Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Saturday School EP. 5 - The Sling Shot

Episode Date: June 20, 2020

Hello class! In today's Saturday School, we ask Mark Bell at what moment did he realize the Sling Shot was going to be something special. It was the Sling Shot, as well as other protective lifting gear, that has helped build the Sling Shot Empire and create a free gym since there was no need to rely on making money from memberships. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support the show by visiting our sponsors! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

my throat is actually kind of jacked up right now i think it's allergies but anyways yeah that coronavirus uh everybody welcome to saturday school with mark bell this is your opportunity to ask the people's coach any questions that you guys have burning deep inside you um we want to give a huge shout out and thank you to people too deep well partially deep how many inches hey now we wanted to give a huge shout out and thank you to piedmontese beef for making this whole thing possible for more information please head over to piedmontese.com that's p-i-e-d-m-o-n-t-e-s-e dot com at checkout enter promo code power project for 25 off your order and if your order is 99 dollars or more you get free two-day shipping mark bell how are you doing today doing fantastic it's uh nice and sunny out

here in bodega bay and having a good day so far ready to rock and roll heck yeah i like that all right let's jump right into it uh mark when was it like was there a specific moment when you realized like holy crap man this slingshot idea is actually going to be something special? Yeah, you know, when it comes to the slingshot, it's kind of weird. I think that I had a vision for it. Um, I, I recall, um, when I made it, when I made the product for, when I first invented it, the first time I tried it out, which was shortly after it was made, it was, it was made like a day or two later, um, by my wife's friend who sews a swimsuits together. And, uh, I just needed somebody that had a good sewing machine to sew two knee wraps together.

She sewed the two knee wraps together and I tried it, tried the slingshot on at a Fitness 19 that's in Woodland, California and did a couple reps with 135 and a couple reps with 225 and right then and there, I knew it was going to be big. Now, I knew before that, I knew before I ever even touched the thing that it was going to be a big deal. But I also knew that there was going to be other factors that would be important to make it a big deal. I knew that it would have to be simple. And sliding something up over your arms, you take the product, you slide it up over your left arm or your right arm first, and then you slide it up over whatever arm doesn't have the slingshot on it anymore. And, uh, you're pretty much good to go. There's

nothing complicated about it and it doesn't change your form. You know, I know this from playing football and doing other sports that sometimes people make products that go along with, say, like sprinting, or it goes along with, say, like throwing punches for boxing, or it mimics something like a donut on a baseball bat and things of that nature. And it either makes the thing harder or sometimes helps to make the thing easier. In most cases, most things make things harder. And, um, I knew that in making a product that was going to either make something easier, make something harder. I knew that one of the key components was not to mess with the mechanics of the, of the movement, because that's the drawback of like running with a parachute. Let's say,

you know, that's the drawback of, of, uh drawback of even the drawback of wearing a weighted vest and running. Well, it's just the negative probably outweighs the positive because that's going to hurt. It's going to cost you a lot to be able to do that. And then the other side of things was most of the things in the fitness industry, they usually make things harder. I would say the only thing that tries to sell you on the fact that it makes things easier are supplements. And then supplements, a lot of times, they're just not super effective because as we know, it's only a supplement.

It's supplementing what you're doing. And a large part of what you're doing is going to have to be getting the proper amount of sleep, getting in the proper amount of training, getting the proper nutrition, and then on top of that, taking that supplement and that can help. But this was so simple and this was going to be something that was actually going to help you. And so when you start to think about the different products that are out there, you think about most fitness products, they're usually like like try to make things kind of hard. Sometimes it could be convenience, like a, you know, like a P90X, like straps or something like that. You know, sometimes it's out of convenience. Okay, well now I got options to

do more exercises. Like that's really cool. But a lot of times things make things a little bit more difficult. So I knew that if the slingshot was simple to use and I knew that if it was simple to understand and I knew also that if it made something easier, I knew where all that was confirmed in kind of one shot. And, uh, and then it got confirmed further as I went along. But I remember being in my house in Woodland, uh, with my brother-in-law, my brother-in-law, Andy, he played football for UC Davis. Um, he's a guy who's like into hunting. He's into fishing. He's, he's just like, he's just very like American, I guess you'd say, I guess you'd say like he, he, he, he just, he's a perfect guy to test a product out on because you know, he, he played, he played sports all his life. Then he stopped playing sports.

He gained some weight, those kinds of things. Right. Um, and he just wasn't as active anymore. So I threw him in a slingshot in my kitchen and I was like, try some pushups with that. He hit the ground and right away he's like, Oh my, he's like, Holy shit, dude, everyone's going to want to buy this. Cause he used to be a quarterback and he was taught and he played baseball and stuff too. And he was taught, look, you know, don't do these bulking exercises because they're going to make your shoulders too tight. It's going to compromise your, your, your shoulder complex. And it's going to, you know, lead to, you know, lead to all these things. They used to think all that right now we know it's like,

Hey, it's better to strengthen it and things like that. But anyway, he kind of came up through some of that side of it. And he was like, I was taught to not bench press. And I said, a lot of coaches till this day still teach you not to bench press. They still coach against bench pressing or they say, hey, if you're going to bench press, only go halfway down. Because the mechanics of the bench press, once you bring that weight all the way down to your chest, you now have the weight. Once you bring that weight all the way down to your chest, you now have the weight. You now have your elbow way past the midline of your body and your shoulders in a compromising position and so on. And so, you know, I obviously understood all this in the making of the slingshot. But in showing it to somebody else who understood it from the consumer standpoint, from somebody who that was going to understand it from the user, the athlete side of things, that was really big for me to have him just try it. And so imagine

seeing something new, right? I show you a fat loss capsule, right? I show you this product and I say, I say, Hey, listen, I tell everybody that's listening to this right now, I say, hey, this capsule I'm holding in my hands, this will make you lose one pound of body fat. And then you try it and the next day you're a pound lighter. And then you try it again and the next day you're a pound lighter. So within a 72-hour period, you are fully convinced this, okay, that is equaling that. like that's doing what the guy told me it was going to do so same thing with the slingshot i show it to you you're skeptical because you're like i don't know like i i see a lot of devices being thrown at me all the time on tv and they're marketed to me and they're always pieces of shit and then very very rarely they do anything

and if i said andrew i know that you've had shoulder injuries in the past. I know that you struggled with pushups, but try this on, you know, is it making your pushup better or is it making your pushup worse? Is it easier to do a pushup in a slingshot or is it harder? And you would put it on and you might take a second to adjust it a particular way that feels comfortable for you. But you would say probably something along the lines that we've heard this thousands of times. Normally, I can only do five push-ups and I just busted out 12 and it didn't hurt. And so I knew very early on that it was going to be a big deal. But as we kept moving forward and as I kept moving into turning into an actual, you know, taking an invention and turning it into an actual idea that was for sale on the Internet, you know, those are kind of separate. They're separate things.

But as I started to as we started to explore what it's going to be like to mail the thing, like what's going to be like to ship it. Well, now we're doing even better because, OK, you happen to create a product that's lightweight. Like I didn't make the next a 45 pound plate. You know, I didn't make the next best, uh, lifting bar that takes up X amount of space. It's not, it's not big, it's not heavy, it's not bulky. It can fit in a flat rate shipping box. So like all these factors are massive, you know, know but but that one day in my kitchen with my brother-in-law where a former football player just tried it on and within five seconds totally and completely understood it there was no there was no um like hesitation there was no like hey i don't really i don't get it you know like that's cool that you're into that Mark, but I don't really even like, um, so he's a relative.

So of course he's going to be like kind. Right. But I could see the enthusiasm on his face. I could see his mind kind of going and I can see him just immediately understanding what it does. And we've seen it time and time again, as we have other people try it out. Some people sometimes are like, Hey man, I don't have any problem with push-ups. And it's like, well, it's not really necessarily about that. But if you can do 50 push-ups, imagine what it would feel like to be able to do 100. And now try 100 in a row with the slingshot on. And then now try 70 with the slingshot off.

So you still were able to improve. You're still going to be able to improve. And obviously, it's for bench press and it's for dips. I never really, I didn't even make it to be for pushups, but it just worked out that it ended up being for other things. And that's also what made it more popular is the fact that it could be used for so many different things. Going back to the gym in gym in, in Woodland,

what was going through your mind the first time you actually used it to, to bench press? Yeah. So I didn't really have, I had nothing. I had nothing similar at the time to mimic it. I had nothing that was made out of that same material to mimic it. So now I had, at that point, I had tested out trying different shirts.

I had, so a lot of people listening are aware of bench shirts and a lot of people aren't. But a bench shirt is a supportive upper body device that used to be utilized in equipped powerlifting, well, still is utilized in equipped powerlifting. And sometimes it can help you, it can assist you to bench press 50, 100, 200, sometimes even more pounds on your bench press. So if you bench press 600 pounds, you might be able to bench press 800 pounds in a bench shirt. For example, I did a 578 pound raw bench press without a bench shirt.

a 578 pound raw bench press without a bench shirt. And in a bench shirt, I did an 854 pound bench. So you can see how much a bench shirt can assist you. But a bench shirt is really weird. It's like, it's a technical device. It actually causes a lot of complication and it actually causes a lot of pain. It's very painful. It's not simple to utilize. It takes a couple people to get you into it. It's also very expensive. They could be two, 300 bucks. And so it's a skill to be able to bench press in a bench shirt. And so what I knew was if I can make something that worked a little bit like a bench press, but didn't hurt at all and was super effective and pulled the pain away from you because that's what I knew about a bench shirt. I'm like, wow, a bench shirt's amazing because it's so supportive and it has so much compression. That compression, a compressed muscle is a stronger muscle. It feels better. Now that I have this knee wrapped, this squat

feels better. People used to wrap their elbows too and bench press. Some people may have seen Larry Wheels wrap his elbows up and bench press, you know, 650 or 625 or something crazy like that. So a supported muscle, a muscle that you have some compression on can be a stronger muscle. And the slingshot doesn't really work necessarily with compression. But a lot of other products do the, I would say, you know, what I,

what I felt the first time that I used it at that gym in Woodland was just like, I was like elated because I, I've been thinking about this damn thing for a while. You I, I've been thinking about this damn thing for a while. You know, I've been thinking about this for a long time and a lot of things prevented me from actually making it. And really, well, I guess it really wasn't a lot of things. It's just more like self-doubt because I brought it to a couple of different companies. I explained to them what I was talking about. None of them knew what I was talking about.

And most people at the time and most of those companies just didn't think it was a good idea. Like, why would somebody want that? And after you hear that several times, you start to believe that too. You're like, yeah, they're probably right. It probably is a stupid idea. Especially me, you know, being considered dumb and being told that I was dumb or stupid, uh, going through school. I was like, ah, it's just another dumb, stupid idea that I have. So I should probably just shut up and keep lifting weights, you know? Um, but yeah, the first day that I made it, I, I, I knew it was special.

I knew it was special. I knew it was going to change my life. Whereas like, you know, doing like a 2,600 pound total or squatting a thousand pounds or benching 854. I think I knew that that whole journey, that whole process was going to slowly, process was going to slowly but surely change my life because in my head, it was like, this is a better option. Like this is, this is the, this is the best for me just as you know, getting into photography was like your, you know, you felt like somewhere along the line, you like made that up or

invented that for yourself or, or heard it from somebody else and thought that that would be cool. And the same thing with somebody trying to get into bodybuilding or get lean, they somewhere along the lines made a decision to where they're like, if I did that, I bet you that would bring a lot of happiness to me. I mean, it's not like you're doing it to make yourself worse off, right? you're doing it to make yourself worse off, right? However, in making a slingshot, because it's like a tangible item, it was different than anything else I ever experienced. I guess maybe you could relate it to meeting somebody.

But sometimes even that process just takes a really long time to understand the value of how important that person is. But I do remember, you know, meeting Andy for the first time and, and being like mesmerized by her. And then also just, you know, you think about that person nonstop, you know, and the slingshot was kind of no different in a weird way. But on top of like thinking about them all day, you're thinking about how you're kind of like, I finally did it almost. You're kind of thinking to yourself, I finally found this like companion, like now I can live the rest of my life with this other person and I don't have to figure out this world by myself, which is an amazing thing. I don't know if you ever actually really, truly say that to yourself, but that's really kind of what it's about. And then you also get to enjoy stuff with someone else too.

Like you might go through some tough times together and some good times together and so on, but whatever the case is, you get to experience it all together. You know, Andy and I can laugh about the first few apartments that we had or the shitty cars that we had or, you know, and, and we can, we can kind of have a, we can kind of have a good time with it now, but the slingshot was just so different. And I, I've never, I've never experienced anything like that before or since. And it's hard to,

it's it's hard to put into words. I mean, it just, just imagine somebody just like, I don't know, just it's hard. It's hard to it's hard, like, because even if you were to find like a briefcase full of like a million dollars, like that's still different because you didn't like make it, you know, having a child doesn't fit in that scenario either because having a kid is like while it's amazing it's also really scary and uh you don't really understand its benefits until who knows maybe maybe until they're like in their 30s or something i don't i don't know but uh yeah it was definitely different. I've never had anything really quite like that before. And nowadays, what's it like seeing the slingshot in some of the most world-famous gyms? We see it in all professional sports, from baseball, basketball, football. These high level athletes

are all using the slingshot. Is that something that you saw happening back then? Is it something that you're like, like every time you see it, you're still shocked? Like what, what goes through your mind when you see the slingshot being used by a professional athlete today? Yeah, I'm really, I'm really grateful. You know, I'm grateful that there's strength coaches out there that are smart enough to understand, you know, what it can do for you. You know, it's seeing Odell Beckham Jr. more recently, you know, in our knee sleeves and using the slingshot. Seeing The Rock over the years using the hip circle. circle, seeing Superman utilizing the hip circle and just seeing all these different athletes and people using the products throughout the years has been, it's been amazing. I would say like, I'm, you know, I know what the product does.

So I, I'm not shocked. Like I, I think that everyone should have it, you my head, because maybe I might look at stuff sometimes from a pessimistic standpoint and say, why doesn't that dude have a slingshot in his gym bag? What, is he crazy? What, does he not know what's going on? But really, it's just a matter of, you know, more people being aware of it. And I think most people will find that some of the products that we have on our website, something that we have will like vibe with them and we'll work with them and we'll work with whatever it is that they do.

But it's, it's an amazing feeling to see it out there and to see all the different uses that people have kind of come up with for the various products that we have. And it's an amazing feeling. And I feel just I feel really grateful and I feel really good. I mean, it just makes me, you know, to really kind of narrow it all down. And, you know, I'm a big believer in, you know, following your interests and following things that make you feel good. And it feels amazing.

You know, it feels like how am I going to – how can I impact Odell Beckham Jr.'s life? You know, like what am I going to do? Like the guy, you know, he's one of the best wide receivers in the NFL. Like I can't really – I can't think of anything. There's not a speech I can probably give that he would be like, oh, man, I'm fired up. He probably is pretty self-motivated as it is, you know? So, um, if I can make a product and, uh,

people that other people identify as being, you know, quote unquote great or huge successes. Um, and if they dig it, then, then that's awesome. But I just see, you know, you're, you're kind of average person using it as well. And I really enjoy seeing that a lot too, because those are the people I get the messages from where they're not just using it to go from squatting, you know, 275 to 295 or 275 to 300 or whatever. They're using it. And then they're usually responding by saying, you know, you helped to change my life. And usually the product is like an afterthought. You're like, oh, yeah, yeah. And I have your slingshot too. You know, usually it's like that. So I love seeing the athletes use it. But I love the impact that the company and the brand and some of the stuff that we've done together via podcasts and videos that I love hearing that a lot too. Yeah. I, yeah. Anytime I see it, you know, it's kind of like the, uh, that DiCaprio meme, you know, he's pointing to the TV like, Oh, look right there. That's where it is. That,

that, that, I can't remember exactly what he says, but the one from, uh, you know, the movie, um, once upon a time in Hollywood, um, every time I see it used in the wild, it just, we all get pumped up, man. It's such a huge win for everybody that works, you know, with you and the whole company. Points on the scoreboard, baby. Yeah, it's amazing. It's just, you can't help but be proud of it. So thanks, Mark, for that awesome history lesson

in the Mark Bell slingshot and the whole concept, the whole thing from concept to execution. Really appreciate that. And if you guys appreciate it, make sure you guys give us a like, a thumbs up, a like, wherever the heck you're watching this, whether it be YouTube, Facebook, or you're listening to it on whatever podcasting app that you choose. Let us know what you guys think. And if you guys have any other questions for Mark Bell, this is your opportunity to reach out and ask him. We have people at expos that get lined up for hours that want to just talk to Mark for half a second.

Well, now you have all the time you need, and you can formulate an awesome question for Mark Bell. Hit us up at MarkBellsPowerProject on Instagram, at MBPowerProject on Twitter. Use the hashtag SaturdaySchool. Put it in all caps. Do whatever you got to do to get our attention ask your question and we will ask Mark Bell whatever questions you guys might have Mark what else can we tell the people

you guys can find me at Mark Smelly Bell Instagram Twitter and I have a YouTube channel as well strength is never weakness weakness never strength thank you guys so much for following along