep, that guy's fucking ferocious. That motherfucker's got it. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's, it's not that often. I mean,

here and there, you'll see someone who's like kind of fit, you know, here and there you'll see, you'll be like, oh, okay. Guy gets a head nod. Guy's got a little calves, a little forearm. Like, Hey, what's up? You know, but it's different though. It's different when you see the unicorn and you see the guy. And a lot of times, a lot of times it's, uh, I don't know, just think about how many, how many times have you been introduced to somebody and somebody tells you, Hey, this is so-and-so they own, you know, they own half the block down the street you know they own this this and this how often are they like just a total slob it's really rare like how often is there you know they have this like long ass shirt and it's like on you know partially tucked and

partially not tucked and and they're very heavy and they're breathing hard and they're sweaty. It's like that's – it's really rare. And why is that rare? Well, because that person has a lot of pieces of their life that aren't organized. And then it bleeds into a lot of other areas where they're not organized. And I'm not a huge believer necessarily in like the way you do, you know, anything is the way you do everything. I think it's a little drastic. But for the most part, for the most part, you can,

there's a paper trail. There's, there's a paper trail. Now having said that, we also know a lot of like dumb meatheads that are shredded and look great and they're not really doing, you know, but we're usually, usually when we talk about it, we're usually kind of disappointed. We're like, man, that guy's, let's shake our head. We're like, that guy's incredible. Like, I don't understand. Like, I should be doing like, you know, but some, but for some people, um, they, they, they kind of get stuck.

They get stuck in what they're doing and they're not paying attention. They don't really understand that. Like if you can get yourself in shape and you can inspire some other people to get themselves in shape, you are solving a riddle and solving a problem. That's really, really difficult for most people. a problem that's really, really difficult for most people. If you think about like our boy Nsema, it would be an interesting question to ask somebody, Hey, would you rather be rich or would you rather look like Nsema? You know what I mean? Like, and I think like my answer would be like, you know, if I could pick one over the other, I think looking like Encima would be awesome as it would be an amazing place to start.

And then I can turn – you know what I mean? Once you look like that, you can turn that into something. And that's the whole point of a lot of what we're talking about here today. Yeah, I think the rebuttal would be like, well, if I was rich, I could pay somebody to help train me or I can, you know, whatever. But it's like, well, I mean, you can't pay somebody to instill habits into you. Well, people also say the opposite of that, too. Like, if I was rich, I'd be drinking a martini on a beach. True.

Yeah. And you're like, well, wait a second. That's so damn true but you can i mean look you know making more money is important and um you know fuck people that are like making a list of the shit that they want to do and they want to get better at put that down like write it like write make more money and then also think about it think about it more like put little arrows next to it. Like, how do I make, what amount do you make? What amount do you make ish? Do you possess the ability to make more? And I think it's like, man, of course you do. Do you possess the ability to wake up tomorrow morning and just decide that every time that you walk, anytime you're walking anywhere, that you're just going to walk a tiny bit faster? Like you could decide the wackiest, weirdest little things, but you can. And will you have to go back and forth in your mind going, shit, I'm walking super slow again?

Yeah, of course you will. You have to keep encouraging yourself to walk faster. And that's something that obviously is like free. But I think that when it comes to finances, I think that people think it's like this real elusive thing. And it certainly can be. but if you were to think to yourself, you know, in 2024, I really would like, I think maybe some of the problem is the same problem that you end up with when people are talking about getting in shape. It's like, Hey man, like you're super fat. You're, you're, you're really fat. You're not going to necessarily all of a sudden get in shape.

You're going to go from being fat to being less fat to being less fat to then starting to have a physique where people like that guy exercises. Then to being in shape. It's going to take a while. And the same things when it comes to finances. in shape. It's going to take a while. And the same things when it comes to finances, but can the person that's currently fat, can they look a little bit better very easily in a short, and in a short period of time? Yeah. I mean, it, you can, you can be in better, you could look way different in three weeks or in like a month, two months. I mean, we, we were talking with Wyatt earlier. Wyatt ended up being over 270 pounds for a little while. He was gaining some weight and wasn't heading in

a great direction. And then he was kind of telling me some different things he was going to do with his diet. I said, let me just, let me, please just let me help you because you are the typical yo-yo dieter, you know, because I've been around him long enough to kind of see him make these big shifts. And he has lost a tremendous amount of weight in a short period of time. I think he told us today. About 20 pounds, yeah. Yeah. A little bit more than 20 pounds.

Yeah, it was something over 20 pounds. I was like, wow, that's pretty fast. But what I told him is like, let's have this be, this isn't like December. This isn't January. This isn't, this is like forever. Like this is like, let's, let's figure this out. And when you come off of this, you're not going to like spin out of this and then spin out of control. We're going to utilize the same principles that you utilize to lose the, cause what he was trying to do before is like kind of count macros. And I'm a fan of it. I think there's, I think it has utility. I think it has more utility when you have better discipline with your food already. And then you're like, I can allot 400 calories

towards whatever the hell I want or 800 calories even. I think that makes a lot of sense. Like if you're like our boy Ray, who knows how to eat, you know, really kind of perfectly most of the time, then it makes sense for him to just be like, yeah, I'm going to get down with some, you know, two Snickers bars or something at the end of the day. It's not going to really matter a ton. But if you're newer to nutrition and you need a dietary intervention because you've tried a bunch of diets before and they haven't been successful for you, it's not a great strategy to use the foods that made you fat to help you to lose weight. It's like it doesn't make any sense.

weight. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. Those foods react in your body and in your brain in a way that puts you out of control. Think about if a friend came to you and they were hooked on methamphetamines. They're hooked on, they're hooked on crystal meth, you know, and they come to you and they're like, man was really doing a lot of crystal meth but this week i'm gonna cut it way back you know you're like i don't think that's fucking good i know it's not the same thing because i realized that drugs and and food aren't exactly the same but i i do think i actually i wonder and i don't think anybody knows the answer to this, but I really do wonder because I think that like peanut butter cups, I think they send my brain to the moon and back again. And I don't think some other people, there's a lot of other

people that are with me on that, but I don't think for some other people that they care, that it matters that much. There's some people that just don't care that much about food. They'll go, Oh my God, it's three o'clock. I barely ate anything all day. You're like, what? How's that? Like, I'll do that sometimes, but that's like an intentional, uh, fast for me. I feel like I'm going to die. So there's some people that they don't really care that much about about food and it you know it has a different has a slightly different impact on them i guess they're just like oh my goodness i better go eat my bag of baby carrots yeah exactly really power project family foot health is something that we talked about all the time on the podcast, and that's why we love Vivo Barefoot Shoes.

But we love them not just because they are flat, flexible, and wide, but also they don't look bad. They look actually really, really good. These are their new boots. These are their Modus trainers for in the gym. These are some of their casual shoes. But when you look at a lot of barefoot shoes, some people get turned off because they don't want to wear those shoes outside.

And that's understandable. That's very understandable. But with Vivo, these shoes look so good and they're so good for your feet that they're almost a no-brainer. So, well, they are a no-brainer. Andrew, how can they get some of these kicks? Yes, you guys got to head over to vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject and you guys will receive 15% off your order. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject. guys will receive 15 off your order again vivo barefoot.com slash power project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes so i mean yeah we did um kind of talk about getting in shape and then we you just talked about diet right now um because that's like the other not the only other piece of the puzzle but it's a huge piece of the puzzle

when it comes to shaping and sculpting a body that you can be happy with. Where can people start when it comes to the diet? You know, like there's a lot of information. There's probably the most information about anything, and it's going to be diet stuff. Like there's just so much stuff to get lost online. So what's some good direction for people to start with? Yeah, I forget what the stat was, but it was like, you know, it was like 80% of the top 100 New York Times bestsellers like every year are diet books.

It was like something wild like that. You're like, oh, my God. Like, and that's still the case or something like that. You're like, holy shit. There should be one. I know, right? There doesn't need to be. Yeah, like, oh, I read that.

It should have happened a long time ago, right? Yeah, it's like everybody should have read that one book and everyone should be good to go. a diet is that if we eat the foods if we eat the if we eat foods that are as natty as possible it's really hard to go wrong and you can you can go in whatever direction you want with that like if you want to eat more plants you can go that way if you want to eat more meat i think you can go that way um in terms of like being able to control your body weight in terms of like being able to control your body weight, in terms of like overall health and like longevity and like all these other things that people talk about. It does seem like, you know, getting the right amino acids in can be a little difficult on, you know, these kind of vegan style diets. But there's a lot of people who are figuring it out pretty well, and there's a lot of people that are getting along on those diets pretty well.

And then also on the carnivore side, you could make an argument that you might be missing some nutrients there and so on. But I think that both sides are fighting, right? The vegan side and the carnivore side, and both sides seem to work pretty well. Like both sides seem to assist people with weight loss. Are both sides helping with the same type of weight loss? I'm not sure on that. I don't know what the data shows when somebody does a vegan style diet versus a carnivore diet. And if there's like less,

you know, muscle mass and things like that. that anyway i'm not going to even bother to speculate on any of that but what i think is important and i think what both sides are kind of saying is like okay there's people on the vegan side that don't think it's a good idea to eat animals for multiple reasons um however i think both sides would agree on it makes a lot of sense to eat things that are natural to and like what's natural well i would say like all forms of meat or most forms of meat that aren't like ultra processed i think are natural things like salami and and pepperoni and not that kind of stuff. Sausage. Those things are okay.

I think they're not horrible to eat, but it's easy to overeat on them because of the flavor profile of those things. They're mixing a lot of things together. But meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, I don't think you need a whole lot else surrounding that diet. If I was to mix in a little bit of extra stuff, I would throw in a little bit of dairy. If I was to mix it, if you can handle dairy, if I was going to mix anything else into that mix, I would say some sort of potato or some sort of rice. If you eat those foods, you should be able to manage everything pretty well.

If you eat those foods and you have a hard time managing your body weight, then you might have to look at a couple things. You might have to look at, okay, how much rice and potatoes am I eating? Am I really just killing the amount of carbohydrates I'm eating? Which shouldn't necessarily be a problem, but it could also be a problem because you could also be overeating fat.

And if you're overeating fat and carbohydrates at the same time, not literally at the same time like in the same meal, but if you're doing that day in and day out and you have a caloric surplus, it's going to end up in you gaining excess body fat and you gaining weight. For myself, that's exactly what my diet looks like. I eat eggs. I eat meat. I have protein shakes. I have like some cottage cheese. I have some yogurt. When I say I have some cottage cheese I have some yogurt when I say I have some cottage cheese it's like I might eat cottage cheese like once a week when I say I have some yogurt I might eat yogurt like once or twice a week potatoes and rice same deal I might eat a potato like once a week

or twice a week rice I might have a serving or two of rice once a week, twice a week, not once a day or twice a day, once a week or twice a week. I don't think there's any problem with those foods in terms of body fat. But again, it depends on how much fat you're consuming in your diet. I think it's important to also look at fat calories. And this is like, I don't know, we just have all these over-corrections all the time. In the 80s, there were a lot of books and there was a lot of information talking about going low-fat and these low-fat diets. I think one of the problems with any style of diet when somebody tries it is one of the key factors is that you're not overeating. And what happened with the low fat movement was people went low fat, they reduced their fat

calories, but then they still overate. So there was a lot of like, there was things like snack wells and some other things, and people thought it was the sugar that was making people fat. And I am a person that does believe that your choices and your foods do matter. And that potentially some of those foods could be more harmful than others, and they could lead to insulin resistance and they can lead to, um, because there are some people, and there's many even countries where there's a lot of people that have diabetes and they're not fat, which is just the craziest, most interesting thing. Another interesting thing about diabetes is I heard just recently they said if we had like a way of measuring lipids, that diabetes would be a lipid toxicity disease and not necessarily just a sugar disease, sugar toxicity disease, which that's really interesting. But if you think about

it, a lot of times it makes sense because somebody that has insulin resistance, oftentimes they gain body fat, but not all of them gain body fat. So maybe it's both. Maybe it's not just a lipid triglyceride jump that somebody's getting from overeating, but maybe it's also the sugar. But in any event, I think the best diet to be on is meat, eggs, fruit, and just repeat. And if you're not hungry, don't eat. If you're not hungry for meat, don't eat. If you're not hungry for meat, don't eat. If you, when you go and look through your pantry

and when you go and look through your refrigerator and you're thinking about like, oh, you know, what should I eat, Lex? And if the things in your pantry are way more appealing to you, that's fake hunger. You're not, you don't actually need food at the moment. If you have like a already cooked, you have leftovers of chicken or you have leftovers of some sort of meat that you cooked up the night before and it doesn't seem appetizing to you, it's because you're not hungry enough yet. You need to wait.

So I kind of like to not necessarily fast, but I think it's a good idea to not eat and then when your body is hungry and ready for more meat to eat so eat don't eat repeat eat don't eat repeat and when you do eat eat meat it's really frustrating though so like you know i i talk about how i have two meals a day i have breakfast is a bunch of eggs i don't eat anything till dinner time which is a steak and rice. But I still, after dinner, will be like, hmm, like what can I snack on? And, you know, all we really have is whole foods. And then I open up the pantry, you know, the closet full of food. And thankfully,

like we've been doing really good. Like there's nothing in there that's, you know, too tasty or palatable. It's just like a lot of tasty pastries. It's a lot of like protein bars and stuff, which, you know, for me, if I eat those late at night, I wake up feeling like a, like kind of like a, I guess I'll say bloated. Um, so it's really frustrating cause I'm like, no, I want something, but it's not there. And I can turn around upset, but I won't turn around hungry. There's a very, very distinct difference between the two. Yes, I kick and scream and I'm like, that's it. Next time we go to the grocery store, I'm going to get some cereal or something because this is stupid. I work hard.

I should be able to – We don't have anything here. Yeah, I should be able to figure something out. And then I go to the store and I'm like, no, dude, just don't buy it. So that's how I do it is I just don't, I don't keep it in the house. And, and I know what that sounds like when it's like, oh, if you're not hungry for chicken, then you're not really hungry. It's like, well, no, I just want something. Exactly. You just want something to play with, you know, you don't want actual food and, and, and try to find, try to find a better option, you know, just try to find.

So, you know, like the worst options are potato chips. The worst options are Cheez-Its. The worst options are things that have fat and carbohydrates together. I call them matrix foods. Yeah. Like I'll be eating some cereal and I look down at it and I'm like, I know this isn't real, but I don't care. You know, that whole scene will play in my head. And I'm like, fuck, this is matrix food.

Like, this is not real. This isn't doing anything for me. Like, I'm not actually consuming this, but of course I am. If you want to play like a little bit of the calorie game, I think if you can find something that either is like lower in fat or lower in carbs, I think that you can have a snack. You know, I think that I think you can. and carbs, I think that you can have a snack. You know, I think that you, I think you can. It's just also hard too, to like not have a snack that's so ridiculous that it's such a huge departure from like, you know, eating a Pop-Tart, you know, like a legendary tasty pastry is a good example. It's like, Hey dude, like it's close enough, bro. Like it's, it's really good. Like,

I don't think that pop tarts i personally i don't really love pop tarts i i would eat them when i was a kid because i was a fat kid but i don't think they're they don't stand out in my head as being like amazing i just remember like i didn't eat the crust and like a third of the thing was pretty good yeah you know yeah that makes a lot of sense and a tasty pastry is cool and like i eat the outside of it first to like get rid of that part that's probably where most of the protein is in the collagen you do the same thing yeah i show didn't see him how to do it he's like oh my gosh you know sometimes he's like a you know like a little brother to us and you show him cool things yeah that happened well because he remember be one of them. Well, because he – remember with Pop-Tarts, he's like, you guys cook them?

Yeah. He didn't know that you're supposed to put them in a toaster. And then the – because I wanted to talk about the Ninja Creamy, but when we're talking about the Ninja Foodie Grill, it's in the name. He was like, I didn't even know it had a grill function. And I'm like, that's the reason why we buy that one. Yeah, right. But, yeah, as far as ice cream and snacks and tasty things, had a grill function and i'm like that's the reason why we buy that one yeah right but uh

yeah as far as ice cream and snacks and tasty things getting a ninja creamy is a game changer i think that that thing's going to change the world a ninja creamy is amazing for those of you that aren't sure what we're talking about we've talked about it a bunch and you need to get one um i want to say they're like under 200 bucks, right? Yeah, they're somewhere. Dude, I'll check right now. But whatever the heck it costs, it's worth it. It's totally worth it. And what you do is you just take your favorite protein powder, you blend it up, and you throw

it in this little tub that the Ninja Creamy has. You have to put it in the freezer. It probably needs five to six hours of freezing. A day to be safe yeah 10 out 10 hours let's say overnight yeah and then then you'll have uh you'll have this tub of rock solid stuff that you can't do anything with yet and you put it in the ninja creamy and you push a couple buttons on ninja creamy and boom you got some uh ice. And you don't really, I know there's like recipes and people get all fired up about like all these different things to put in there, but

you can keep it really simple. I think having a, you need some sort of base because if you just use water, it can just be too weird. But use some like Fair Life or use your favorite kind of milk, dump some of that in with whatever your favorite protein powder is. We use a Steak Shake and the Full Carnivore Steak Shake along with like this is the whey protein. Those are amazing. They all taste really good. You dump some of that in there. I think collagen can help thicken it up.

You use some other stuff to thicken things up sometimes too, right? Yeah, yeah. I'll use xanthan gum. So Andrew will use a little bit of xanthan gum i mainly just use collagen the collagen sort of makes it marshmallow-y um don't use too much of it because it will change the flavor i also use within you hydration and i'll use like a chocolate packet or sometimes salted caramel packet and that's usually it. Like sometimes I'll squeeze some, we have like chocolate allulose from RX Sugar. We have a couple other things around the house

if I want to just make it a little sweeter. When you're feeling frisky. Yeah, I'll sometimes just chuck something else in there. I'm trying to think of different things I've done. I've even put like a little bit of honey in there and some of the vanilla ones I've made. I've even, I've blended up some fruit.

I've blended up a real banana with the banana steak shake. I've used PB two before. Oh yeah. PB two is really good in there. But again, you don't need some complicated recipe. It's really just, you're trying to make a shake that you would find to be

delicious. And then you just pour that bitch out into a container, throw that sucker in the freezer, you overnight it. And the next day you push a couple of buttons on the Ninja Creamy and you got ice cream. Oh, you might have to blend it more than once though. Yeah. But I mean, it's already all out and it's ready to go. It's if you have kids and you're like me, you have a hard time trying to get your teenage daughter to have more protein. Even if you make the plain basic of all basic ice creams with something like Fairlife protein that just happens to have a little bit more protein than regular milk. I mean, she's getting a really good dose of protein without really even knowing it. Oh, that's great. And on top of that, I'm cool with her having, because it has a mix-in feature.

So like she'll get some M&Ms and she'll mix them in and it makes like a McFlurry. And it's just incredible. People need to get that. I wanted to ask you about relationships. You know, we were talking about the gym spilling over into like other parts of our lives. We were talking to them like kind of like almost on like the financial side of things how about like yeah if somebody's trying to uh better their relationship they want to be a better person to their spouse in 2024 how can the gym help them out with that the gym will help a ton with that by you being stronger and being in better shape.

So, you know, you see the wife comes home and maybe she went to the grocery store and she's lugging some shit in from the, you know, pop up and help her out. I also think trying to ask for so many favors all the time, you know, like think about the other person think about like, what's their vantage point. Like what's their day look like? Just put yourself in, in, in their shoes, put yourself in your significant other shoes and see what that day looks like. You know, do they work from 6am to 6pm? And then when they get home, uh, there's dishes and other things to, you know, figure out if that's the other things to, you know, figure out. If that's the case, maybe, you know, once in a while you get your lazy ass to, you know, do some dishes or, you know, greet them when they come home or something. You know, just try to switch things up a little bit. Try to lighten up what it is the other person's responsibility is. I think women are pretty good at that.

And women know what we want. And they know that we, like, center everything around food in some way. And I think, I mean, at least this is the way it works in my family maybe other people have things differently but um yeah my wife knows like if if work's getting to be a certain way or I'm just working many hours or just whatever um when I come home she'll have like cooked something and you know the sometimes uh you know sometimes when it comes to, like, other things, I'll, like, last night my wife was watching Survivor. I was like, okay, I'll take Quinn to her tutoring, and so I did.

There's a lot of stuff like that where it's like, all right, well, you know, I'm not great at, like, doing dishes. I'm not great at, like, doing laundry. Like, I suck at all that stuff. Not that I suck at it, Like I can't do it well. It's just that like, I don't usually do it, but I will help with the dishes on occasion. And I will definitely, anytime the kids need something, I will always do something with the kids. And I've always been that way. And so I'm just trying to think of like, what can lighten the load for my wife in a way that allows her to do more stuff, gives her more freedom or leniency.

And so just little stuff like not being a lazy bum and not saying, hey, can you get me a glass of water? Like if I can get up and get a glass of water, I'll get it. I don't need to add one more thing uh to her plate uh if my clothes are on the ground just fucking just don't walk past them just pick them up you know what i mean like just pick my wife will pick them up and she'll never say anything about it but that doesn't mean that i shouldn't pick them up like if i want a better relationship with her if i want to you know the the best way to love somebody is, is to show them, you know, you, you don't just, you can say it, you know, you could say it a lot.

Um, but the best way to show that you really appreciate them is, is to actually have actionable things where you're showing them. And when you go out of your way to do something, that's how, you know, you love somebody and that's how they, that's how you know you love somebody that's how they that's how you know they love you when you're in the beginning stages of relationship with somebody and they go out of their way to do something special for you not like just necessarily like buy like a gift or something but it's like they did something that was really flattering where you're like wow like they care about me way more than, like I wasn't expecting anyone to give a fuck about me this much. Like this is really cool. That's how you know that you're in love.

And that's exactly, those are the things that you want to try to figure out. How do you make those things happen even if you've been together for a long time? Pepper Watch Family on the podcast, we talk all the time about feeling good, good habits to make sure that your health is in check. And one of the things that's super important is getting your blood work done because you could be getting great sleep. You could be having great nutrition, but under the hood, there could be things going on that you don't realize. So it's always good to get your blood work checked so you can totally understand what's going on. Now, the thing is also when you get your

blood work checked, there's so many different things in so many different numbers that it's hard to tell what's good, what's bad, and how do I optimize things? And that's where Merrick Health comes in because they have patient care coordinators on staff that can help you interpret your blood work and then give you the necessary recommendations as far as supplementation, nutrition, and if you need it, hormone optimization that'll start moving you in the right direction. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yes, that's over at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. That's M-A-R-R-E-K Health.com slash PowerProject. At checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save 10% off the PowerProject panel, the PowerProject checkup panel, or any individual lab you select. Again, that's at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes.

Yeah, I've been focusing on – because it's like you see it on TV a lot where like the girlfriends get together and they're in a circle of just like complaining about like their husbands not doing this or not doing that or whatever it is. It's like a complaint fest. So in my head, I'm like I just want to make sure my wife doesn't have anything to complain about. I'm not perfect. I'm striving for this, right? But like, you know, I don't want someone else's spouse to be like, oh, my husband farts all the time. So like I will literally like if I have to, I'll try to walk out of the room and be like, I got to go get something. And sometimes it's funny because she knows what I'm doing.

But yeah, the little things like you're saying, like the clothes on the floor. Even that example, it might sound silly, but I think it's a good example. Yeah. So, like I said, like. You want to be desirable to your wife. You don't want her just being like. Yes. Around farting all the time.

Yeah. And, you know, but like other things, like I don't want her to complain about me complaining too. You know, like, yeah, I can say this. There was somebody that she was talking to and they were saying that like their husband's like, oh, I hate my job. And, you know, I got to wake up early. And she's like, oh, what time does he have to wake up? He's like, oh, he has to wake up around like 430. And then she's like, in my head, I'm like, well, Andrew does that every day.

And I don't hear him complain once. And I'm i'm like well it's a little bit different babe because like you know she's going to work i'm going to work out and stuff but like things like that like you want your spouse to be like damn my man's the shit like that's cool you know like so that and so like for me that's like what going to the gym has done right like when my wife first met me like i actually started working out because of her but like i wasn't the confident and like strong person I am today. You know, I wasn't the guy that I was going to, to jujitsu when I first met her, but like now that I am like, I feel even better and I feel more confident with her and stuff. And so for us, I mean, working out has, we already had a great relationship, but just made everything so much better and i just think other

couples would i mean easily be able to experience that as well yeah and i almost forgot like the value of um committing to like a specific time you know and i i think that there i'll always believe that there's something special to getting shit done early um i don't wake up, you know, nearly as early as I used to. But I do think there's still a lot of value in practicing and spending some time waking up at 5 a.m., waking up at 4 a.m., and, you know, going to the gym and getting a good workout in it. It's a great discipline. And it's something that you ended up learning way before you had your son.

And so it's like, that would be a hard skill to pick up out of nowhere after you had your son, but it's an E it's an easier thing to lean into. This is going to sound weird, but you know, people don't understand that. Like when you have a kid kid you value the time you have have with the kid but you really value the time that you have with yourself too

so don't feel guilty if you're pumped to get out of the house and i remember like when i would leave in the morning i was like you know i don't want to wake anybody up and be real quiet and everybody be asleep and even by the time i got back a lot of times everybody would still be sleeping but i'd leave at like 4 4 30 or something like that and um yeah like the second i got out of the house i was like i'm free this is fucking awesome i get to go and like you know do what i do what i love doing but you don't feel any guilt over that. That's normal because, you know, you're at home and you have real life, real world shit to do with. And when you pop out of the house for a few minutes, you get to go and exercise and you get to go and do jujitsu or whatever it is that you're running off to. Yeah.

We spoke recently about like trying to get our schedules together because, you know, I had spent a whole day kind of like here and then at home working on other stuff and yeah I felt bad for that because I'm like oh dude I didn't get to hang out with my son but yeah waking up early I mean it has so many benefits because like I don't know I operate really well like um like tech technically I guess I'll say like whether it's like writing stuff or working on the podcast or working on my own stuff for some reason at 530 a.m. Everything is so clear and smooth and doesn't like there's no distractions. Obviously, it's more than just no distractions, but it's twofold. It's it's time for myself, but it's that time that I'm utilizing right now to get work done or get my stuff done so that at 5 30 p.m i'm not worried about getting all that work done and there is something special about waking up early and then it's like amplified

when you're doing it for yourself because you're actually doing it for the family you know in a weird way and it's just i don't know man it's it's awesome if if you're not doing that right now give it a shot like wake up early and do something for yourself. We like to go to the gym, and so that's one thing that you can do. But even if that's not it, start journaling or something. Just do something to get up early. You can split your day up into like where every day seems like three days. Yeah. You know, so you got your morning window, your morning wood.

You got your morning window of like exercise and like getting shit in. That's like maybe personal. That's like more for you. Then you have the middle hours of the day that are devoted to work. And then you have the evening hours that are devoted more to family. And that's the way every day is for me. And I, I get what I need to get done every single day and it feels amazing um I also am not like I'm not super critical of myself I don't like

I don't look over my you know I'm not like a teacher like looking over your shoulder you know saying hey you're doing that math problem the wrong way or whatever I don't look at myself that way I don't look at the things that I need to do. Like if I have a to-do list and something gets bumped the next day, it doesn't bother me at all. It's fine. Like, okay, I'm going to try to – a lot of times it's like, let me try to get to this within the next couple of days.

And if it slips by and I miss it, it's like not a huge deal. Like I'll get to this thing. I think for some people they get super frustrated. They get down on themselves if they didn't get to that thing. And, you know, it could be something simple. It could be like washing your car, you know, um, just, you know, there's so many, I have a, I have a, something that I think is really helpful for me is that I hate instituting things that need to be policed, you know? So if you're, if you police yourself a lot, if you make up, if you make up a lot of rules for yourself, you're going to have to police yourself a lot. You're going to have to

like tell yourself that that was bad. You're going to have to tell yourself that you can't do that. Like, what are you doing, man? You can't do that. You're going to jail. You know, you're going to have to like come down on yourself hard every time. And so I think we need more like generalized plans for ourself. We need more things that are, they're not so concrete. They don't have, doesn't have to happen today. This thing that you're working on, that's not your job because there's things that you will have to do that you do need to get done that are your job. But there's things outside of that. You could be, I don't know, You could just be like, um, you, uh, you want to start a garden at your house. You, um, you also want to look into a different school for your son to go to. Like there's,

you've got like these three, four or five things. It doesn't really, it's not, doesn't matter that much that you get to it right then and there. You don't need to be so upset with yourself if you didn't do it. And if you do do it, if you do check into these things and that work or that amount of time stressed you out a little bit or threw you off a little bit and you go home and have a drink and you didn't do your workout that day, don't beat yourself up over that either. Because remember, as I was saying in the beginning, out that day, don't beat yourself up over that either. Cause remember, as I was saying in the beginning, the consistency of all this is it's going to be murky in the beginning. It's going to take time. You're more than likely not just going to be able to flip a switch and then all

of a sudden be into it. And if you are someone that can flip a switch and all of a sudden be into it, you'll be the same person that flips this, that gets the flipped switched on them and you're kicked back out of it so you know there's there's a price to pay like kind of being you know either way but i don't know it's kind of the way i see it yeah i really like that but i do want to ask you like what are your thoughts on i guess this is for for different things this is for more than just like the miscellaneous oh i gotta i don't know clean up the garage or whatever it is, but like something on like maybe like a fitness goal. What are your thoughts on putting like an actual like date on the calendar where it's like, you know, by this date or whatever, like I want this, like actually put it in writing like we said earlier? Yeah, I think as long as you're like

within striking distance of it i think it's fine you know i think there's many different types of goals you know there's like there's goals that are like overreaching there's there's like big goals there's there's goals that are that are so big they need to be called dreams right like they need to be they're in a slightly different category like well wait a second that one's you know for now that's a dream and your dream can turn into a goal as you get closer to it you know like kind of i mean that's not that you couldn't do it but it's difficult to make a million dollars in a year when you haven't made a hundred thousand dollars in a year yet although it happens you know it happens with like professional athletes and happens with people all the time so it's you know it's good to i want to make a million dollars in in a year um i want

to make i want to make a million dollars um you know in in the future right well that dream that you have to make a million dollars can can turn into a goal you know as you start to chip your way and get closer but it also doesn't hurt to have your dreams and or your goals be like pretty big because even if you fall short of them you still you know like i don't know what if you just said i want to make 500 million dollars you know you just start start to, and I think it's, it's an interesting thing to think about. Like if you were to, if you were to say, if you were to say something really big to yourself, like let's, let's take this for example, let's say, uh, you know, Andrew, could you be 6% body fat? You know, you might be like, well, it sounds sounds like it sounds like quite a bit to chew off you know and it's going to lead to like a lot of sacrifice in other in other areas but if you don't

think that you can be six percent body fat then you certainly never will be right not even saying that's a goal because like that's such a lean body fat percentage that it's just like we we know what it costs to do that you know and by the same token you know if you and i are sitting here saying like we want to be billionaires it's like hmm like really like uh you know it's like i don't know if i even care you know what i mean like i don't know if i even care like that's it's cool but that seems like it's so far that uh i don't even know like i don't even have like an emotional attachment to it at all like i don't yeah you know what i mean like whereas when i was thinking when i was younger when i was thinking about a million dollars i was like that sounds so that sounds like so cool to try to figure that out one day. I'd love to be able to, and there would be doubt and I'd

be like, I don't know if I'll ever, you know, I don't know if I'll ever figure that out. But I was like, that would be, and then I wrote it down, like how much you would need to make in a day and stuff like that, which is 2750, by the way. But, um, you know, when it comes to our goals and some of those things, you know, I think it's good to have, it's, it's good to have goals that are a little bit more like a, like a checklist. They're a little bit more of things that you could, uh, you could get to now. Like I want to be able to, um, I want to be able to do, uh, 10, uh, I want to be able to do 10 pull-ups with perfect form, full range of motion. And right now you can do six. That's the kind of shit that I like because I think it's energizing.

It's uplifting when you have something that you're so close to. And then I come in, I'm like, dude, I did eight reps. And you're pumped up too because I told you that I wanted to do 10. And you're like, to. And then I come in, I'm like, dude, I did, I did eight reps, you know, I did eight reps and you're pumped up too. Cause I told you that I wanted to do 10 and you're like, oh, that's sick. You could fucking improve by two and you know, be soon enough. Um, so I think that those, like those smaller goals, those intermediate goals, I think can be really important because they just hype you up so much. And they, you're, you're, you're talking about like, it's producing, uh, you know, a dopamine response. It's, it's produced, it's just giving you so much and they you're you're talking about like it's producing uh you know a dopamine response it's it's produced it's just giving you so much confidence every time you're hitting those markers

do you think it's a good idea to tell someone about your goals i think it could be a great idea and i think like we said earlier about like writing it down, I think writing it down, um, telling people about it. Uh, let's just say, let's just say I wanted to film a movie. And I said, if I said, Andrew, you know, in January, I'm going to, I just got excited about this idea. I'm, I'm going to start filming a movie. Well, if I say that before I'm actually set to do it, I just kind of halfway set it in motion. Deion Sanders did this recently when he was being kind of criticized with the Colorado Buffaloes. He, you know, started out the season real hot and then the season went real cold real fast. It is Colorado.

It's cold. Exactly. He said, he goes, no, I knew this. I knew we weren't there. He's like, we're like five or six players and then he looked right at the camera. He goes, we're five or six players

away right now. He's like, so if you're listening to this, come to the University of Colorado so we can win some championships and i was like he just i was like he just made that happen right like he just almost willed that to happen just by doing that he turned it in like a little bit of like almost like a wrestling promo he was like if you want to if you want to win some national championships come to the university of colorado and i was like that's crazy because he was talking about how he's like five or six athletes off but just because he said that message as soon as that message went through the airwaves how many kids how many homes how many of these high level uh football players are out there that are telling their parents i

gotta go see deon sanders i gotta go to Colorado. They're shifting their mindset towards, and even, you know, nowadays they have in college football, they have like a little bit of a trading system. So you can get traded to like another team. So they could, through like the trading portal or whatever they call it. So. Oh yeah. Cause kids transfer. That's right.

Okay. Yeah. Transfer portal. So you could try you can transfer so like he could have he could have a junior you know what i mean or a sophomore he doesn't have to just settle for like kids that are just coming out of high school he could get like someone who's already amazing that can change the team right now man how great i mean dude if you're a kid and you're a football fan and you're trying to make it to the league how amazing would that be to go play for Deion Sanders you know how successful like so many of these guys are going to

be like not even like football football wise like whatever but like you know these guys are going to like be big time just in all kinds of other stuff yeah absolutely Deion is amazing yeah just on the topic of uh journaling and writing stuff down something I did recently with a friend, which is just a little different for me, but we just did some journaling. And this is something that you can try to do. For those of you that think it's cool, then maybe join in. Those of you that think it's weird, it's fine. If you think it's weird, it's okay. then maybe join in.

Those of you who think it's weird, it's fine. If you think it's weird, it's okay. You want to write down kind of the following four things. And you want to write down maybe a couple of things in each category. Maybe it's like two, three things in each category. But something you're grateful for, your plans for the day, your fears, and something to watch out for. So again, number one, gratitude.

Number two, plans. Number three, fears. And number three and number four, things to kind of like watch out for. And I did this practice and I was like, oh, whatever. You know, I just did it with a friend and then my other friend did it as well and then you just once you're you just write it on a piece of paper and when you're done you just fold it up and you just keep the piece of paper you can throw it away but you could also just look at it a couple days later and you kind of look and you're like oh wow and like fears and or like resentments or anything like that

that's probably going to be the one that you look at that will probably constantly be like rotating or changing or look the funniest to you when you look back at it yeah you're gonna be like why a jujitsu tournament why was that even you know your four jujitsu tournaments you know down the line now and you look at that and you're like, why was that even a fear? I was being such a pussy. And then same thing with some of these other things too. But gratitude is an interesting thing. You hear people talk about that a lot and like, hey, you should, you know.

I actually halfway used to think a lot of this stuff is crap too. I actually halfway used to think a lot of this stuff is crap too. But what I would say about this is that if you're grateful and you feel grateful and it's clear to other people, like you don't have to necessarily write it down to be a grateful person. People should be able to recognize that within you in a lot of ways just by the way that you are and the way that you act and the way that you live your life. It should be, you know, hopefully it's clear that you like life, that you enjoy life and that you're grateful for it. But more recently, I've just been kind of thinking of gratitude and how grateful I am of my body and what it's capable of doing. Sometimes it happens to me on a run. Sometimes I'm done with the run and I'm like, man, I'm just, that was, that was really cool. Like, I know it sounds silly, but that was really neat for me to be able to run around the block a

couple of times. Like that felt, that felt amazing. That felt incredible. And I think that these things are so sort of like unknown for whatever reason, but I actually think that these things can help a ton with your health. Not necessarily, you're not necessarily doing anything for your health other than just like writing down like what you're grateful for. But like being grateful, some meditation, writing out your plans, writing out your concerns, writing. It's cathartic. It's therapy. And is somebody with a bunch of scattered ideas that's fearful, that's scared, that hasn't written it out, are they going to be stronger in the world than somebody that has written these things out, that has organized their thoughts around it. Oh, why am I fearful of that?

Oh, I'm fearful of that because my dad left when we were really young. And, you know, it's probably this, this and this. And yeah, I'm an adult now, but fucking A, that hurt. You know, you start to organize your thoughts and you start to recognize this can make everything that you do stronger. This can make everything that you do stronger. This can make your relationship stronger. This can make it make way more sense why you're so sensitive to what certain people say to you. Maybe it's your dad or your wife or somebody.

And you can go, oh, my God. Because if you play through this stuff, it will all come to you where this, like for some people, unfortunately, they have like trauma for myself. I don't remember. I don't remember having any anything real traumatic happen. But there's things that happen in people's lives that are that are difficult, regardless of how difficult it is in comparison to somebody else. I have a friend that he lost his dad in like 9-11. It's like I can't think of losing a family member is just horrendous, but I can't think of like how awful that situation must have been for that family

and the other people that lost people on that day too. It's just horrific in so many different ways. I never had anything that crazy happen to me, but the worst thing that happened to you is the worst thing that happened to you. And I don't have anything else. I don't, I don't, I can only imagine how my friend felt. I can't, I can't put myself in his shoes, but I've had other events happen. And even though I don't really view them as traumas, they do shape you. They do shape you. You have no choice. You have no choice in having some of the things that have happened in your life for good or bad or for

better or worse to kind of mold you and kind of shape you and kind of aim you in a particular direction. And so if you can like, I mean, you don't have to like journal and write so deep about like your deepest, darkest emotion, but maybe you should because maybe it could be helpful. Yeah, you can work through some things. Yeah, and you can like work it out. Hey, look at that right real quick for some clarification um so the the out of the four things the last two so something

that you're uh that you fear and then something to watch out for what's the like the watch out for because in my head i instantly go to something that like oh watch out for that like it could bite uh so what's the difference between the two? Watch out for is kind of like a blind spot, you know, like I'm doing all these things that are positive, but like maybe what's the kind of thing to like look out for? Like we love podcasting, you know, and we get talking and we're like, all right, let's go here. We're going to go. We're going to go to Arizona and we're going to Colorado and we're going to Texas and we're going to go. And then you go home and you talk to your wife and you're like, oh, wait a second. Right. So it's like stuff like that. What to watch out for would be Stephanie.

Watch out. Yeah. Kind of a cheesy question. But do you have any goals for 2024? Yeah. Kind of a cheesy question, but do you have any goals for 2024? Yes, for sure. You know, goal number one is to just continue to get leaner. I'm enjoying this process of leaning out and I don't know how much longer it will continue on for. I see you eating egg whites. Yeah, because I've been pushing the envelope on this but uh i think i probably need to like define a little bit of more of a goal in terms of like how lean um so that would be smart for me to like write it out like oh i want striations in my quads and then once i get there i can be cool and then I can make another change from there just so it's not ongoing forever.

But, yeah, that's something I've been working on. And another goal is just to get stronger. So I've been bench pressing and deadlifting a little bit more recently. And the good thing is I'm really weak. So getting stronger is not going to be hard. And this is not – I'm not trying to get strong like I was in the past. I'm not comparing myself to my former self for multiple reasons, but probably the biggest reason just being like my weight, you know, I'm, I'm more in the range

of like 220 pounds now. And, uh, I haven't honestly really ever power lifted at that weight before i've cut down to that weight before and done some stuff in the 220 class when i was like a kid basically but and i tried to do a 500 pound bench um as an adult in the 220 class but anyway i'm just working on just just kind of rebuilding some strength because um I took so much time away from some of those conventional lifts. And I realized, especially when it comes to bench pressing, that I'm way too good at bench pressing to ever really stop. It's an exercise that, like, I just, I get so much from it. It works my entire body. so much from it it works my entire body and uh it's just always a good idea for me to handle some sort of regular ish barbell bench like once a week um again i get so much from it

why wouldn't i do it you know so to me it's like it's almost like a squat or deadlift in a way like it i it works my whole body i can handle a lot of weight in it and uh it's good for everything it's good for bone density it's good it's just a bench press is the only issue is so i think most of the time when people are thinking of these kind of like money exercise in the gym they're usually thinking of a squat or deadlift and the bench is like sort of the last the last one on that list. But it fits me really well. It doesn't take anything extra for me to do it. It doesn't compromise anything.

It doesn't hurt. Whereas if I'm really starting to get way into squats again, that's going to be – i will start to squat again too soon but like that that's just gonna that's gonna take i could take like a year and a half two years for me to like get halfway proficient at squatting again yeah and then what else would that take away from right exactly squatting and running i know it's possible but you really love running right now so don't mess with that exactly and that's that's exactly what I'm looking at. And that would be like what to watch out for. Got it, okay.

Okay, I'm trying to increase my deadlift, but okay, I like deadlifting. But the whole reason why I've been using 225 for the last three weeks is because it's something I'm watching out for. I'm watching out for I'm paying attention to like you can use 315 but you kind of can't because it could fuck up your running so stay with 225 and I don't know maybe it never gets any heavier than that who knows but most likely I'll most likely I'll progress to adding a little bit more weight to that yeah anything else no I to that. Yeah. Anything else? No, I think that's, I think we fucking nailed it.

You know, I think, you know, getting in shape in the gym can help shape so many other aspects and avenues of your life. And, um, I have a quote to share with everybody here. Here we go.

Um, I'm grateful for all the people that dig Saturday School too. We've got some great fans. Oh, I was telling somebody. Who was it? Oh, it was Bruce Cardenas. I was with Bruce at Gold's Gym. And I ran into a couple of fans at Gold's Gym.

And I was telling Bruce, I said, you know, it's really kind of cool. I was like, sometimes I'll run into like someone that's kind of like a follower, like to follow Instagram and stuff. And sometimes I'll run into a real diehard fan who was a fan of like powerlifting. They were a fan of me from long ago. I said, there's a big difference. And he goes, have we run into any real fans yet? I said, no. I said, you'll know it when we do.

And then it was like maybe 20 minutes later, we ran into a guy with like a strong hat. That's sick. And he was like, strength is there every week. And I said, there you go. I said, Bruce is like, yeah. He's like, it's way different. He's like, that guy's eyes just lit up when he saw you i was like yeah i was like it's super it's super cool it's like i have this like uh little tribe of people that that love uh the

shit that i used to do uh anyway yeah i heard this this morning and uh this guy was basically talking about how so many people, they create their future based off of their past negative experiences a lot of times, and so they're thinking about what they're going to do in defense of the things that happened to them that were negative, and he said, create your future from your future, not from your past. So I thought that was pretty neat. You're trying to create your future from what you're doing. Like you, you don't have to still be that same person. You can continue continually to make small changes. Uh, when we had, uh, uh, we had Gil Headley, when we had Gil Headley on, this guy works with the dead, and he was convincing us, and he did a great job.

I found so much of what he said to be super motivational, but he was saying how malleable the human body is and the brain and how much you can make such huge changes while you're alive on this earth. And even after the body, after you die, the body makes tons of changes almost immediately. And he just had a, you know, case after case of all these things that he thinks that people could do to, um, to help create a better future. So don't just think about, there's no reason for you to talk about fitness in a negative light. There's no reason for you to say, ah, I'm not good at that.

And you're not good at it compared to what? If you're comparing it to yourself and you haven't really done much of it yet, well, of course you're not proficient at it yet. You haven't really done it much. And just think about the advice that you would give to a friend. If you're a, if you're somebody that's, um, pretty good with like computers or something like that, but you're not great in the gym and you're down on yourself for the stuff that you can't do at the gym. Uh, if that's,

if your friend who is good at the gym comes and checks out or he's on the computer and he's all frustrated and he's like, man, I don't fucking understand these things. And what is this thing doing? And you would say to him, Hey, you know what?

You can, you can learn some of this. You can, and he would say, Oh, I'm not good at this. And you could say, Hey,

settle down, settle down, check this shit out on YouTube. It's really easy to learn. You can learn some of this you're not going to learn it all overnight you can learn like the little stuff at first and you can fix your computer yourself

and stop coming to me for it alright strength is never weak this week this is never strength catch you guys later bye