Mark Bell's Power Project - Matt Wenning - The Conjugate System and Lifting HEAVY With Longevity in Mind || MBPP Ep. 813

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Matt Wenning, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how Matt has been able to stay healthy in a very demanding sport and he gives us his thoughts on Knees Over Toes Guy. Follow Matt on IG: https://www.instagram.com/realmattwenning/ Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://www.naboso.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWERVIVO20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ 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 ➢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 #Conjugate #mattwenning  #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Power Project family, how's it going? Now, a lot of you guys are lifters, athletes. You're serious about the gym, and we are too. And that's why we've been using Slingshot products for years, all right? You have the original Slingshot, obviously the glittery pink hip circle, which is my personal favorite. But if you don't like that, then you have the normal hip circle that's used to warm up the hips. But on the website, they have tons of equipment, knee sleeves, elbow sleeves, the gangster wraps right there. So you need to go check them out.

And Andrew, can you tell them more about it? Yes, that's over at markbellslingshot.com and at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT10 to save 10% off your entire order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. How old is she? She was 86.

Okay. So it's not like she died too young, but I think it's hard when you get to that age because talking with my grandma, she was just ready to go. All of her friends were already gone. All the people that she had all the fun with other than me were already gone. And you're just like, oh, fuck. I mean, I think that's a really big wake-up call for us.

You don't realize the people that are in your life and how important they could be or are right now. That's all temporary. Why does this headset look so small on his head? Is it because of the large training? It's bigger than mine. I usually get made fun of for that shit. Those headphones are stretched out. They're almost straight across.

I got a big fucking head. Damn, bro. That's nice. That's a head of strength, though. I guess. Remember, Louie would talk about guys with small heads. He's like, they're not good for strength training god you remember microgeria's head yeah huge biggest fucking head i've ever seen he had a pumpkin head massive i think what's up with this 520 pound

squat for 24 reps and did you nearly die from it because it was it was it 24 reps and why didn't you get to depth on any squat so high so high so yeah so i saw it and i was like oh dude these definitely all look good they would have passed in any federation and then i i was like motherfucker the funniest part was the internet judges two weeks beforehand i had done 325 for 25 i was slowly just kind of working my way up just to feel it out make sure didn't you do it for 26 and did it deeper and it wasn't 535 that you used tom platt style which is funny that they all compare it to tom platt's because the video you can't see tom platt's depth i think he's wearing a squat suit he's wearing a squat suit i mean i'm not hating and then he's like he was doing it with no sleeves he had a fucking z suit on put us i'm done do it again and do it with a squat suit on. I think that was a one-time thing.

But I did the 325, and obviously at my strength level and my mileage, 325 is very hard for me to break parallel with because— 525, you mean? Well, the week before. Oh. So I do 225 for 25. Then the next week I do 325 for 25. And I'm like, okay, it's there.

It feels good. And people are like, oh, that's a long way from 520. And I was like okay it's it's there it feels good and people like oh that's a long way from 520 and i was like it's not for me like people don't realize when i was competing i would start the bar at 500 that's the first fucking set so i'm just checking my wind wait like you'd go in you wouldn't do anything else you just put 500 and that'd be the thing that would warm you up. So when I squatted 865 and a half, the all-time world record in belt only, which was 2016, my first set after my winning warm-ups was 500. So I would do like 315 for 25 on the belt squat. 500 was the first set.

And so that way, I learned this quickly because one time I went to a meet and the hotel, you know how the meets were at the hotels? Don't try this at home, by the way. No, don't try this at home. So one time, I'm up in my room. I don't like to be at the meet before I compete. It just wears me out watching other people. So I tell my friend, I'm like, hey, let me know when I'm about an hour and a half away from my flight starting. The son of a bitch fucking forgets.

I have my buddy running up to my hotel room and goes, dude, you got 25 minutes before your first fucking attempt. I'm like, oh, shit. So I had to start at 500. Well, I did, and that's when I was still in equipment. I did. I squatted 1197.6, the all-time world record in gear. So I was like, I didn't need to fucking do all those

warm-ups and ironically i had more left in the tank for deadlifts yeah so anyway um it's amazing because no matter how much you work you warm up there's always that set that you get from a warm from a particular warm-up where you're like i'm good now but it doesn't happen in the early sets doesn't happen with a plate doesn't happen with two plates it doesn't happen in the early sets. It doesn't happen with a plate. It doesn't happen with two plates. It happens when you get to, I don't know, maybe around 60% or 70%. You get kind of over the hump. And then in your head, you're like, okay, I think I can handle something pretty good today. Yeah, and I never base how good a meet or a workout is going to go by how the warm-up sets feel.

Because I've had some of the worst warm-up sets. And then for some reason, my body just wakes the fuck up and says it's time to go, and then it's game on. So sometimes I think having that ability to flip that switch on demand without going, well, I didn't have enough warm-ups, or well, I didn't have this, or I didn't have this optimal environment. It was too fucking hot. I mean, how many gyms here in my gym, we don't have fucking AC. So you go to a meet meet it's like a fucking vacation because now it's controlled 70 68 my gym when i did that 520 for 24 was 103 oh fuck i had a fan on me that's all i had because it was in the end of july i believe in ohio you know the

humidity and heat brutal so i go in a little bit early i said hey guys let's all get there at eight o'clock before it gets too hot i probably started that squat at 9 a.m so it wasn't quite hot enough yet but my place is in a warehouse it just absorbs heat so it was hot and i was like dude if i'd waited about another month now because it's like 64 back there now yeah i probably would have been able to squeeze out a couple of more but i was just tired of putting it off for so long so are you gonna pull up the video? Yeah, I was looking for it on your Instagram. I don't understand.

I look at this and I'm like, how in the fuck is that not below parallel? Oh, it is. So it's just funny because to me, if you look at... You're cheating. You got a belt on. You have those, those are strong sleeves. Yeah, those are way too small.

What's funny is they're a 4X sleeve. I mean, I put them on myself. But people were asking about the wrap around the left hip. So when I was training at Louie's at Westside, I had tore my left hip squatting 1,055, and it didn't hurt when I tore it. It was actually in the joint like I hurt some part of the hip socket. Let's go back and watch that last rep. I got some problems with this last rep.

The last rep got nasty, yeah. Yeah, what happened here? Is this a completed rep, guys? Like, let's judge this. Let's be internet judges. Let's be picky. So what happened was I was about ready to hit my face to the fucking floor. So at 20, I'm like, okay, now I know why this is a world fucking record.

At this 22, I'm having to really check my... That right there, you can almost see I'm starting to almost lose my balance. This is what's impressive. Oh, brutal. This is what's impressive. That does hurt. I did not notice my wind being the problem. My conditioning, because

my winning warm-ups were so good, that was a complete, total full-body muscle failure so what you didn't see is after i got done with that i laid on the ground i couldn't move for i would say about 12 to 15 minutes like i felt like if i moved my body was gonna fucking like go into someplace i didn't want it to go welcome to crossfit yeah pretty much with real weight so you know but you know this is a really interesting thing because it's like okay the record was 23 you got 24 and it's that whole concept of if you know what the barrier is

you'll just go right past it and then you just just exhaust so my goal was 25 okay that was the goal i thought honestly i thought probably two weeks prior i thought that maybe around 30 was close i think the heat is what got me a little um but to me it was like i wanted to be at least for me myself i wanted to be the only squatter that ever broke world records equipped raw and had at least something in the rep range that was fucking insane yeah and so for me, it was one of those things I knew I was going to be 43 in a couple of months. I'll be 43 in a couple of weeks now. And I was like, I cannot wait any longer. Like the body is going to start not letting me do this at some point. I need to put the hammer down and just fucking do it. And that's why I didn't wait till it got cooler. I felt good doing the 325 for 25. I'm like, I'm going for it next week. Fuck it.

And I knew at the week after that, I was going out to talk to Jeff Cavalier and speak at his conference. So that was going to put a ding in the training cycle. And so I just had to do it, you know. Right now you can go and train and do just about anything that you want in strength, right? If you wanted to set your sights again on an 800-pound deadlift, I'm sure you could probably accomplish that. If you wanted to get back in gear, you could probably do some of those things. Do you think that any of those things interest you anymore,

or are you just like you did that and you're cool with it? I felt like at each division of what I did, I felt like I gave everything I had. And I think the only thing to gain from going back and doing that is just injury. I mean, at this point, I feel like, you know, some people look back. I think the people that have those issues are people that maybe have not attained the goals that they thought were possible. I went far beyond what I thought my body was capable of, both physically and mentally. And so with that being said, I don't have any regrets or anything I felt like I left on the table.

But I also feel like I got extremely lucky that I didn't accumulate any mileage or injuries. So it's kind of like how many times can you go to the blackjack table and win before you lose? And for me, it's not worth losing anymore. I mean, let's just put this in perspective how many fucking guys can squat over 500 pounds for close to 25 reps not many and only 13 000 people gave a fuck now if so if that video would have went viral and had 10 million views and people like dude you got to try something crazier you know or that would have picked up maybe some bigger sponsors for the,

for the YouTube channel. Maybe I consider it, but the mileage to risk ratio is not fucking worth it. You know, I did that because I thought that I could beat Platts' record. And in my opinion, I did. What's the point after that? You know, it's to the point now you get old enough that you start looking back at the shit you and I did and you start going, okay, that was fucking insane. Now what's the point of it? The point of it was is that I pushed my limits as far as I thought I could and I got away with no injuries.

So to me, I won because there's so many guys that we competed against that can't fucking walk good anymore. They can't even train anymore because they're so beat up. they can't even they can't even train anymore because they're so beat up somehow either because of my smarts or some luck or some education I got the ability to push past that and go further than I ever thought I could but without accumulation of mileage and that was my whole goal I wanted people to realize like look maybe I had a little bit of gifts when I was a kid and I was had the potential to be stronger than a lot of people, but I lasted for 30 years too. You can't take that away. And so for me, it's, it's one of those things where I just felt like I didn't leave anything on the table and any particular thing. Now, I just want to feel good, look good, be healthy, including, you know, constant blood work.

Um, and I was always pretty healthy for being a bigger guy, but you know, constant blood work. And I was always pretty healthy for being a bigger guy. But, you know, you can't sustain 300 pounds in your 40s and 50s and not retain some health issues. So right now, 255 to 63, my blood work looks amazing. And that's where I know my body needs to be. If I push into the 270s, my triglycerides and blood sugars start to act weird no matter how clean I try to do it. So it's not worth it to me. And that's always what I think people need to balance is get as good as you can at whatever you want to be good at, but don't put your health behind that because eventually you'll have neither, right? If you're not healthy getting up to that point, you will not sustain it. And then you're going to pay for it more than you think.

How can other people do that in whatever particular sport they're interested in, do you think? Because a lot of people, they'll do jujitsu for a long time. They get real excited. They jump into it for, you know, they're doing it frequently. They're doing it at a high intensity. We see it a lot with lifting and a lot of lifters will complain to me like, man, how do you keep your elbows and how do you keep your knees? And I'm thinking like, well, you know, during my powerlifting career, I did run into issues with the elbows and the knees and stuff like that. But right now I feel fucking awesome.

I don't have any more problems. So how do you think some other people can avoid the trap of like being so obsessed with just getting better today and maybe see off into the distance a little bit so they can? Well, maybe that's a trait that I just have that gives me the advantages. But I will say will say this one always get your blood work done there's always some creeping

issue that either you're fighting genetically or because you're abusing bad foods or whatever bad genetics so i'll give you an example when my dad found out he was sick if i live another year i will outlive my dad when my dad found out he was sick his If I live another year, I will outlive my dad. When my dad found out he was sick, his triglycerides were 1,270 at the doctor. Oh my goodness. Highs 300. He had cancer so bad that within six months, he was six foot five, weighed 280. And in six months, he was 90 pounds. And they told him, it's like, we're just going to try to keep you comfortable because it's everywhere. And so he was exposed to Agent Orange of Vietnam. He also was a smoker, which accelerated it. So a lot of different compounding factors. But the point is,

is I think the first thing you need to do is make sure that you're trying to do everything you can to be healthy. The second thing I think is just as, or maybe if not more important and more controllable, is always be looking at structural and muscular weaknesses. So your training should be developing the shortcomings of your physical body, meaning if you have bad hamstring to quadricep ratio, you need to get that closer to a proper ratio, which should be as close to one-to-one as possible. If you don't have a strong core or transverse abdominal muscles, which I think is the most important ab muscle you have, which is the deeper one that goes this way, instead of the six-pack that everybody thinks,

the TVA is actually what braces in and locks. Is that more like obliques and things of that nature? It'd be underneath the oblique. Okay. So that muscle group, in my opinion, is really connected heavily into the lower back and back injuries. So TVA is insanely important to be strong.

So how do you like, real quick, pausing on the TVA, how do you work on that specifically? What movements would you suggest? Well, you got planks, right? When you squat and deadlift, the body forces them to turn on as long as your posture and everything is sound. So maybe do some stuff without a belt here and there or something like that.

Beltless training, side planks, leg raises. Anything that's going to require bracing is going to require TVA. Anything that attaches the upper and lower extremities together to produce a movement is going to attack the TVA. Farmer carry. Oh, absolutely. Farmers carry overhead squats, which I'm not a huge fan of overhead stuff. But maybe walking with something overhead. Oh, absolutely. Farmers carry overhead squats, which, you know, I'm not a huge fan of overhead stuff. But maybe walking with something overhead. Yeah, exactly.

So my point is, is one, make sure you're healthy internally. Two, make sure you're healthy externally by meaning look at your posture and muscle balances and make sure that those are as even as you possibly can. But the problem is, say you have a hamstring weakness which i would say 60 of the people watching this hamstrings are not strong enough to do what they want to do would we agree with that yeah yeah okay well if you're going to make a program for somebody's hamstrings to get better how long does that actually take well i can tell you because the bulgarians and russians wrote about it 36 months why did they come up with that number? Fucking years. Because what I think they didn't really say why they came up with the number because the hamstring is not a great leverage style muscle. Let's look at the quadricep, for example.

If we look at the quadricep, you got multiple muscles coming down to the kneecap. The kneecap is not only a protector of the knee if you fall. It's a lever system. It's the only joint in your body that has a bone over the joint to create a lever that floats so how in the fuck does the hamstring stay in balance with the quadricep with that level of leverage in the front it's insanely hard yeah so the soviets figured out a long time ago that it's going to take three years to create some sort of balance at that joint which is why i feel we have so many knee issues, but it's also why I feel it's very important to squat with vertical shanks and learn how to do that before

you go to any other training style. I'm not saying you don't use it occasionally like a knee over toe or an Olympic style squat, but learn how to squat using the posterior chain as a primary mover because it's probably your primary fucking weakness. Don't most power lifters do that though because they squat low bar and they drive into their hips when they're squatting? Or are they doing something off? Well, I think I think with Louie's passing and Westside's information kind of not becoming lost, but not relevant today because of whatever the lifters are. We're finding the freaks out of people don't develop anymore.

They just are not. Would you agree? So I would say that squatting technique in general has been a little bit lost because the guys that are good at it now are probably good at it because their leverages are good, not because they learned how to do it right. Whereas we saw guys at Westside when you and I were there that were not built to squat what they could squat, but they learned how to lever the weight correctly. Look at Corey Gregory. Yeah, Corey Gregory. He's still squatting, you know, pretty heavy weights. He's, and he's a thinner guy. He's probably an inch taller than me. He does not have leverage to squat. And he's close to 50. Yeah. You know, I mean, he's still doing it. So I think you have to be healthy in both ways, internal and external, but you don't find anybody

talking about correcting postural deficiencies and muscular weaknesses before extreme loading occurs. And that's why everybody's in and out in two to four years versus like you and I are in it for 30 years. So that to me is one of the biggest problems I see today is the fact that we're not, we're not looking at everything long term. And really out in reality, if you want to be insanely strong, let's say this is, you know, because I would say that most people watching this like to work out, but maybe they don't have the potential right now to be elite or one of the best in the world. But is it because you're not good enough genetically or your timeline's too short? Because I'll tell you one of the biggest things that was ever told to me that shaped my entire career. 21 years old,

I squat my first 700. 21. 21. How long were you powerlifting at that point? Already almost 10 years. I just won my first world title at 19. I'd already been training for seven years. I started when I was 12. Yeah. And long story short, there were a lot of supportive people in the area that were decent powerlifters that were only a mile from my house. So I got lucky starting younger and they would never let me push until I failed. They always worked on technique first, blah, blah, blah. But the big thing is, is that at 22, I'm up closer to Chicago and I squat 700. Guess who's there? Ed Cohen. And I didn't know him very well, but my coach knew of him. And he goes, you need to talk to him. And I talked to

Eddie and Eddie goes, man, that 700 pound squat looked really good. If you can stay healthy in five or eight years, you'll squat 800. And for an average person, they go, what? Another a hundred pounds is going to take me five fucking years? I didn't care because I like training. So to me, it was, it's not going to take me that long in my mind, but I didn't care if it did or not because I just like being in the gym. So the thing of it is, is my timeline was never, I want to be this by 25 or I want to be this by next week. I will be as patient as I need to be to get where I need to be, period. And I think that's missing today. It's missing almost in every aspect of sport or whatever. Even with

weight loss. Yeah. But when I was flying here from Ohio, I was reading some books because I'm actually going to write a book for human kinetics on conjugate training, which is awesome, but it's a lot of work. And I was reading some things and they said, if you read for one hour a day, which is 5% or 10% of your day in five to eight years, you will be a master of your field. If you read in that field five years, it goes back to what Charles Poliquin used to say all the time. People overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what can happen in five. And Poliquin also said people should be reading at least multiple hours. Like I don't think it was one, I think it was multiple hours a day. Yeah. And he did. I mean, it was a walking textbook, but I like to keep it around one hour.

And just because I don't want to burn out. Here's the thing. It's like, how hard can you train in a session versus how much tonnage can you do in a month? If you work out too hard in one day and you got to back off, you're actually better off training easy three days in a row versus one hard day and having to take two down. And that's the same thing with education. In my opinion, slow methodical amounts are more important than intense amounts at one bout. And that can be in education or in physical ability, in my opinion. You know, one thing that you were saying when ed told you you you squatted 700 he said five to eight years to be able to squat 800 first off you know you're talking about people wanting to do things super quickly well on social the crazy thing is you see cats one year they're squatting 700 and then the next year they're squatting 800 or they're getting

very close to 800 you see guys who are deadlifting 850 or 900 one year and the next year they're deadlifting 1,000. So it makes me wonder because, I mean, even myself when I came here to ST, I was deadlifting 620. And then in like six or seven months, I deadlifted 750. But it was because of all the people around me.

So I wonder if, number one, yeah, strength does take time. But is it partially because of all the people around me. So I wonder if, number one, yes, strength does take time. But is it partially because a lot of people are seeing some people do this kind of quickly that maybe some of the processes are a little bit better, but also they're maybe going too fast at it at the same time? The big question is, though, okay, let's say a guy goes from 700 to 850 in a year. Where is he at the next year? He's fucking injured, and he's gone. That's the problem with today is you see these guys do these immense things, but you don't see dudes lasting like Mike Bridges and Larry Pacifico.

I mean, think about this. Larry Pacifico won 10 world titles in a row. Could you imagine being the best in the world in your weight class for 10 straight fucking years in anything yeah that is called the guy i want to fucking talk to because not only has he figured out how to be the best he's figured out how to fucking stay there and that's the big problem and you know for a fact that he wasn't always the strongest you know what i mean like he had to use his wits he had to figure out like i'm gonna catch this guy on my deadlift or he had to be strategic, I'm sure.

Yeah, strategic. But the point is, is I don't take anybody's advice per se in certain things unless they show me that they know what they're talking about for at least 10 years. Because now their longevity – I'm going to come back to that idea in 10 years. So the longevity aspect of that creates the education. And, you know, we talked about that earlier, but there's just there's so much lack of education these days. There's so much information out now, but nobody's utilizing it. And nothing's long term. We look at all these strength studies.

How many of them are longer than a year? None. And who are they studying? And yeah, exactly. Who are they studying? That's another issue. You know, I don't want to hear that you figured out how to bench press from a study that trained recreational lifters in college. They could only bench press 185 fucking pounds.

They went from 185 to 225. You're like, I don't care about that study. Awesome bicep curl, jackass. But now you show me a study that takes somebody, from 450 to 500 10 at that level now i want to hear what you have to say and so there was a paper that came out a couple of years ago i'd have to cite it for you but they showed how long has louis and myself and a handful of other guys talked about the bench press being a tricep mover a lot right how you want to get your bench bigger build your triceps how many times you hear that from louis yeah all the time for the last 20 years yep okay there was a paper that just came out and said at maximum weights the tricep is the main presser and the pec is a stabilizer

no shit motherfucker i love this shit did you see this paper came out the day louis the day yeah probably just the way things went for him. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I mean, Charlie Francis had a great meme. I'll post it later today so people can see it. But Charlie Francis was the guy that trained Ben Johnson. Probably one of the best Olympic sprint coaches to ever live. Most influential, yeah. And influential.

And he had a hellacious meme. He's been dead for a while. He said, the job of the researcher is to prove what i already know works and i was like fucking a right yeah that's an amazing quote i'm really curious about this man because we have so many people that uh number one come on the podcast they talk about evidence-based stuff social media there's a lot of people who are super evidence-based right and some of the shit you you see you're like even though that's evidence-based, it kind of seems like bullshit. You are big into learning, reading, educating yourself, but you're also big into the practical aspects of a lot of things.

Now, how do you navigate and kind of filter the evidence-based side of things and then the practicality side of things? Because something that you guys have been saying for 20 years about the bench press and the tricep is something that when you tell that to an evidence-based guy he'd be like no when you look at the biomechanics of that that doesn't make any sense and then research shows up to kind of back up what the guys who've been practically doing this shit have been saying for years how do you balance that well the first thing is is you you take research with a grain of salt because again you don't know what the population that they're studying. Now, that is the real advantage to the old Bulgarian, Soviet, Eastern Bloc country researching because they wouldn't do research on people that weren't already elite. The AS Prilipin chart was situated with lifters that were already good and were practiced with thousands of

lifters. So, Louie's thought process on volume, which I still follow today, how many speed reps do you do in a week? How many max effort? That was all learned 60 fucking years ago. Nobody wants to listen. The thing of it is if you have thousands of elite athletes and that system all works for almost all of those guys, now you're telling me something.

But you take 10 people from the gym at your high school or college and you put them into a weight training program. All you got to do is read the fucking study. But that's where highly experienced lifters can look at something and tell if it's garbage or it's not. A lot of the stuff that I learned about muscle in particular was veterinarian studies because you can control mice. You can make them eat, sleep, and train anytime you want and whatever you want to do. They don't bench press very well, though. No, they're terrible benchers. But the thing of it is if you look at the research that was done in the old eastern bloc countries, they were as close to controlled as possible.

They were in barracks. They trained. They didn't work. They were separated from families for multiple months at a time. So you're taking away variables. You're taking away stressors. So if that's optimal, why not follow the optimal? And so to me, I don't hold a lot of clout into the new research because of the population that they're training. If you could separate somebody and put them in a scenario like a communist state where when you decide or they decide for you that you are going to be an Olympic lifter or a gymnast and now the next 10 years of your life is dedicated to that, now you have some research. And it sucks because nobody thinks, well, I don't want to live like that. Well, if you're a scientist and you want to study, you definitely want that scenario.

We can't really replicate that in today's global situation. The Chinese are probably as close to the Olympic lifting as they can to do that. And that's why a lot of the Soviet coaches are over there now. So in the 90s when the Soviet Union fell apart, a lot of the Soviet coaches went to China. And the reason was they don't want to come to America because they don't have any control of the athlete. I mean, let's look at Mark Henry, for example. Mike Stone, which applied and didn't get hired, but he was going to be my professor in grad school when Kramer left and went to UConn. He came in and we got to sit down and talk for quite a while.

And he said Mark Henry was the most genetically gifted guy he'd ever seen, but he was too lazy for him to train. He would come in and be like, I don't feel like working out today and just walk out. You didn't do that in the Soviet system, right? It was a privilege to represent your country. It was a privilege to have the capacity to win gold medals. And then you start looking at the fact that you had dozens, if not hundreds of researchers working for the same goal. So let's just look at it from that perspective. Imagine if we had medical doctors, psychologists, biomechanical experts, all working with the USOC and the athlete had to live

that life. We would probably find some really cool research and get even better. But in my opinion, we just can't replicate that now. And so with that particular situation, we have a problem with research today. So what I always do is I read it. I look at the thing, the research as a whole. But then I also remember my core values of what took me 30 years to understand, which is I know A.S. Prillipin's chart's pretty damn close. I know that we need to max. I know that we need repetition effort work, and I know we need dynamic work. See if you can pull that up, the Perlopin's chart. Yeah.

It shouldn't be too hard to find. With me being that particular, I try to see what fits into that and what doesn't. If you balance that with knowing structural weaknesses, so how do you find structural weaknesses? Well, you either have an advanced coach, or you've been around long enough to look at your own videos and go, that didn't look right. This is the muscle group I think is the problem. Yeah, and sometimes you're wrong, but you'll still find it eventually. Eventually you'll find it if you're cognitive about what you're doing. And that's another big

issue you see with training today is people might be videoing it to post it on Instagram or anything of that nature. But what you start finding is that who's training really cognitive and who has monthly and say quarterly or biannual training modalities set in place? They don't. Give us a little dissertation on this, if you will, like kind of guide us through, you know, how someone would utilize some of these numbers. So this looks like a modification of the pro-open chart, but let's just say it's the right one. So if we look at percent of 1RM is 95 to 100%, I believe 90%. So, and I base everything off of RPE and so did Prilipin and them guys after this chart was made. And I want to say the mid sixties. Rate of perceived effort. Right. So for those of you that are utilizing percentage-based training, it is very good about keeping you

honest, but it also doesn't build in the fluctuation of day-to-day stressors. So the RPE scale allows you to do a 9 or 90% when it's applicable. So you're always training as hard as you can. So for instance, I've been sipping on this water for the last 20 minutes, and it's only down to here. Well, if I've worked my ass off and I've got a family and kids, this is how much I can train. I might want to train this whole can. I only have this much energy left. RPE is adaptable to that.

So with that being said, it allows you to train harder. But let's just go back to the prilipin chart. So it's telling us that we need to be around one to three reps per set. That keeps us in the maximal effort range, total reps per workout, which is about seven, four to 10. And then that creates maximal strength. 85 to 95% is going to be strength as well. I find that is probably the sweet spot to not overtrain.

So what you'll find in the book, and it's not going to come out for a long time, but the Soviets figured out with warm ups, main lifts and accessories that the average percentage of the workout need to be between 72 and 76% for optimal recovery and optimal performance gain. Anything above that overtrained and anything under that wasn't enough stimulus. So if we break down this particular scenario, what it's doing is telling you how many reps per percentage area you need to train in order for your body to adapt to the training. Anything above that's over and anything under that is not optimal. So when your intensity is higher, when you're utilizing more weight, when you're getting closer to your one rep max, you're also going to be doing less sets, correct? Yeah, and that's where you have to understand, see that 95 to a hundred at the top,

you have to ask yourself one big thing, especially the way I train or powerlifters train. You have to ask yourself, are you testing what you have or are you building something new? In reality, you can't do both at the same time. So I find that 85, 95% allows you to strain, tells the body enough information, hey, we need to get stronger, but also allows adaptability because the percentage isn't a fight or flight scenario. And if you're using like a new bar or new exercise, be really fucking careful, right? Because it's a novel thing to your body, right? Absolutely. So you look at the video that i gave you yesterday i benched i got off the plane no meals got up and left my house at 4 a.m to come here and bench 500 with the cadillac bar from kabuki i've never used that bar never ever whoo so grab something you've

never done before and still hit within i'd say that's about 90 of what i could bench it still looked pretty easy yeah okay i stopped There's no point in going heavier. My body's going, hey, this is a new fucking environment. We just got you, because that Cadillac bar is not only a very close to hammer grip, it's also arced. So now you're an inch and a half deeper than you probably would be on a normal bar. Well, for an elite bencher, that's a completely different environment. So I know that if I can use almost any bar and be within 90% of my best, my training is actually developing new strengths without testing. But it's still max effort, though. So how do you change better. 525 would overtrain, stop right before the overtraining process occurs.

But that requires a lot of skill and a lot of swallowing your pride and your ego. I mean, I hadn't seen your brother for years. So for him to see me bench five plates right off the plane was like crazy. I could have impressed him more, but I know when to stop. And that comes with experience, right? So percentages basically give you an idea of where you need to be. I wouldn't say that that chart would be the one I would select. I would go with the one that's the original chart.

So it looks like just – it's got bluish top. If you show me – Matt has it in his pocket. Probably somewhere. Here's my chart. The one on the left. It's got the blue and white. That's the original chart right there yep okay oh nice there we go right now this is where i think that other chart had

messed up these are how many you need about per month notice also too this is a strength chart right and what i noticed right away is that a hundred is not on there. It's not. And this is where I started to understand that 9 RP or 90% was the trick to max effort for years to come. And for even something like sprinting, right? Like Hussein Bolt, these guys, how often do they do max sprints? 100%? Very, very seldom. Every four years maybe when he shows up to the Olympics and smokes some people. Yeah.

So the key is are you testing or are you building new? 90%, in my opinion, builds new. Over 90% tests your strength, but it's not necessarily making you better because it's too strenuous and the body starts throwing governors and anxiety. We've been there for years. Yeah. You go a little too heavy. What happens the next week?

You're neurologically drained. You feel like shit. You may have to push through your training. That's telling your body to shut down. It was too difficult for me to do percentage-based training for that reason. It's the reason why I didn't have much programming because when I did that, it would stress me out before the gym. It's almost like the Mike Tyson stare down where he had the guy beat before the weights had me beat sometimes and i was like man that's that's not like me i'm more i'm normally more carefree i normally have more fun in the gym and i would just stiffen up and i'd be super tight thinking about the double that i had to do with 935 or whatever the yeah so what i would do is

when i was competing this might be helpful for some that are listening is I would do like, let's say, uh, eight weeks out. I would do say if I was going to squat eight 50, I'd do 700 for four, right? But that was a percentage, maybe 80% for four, the two weeks between that I would pick a bar and I would stop when I felt like I had strained enough, which is about a nine. So I do a safety bar band, safety bar chains or camber bar or whatever. Then three weeks after that point, so that was week eight, let's say, week four, I would do 750 for three, another higher percentage, one less rep. So I was doing a percentage conjugate. So I would percent to make my body understand what needed to be done. And then in between those weeks, I'm still straining, but I'm using a different stimulus that's based on RPE. So I go percentage, RPE, RPE, percentage, RPE, RPE. And every time I'd ramp it up, go to a meet, boom, break a world

record. This reminds me of the way that some people will run. Some people choose to run and they might run for time one day, but they don't check the distance. On another day, they might just run the distance and not check the time. Other times they check both to kind of see where they're at and to measure where they're at. Some days they're going to go harder. But again, back to like some of the things that were on that chart, they're going to be, for most of their training, if somebody's training smart, and the higher level athlete can get away with

maybe not having the percentage quite as high. But I think, you know, that 75 to maybe 90% is where most people should hang out most of the time. But a lot of times you see people, they just want the PR. They want the PR, whether it be running, lifting, whatever it is they're doing. And over a period of time, normally your luck runs out. And then if it doesn't, people always point to the one guy on Instagram where it hasn't run out, someone like a John Hack. But we don't really know, like John, you know, he's posting the main lift. He's, he's posting the cool thing that he did for the day. And obviously he's lifting crazy weights. He might be the strongest lifter that ever lived. He's doing an amazing job.

But we're also not seeing like him doing pull-ups. We're not seeing him doing weighted dips. Or how long he's taking on an off-season. Right. We don't have any idea of some of these things. How often does he compete, right? Well, bodybuilders have been doing that for years. I mean, think about like, well, every bodybuilder.

But let's just go back to Arnold's day. Yeah. He would lean out and get ready for an Olympia, take an ass load of pictures, and then use them all year. So people thought he'd literally look like that all year round. He probably did stay pretty fit. I'm not saying he got bloated or nasty, but my point is that bodybuilders,

I remember Johnny Jackson talking about that a long time ago. He grew out facial hair. They'd take a bunch of pictures with him with a beard, then the next day they'd shave it so it looked like a different timeline and then he'd go to a bodybuilding show and then he put back on another 10 body fat and train his ass off but then everybody for a whole year thought that he looked like that year round yeah you know and i remember like dexter jackson used to talk about that and all those other people but the point is is like you have to build in off seasons. You have to build in transitional seasons where you're working on different qualities. So I think one of the biggest reasons that I lasted as long as I did and I'm still around and can still do crazy things is because I'll do phases where I work on isolateral balance. So like left and rights.

I'll work on phases where I'm working on speed work more than max work. I'm working on straining more than conditioning. Then I go to other phases where I'm working on speed work more than max work. I'm working on straining more than conditioning. Then I go to other phases where I'm working on capacity versus strength. It doesn't mean I don't maintain those other areas. It just means the emphasis is switched. So if you look at the system that I use, the winning warmups, they mostly stay around a four RPE. The reason is because if you go four RPE in that, rpe on your main lift which is either as fast or as heavy as possible and around eight rpe on the accessories do the math and tell me what percentage that comes out to be it's like 73 what did i just say you have to keep your percentages

as an overall basis around 75 a workout as far as total intensity or you're going to get beat up or get hurt. And so when I saw that, either from the East Germans or the Bulgarian systems, I started realizing that there was some magic in those percentages. So RPE4 on the warmup stays that way all the time because I want that average of 75% of total exertion at the end of the cumulative percentage of strain. 95% of total exertion at the end of the cumulative percentage of strain. Where do you think like some screaming joint pain comes from? Like how do we go back and like find maybe the origin of it? And what is like, what is some of your ways to help solve that?

Because I know there's some guys, especially like with the elbow. And I just think like, man, that elbow joint is really involved in like almost every single movement that we're doing in the gym because we're always like holding a weight to some degree, pulling it or pushing it. So what are some things that you would advocate to help with that? Well, the first thing is, is that pain is not simple. Pain can sometimes be completely developed from something else. So again, your knee pain might be caused from your foot. Your knee pain could be caused from your lower back. It could be caused from a hip issue. It could be caused, my opinion, most of the time from a muscular imbalance or activation issue. The point is, is that when you get pain, in my opinion, for the average listener, look at the other side of that joint. So if your elbow hurts, it could be bicep tendonitis, right? Your pain

might be back here, but the problem's here. And then you start, most of the time when I've seen people that have shoulder or elbow pain, I start digging into their training. They're doing too much isolated bicep work. And even when they do back work, they're doing so much bicep work that they're not even really working their back because their arms dominate neurologically. So you start looking at all those factors, you start seeing the pieces of the puzzle come together. So if you have elbow issues, look at the shoulder, look at your wrist, look at your forearms, start looking at the area as a whole versus compartmentalizing. Well, I only have pain in my right knee. Well, it could be your right hamstring. It could be your right glute. It could be your foot. So it sounds like, well, hell, how do I look that up? Trial and error. That's how you really

figure everything out. You get smarter every time you figure out your own problem, you know, and that's through research and training and experience and working around different kinks and bruises and dings. You start really realizing how your body functions and what really happens. So if we think that way, then you can start to say, well, maybe if I use a different bar when I squat, right? Because then your hands are down here, like a cambered bar, safety bar. How do I take pressure off the elbow? What are some things I can do in my training where I can still do a lot of stuff that I love, but I can do less reps where my arm is in a weird compromised position?

So now you're getting into the meats and potatoes, a conjugate in the thought process of why you trained the way we trained, which is rotation of movement. So a lot of times if I see, say, a power lifter, let's just say that's my background. If I see a power lifter having an elbow issue and then I ask, you know, well, how do you squat? Well, I squat with a straight bar. How many times do you squat with a straight bar? Two times a week for the last five years.

There's your fucking elbow problem, asshole. Right? You are in this position twice a week straining your ass off and you're asking me why your elbow hurts so if he were to go safety bar no elbow pressure at all camber bar minimal elbow pressure and then a straight bar and then rotated that around there's no joint pain because you're changing the pressure gradient and now the joints may still be squatting but the specificity of the exact movement has changed just enough to give pressure in areas of the joint a break. Or maybe skip a squat workout, for God's sake.

Or maybe skip a squat workout and just work on accessories. There's been many times I walk into the gym and I cut the core lift out and do the warm-ups and do the accessories. And I'll tell you why. Because in my opinion, for almost everybody's goal, the lacking issue is that they forget that GPP is the base on which everything is built. So if you're not fit enough to recover from a max effort exercise, eventually you're not going to do max effort. and not let you through the range of motion. The point is every time you go through a cycle where you may PR and whatever you like to PR in, it could be a running distance or a lifting amount. You need to go back to the basics and reanalyze everything and figure out where are the shortcomings

and then develop your training based on those areas versus thinking you got it figured out because the body is a constant change either through aging, mileage, could be all kinds of different factors. But I always sit back down when i get done say like when i did that tom platt squat it was a reanalyzation of everything that i did i watched the squat and as you can see in the video there was no technical breakdown i was just fucking trash yeah that is mastery because i was tired my my eyes were blacking out my body wanted to die and i did not change my form. That shows you the level of technical

mastery because the average person would have, knees would have started bucking in at 15, back would have started rounding at 18. My body just said, I've had enough, but it didn't break form. And that's when you start realizing that the ability to use video to find your weakness at that level becomes nearly impossible. It's what you feel because you can't see it in the video. It's not there. My knees didn't come in. My shins didn't go forward. My back didn't round. Where's the weakness? And at that level, there's no fucking weakness. Yeah. Because if there's a weakness, it shows quickly once there's about, there's more ways than this, but to make it simple and quick, there's three ways you can see a weakness.

You can see it by moving insanely fast. So if I say I want you to speed squat, but you've got to move as fast as you can, you're going to make a form error if you don't have balance, like structural balance. But you're going to have to be a pretty good coach to see it because it's going to be quick. You can go heavy as shit, and then that's going to show you where your weaknesses are because when you go into strain There is no amount of coaching that happens at fight or flight If I put you know, let's say 500 pounds in your hands right now to bench You're going to show me what the problem is really fucking fast, right? Again, there's one other way I can go very unstable

I could take a bar and hang a bunch of kettlebells on it and watch you squat What are you going to do? You're going to do whatever you can to stay in that situation, which is going to show me all your strengths and your weaknesses. So you can go unstable, you can go quickness, or you can go heavy. Those three ways could show you as an assessment tool of what you need to be working on in general. That's what I utilize those for. So when you're maxing or you're doing speed work or you're doing shit till failure, don't use it as, well, I got 26 reps with a hundred pound dumbbells on the bench. You tell me where the weakness was and what started to happen when you got tired.

That's the information you should be getting, not the end result. And that's where I think people will mess up is they might be testing what they're doing, but they're not assessing what they're doing. You know, I know you're probably going to mention the longevity aspect of things, but you know, some people are very scared, especially if let's say they're a competing power lifter. Number one, maybe they don't give themselves a long enough time horizon, but let's say that they do need to start working on certain weaknesses. Well, when you see some of your favorite lifters and they've just been squatting, they've been deadlifting, they've been benching, and you just keep seeing videos and videos of them continuing to do that and continuing to get stronger.

It's hard for someone to think that I need to stop benching for now to get stronger at bench or I need to stop deadlifting to get stronger at deadlift. It seems like I just need to continue. Specify. And one of the things a few years ago when I first heard about conjugate, when I'd hear certain people that were really prominent coaches talk about conjugate, they'd be like, how the fuck does this work? Because you're not specific enough. Like it's totally getting rid of the specificity aspect. So why would somebody want to actually make that switch if they're actually going away from the movements that they need to do on the platform? That's a good question because there are some

people that are anthropometrically built to constantly do those lifts. But I think if they were to run into Ed Cohen right now at nearly 60 years old and see that he can't wash his hair and his body's all banged up because he trained very specifically constantly, you might want to reconsider that. Because at the end of the day, performance, I know that most younger kids, all they care about is the number. But in reality, in my opinion, it's a balance of the number and the mileage. So if you say squat an all-time world record, but you need your knees replaced at 40 years old, you did not win. And that's the biggest thing I think people don't understand. But the specificity of the movement's not nearly as important as the specificity of your weakness. That's where the key comes in. So for instance,

the straight bar for me was fucking easy to squat with. It was like walking, getting my, well, not getting my shoes on. We talked about that earlier, getting my sandals on, getting my sandals on in the morning. So there was very little room to develop anything new from that traditional movement. But the safety bar brought out everything because I have a taller torso and I'm six foot one. So to squat all time world records, I didn't necessarily have the leverage that the shorter guys like Lillibridge and them had. So the safety bar made it worse. And so I, when I saw technical breakdown with the safety bar, I knew that's what needed to be fixed with the straight bar. So my point is, is that although the lift may not be specific, let's say safety bar

back squat and regular bar back squat, they may have some differences. But if one of them hits your weaknesses more, how is that not specific to your weaknesses? And that's where everybody gets screwed up. They specify based on the event versus what their body needs individually. That's my answer to that is if you're not mobile, but you keep hiding that, eventually it's going to call your trump card. Yeah. So you have to work your weaknesses whether you want to or not, because if you don't, it's either going to stagnate performance or it's going to cause injury. And those issues could come from anything.

And those issues could come from anything. It could come from a muscle imbalance, flexibility imbalance, like control or being able to balance the antagonist-antagonist muscle groups. It could come all kinds of different ways, but you have to know where those limitations are and then be working on those areas. That's the real specificity that people need to be thinking about versus specificity of sport, right? I mean, and that's why the Soviets, again, in the Eastern Bloc countries made everybody a great athlete, then made them a good at one sport. Let's look at how many people go to the NFL, or I'll say Ohio State because they're five minutes from my gym. I remember sitting down and talking with Trestle for quite a long time. I used to train Earl Bruce, and he was the head football coach from 1979 to 1989, right before Cooper. And he was in his early 80s when I trained him, and this was close to 10

years ago. He took me in to talk to Trestle, and Trestle goes, we don't look at anybody that's not a three-sport athlete. And I thought that was interesting, right? I go, why is that? He goes, because they have higher ability to get higher in the chain and football if they're already good at this this and this and then i specify them into football they're going to get better by the time they're a junior or senior but if all they've ever played is football i only have what i recruited i can't make them better because they're already too specific so there's my answer to that fucking bullshit and that's huge though because when it comes to like let's look at powerlifting,

you were doing it since you were 12, right? Yeah. I did my first bench meet at 13. That first bench meet at 13. Now, when a lot of people like first meet the gym, they might be in their late teens,

early twenties. Sure. They get into bodybuilding, but they're like, ah, that's not fun. Then they go into powerlifting and maybe they didn't do many sports. Maybe the strength is their first thing.

Well, they're just now attacking heavy barbells without the blend of all these other things that certain top-level powerlifters right now were former athletes. Like, they have former basis of really good movement, strength, mobility within sport, and then they go behind a bar and they're like, fuck, just everything gets strong.

Well, I'll tell you what was told to me, and i was a kid it was the ultimate heartbreak but now that i'm older i understand wade russell played he was my head strength coach at ball state and he was the guy that taught me everything i knew in college he actually works for me now as an online coach which is cool as shit right six foot six 280 468 40 in 1981 jesus and when i came in i thought i was a strong bencher i was benching 500 we went in one day he was already in his late 30s and was just dicking around with weights he benched 405 for 10 okay so this dude's legit right anyway he goes you know you power lifters crack me up you guys think you're all hot shit i'm like because we are we're badass right i'm stronger than everybody on your football team. He goes, yeah,

here at Ball State, but I'm going to tell you right now, if the running backs in the NFL saw that there was $50 million to break a squat record, you guys would all die. And I started going, no, dude, they're not like us. We're fucking, you know. And then as I got older and watched, I'll give you an example. I trained Jay Richardson when he got drafted from the Raiders. So Jay Richardson was on the 2002 national team for Ohio State. He gets drafted by the Raiders in 03, comes to see me at Westside in 04. So his first off season, I trained him for 15 weeks. I am not shooting you. His squat went from 535 to 715 weeks and he's six foot six. went from 535 to 715 weeks and he's six foot six dude and i'm not making those numbers up i saw it and i'm like way was right like and could you imagine if he was darren sproles or somebody

that short that had the leverages you're thinking fuck dude like these guys are next level but that's where everybody screws up they think you know and i like i said i get all the credit in the world to hack and some of these new lifters don't let these pro football guys come out and show you how it's done because if all they had to focus on was lifting weights we would all be in big trouble i mean think about it you run like a bo jackson for example there's his rookie card right there a 4-1-3-40 and didn't work out could you imagine if he squatted done right and you said like you talked he said he didn't lift weights he said he told that to me in person at the 2003 national conference when i was at the nsca i came up to him and i was you know i was already collegiate national record holder i'd

already won a world as a teen so i look like i lift the weights i come up to him he's probably in his early 40s at the time and i go dude you look like you're still in really good shape man what have you been doing he goes man i haven't done anything physical in like 12 years and i walked away just going fuck you you know like this dude has this level of genetics like what and i i don't know like to me it's it's it's tough but here's the thing is that i love and you know i get i get drive and motivation from like anybody else from the superstars, Jordan, Bo Jackson. But replicating what they were able to do at a certain time is not smart. And any high-level book tells you that.

I try to tell people the reason I got good is because I was patient and I was willing to learn every step along the way. And I had no fucking timeline. I didn't care if it took me until I was 40 to break my first world record. If I started lifting when I was 12, I didn't break my first world record till I was 28. 16 years. And I'm talking 16 years that I can guarantee you, even after contests, I didn't take more than two to three months off total in that 16 years. That's how much dedication it took me to reach that level.

It wasn't like I was just boom, automatically I was crazy strong, but it's also why it lasted because I slowly progressively gave my body that resistance to adapt to. Therefore, the ligaments, the tendons, the bones, and the muscles were prepared for that level of intensity versus punching a bunch of drugs and then getting strong in two years. And now your soft tissue is not ready. And now you're just a ticking time bomb. And that's what happens to average people that try to do above average things. The impatience just gets them like too fast.

And so as much as I like to use people for motivation, look at people that have done something for 10 or more years with minimal injuries, and they probably are going to know more than your idols. I think Stan was around our age when he broke his first world record. You know, it took him many years. He was just bodybuilding. He did do a powerlifting meet. I think he did like a deadlift competition.

He already did deadlift 800 pounds. I mean, he was already very strong. He competed actually here in Sacramento at just like some local meet. That's kind of how I found out about him. And I was like, who is this weird, like German looking dude making all these weird noises lifting? Yeah. Yeah. Making all those strange noises. So I contacted him. Anyway, he started coming to super training, but even using him as an example stan trained with me he did the conjugate

stuff then he got excited by some other methods that he thought were going to be in his best interests and he tried periodization and he immediately got hurt almost to the point where he thought he was done he thought it was over with he came back and he did more west side stuff i mean that's not proof that the system is uh bulletproof bulletproof but yeah it it was a good example well it does make you raise an eyebrow yeah right you know really if anybody takes anything away from this and i've said it a thousand times in the last 10 years it's not what you can do it's what you can recover from and if you look at prilipin's chart and you look at a lot of the periodization and stuff that bluey talked about and i talk about and you talk about.

It's all about setting up for restoration. Training is great, but if you don't understand how long it takes for the body to restore itself to prep for the next cycle or the next training session, you've got a big problem. So sometimes to go two steps forward, you've got to take one step back. And a lot of people think everything's linear. And in reality, the body doesn't adapt the training in a linear fashion. It does it in waves. And you have to be able to ride the waves. And like I said, that starts with having a passion to train, not necessarily having a passion to excel. The excelling comes from the consistency. The passion comes from something completely different. I didn't keep training because I wanted to break records.

I kept training because I had a training group. I like to work out. I like to push myself. And if that meant records, great. And if it didn't, I was okay with that too. What you got over there, Andrew? What you cooking up? I did want to go back to the elbow pain when you're squatting.

You're like, okay, motherfucker, use a different bar. That makes a lot of sense. But my first thought is like, is that just like kind of putting a bandaid on a more like significant problem that needs to be addressed? I really think that by me saying that, I think what I'm trying to get at is that stop with the specific mileage. So if I switch the bar and give my body seven days break on that joint and it feels better, it's telling you it's being overused. So what I find is that if your training automatically already builds in an educated rotation of movements, then what you're doing is allowing recovery at each particular mileage point. The straight bar has particular mileage to it with elbows, knees, back that need to be rotated in order for it to recover right um you can apply that to any sport that you want but there's reasons why you have to

have off seasons transitional loads different rep ranges not only because one the biggest reason most people quit training is because it gets fucking boring but two because it reduces the mileage at the joint while still allowing movement. So if I can squat, you know, and I will take this to my grave, but like you take somebody that squats with a straight bar every week, week in and week out for 10 years, and let's say they survive. The guy that trains with multiple bars and strategically puts that straight bar back in when it's needed will be stronger in 10 years because they have all different types of strength,

right? They're strong in all different areas where this person is only strong in one way. Athletically, if I bring a fireman in, for example, to the gym and they're a proficient squatter with the safety bar and they're a proficient squatter with the camber bar and they're proficient free and they're proficient with a box and they're proficient narrow and wide, that person has way more transfer and way more athletic than a guy that's only practiced the same thing over and over and over again. That's all he's good at. Because as soon as that becomes not doable through an injury

or just because it gets heavy and the form breaks, they're not finishing it. Whereas the real reason I was able to take that 520 for 24 and not break form was because I was strong everywhere versus one spot. Yeah. Power Project family, I hope you guys are enjoying this episode. Now, Mark, Andrew, and myself have been cold plunging for a while now. We actually use the Cold Plunge XL. But the reason why this has become part of our daily routine every single day

is because of honestly how good it makes us feel coming out of that water. Now, if you want to take a cold shower, that is beneficial, and you need to be doing that if you don't have a cold plunge. But if you do get a cold plunge that goes all the way down to 39 degrees, it's crazy because Andrew Hurman actually talked about the benefits of dopamine post-cold plunging. Now, cocaine gives you a 2.5 rise in your dopamine release. Cold plunging gives you that also, but it also gives

you a sustained higher level of dopamine throughout your day. That's just one of the benefits, as there are many. So if you guys want to get on it, Andrew, how can they? Oh, yes. You guys got to head over to the cold plunge dot com and check out Andrew Promo Code Power Project to save one hundred and fifty dollars off. And before we drop off here, I do have to say that this has been the absolute best thing I have ever done for my mental health. Every single day I get in this cold plunge and I come out a happier, more positive and more vibrant human. I can't that some of those guys that squat 315, that have a full schedule, that have a wife, they got other responsibilities, they're able to probably do a lot of other things in the gym with proficiency. And even the things outside the gym, the demands that they're asked to do. in the gym with proficiency and even the things outside the gym, the demands that they're asked to do. So you end up with someone that maybe they're not the strongest when it comes to like the

squat, but they have great overall strength, great overall athleticism. They probably feel really good day to day, right? Well, that's the key is because here's the problem. With fire department stuff, especially, they might come in around 2021 that's the same their prime those dudes have to last until they're almost 60 now they have to work 25 30 years now to reach full retirement they cannot have a stupid training program because guess what they're going to be fried by the time they're 30 and they got 25 more years to work that creates a completely different scenario than what's, say, in the

military where the guys are in there from 19 to 24. And that's why you can't use military-style training unless it's special ops stuff where guys are there long-term. You can't utilize anything that they do because they're dealing with only people in their prime. And then once you can't do it, you just get out. Versus in the fire department, here's the difference. Let's say a guy gets injured because he trains like an idiot or he just doesn't train at all because he's lifting obese patients all

the time. That person becomes a liability. If they have to come out of the job at 30, they're paying for them for the rest of their lives through the union. Think about how much money that is to replace them, to somebody else so again that's where the smarts come in and that's where i started to realize like i'll give you an example on average one of the fire departments i've been at in dublin for 15 years when i got there they could swing on average 130 guys could swing a 35 pound kettlebell for 40 seconds before they dropped sounds terrible to us because we're all pretty good athletes. Yeah. But you watch it and I'm like, oh no, these guys have no work capacity at all. So building a strength program around no

work capacity is a bad idea. So the first thing I did was all winning warmups for a year and a half. Just winning warmups, four sets of 25, three exercises. Some of it involved kettlebell swinging. Some of it involved belt squats, right? I mean, we're doing big movements. involve kettlebell swinging some involve belt squats right i mean we're doing big movements we did that for about 18 months and i went back and the average time went from 48 seconds to four minutes now this is guys from 21 to 55 i'm not talking fucking dudes that are 24 the entire age spectrum and i'm thinking fuck right now and i'm starting to understand that work capacity and gpp is the baseline of everything. Then I developed the strength program for the next two to three years.

The average deadlift went from no bullshit 185 to 400 from guys that were 19, 20 all the way to 55. So I had dudes in their 50s pulling way over 400 easily, double overhand. Where we started, they were in the low twos if they were lucky yeah and now guess what they don't get hurt lifting fat people and putting them in the ambulances and take them to the hospital because three of those guys go do that job and now three of them can deadlift 400 that's 1200 pounds when they got there their max deadlift combined was 600 pounds and now you got a 600 pound patient you're at max. Now you make one wrong move and you're in deep shit. So what I started to realize was it started to reaffirm my thought processes, build work capacity, build mobility, then build strength and have a long-term thought

process because they're there 30 years anyway. I don't need to get them strong tomorrow. So I started to see what the timeline was. And the timeline to get better was 36 months. So when I go in for these interviews or these jobs, I said, if I'm not here for at least five years, I don't want your job. I don't care how much it pays because I know that's how long it's going to take to fix everybody and get them better. You're dealing with different age groups. You got to get people to buy in because they're union. That means they don't have to do shit that you tell them. So I got to attack some people and say hey i'm gonna make you retire and be able to do anything you want to do okay i'm in i want to make you stronger the athlete guys i want to make you stronger so

when you go on the job you can do whatever you need to do for some people that's not a drive they just want to come and collect a check so how do you get that guy to want to work out when he doesn't even want to be there so you start getting all these guys to buy in well that's part of the five-year process too. But I started realizing about 36 to 48 months, everything changed around. And now we've went from spending, and this is this exact department I'm talking about. They were spending $600,000 a year in paid time off premiums, workman comp claims. 2018, they were under 100,000. And the average age went up three years. So the average age when I started was 40, 41, and then it was 44. So it's not like they got

rid of a bunch of old guys and a bunch of new guys came in, which would make it skewed. These guys on average stayed on the job. I mean, I think we had maybe only 5% of went in and new guys came in. So my point is the average age went up. We dropped their percentage of savings down almost a half a million dollars a year. And that's what started the process of all the other fire departments going, what the fuck are these guys doing? We need on this because we're spending too much money. It doesn't take very long with lower back problems and ACL repairs, strains, hernias, things like that to start adding up to a half a million dollars with 130 guys on an insurance premium, right? So that's when i started to realize with that population how long it really does take

to get better so my timeline on everything increased even more so that's really interesting what else you got andrew you got something else tvas what did that stand for again transverse abdominus okay i know you talked about like like like how to train that, but because like, I've had lower back issues and I know, um, whatever the fuck the core strength is, I know mine's always been weak, you know, like whether we're doing like leg extensions or some like random bodybuilding workout, my whole body just starts trembling. So that's something that I want to look into. Well, your TVA embracing capacity in your core is going to have to work harder. The less built you are to do those things. So you're taller and thinner with a longer torso.

That means your core has to work percentages higher versus guys like Ed Cohen where their torso is this tall. Well, make that strong too. And now their capacity to be strong is unbelievable. So my point is, is TV, I've always seen, you can always find people, if they have a strong TVA, all the rest of the core muscles are strong. But if you don't have a strong TVA, and let's just say you have a six-pack, that doesn't necessarily mean you can do anything. So TVA is one of those hidden muscle groups I think that really needs to be put into play. I know a lot of, who's the big back-dot guy that's? Stuart McGill.

Stuart McGill. If you look at almost everything he does, it's the big back dock guy that's? Stuart McGill. Stuart McGill. If you look at almost everything he does, it's TVA activation. And he's considered by most to be the godfather of all that shit. But we do tons of planks, side planks, things like that. I've even gotten to the point now, I have to find the video, but I'm doing planks while my 320-pound partner is standing on me. Oh, snap. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah, Rob would just stand up and is standing on me. Oh, snap. Whoa.

Yeah. Yeah, Rob would just stand up and just stand on me, not for like a whole minute, but like 10, 15 seconds. I don't need it any fucking longer. I'm a squatter. But people are like, what the fuck? I'm like, yeah, dude. So they'll put like 100, 200-pound dumbbells on me,

and I might be shaking and like hurting, but I'm not moving. So that is TVA. What are some of your favorite things to do for lower back issues? Well, I mean, I've always been a huge component of the reverse hyper. But 45-degree back extension is huge because it ties in the entire posterior chain. Let's stop on the reverse hyper for a second. Some people end up getting some pain when they get on there, and sometimes it bothers their stomach and stuff. Do you have any recommendations?

Well, if it's hurting your stomach, your TVA is weak as garbage because the TVA is going to lock everything in and keep that pad and that weight from pushing on your stomach and making it shitty, right? So when I brace in on the reverse hyper, I don't notice it's pushing on me at all. Is that because my TVA is strong? In my opinion, yes. But I feel like if you have pain doing the reverse hyper, it's because you fucking need it.

Now, here's the other factor. Should people maybe start with like no weight on there they should start isolateral one leg at a time because everybody has a left or right imbalance no matter how good you are so if you keep it light and keep it tempoed where you're not and that's the other thing i see people having pain with it they're letting it swing too much. So if you go one, two, one, two, single-legged with just 25 pounds to start with, build up each leg separately, then combine it with bilateral reverse hyper, now you can turn on the juice. But I would say that would be a six-week to 12-week process depending on how weak you are. Patience. Patience.

Again, patience. No, I was just going to say that because when I do the reverse hyper, yeah, it does kind of bother the stomach. But it's just something I don't really mess with because my back does like to kind of get aggravated on that. But also, like, I get, like, random really bad headaches when I get on there because I think I'm bracing too much because I'm feeling too much. And your blood pressure goes way up. Yeah, it's crazy. So try an isolateral super light tempo and tell me if it's the same problem. I'll bet it's not. Yeah, I've never tried up. Yeah, it's crazy. So try an isolateral super light on tempo and tell me if it's the same problem.

I'll bet it's not. Yeah, I've never tried that. So yeah, I'll give it a go. We'll fix that. I want to go back to actually the volume thing you were mentioning because there's a few things that just correlate really well into that. First, we had Andrei Milanochev on the podcast a while ago, and he mentioned that every—

Was he drooling while he was on here? Because when I talked to him, he just looked like he was spaced spaced out didn't know where the fuck he was you remember that we were 2014 i squat the all-time world record 832 take from scott weech and milanichev squats like a thousand in knee wraps which nobody i don't think had done yet right i and i beat him on the bench so i was like in the back of my mind i'm like fuck you you know and then he ends up pulling something crazy too but i go back to talk to him he just looks at me and you can just see him like drooling out of his mouth and like his eyes were glazed over and i go over look at his coach and i'm like what's wrong with him and i found out that before the meet he fucking was already there warming up two hours before the

squat session started i'm like what is wrong with this dude? He took 135 and sat down for 20 minutes. You remember this? Yeah. Then he took 225 for a couple reps and rested for 20 minutes. Then 315. So it took him like an hour and a half to get ready to squat. And I was like, that's not good. But I remember talking to him and I'm thinking, man, I think this guy's like, he's got problems.

Like he's mental. You know what I mean? Like he wasn't all there or something. He had a lobotomy. He was very concentrated on what he was doing. When he came on to the show, he mentioned how when he looks at somebody and he wants them to start getting stronger, he first is like, how long have you been working with a good amount of training volume? And if you haven't, you need to be working with a good amount of training volume for maybe two years before you start to try to get stronger.

So there's that. But then there's also the aspect – So it matched what I found out with the fire department. Exactly. And also I was just thinking about the idea of the work capacity thing because when you see a lot of individuals from sports like football, soccer, et cetera, where they're doing these sports where they're running around, running around, running around, and then they start lifting. It seems that they just handle volume really well and perform really well in those sports because their work capacity is here even though they have been focusing on building muscle over the years. So it's just if you don't have that work capacity, you've got to build that shit.

Or it's going to limit your ceiling. So let's say potentially— Stan Efferding's another one who's a former soccer player but yeah former soccer player and then started off with extreme bodybuilding volumes then cut that back down into powerlifting volumes and he became a fucking tank so again you're gonna build the base whether you want to or not you're either gonna build it the wrong way by starting too specific and then you're going to create a bunch of injuries and your limiting factor is going to be your capacity or you're going to take the long road build your capacity first and then raise it up but either way it's going to either help or hurt your ability to make progress yeah it depends on when do you want to pay for that to me i'd rather build the easy shit i wouldn't say

it's the easy shit i would build the stuff that is going to allow me to recover and allow my ligaments and tendons to play an integral part of not getting hurt when i'm doing crazy shit first then train hard and not accumulate injury yeah versus the other way around well i'm gonna oh i have to go back to all this now because i'm hurt all the time that's a kick in the ass and most people just quit. So in my opinion, like I said, it's all about long-term, but I agree. I think 24 to 36 months is a crucial point into developing athleticism, then decide what you want to do. So the Soviets figured that out years ago. They would start training the kids at four and five years old, not necessarily as an Olympic lifter, as a gymnast. I mean, imagine if you wanted to bench, right?

Let's say you wanted to be a bench presser, and you knew it from the time you were four years old, which is not common. Let's just say you did. Could you imagine if we had a kid walking into super training right now that was seven years old and has been able to walk on his hands for the last year and a half, can brace with however long you want to put him on a plank, can drag a sled with his body weight for a half a mile and doesn't even break a sweat, and then you want to teach him how to get strong?

Dude, give me that kid. But that's what you have to develop first. You have to have capacity, mobility, control, then loading. But I think everybody wants to go to the loading first and that's causes the biggest problem what's been some of your thought process behind uh being a business owner um because i know that sometimes that transition isn't easy for people and maybe you never really thought of yourself that way sometimes people uh will even have like limiting beliefs like because you you had uh a lot of success when you were young you said with swimming and then a lot of success with powerlifting.

But sometimes when we branch off into something new or different, sometimes we're like, I don't know about this. How has that process been for you? And you know, you're making equipment, you're selling programs, you're driving a lot of people to your website, you got a YouTube channel, like you're, you're doing a lot of things. So how has that process been for you? It's, it's definitely different. I mean, the process changes as you grow because,

well, as you well know, the more employees you have, it ain't about you anymore. It's about the group. So, you know, I got five, six media team guys, you know, I got people that help me, like online coaches, you know, five of them guys. I mean, I got other people that depend on me to do a good job and help. And that starts to change the demographic of what you're focusing on because I want to grow everybody in my crew. I don't – me will grow if they grow. And that becomes an issue because in powerlifting it's a singular sport and you focus on you.

But I learned through training with Louie and Chuck and them guys that we needed to be better as a unit. And that really changed everything, which I don't think I've ever seen it at that capacity. Because, you know, when we were at Westside, you had me, Greg, Harrington, Vlad, Chuck. So we had six or eight guys in one group that could all squat over a thousand. The average was a thousand 30. Everybody could bench six, 700 pounds. Everybody could pull 800 and everybody tried to get everybody better because if they got better, we got better. And the pressure was the group pressure. It wasn't just one person. And so I use utilize that similar thought process

in my business where what's the weak link, how do I make it better? And what happens? And sometimes the weak link shows in ways you don't know. So COVID happened in 20. I had all these fire contracts. Well, they didn't want any outsiders as an administration to come in. So I'm froze. I had just built my new house and I'm thinking, shit, like this is not good. Like if they all freeze for an extended period of time, I'm not even sure I'm going to pay my mortgage. Because, you know, you go from making however much a month you got your budgeting set and you're like, okay, this is what I got coming in. Then all of a sudden, six, eight grand a month is gone. And so I'm starting to think like almost panicked a little bit.

Like I'm like, oh, fuck, the whole economy is going to change. So I started going, okay, well, I got all these manuals sitting in my bank on my computer that I've been playing with, writing my own training down, just getting notes here and there. And I never really just at first decided that they were going to be products. I just wanted to create timelines. So if I wanted to train, say power building, or I wanted to go hypertrophy, or I wanted to go a transition cycle, I had them. I'm like, these are fucking manuals. So I started making manuals on them and putting everything down that I knew. And within like six months of that happening, the internet started to outsell what I was making in person. And I was like, shit, I should have done this five years ago. But you know, you're, you're always wondered like,

who wants to listen to what I have to say? You know, you just don't know. And I realized that there were quite a few people that wanted to know what I knew. So I started to do that. It started to change my business model, started to add more into the YouTube channel, started to add more into Instagram. And I just started to realize that, okay, it's time to transition into being a longevity lifter that has some things to sell, but also trying to teach people to slow down and take, be patient and get better the right way. Um, so it doesn't sound like it'll sell well. No, actually it's, it's, it can be difficult sometimes. So with that being said, you just have to be open to change. I think businesses is about change. You might have the market whipped for a minute and then all of a sudden other people caught up or somebody else has a better idea. And then you have to, you always,

you always got to be developing. So I'm, I usually spend most of my off day on Friday sitting around going, where's the weakness in the business? How do I make it better? And I seem to be, I've made the right choices. But again, I think business is half strategic and half luck. You know, now I had to put all the work in. I already had a name before the business started. That helps tremendously. But at the end of the day, some of it's just being at the right place at the right time.

And I think the big issue with the exercise community is we're just sold on so much bullshit that sometimes it's a breath of fresh air for somebody to bring everything back down to square one and go, look, this is how you should do it. These are the references of where I got this from. And hopefully you'll listen, you know? So I don't, I don't know. I mean, I, my first love was welding and fabricating. Uh, my family used to build, uh, gas tankers for marathons. So the big semis you see taking gas to the gas stations, they used to build those. Wow. So I knew how to weld as a kid. And initially, I went to a pretty shitty high school that there was a lot of compounding factors. So my dad passes away right before I start my freshman year.

I don't know how to deal with any of that. So it kind of radiated into school being a problem. Not that I was a problem student. I just had a problem learning and just focusing. I was just kind of lost for a while. And I didn't know what that was, but it was definitely that. And so I was put into a lot of vocational schools, you know, like schooling, like shop classes and, well, math's just not college material. And at that time they were probably right. So I'm like, well, fuck, I'm probably just going to be a welder. So I started setting my eyes towards iron worker, pipe fitters union, because I knew I could make big money. And if I wanted to travel, my ultimate goal, because I liked to swim was I wanted to be an underwater welder on a fucking oil rig.

Six months a year, go out in the Pacific ocean. Sounds kind of amazing, but terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's some crazy stories on that. So the guy that taught me to weld at that level was a guy named Ted Stevens, and he welded on the Alaskan pipelines in the 70s. Have either one of you guys ever welded before? Nope. Very, very little on my, like, track car, yeah. It's completely impossible. Like, if you ever took just a handful of minutes to try it,

you would not understand how anything exists. So they're like, how the fuck do they make that bench for that squat rack? It's so hard. How do they make it without it looking like complete dog shit? So the one black bench, when you guys walk in, the one farthest away on the left, I built that one by hand, and then I built your guys' belt squat. They powder coated it for me. So again, I'm not fast enough at it to make a ton of money. that one by hand and then i built your guys's belt squat they powder coated it for me so again i'm not fast enough at it to make a ton of money so what i do is anytime we make a new product i

go in and make the prototype then they have they have the ability to copy um so i thought that that's what i was going to do for a living i wanted to go on like world in the alaskan pipelines or be an oil rig underwater welder guys make fucking crazy money and uh some way or another i ended up skating into school did really well and changed direction but i learned those particular skills that 10 years later came into play big time yeah because here's the thing i i i'm always a huge fan of kind of skipped over a pretty important yeah like you went to like the university for uh for uh what was the kinesiology right um biomechanics biomechanics so that's a big school for that that's like a well-known that's the best one in the world at

the time so he just was like i slipped into school i don't know how far you want to go into that story but i think it's important we'll go go into it. So the welding, the welding was going to be the career. Eventually I got out of it and decided I wanted to do something with sports performance. How that started was I had just graduated high school and I didn't have very good college grades. So I knew that it was going to be hard for me to get into college. I go to visit my mom at the hospital. She's in charge of surgery.

And one of the ladies that she works with, her son's maybe five, seven years older than me. He's an accountant for the Colts. So he's walking, just happened to be walking in the hallway and saw my name in the paper because I had just won Worlds. He goes, dude, you're that fucking kid that was just on Channel 6, right? And it was funny because when they were talking, Anthony Calhoun, he still does the Colts games.

He comes in to interview me at the Y, and he's like this is matt winning and i'm sitting there doing 225 for like 50 reps as a teenager yeah yeah and so so he's like uh so i knew anthony calhoun but he didn't have any real connections at the colts at that time he was just starting as a broadcaster but this fucking kid was in the office and he goes man i go well i want to do something with weight training but i was from this small town the internet hadn't started really yet i didn't know that there were strength coaches i just thought personal training i didn't know he goes well you ought to come down and talk to the head strength coach of the colts maybe he can give you some guidance like they have a coach strength coach like fuck yeah so uh about two

weeks later he has an opening i go down john torring i don't know if you know who he was but he was the head strength coach at indianapolis from 97 to 14 you know how crazy that is in the pros yeah i mean he was at the same team for that long crazy uh multiple super bowls peyton manning's like right hand dude long story short he sits down and he goes he goes well what do you want what do you want to do i said i want your job he just starts laughing right and he's like well i mean i heard you're a pretty strong kid but it's going to take a lot more than being strong to do this kind of job you're going to need to get a degree and probably a master's and i'm thinking kind of the wind out of my sails i'm like fuck right like i don't know if i'm cut for school

because i sucked in high school but my teachers were fucking terrible to be honest. And I, and I did, I was in a bad spot at that time. But when you want something so fucking bad, you're willing to cut your hand off to get it. It's a different story. And when it's your own money, it's a different story. So he goes, where are you from? Cause he didn't even know I was from the state.

I go, what, from up in Muncie? He goes, yeah, Ball State. I'm like thinking, yeah, fucking Ball State. It's like my home school. Cause I had done no research. He goes, that is the number one school in the world for exercise science and biomechanics. Wow. I go, what? You mean the school that's five blocks from my house? He goes, yeah, Dr. Kramer's there. All the founders from the NSCA are there. He goes, it's a fucking juggernaut.

Dr. Kostel was there and they're doing studies on astronauts right now for anti-gravity because what you don't know is that when an astronaut goes into space for about 10 days when they come back down they're 50 percent weaker in 10 days there's no gravity yeah so it's like being bedridden for 10 days straight no movement so um so i'm like oh shit okay so i'm working as an assistant welder at the hospital because i would work weekend hours and a lot of those guys guys wanted to work Monday through Friday and have weekends off for their kids. So Ted Stevens, the guy I was telling you that taught me how to weld, welded on the Alaskan pipelines. He was retired, but his wife worked at the hospital. So he just decided to work in maintenance so they could have lunches together and spend time together on their breaks.

And so I'm there with this guy. He's fucking badass. He's already in his early 60s can work me to death but like with me i mean climbing up ladders walking across pipes welding in weird positions dude was an animal and he go i go yeah i went and talked to john torring but he's telling me i need to go to school and i had no confidence because i had sucked so bad in high school and he goes we'll go over to admissions and fucking tell him you want in he didn't understand it either but he's like trust me when i tell you walk in there with

confidence and bust the fucking door down they're gonna let you in so i go in and talk with the guy this is fucking crazy talk about stars aligning so i go in to talk to admission admissions and i sit down this guy looks super familiar and he's like he's like you look really familiar i said yeah i was just on the news for being a winning worlds and you know whatever and and he goes yeah i work out the why were you work out i didn't even know it right so this fucking guy had seen me for the last five years grinding my ass off in the gym he knew i was serious he goes your grades are fucking terrible but he goes i might be able to sneak you you in on like, what would you call it? Probation.

But this means that you're going to have to get over a 3.0 GPA the first semester. They're going to kick you out permanently. There's nothing I can do. And I said, I'll fucking do it. I'll do it. And he goes, I can't promise you anything, but we're looking for a letter in two weeks. So I go back to work and Ted goes, well, how the fuck did it go? And I said, well, I think they're going to let me in, but I got to wait two weeks.

He goes, see, I told you, just go in there and fucking act like you own the place and they'll give you what you want. Yeah. So two weeks later, I had acceptance from probation. And in the first semester, I get a 3.8. So I'm in like Flynn. So now I call Tori and I'm like, dude, I'm in school, you know, and he's fucking proud of shit.

I mean, I've been trying to get a hold of him for a while because I want to really – he kind of pushed the button to get me to go to do that. And he lives in Jersey somewhere. So I tell Ted and I call up Toreen and Toreen goes, you go to class. You get straight fucking A's and I want you to go straight down to Wade. He didn't know who the strength coach was, but I want you to go straight down to Wade and I want you to shove your head so far up his ass every hour you have off from school

that you don't know what to do. I'm like, why? I was like, I'm going to be in class. He goes, class is only this. He goes, Wade or the head strength coach at the time is going to teach you how to coach. He's going to teach you that being strong is only a portion of what makes you a good strength coach.

And I could see Wade take 30 people and just instruct them like fucking crazy. He's got these guys that are all the same size as him. I mean, at that time, we had the biggest offensive line in the NCAA. The average weight was 325. Aaron Johnson played at semi-pro ball. We had a couple guys get big pro looks. I mean, they were at small D1 school, but they got some good recruits that year, not played well as a team, but had individual guys that were just animals.

And I watched, wait, all right, guys, we're going to blah, blah, blah, do this. And I'm watching. I'm going, dude, I don't know if I can talk to these guys like that. And he goes, you will in six or eight months. You'll get used to it, blah, blah, blah. And he was right. So he gave me the shit teams he didn't want to train at first. So I was working with men's and women's swimming and women's softball and all these fucking – but here's where I started to learn.

I started to learn how to talk to all different kinds of people. Some of those people didn't want to be there at all. It was just part of the schooling, like part of the whatever. So I did that in three or four years. And then Wade got me in the first year. I was an unpaid assistant as an undergrad. So now I did such a good job that they were actually paying me to be down there as going to school.

So I'm kind of an assistant strength coach as an undergrad. Well, all of that work and all those hours when I went and applied for grad school, shoe in. So Dr. Newton, Dr. Kramer got me into graduate school and that was that. I mean, and then I was still welding a little bit and still keeping up on that. Um, and it was amazing how all that stuff came together and became the business, but it just like, you know, people look back, oh man, I'd like to redo this part of my life for that. I honestly, there's nothing I could have done better. I couldn't have rolled the dice better. I couldn't have been more confident in what I was trying to do. And I was

nervous every step of that way. I mean, it was, it was, I look back at it sometimes and it's almost like emotional because there's probably five or six different roads and avenues that I could have went the opposite way and it completely changed everything. And somehow I picked the right way, you know, whether it was training or it was going to school or this or that. I mean, I could have just been a shithead welder back home and I probably would have been good at it, but I wouldn't have been what I'm at, what I do now. And it's just, I think confidence is one of those things that will lead you in places you never even thought, you know. will lead you in places you never even thought, you know? So. I know you're close to your grandmother. You told us before about riding around the country with her on the back of your motorcycle and stuff like that. What about your parents? Were you pretty close with your dad? You know, I know he passed when you were young, but were you pretty close

with your dad? And is your mom, was your mom very involved in your life? My mom was involved, but in a weird way, she was always supportive no matter what I wanted to do, but she was more of a role model as far as work ethic you know she was in charge of surgery she was the head cardiac nurse so if somebody was having open heart surgery she's handing the tools and half the time she knew more than some of the doctors did on what to do with this and that like she could have been a doctor yeah i always get on her real bad i'm like mom you're so fucking smart well i just wanted to be a nurse i didn't want to be a fucking doctor i'm like, mom, you're so fucking smart. Well, I just wanted to be a nurse. I didn't want to be a fucking doctor. I'm like, yeah, but if you'd have been a fucking doctor, we'd be rich now, you know, selfishly. I'm like, now I'm like, fuck. Right. So anyway. Um, but my

dad, it was a weird situation. Um, my dad was a hard ass Marine from Vietnam and you didn't fuck around. I remember like on Saturdays I'd get up, I'd go to swim practice. I'd get home about, we started swim practice at like sometimes 545, six o'clock. Can you imagine five, six years old? The pool was right across the fucking street, private pool. My dad's like, you're going to the fucking swim team. Because for him, it was like, get the fuck out of the house. Get out of the house so I can probably bang my mom so so most likely yeah probably so i would go to swim practice and

get home and it was two and a half hours of chores on saturday after that clean your room pick everything up do the dishes finish the laundry so i started that structure process but i hated my dad for that because i watch all my other friends, they get up whatever they wanted on Saturday and go do whatever they wanted. So it was, it's odd to say, but when my dad passed, it was almost like a relief thing because he was so hard on me. And I remember him talking to my mom about it. And he's like, I just see too much of him and me, you know, like, and it wasn't a good way at that time. Cause I hadn't been doing anything super impressive. All of these things that you guys know me for didn't happen until after he died. So I'm just like this kid that's just rebellious. I run out in front of cars and get

hit by fucking cars. You know what I'm saying? Like, I mean, so, you know, and another thing is my dad was constantly stressed because my sister was born four years after me and her heart was backwards. So she's the oldest living person in the world that they know of. She goes to Duke for all of her shit. Her heart is turned backwards. So the pulmonary side pumps her body and the body side pumps her lung. So she has lung hypertension and low blood pressure in her body. And most kids die before 13 with it because once they start to grow the heart can't keep up so they did an experimental surgery when she was like seven or eight and she's still alive and she's 37 so now duke treats her for free i mean we're talking like she's had three open heart surgeries she has if you saw her like you knew something was wrong her

color is just off but her VO2 max is 14. They can't understand why she's alive. But her body is basically adapted like she lives in the Himalayas. Because she was born that way, her body adapted to low oxygen. But if that had happened to you right now, you would die. But her body accommodated to it as a kid. So as she grew, now she's not going to have the lifespan that you or I have. So think about dealing with all of that.

Then you got this kid with high energy that's a fucking rager. And now, you know, you come home, dad comes home from work, and it's just ass-busting time. You know what I mean? So I was like trying to get out of the house. I was actually, it was kind of nice to go get hit by a car and stay in the hospital for a while. But wait, yeah, what happened when you got hit by that car? Because you mentioned like as far as injuries, it's still, that's

one of the only lingering things, but how the fuck did that happen? So we were playing, so the pool, the private pool you had to pay, I don't know, 400 bucks a year to be a member and it was for the people that lived in the community or the neighborhood only. I don't know if you guys have that in Sacramento, but.

We have some places like that. Private pools. And they'd swim against each other, the pools. So right across the street was a huge basketball court, you know, and it was like a private, like, training area. You had basketball, tennis, the swimming pool. And we lived right across the street. So my buddy, Zach, we're playing this game called bike tag. And we'd be on our bicycles, and then you you have to touch them or hit them with the tire you know like bump them

into the tire touch them then they're it and they chase you sounds fun as fuck so zach chases i chase zach right out of the fucking street and this lady's driving drunk 25 she's doing 50 to 25 and fucking nails me so this leg on the right side is broken six places, shatters my pelvis and breaks my left leg in four, rips all my hair out. I'm drug under the car. So there was a blood stain from my head, which is probably why I'm half retarded. There's a blood stain.

There was a blood stain on that concrete until they redid it for 15 fucking years with gouge marks that deep from my bike going into the pavement. And so, yeah yeah i got fucking nailed but the only thing i remember is i woke up in the ambulance and they had their compression pants on me so my legs wouldn't move anymore now if you saw my right calf you'd see a huge scar where the bone came out of my leg so it not only snapped it came out of my leg and compounded

well they put me in these pat in these pants so I couldn't move. And it was August. It was hotter than fuck. So I remember waking up and my legs were so fucking hot. I couldn't feel anything. And I could see the lights in the ambulance. And they ended up just like knocking me right back out. So I get to the hospital. Who's working in surgery? My fucking mom. So there's a young kid hitting Haltman Village coming in for multiple leg fractures. They don't even know what else. And my mom's in charge of surgery. She's in the surgical room while I'm getting my legs fixed. Could you fucking imagine? That's your kid on the table getting all that shit done. So I had to go through three leg surgeries. My pelvis was broken like six places. I mean, to be able to do the shit

that I've done is just fucking insane. But I started to realize that i was um my right leg is nine millimeter shorter than my left so i have to wear a special heel lift inside the shoe that lifts my leg up to match it perfect i didn't realize that took a squat 800 i started getting my back back pain and i'm like what the fuck you know i was telling mom i was like why is my back hurt when i squat she's you squat 800 you fucking dumbass because she'd never seen anything like that yeah she's from a little town or whatever not really into sports I said no it feels like something's off like it's just weird but I didn't notice it at all until I got up to close to 800 so they go in and do a bone link discrepancy test on me which is like a full body MRI

and they measure it in my shin bone from the my knee to my ankle was nine millimeters shorter so they built me a special heel lift. And within, I'd say, a year and a half, squatted 865 IPF and no back pain. Wow. I was like, fuck, right? So talk about learning balance quickly. I had a structural imbalance from a car accident.

So that's when I started realizing that it was so important to balance the left and right side and started studying a bunch of it from Paula Quinn at the time. But that's the shit that we were dealing with in the family and that's why my dad and i we didn't get along really well i actually went live with my my great grandma uh when i was in cast because they didn't want my brother and sister to be around me and actually hit my leg or refracture it so um but my great grandma was a huge drive for me she She, uh, you know, she never really had a ton of money, um, but she had a hellacious work ethic and she was so driven to be somebody that

by the time she finished raising my, my grandmother, she went back and got a nursing degree after at 40 years old because she wanted to do it so bad. And that's where my mom got the drive to be a nurse for my, her grandmother, my great grandma. And she's, she lived until I was almost 22, but I'd go over there and help her with anything I could. And we had a lot of fun that year, even though I was in a hospital bed and I couldn't move. Yeah. She, um, she taught me a lot because she was at old school style. Like I'll give you a funny story. This is fucking hilarious. So this is all in ohio no this is indiana remember i'm from oh right i'm from muncie so ball state so um this is a funny

story kind of not really embarrassing but odd so i'm in this hospital bed i tell mom like mom i don't want to like pee in front of my great grandma all right you know because i can't move yeah and she's like oh it'll be okay she's a nurse you know but still your fucking great grandma it's weird you know she's 75 you're six you got to get your dick out and so you know i have one of those like those bed urinal things like it looks like a cup with a big hole in it and i i told my grandma i was like grandma i don't i think that thing's too big like you know because i'm thinking my dick's supposed to fit in this monster hole. And she goes, don't worry, they're all small. Trying to make me feel comfortable. And I'm just like, oh, my God, this is so fucking embarrassing.

Made it ten times worse. Because I'm six years old and I'm thinking, like, I'm thinking this thing's the wrong size. And she's like, you know, I remember her just going, they're all small like that. And I was like, oh, my God. That was pretty funny. Dude, have you ever gotten a DEXA scan to see your bone density? Because with all the years of powerlifting, what is your bone density? So, yeah, I did.

So Serrano wanted me to go and get one done because he wanted to see what it was, too. So an average man's bone density is like 1.1, 1.12. Mine's 3.96. So my bones are three and a half times stronger than a normal man's. Interesting. Okay. Damn. But it's funny.

When they did that test, they came back and go, what happened to you as a kid? And I said, well, I was in a car accident, broke my legs. Where my bones restructured themselves was unknown material to the DEXA. Didn't know it was bone anymore it was blue so i had blue all over my bones yeah around my legs like almost look like a fucking exoskeleton from the brain that's some freak shit they were like it would take they told me it would take three times the pressure to break my shin bone in that area than it would a normal bone like he's like it would hurt like fuck but you could probably take a baseball bat to your leg

like at full speed. And I was thinking, I'm like, I don't want to try that. He goes, but I have never seen. It's like that Adam Sandler scene where they drive that hot poker into his foot. Yeah, the docs were like, we have never seen that density of material in a DEXA scan unless it was metal. Like stainless steel rods or something. And my bones had structured themselves. And even down in my lumbar my discs or my uh my vertebrae were all have blue around the discs for unknown material then you

also had an injury your pelvis pelvis was broke yeah and that's why i had to learn how to get be a great dead up a good deadlifter for a three lift guy i had to learn to be a good deletor in a roundabout way i couldn't just pull all the time deadlifts because it agitated that fucking injury really bad. So I did a lot of good morning or a lot of 45 degree back extensions, reverse hypers. And then I would pull every two or three weeks because that's all my body would let me do. And ended up pulling over 800, you know, doing it a roundabout way again, not attacking things specifically. So the injury taught me to not specifically attack the area. Because if I would have went at it like a normal guy would now,

I would have fucking never made it because my body was not going to let me train that way, no matter what I wanted to do. Switching gears a little bit, there's a lot of information, you know, swirling around on the Internet and people are getting sometimes really helpful and great information. Sometimes it's motivating people, uh, to move and stuff, but we've talked a little bit about it briefly. And I'd love to get your thoughts on, um, you and I learned how to box squat and Louie taught a lot about like sitting back on the box and not specifically driving the knees forward. And now you're seeing more people talking about driving the knees forward.

Some of powerlifting as we knew it changed because they got rid of the gear. People started to squat a little lower. And when you squat a little bit lower, your knees tend to want to pitch forward a bit. We had Ben Patrick on the show. He's a friend of ours. We've talked a lot about like the knees over toes type of stuff. What are some things that you might think are maybe a little bit off about some of that message and what are just your kind of thoughts in general about um you know box squatting versus like specifically trying to drive the knees

so the initial box squat wasn't a technical thing from louis what it was was it separated the eccentric and concentric chain of the movement so it's like go bench press like if you're listening to this right now just pause go over to the bench press and bench press 135 touch and go and then 135 with a two second pause and tell me which one's easier or harder that was the whole point the point was the box separated the downward phase from the upward phase which taught you one how one, how to stay tight, but two, it also started to change your form a little bit, teaches you about lateral pressure. So when Louie would have you sit on the box, you might loosen up the vertical pressure, but the lateral pressure

stays 100%, right? And so it teaches you where to stay tight. With that being said, if you look at all the, not all the squatters, but most of the great all-time greats, so we could talk about Hack and some of these other guys, I think to be an all-time great, they're going to need to be around quite a bit longer. But if we look at, say, Don Reinholdt, we look at, who was the first guy to squat a thousand? I can't remember what his name was. I haven't talked about him in a while. There was Dr squat well dr squat but i think it was before david waddington oh yeah dave waddington if you look at dave waddington ed cohen mike bridges so i'm trying to cover all these weight classes and um don reinholdt you start realizing that they don't squat with their shins coming forward and that's where Louie initially got that idea for technique.

And at least as far as I remember him talking to me about it at training and breakfast. So I started modeling my squat mostly off of Chuck because I knew Chuck was modeling off of what Louie was telling him from Bridges and Cohen and all them guys. So if you go back and watch those dudes squat, you start seeing their shins are very vertical. And the thought process for it is to utilize more posterior chain to squat so when people see like my i'll give you an example you see the 520 for 24 and people like well that's not as deep as say tom platts did his yeah well are you measuring how far his shins go forward or how deep his actual hips are because if you look at it that way it's pretty damn close because if your knees go forward in lou deep his actual hips are. Because if you look at it that way, it's pretty damn close. Because if your knees go forward, in Louie's thought process, and really mine, it's wasted

energy. Because as you go forward, you're not going deeper in the hip. So what you start to realize is that forward, in some ways, can be a waste of energy. Like a sissy squat. You can keep driving your knees forward and you never come close to breaking parallel. Exactly. So what's the point of squatting is in competition you break parallel. Now, whether it's by this much or that much, it's still good or bad.

It doesn't matter. So here's the thing. My thought process on the knees going over the toes is that it is an exercise that should be done on occasion. on occasion. But in my opinion, if we look at where people's muscle imbalances are, most of the time they're anteriorly strong or at least dominant and they're posteriorly weak. When I let my knee go over my toe, I'm basically focusing on all quad. And if it's all quad, it's a lot of lower back. Well, if I sit back and push my knees out, now my hamstrings, my glutes, my lower back, and my quads all work together in one synchronous unit that should be mastered first before you go knees over toes the reason that most people when they squat vertical shank they think it looks higher than than letting the shins

travel forward is because it's the most efficient way to break parallel if i sit back and push out then it looks almost like it's high but it's not because there's no wasted energy. If you ever watch Chuck Vogelpoel squat, it's like fucking magic. Yeah, when you squat, one of the objectives, especially in powerlifting, because you mentioned you're just trying to get your hip lower than your knee. One of the objectives is to not move your knees any lower. And sometimes that's the first thing that people do. lower. And sometimes that's the first thing that people do. They're moving the object that they're supposed to dip down below parallel down by jamming the knees forward with the first part of that movement. So you really want to sit back so that knee stays nice and high. In reality, how far you

sit back is how far you push out. So if I push my knees out as hard as I can, my body sits back automatically because it doesn't want to go forward. But the big thing is, is what's the number one thing that most coaches back in the day and doctors told you was bad squatting your knees. It's going to kill your knees. Well, not if you squat with all the pressure everywhere. The problem is when you let the knee travel way too far over the toe, it puts too much sheer force at one particular area,

therefore causing issue. And then people will go like, well, why would you, why would you do that? And I was like, well, Olympic lifting is different because they need to catch the bar. So this is Chuck

probably squatting somewhere around 1150 at 242. And this is a wide ass squat. And that's super wide, but look at his shins. Jesus Christ. That's just his shins stay totally straight. Now, the thing of it is, if you were to watch, say like a Tom Platz with his knees go way over his toes, it's not any deeper at the hip. It's just wasted motion forward. So it's difficult because everybody has their opinion on it. But like I said, you know, here's the thing. I think it's interesting. And like I said, I think there's a lot of things that Patrick and a lot of those guys have to offer that I think some people need to listen to. But in here's my thing and maybe i'm biased because i've trained hard for a lot of years but if it was so good at developing anything why does ben

patrick have no leg size actually in person he's got pretty good legs see every time i've seen him i on video he's a thin he's a kind of a thin shaped guy but he has legs are pretty jacked so here's my thing is my legs got to be 31 and a half inches around with multiple leg fractures and i was bedridden for fucking two years that to me shows i didn't have a knee problem my joint didn't hurt i was fucking broke yeah and i got my legs to grow that big so i'm starting to wonder like if my knee was to go way over my toe how did i get all that quadricep development from not doing that so my my thought process is why not use a squat particular technique that develops

everything not just one area so i think there are some things that he talks about and like i said i'm not a guru of his information but i know he does talk a lot about glute ham raises yeah he does talk a lot about hamstrings and balancing it out. Yeah. Here's my thing. It's transfer. So here's my deal. You put me in heeled shoes, ultra narrow, and you watch how much I can fucking squat.

So squat. Yeah. I just did 600 for 10, like fucking probably six months ago. And then put me back in my position and see what I can squat. My point is, is that to me, teaching those positions only makes you good. Again, we go back to the beginning. It only makes you good in one way. If I were to take Ben Patrick and show him how to squat my way, he wouldn't be any good at it.

I'd go his way. I could still squat a shitload. I think he'd be kind of surprised, though. Maybe. Because there's two things. He covers a lot of ground with his training. So, you know, the Instagram posts are only what we can see. But he does cover a lot of ground in his training.

Yeah. Oddly enough, when it comes to the knees over toes stuff, right, I don't think you'd argue that it's not beneficial to be able to develop some comfort within that position. It shouldn't be maybe the whole way you squat, the primary way you squat, especially if you're a powerlifter. If you're a powerlifter, you'd probably want to develop a way of squatting that would allow you to move the most weight possible. And squatting in that fashion, the way that Ben does, probably is not going to allow you to do that.

But a powerlifter who does squat in that fashion, developing some of that, let's say in an outside training block when they're not working the specific squats, it's probably a decent idea. But the other thing, I think like Mark mentioned, he does work like GHRs and hamstrings and that type of stuff a lot. When he came in here, it's not a crazy amount of weight, especially when thinking of a powerlifter, but he came and he deadlifted. 465. I think it was 475. Yeah, yeah. And it was super – he's never done that before by the way it's not like he deadlifts but he easily deadlifted 475 trap bar deadlift trap bar deadlift and it was pretty hand gluten hamstring dominant so i i get what you're saying you know someone goes too far down that rabbit

hole and only just hammers that, it's the same. I think it's a similar thing to the powerlifter who just stays low bar squatting their whole training cycle year after year after year. My point is, if you put me in Patrick's position within reason, I'll excel at it. Oh, yeah. Put me in the other position, I'll break a world record. I think it's being able to have transition. But what I see on the internet, and like I said, I don't study it a ton, is that it's the same positioning showing over and over. That's what I see. And that's where I have an issue. I say, if you squat like this,

say once every six or eight weeks, I'm down. I think it's a great idea. But utilizing the exact same position all the time, we're saying that that alleviates certain issues it to me is a little off like i think that you know really squatting is going to be dependent on a few things it's going to be depending on how you're built it's going to be depending on where your muscle weaknesses are and how much you're attacking your weaknesses and then like i said you know you need to last a long time before you start doing advice meaning i would not be standing here talking to you about squats and my positioning on it unless i lasted through fucking four world records and i don't have any knee problems and i'm 43 yeah that's when you start going well uh see and that's when i start

sitting back going okay well last another 10 years and then tell me you had the same thought process because my thought process has come from many, many years of grinding at the highest level that I could possibly obtain. And I try to tell people, I'm like, look, it's all about, again, you can have a great idea, but that idea changes over time as you evolve. So how I think about things now isn't all the same as what it was 10 years ago, but a lot of it solidifies where I've been and what I've done and who I have fixed. So seeing guys like, you know, like my 350 firemen that I train and watching them get stronger and then watch their injury rates go down. But I don't see anybody making that famous.

And that's guys between 20 years old and 60 and they have no injuries and we're saving them a half a million dollars per department like that's where i would think the average person would go i want to listen to this dude but it's just not the case because it's not sexy or new or whatever and this is the other big thing if you look at how ben patrick talks about squats it's very similar to 20 years ago what charles paul quinn was saying oh absolutely absolutely. Right? Yeah. Charles references Poliquin a lot. He does. But I'll tell you this.

I was Poliquin the last five, six years he was alive. And after he went and did seminars with me and Eddie, he changed his mind. Oh, in what way? Vertical shank. So, so what did he say about it? Was he talking about like, this is the way people, like, what did he mention about it? So what he started to say was, I'll give you, I'll the prime day we were in his close to his hometown i was doing a seminar in colorado springs after we went to amsterdam and prague and shot seminars and me and eddie

were showing paul cohen was showing his olympic style squat and me and eddie were showing ours we get to colorado springs to do the last seminar and i'm i'm squatting and eddie's fucking around with squatting because he's already older at that time. And I do something like 600 for 10 vertical shank, just a belt. We take, Charles gets smashed with 275 with his knees over his toes. And he's like, man, I can't figure it out. I was like, dude, you're not using any hamstrings to squat. You're not using a fucking bit of your posterior chain. So me and Eddie showed him how to do some vertical shank squatting. He went back home, and about four or five months later, he called me.

He goes, I went back to squatting the way that I used to squat. He goes, my squat just went up 75 fucking pounds. He goes, I completely changed my thought process on it. And that was partially, though, because he started working the posterior chain, squatting vertical shin, right? Right. But this is where I think maybe there might be, I don't know, misunderstanding of maybe what some of Ben is doing because visually you see the knee over toe, knee over toe, knee over toe. Right. But in between those posts and when you go into like what he actually does with his programming, there's a lot of posterior chain.

Like there's a lot of hamstring. There's a lot of glute. There's Nordics. There's a bunch of things that really dive into that posterior chain where it – let's say that thing that might be a weak link of continuing to hammer that knee over toe is equalized. Counterbalanced. Counterbalanced by working that posterior chain. Yeah, he's all about like hip flexor and shin and all those kinds of things. And with all that stuff, I agree.

Like I said, the transferability is put him in six different squats and see how he responds. If he's not very good at three or four of them, then my opinion is don't train that way. But, again, if you can put somebody that trains in multiple fashions and ways, like I said, I don't think knees over toes is a bad idea occasionally. Just like I think box squats are good occasionally, but we've all seen it. Guys that only box squat have a problem. They go to a meet, they bomb fucking out because they're not comfortable getting in the hole, but it doesn't mean the box squat's bad. It meant that it was

overused for that particular person at that particular time. And that's where it becomes, what do you need at that time? And where I have a problem is I've never seen an athlete that had weak quads. I've seen athletes have weak fucking hamstrings. So although he has everything right with the accessories, why squat in a dominant way that makes those muscle groups even more dominant? That's my problem with it. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. Like you may not even need knees over toes if you know how to squat right in the fashion that you're talking about utilize every type of squat position that

you can to develop a full range of motion to develop strength in all different capacities i've never had any knee injuries in in any of my lifting uh my right knee has like a little bit of like tendonitis um and that developed years ago, like forever ago when I was in high school playing, just playing basketball. And it just was something that would always, uh, come back. But, um, I didn't really necessarily have to, uh, do anything to fix some of that. But when Ben came around and started talking about the backward sled drag and all that kind of stuff, I was like, you know, I'm going to, I think I can still make my knee a little stronger. So I practiced a lot of what you're saying was like, you know what? I'm going to, I think I can still make my knee a little stronger.

So I practiced a lot of what you're saying is like, go upstream and downstream of the injury. Ben was talking about the shins and all that stuff. So I, not only do I stretch the shins a bit, but I also dig into them with some myofascial release. I train them. I train some of the muscles around the knee and I don't have,

I have zero pain in the knee at the moment. So that's awesome. It's been really, like I have zero pain in the knee at the moment. That's awesome. It's been really helpful. Yeah, like I said, let's pause for a second. I got to switch this hard drive really fast. I'm sorry. PropRoger fam, this episode is brought to you by Vivo Barefoot Shoes. We've been wearing these shoes for almost a year now.

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off links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Let's go ahead and get back to this podcast. My bad. Go ahead, guys. So yeah, I think the thing of it is, is there's probably things that you can pick up from him or me and then hybrid it into what you need at that time. Everything that I'm saying is probably not 100% for everybody right now. Same thing applies with Ben's stuff. So you just have to figure out what you need at what time, where's weaknesses and that's what i'm okay with but what i find is that i've never ran into a fireman or a special ops guy or any of the people that i work with and go dude your fucking quads are weak yeah it's always something in the posterior chain so i in my opinion i would look at ben patrick stuff and i would focus more on what he's talking about for accessories the squatting

type stuff i look at it and i go i would never try to bend that way unless it was just every once in a while to train a different range of motion that's just my opinion on the thing makes sense yeah i dig it um i was gonna i don't know if we already touched on this but i was really curious when we were in the gym you mentioned that training now like you think like 20 years ago or 25 years ago, we were ahead as far as like, I guess maybe what's being applied in terms of strength or what's actually being done in terms of strength and right now. And I found that to be a really interesting statement because in my head I was like, but how? Like there's so much, there is so much information being spread now and so many people are popularizing new things, but we were ahead maybe 25 years ago.

So I was curious what you were thinking when you were saying that. Well, there's some different aspects to that particular topic. And maybe it was my timeline in general, what I was learning, what I was learning. But Poliquin, gone. Kramer's retired. You look at guys that were doing a lot of the big strength research from, say, 88 to 2006. A lot of those dudes are retired or they're dead. And what you found is that I think it tied in a little bit to when we were flying astronauts into space. So I'll tell you this.

When I was in graduate school, we were studying anti-gravity and retention of muscle mass. So NASA was funding a lot of strength research at my college. Oh, okay. Like specifically for that or is funding? Well, just in general. So let's say I get, let's say I get a $2 million grant and they want to study muscle retention and strength. Well, that could be in a lot of different things. And I think what I, what I'm kind of upset with, with the NFL, the NBA, and other strength-related sports, when's the last time you heard the NBA give $20 million to colleges to study more power and strength? They don't. They should, though. Because here's the thing is, like, how do we know

what strength coaches are doing is actually perfect? We really don't. Like, everything, and I'm even talking about myself, everything that we have as a hypothesis and an idea, it's not a belief. We don't know for sure what does what, I mean, we have ideas and some of those ideas I feel are right, but they're still, they're still methodologies. They're not, they're not set in stone. And that's why I see, we see so much change, but I think we were on the right path to finding actually what was working and what we were doing a while back, mostly because I think more funding was there. The other fact of the matter is, is think about how many professors, let's go back to the founders of the NSCA, Dr. Kramer, Dr. Volek, Dr. Pearson, a lot of the guys that were my professors back in the day. They had an immense passion to understand strength and performance. You go to a

college now, an average college now for strength and conditioning or exercise science or kinesiology, those fucking professors never did anything. They're there because they had their PhD and they did a little bit of a research project and now they're a teacher. There's no money in it. So the point is, is like teachers don't have the same level like i remember kramer being one of the first professors to talk about strength training and he could bench press over 400 pounds doctor squat that's another big one i i totally missed fred hatfield thousand pound squatter in the early 80s and was a doctorate damn okay i didn't know that talk about i mean and i'm not over a thousand pounds he weighed like 260 or something I mean, and I'm not. Spotted over 1,000 pounds. He weighed like 260 or something.

Yeah, 242. And I'm not an asshole, but he is Louie Simmons times 10. If you really think about it, he was one of the best squatters to ever live and had his PhD. And he was putting out compensatory acceleration papers in the early 80s. Get faster to get stronger. What the fuck? Yeah. I mean, people get bitched at for talking about speed work now to

get stronger. Am I right? And Fred Hatfield was talking about kinetic energy and compensatory acceleration and all these physics properties to get better back when nobody was talking about any of that. He's dead and gone. So my point is, is all those guys that set the path for the scientific research for strength, they've either lost steam, they don't have the funding, or they're gone. And so now I don't think that there's a lot of professors and researchers stepping up because I'll give you an example. Back at Ball State, we were studying all areas. Fucking badass.

Look at this. Let's see his shins. Oh, damn, his shins look terrible. That's weird. That's interesting. Yeah, his knees didn't move at all. No, that's weird yeah his knees didn't move at all no that's weird his knees didn't move oh that's weird but hey what the fuck do i know so god damn he was thick man yeah he was only five foot four oh really yeah wow i met him a couple times in person before he died

and he was uh he was he was awesome dude man he was so humble and so nice and that's not a squat suit that was just a singlet right no that was a suit oh okay yeah but it's like about four times stronger than a singlet so it's not really a squat suit i mean you gotta remember that's the early 80s the fabric technique but i'll tell you what they were using some really fucking gnarly knee wraps back then okay for sure um not to say that the technology today isn't better but don't get twisted that some of that shit was fucking serious because i remember eddie talking to me about shit they do under the knee wraps and there was guys that were taken like god what did he tell me it was something stupid i don't want to say it because it's not my podcast but it was like fucking tennis balls

behind your knee so that they would actually dream like you heard of that yeah i've heard that before yeah i remember uh what's his name uh louie used to talk about it all the time back in the day yeah now i'm not saying they did that at the world class meets but my point is is they were trying shit you know so you can get away with yeah yeah they were stuffing e-wraps under their bench shirts or anything but they were they were doing some wicked shit so that was always a weird one that was fucked up so um long story short is hatfield louie paula quinn kramer all these guys are gone and that was their real passion it was not a money driver it was that's what they wanted to understand you tell me the researchers right now that are doing that kind

of shit exactly i wouldn't know andy fry is one of them there's a couple of guys but they don't have galpin and uh who else galpin and yeah he works with are doing some work with that type of stuff. But not as much as it was. Yeah. And show me the last time Galpin had a research article posted in Muscle and Fitness for things that people actually fucking read. Right. See, that's the other problem, too, is like when Fred Hatfield talked back in the day, people fucking listened. Because he was a big squatter.

He had his doctorate. Back in the 90s when Louis wrote an article in PLHC, how many times did we sit and wait for that next article? It's we want to understand something new. Now nobody gives a shit. If I'm not strong in a year and I don't get strong doing an easy linear periodization model, easy to understand, I don't want to fucking talk about it. That's the problem with today. They don't want to be smarter. To me, it's just as much of a cognitive progression as it is a physical progression. And that's where it really drives me to now that my body's older

and I have to even train smarter to do the shit that I do. Now it's a fucking mind game of getting smarter to keep doing impressive things. It's not the physicality anymore. The physicality dropped me to the education. Now the education keeps me physical. How can some people listening use compensatory acceleration to gain some strength? The dynamic effort method.

If you can beat something with speed, it's lighter. That's what Fred Hatfield talked about all the time. If you can learn to store kinetic energy, which is usually speed work, and if Hatfield was here today, he'd tell you bands and chains because it teaches you to grind through shit that is as getting heavier.

Now there's all kinds of stuff people out talking about. Well, bands and chains don't work in reality. The problem is you can't use research studies with that because the people they studied aren't fucking strong. Show me, go give me like 10, 800 pound squatters that all have impeccable form. And you give me 15 weeks of training them accommodative resistance smart and i will show you progression right because here's the thing is if i take guys that squat 200 they're probably squatting 200 because they have all kinds of issues yeah and so you can't say you can't use bands and chains on that population i'm not saying if you're weaker you can't use them but you can't use them for studies. And that's why I wish that the Soviet system was still around for that particular

reason, just to talk about it. Because in the 80s, right before it all fell apart, they were talking about cords and bands. They were starting to develop bands and it just fell apart. And that would have been interesting. But Alexiev used to use accommodative resistance. There's probably a picture you can find. Alexiev's doing power cleans out of water so they didn't have they didn't understand change yet um see if you can find it they didn't understand change yet but what alexiev would do is the soviets built him a three foot deep pool and they use stainless bars and bumper plates that wouldn't rust and the first part of the pool he was doing out of the water so he'd get the water drag yeah then he would catch it out of the water and so that was the first i would have a crazy feel to it yeah

it'd be slow and well so i got to talk with uh alexiev's coach um through uh verka shansky so i actually got to talk to verka shansky he moved to italy after the soviet union and he gave me a lot of feedback uh many years before he died. And he said that the coach told him that he could do a power clean out of the water with 455. You've got to remember, he had the world record in the clean and jerk and the total till 2014, since 1975. So to me, as talking about all-time world records and the standing of the world record, you can't really touch Alexiev. I mean, he's the only lifter ever to not only break that many world records, but also to be named athlete of the year by Sports Illustrated in 1975.

So see, he's doing it out of water in order for him to gain compensatory acceleration. Now here's what's crazy about Alexiev and started to push my winning warm-ups. Even though he looks like a big fat dude with no muscle his fucking warm-up was a 50 pound kettlebell swing for 15 minutes before he'd start olympic lifting gpp out the fucking ass literally in that case yeah yeah wow yeah he was probably the most conditioned olympic lifter you've ever seen i mean un-fucking-real and that was told to me directly by his coach yeah and i got pictures of him doing kettlebell swings so see he started training variability too so he was the first athlete in the soviet system that was actually allowed to go off grid and start training different ways and that's when they created

the dynamo club and he had 75 lifters that he was training that were all capable of world records every one of them think about that you know how many variations of the two lifts they had 75 they would rotate 75 fucking lifts for the clean and jerk in the snatch so they learned that specificity wasn't the way to get better either so imagine look at that physique yeah but look at pictures find pictures of him young that's when he was older and starting to get unhealthy. Peak physicality. See the top right picture. He's the only lifter, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, it doesn't matter, athlete of the year in 1975. Think about that.

Break all the world records in powerlifting and see if Sports Illustrated will put you on the front cover. John Hackson on the front cover. Right. See? So look at him younger. Fucking Jack. Oh, shit. So in those pictures where he was fatter, he was already in his mid-late 30s, and he was just trying to break the total numbers. He didn't care about being quote-unquote healthy anymore.

So when he was younger, he was fucking cranked. But here's the deal. So he had 75 variations of two different lifts. So he was really – him and Medvedev, if you read the book, I think it's called Development of Special Strengths. If you read the book i think it's called development of special strengths if you read the book it talks a lot about it but what they started to realize is that there was only so much progression you could specify in those two olympic lifts so they started breaking the lifts into pieces both in maximal strain like a front squat and then they would do an overhead squat then they would do you know a part of the clean just from the hang and then they would do a high bar back squat narrow.

And then they would, you know what I mean? The mixture was endless. But the point was is that if they mixed and matched the movements and then they put the specificity in at key points, they were well-rounded athletes that would fucking destroy everybody in the world in Olympic lifting. And not only did it work for Alexiev, he had 75 potential world record holders in the same fucking gym. Imagine walking out in super training and 75 guys are out there right now and they all train here

and they're all capable of winning the Olympics. That's fucking insane. Exactly. But why don't we train that way now? Yeah. I do. But, you know what I mean? What are bands and chains for?

So bands and chains change the force-velocity curve. So if you were to look at your highest amount of force as your slowest point, right? So if I'm – think of it like let's start at the bottom. Can you pull up a force-velocity curve on the page for me, please? So I'm going to talk you guys through this curve, and I think it might make sense of why you might need bands and chains. Now, obviously, there's a lot more physics involved, and I'm talking about it at a very elementary level so that everybody can just go, that makes sense.

I'm not trying to go way crazy into it and act like a smartass. So let's go in here. Okay. So you see as force rises, the speed slows. So at the top, at maximal strength, that would be like the heaviest fucking deadlift you could possibly pick would be the top of that right line closest to the force point. Okay? It's going to just be like the heaviest fucking deadlift you could possibly pick would be the top of that right line closest to the force point okay it's going to just be like how long does a max effort deadlift take five seconds yeah a long time it's almost isometric okay so let's

we understand what that is but down at the bottom where it says speed think of that like throwing a fucking baseball right it's heavier enough to where you can really put some juice into it but you can't put a lot of force into it because it's too light. Now, if we move up to speed strength, we're talking something like a plyometric, like a depth jump or something like that. We go into power, we're probably talking 30 to 40% range where I train speed work. You're talking strength speed, you're somewhere around 60, 70% closer to where Louie talked about speed work. So as you can see, that curve, when you use bands and chains,

you actually move the red line up a little bit, creating more force at a higher velocity because you're having to push on something that's getting heavier. I look at it this way, and it seems to make really good sense to me because I'm a car guy. But let's say you're driving, you get in your car, and you're driving 65 down the highway. Well, let's say 80 now. But let's just say you're going 65 you got on cruise control and that cruise control will not stop you know when you touch the brake it shuts off let's say it doesn't and you start

applying the brake very slowly how hard does that engine have to work to maintain 65 miles an hour with brake friction a fucking ton so why wouldn't that be the same thing for muscle action see what i'm saying so if i'm pushing against bands and chains heavier heavier heavier heavier heavier and now i'm trying to put maximum force into it i have to work harder to maintain bar speed yeah the same way an engine would have to work harder as you apply brakes so by adding bands and chains with the proper amount of weight on the bar and the proper amount of band tension you're going to manipulate that force velocity curve does that make sense so imagine you throw a baseball and you can throw it say 100 feet now attach a micro mini band to it see really when you throw a baseball you're only

throwing it for the first 16 inches and then you've already created enough whip on it you're just following through if you had a band attached to it you ain't following through shit it's gonna have to go all the way through your hand and And that's what bands and chains are for. It's manipulating that force velocity curve. Also potentially assisting with less deceleration because sometimes if the weight's too light that you're using for speed and it doesn't have a band or chain on there, you can kind of like, I guess, like overpress into it and your body's smart enough to not hurt itself. Just like throwing a wiffle ball. Like it's not an appropriate weight to put a ton of force into. To stop, you have to slow down.

But with bands and chains, the amount of slowing down is much less. And a lot of the time, you might not be building as much fatigue as if you were just working with an 80%, 90% load straight up. Here's why free weights, and again, we're going theoretical here. Here's why free weights don't work all the time.

Free weights don't work all the time because they have the same force velocity curve. Where do you notice, and Mark, you've had a gym for a long time. I've had a gym for a long time. You've been around a gym a long time. I know you've been around. Where do people miss a fucking bench or a squat? Either right off the floor or halfway up. Yeah.

But we're talking the halfway up guys right now, which I would say is 80, 90% of everybody. So the bench on the chest and it can't get it. Why you have all the work down here with free weights and none of the work at the top, because once you beat the weight, you've already got inertia on it. And now two 25 doesn't wait to 25, but on your chest,

when you have to go the opposite direction, you might have to put 250 pounds of pressure to get to 25 to move the other way. So now you're building all this strength in the bottom but hardly anything at the top so then when you go to strain and that bar speed's not there you miss in the middle because you didn't strain in the middle because free weight's only hard at the bottom it's like camming it's like a cam you know like when your machine's out there you can change the where the weight gets hard and easy or not at all yeah bands and chains

change that too so now you have to once it here, you're used to it getting heavier, and you just boom. Make sense? Yes. So the reason it got a bad rap was because bench shirts and squat suits got you out of the bottom. So the bands and chains were the hardest at the top. But if you look at muscle physiology, it's the same thing.

You want to create a lot of kinetic energy. You want to get the bar moving really fast. Look at Maddox's bench, how fast it is off his chest. Where the fuck does he miss it? At the top, what does he not train with very often? Bands or chains. So if he was theoretically utilizing a lot of, if you could pull up Maddox's missing a bench,

you're going to see he misses it at the top every time. Why? He trains with free weights all the time. So his starting strength is crazy, but he doesn't keep the inertia going because the weight's got lighter in training therefore the work's not as high at the top makes sense it does makes tons of sense do you think that some of that training has also led to you having longevity because absolutely the weights are lighter at the bottom and heavier at the top he misses misses right. That's a good one.

I think that was. It almost took his teeth out. But I'm looking for one he actually misses before he gets to the top. It shows the 800 that he misses at the end. It's a fucking animal. Yeah, he's an animal. So see how much it slows down there? Yeah.

If he was training with bands and chains. Might be able to plow right through that spot. He'd plow right through it. So. 722. So these are all good ones. want to see here it is i want to see his fails but yeah you watch when he fails and you can see that he's used to training with it off his the weight's going to be the heaviest at the point they tell him to press so right now it's 800 oh maybe not god i was there at that meet, I think. Getting some weird liftoffs, man.

You know, that's the biggest problem with him. I try to talk to him all the time. I was like, you need to have the same liftoff guy every fucking time. Yeah. He goes to these different gyms and doesn't have the same liftoff guy. And with those kind of weights, there's no messing around. I remember Mendelsohn years ago. So we watch where he misses.

See that top point? Yeah. So the thing of it is, he's used to driving it off of his chest. He's strong there. So let's say 800 pounds takes 850 to move. So, again, if you do 800 to 800, what happens to the bar? Nothing, right? You have to push over that.

So he does have that starting power but not the finish power. So that's just like an example of what bands and chains would do, but the average person is going to stick way lower than that on the bench. And it's because if you look at free weights, they have limitations with inertia and kinetic energy. You get to the bottom and this is the hardest point. Now it's already moving, so you just glide through. Bands and chains will not let you do that. There's also a huge advantage when it comes to just sometimes doing stuff in a more advantageous position something like a like

a skull crusher you can do that with some chains on a bar and now the weight is totally deloaded at the bottom where most of the time that might bother someone's elbow be the highest point of injury right everything stretched the worst right so that's the lightest point here's where you start to see why bands of chains have really been in papers as not really working they don't have the right percentages of weight to band ratio because they're not lifters they don't understand it they don't feel it and they're not using athletes that are strong enough to see it you know so that's that's why you're having an issue i know greg knuckles talked on dave tate's thing about bands and chains don't work yeah well that's why they they do work they

just haven't been put in the right position yet with the right professor, with the right fucking research. How about, so, so, I mean, I know there's a big difference between these two, but how about the individuals who try to employ a pause or a double pause to try to get that ton of benefits? So for example, on a bench, come down, press a few inches above pause and then drive. We call that a ratchet. So a ratchet, like when you click, click, click, click, click, click click so we'll do

a lot of ratcheting on the eccentric so what you would do is on a speed bench one two three bang i'm a huge proponent of not fucking with the concentric okay oh concentric is always bow all right whatever you do but on the eccentric if you want to develop particular points of strain i think you can change not only the tempo but you can can also ratchet down. But if you look really the power, if you do a lot of research and reading, the power of getting stronger sometimes lies in the eccentric of the movement, not the concentric. So if you manipulate the eccentric loading, timing, and positioning constantly, you're going to get more benefit out of the same exercise, but never teach your body to have a sticking point on its own. Got it. You teach, if you want that same amount of pressure at another fucking chain, because now it's going to force you to punch through,

but don't teach it to stop. You can do anything you want on the way down, but do not, do not fuck with that concentric. Some people don't have a good idea of how important, um, your rest interval can be and how important, yeah, the, the. Are you talking rest interval as far as the training set or the day? See, that's. Yeah, yeah. Just a particular, a particular set, you know, like you're, you can get stronger by having a specific time domain associated with your rest interval. Like if you're, let's say you're doing four sets of four and you have two minutes rest. Well, that's a way different workout than if you just take your time with your four

sets of four. You're going to be- Or if you did five minutes rest. Right. That'd even be some ways better for what you're saying. So here's how I break it down. But you can get conditioned through it as well. So you could do a two minute rest, right?

And you can get conditioned to tolerate more work in a condensed period of time. So again, law of accommodation, the body also adapts to rest periods. So in my warmups, I hardly rest at all. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So I'll do 300 reps in 12 to 14 minutes, right? Capacity. But when you go to maximal strain, let's say it's a max effort day. What you would do is if you look at ATP replenishment at the cell, it takes anywhere from four to six minutes depending on trainability. So what you would do is on the lighter sets, let's say I'm a 400-pound bencher, 135. I don't need any rest to go to 185, maybe a minute.

225, now we're getting half. So now I'm thinking, okay, maybe a couple minutes. 275, now we're in the 60-70% range, three minutes. When I start getting over 70-80%, you need a bare minimum of four minutes rest if you're trying to do a max effort day. But you also need to maintain some lack of full recovery because you have to ask yourself again, are you testing or building? recovery because you have to ask yourself again, are you testing or building? And I want to test in a beat up state when I'm not at my perfect rehab, because I say that for meets only. Well, how long does it, how long do you wait between a bench press at a fucking meet? 15 minutes in a flight? Long time, but you're fully recovered. So what I find is that I would say on average,

and this is just a general rule of thumb, I try not to rest more than two minutes in training. And if the max effort is very important, it'll go up to four to five minutes between sets as the weights get over 60%, 70%. So, like, you guys weren't here yesterday, but when I benched 500 with that Cadillac bar I'd never touched before, I benched 135, did a set of face pulls, rested about 90 seconds. I benched 135, did a set of face pulls, rested about 90 seconds. Then benched 225 for like five face pulls, rested about 120 seconds.

315, set of face pulls, rested about three minutes. 405 face pulls, rested four minutes. 500 rested five minutes, smoked it. But if I had just done 90 seconds rest, 135, 225, 315, 405, 500, I probably wouldn't have got the 500. I just wouldn't have the recovery ability. So on your lighter sets where you don't need the recovery, push the capacity. And then when the weights become important, i.e. the maximum bench, increase the rest so that the cell level has an ability to recover

because you can't feel that. rest so that the cell level has an ability to recover because you can't feel that you know how many i don't know how many times on online coaching or just fucking around the gym and you let somebody to their own devices especially beginner intermediate guy and then you watch them warm up and then they miss their lift that they wanted to get that day and then you ask them how long did you rest well i felt really good so i just went for it so you're telling me you only rested like a minute between the last set that's why you missed it and then you make them, how long did you rest? Well, I felt really good, so I just went for it. So you're telling me you only rested like a minute between the last set? That's why you missed it. And then you make them rest five minutes and do it again, and they'll get it. And they're like, what?

And I'm like, dude, you can't feel when you're ready. It's a fucking biological time clock at the cell. So when the ATP gets, you know, gets drawed out, it takes four to six minutes for it to come back to 100%. And I would say even 95%. So rest periods are very important, but remember, don't test all the time. Build. And when you build, you want to keep yourself at a deficit, even in the rest periods.

So law of accommodation or basically doing the same thing too often, don't get caught up in using the same rest periods either because, again, when's the last time I benched 500 on an empty stomach with seven hours of flight? Not very often. Yeah. But because I trained so fucking crazy, it wasn't a big deal.

But how many people have you seen fly in, they come in and train, and they're like, well, I can't do my best today because I just got off the plane. I don't give a fuck. You see what I mean? My body's used to going, ah, he wants to do this shit again. Here we go. You know what I mean? It's just, burp, turn wants to do this shit again. Here we go. You know what I mean? It's just turn the switch and go. But I still understand rest periods.

See? So rest periods are huge. Now, what you mentioned though is, we haven't seen him many times, but the other person that we saw do it was John Hack. John came here and it was stupid. Dude, how much did he bench and squat? He benched like 535 and he

squatted like seven maybe like 705 but his knee was weird that day maybe it was maybe it was a little bit less than seven but yeah he he did them back to back and he he did it like uh in a real short period of time it might have took him 30 minutes from start to finish to get through his squat and his bench and And then get this. He drags a sled for maybe like five minutes straight, and he threw up from the sled because he's like he's not used to it. He did that afterwards. Totally different stimulus for him. It shows you, though, how specific even work capacity is. So let's say I'm in really good shape, like Bell's running a bunch.

He comes in and does jujitsu with you for five minutes. He's going to feel like he ran a marathon. I went and I ran with him, right? Like for the first time because I don't usually run. I went and I ran with him. And towards the end of the run, I was like, I can see what the fuck you're doing, Mark. You're starting to speed up because you're trying to – and he did. Like he left me behind a bit.

I was like, fuck you because he's been running a ton. But did he come over and do your shit? What the fuck? I know better than that. He wouldn't do that. That's stupid. That's just stupid. But you get my point, though.

So the thing of it is, is capacity can be specific and goal. That's why I always look for transferability. And that's, again, going back to the knees over toes. I don't want to drill that in, but what is it transferred to? And that's a question that everybody has to answer to themselves. Yeah. Don't know. I mean, maybe if it's always a great question is to ask yourself, yeah, what are you doing something for? You know, what's the result you're looking for? Again, you're not going to show me a squat, a deadlift or a bench press that I'm not good at. And even if I've never seen it before,

I had never touched that Cadillac bar and go to 500 with no meals and no rest and just do it. You see what I'm saying? But see, that's what I do when I go into other gy before. I had never touched that Cadillac bar. And I go to 500 with no meals and no rest and just do it. You see what I'm saying? But see, that's what I do. When I go into other gyms, I was talking to your brother. He's like, what are you looking around for? I said, I'm looking for something I've never seen, which was that Cadillac bar. And I'm like, let's do that. He goes, you're just going to pick something you've never done before?

I'm like, yeah, because my body's never seen that stimulus. But I learned it. Like, see? And that, to me, is smart training. Give me somebody that's never seen that stimulus, but I learned it like, see, and that to me is, that to me is smart training. Give me somebody that's never seen something and they're not, I'm not saying they're the best at it, but they're really good at it. That means that they're transferring their training to almost anything that they want, but running is awesome. But if you go to jujitsu, Matt, and let's just say Mark knows how to jujitsu, the running is not going to help him much.

mat and let's just say mark knows how to jujitsu the running is not going to help him much so is it good for cardio well for transferability maybe not and maybe it is again swimming michael phelps might look amazing in the pool give him a 50 pound kettlebell and see how long he can swing it you might be surprised not very long i think it would be a little bit of an individual thing but i would also say like that uh each person can work towards a particular capacity. So like for, you know, someone who's doing jujitsu, like for them to run two miles, this shouldn't be that hard. You know what I mean? It's like, if you're, if you're trying to be high level. Oh, sure. And that's the thing is like, what are you, what are you weak at? What do you need work on? And again, are you picking things that might transfer to other things to hit multiple

birds with one stone? And that's really what you have to start realizing with your training is, okay, I can squat this particular position, but if it only makes me strong one particular way, it may not be a good investment in time. And that's where I try to get people to understand is like, look, the average person is not trying to break a world record. The average person is trying to put a little muscle mass on and get a little leaner. So what exercises can you pick that's going to allow that to happen and transfer to other things easier? And that's always been my thought process. You know, everybody's, well, sumo's cheating.

Sumo made my conventional fucking strong because it made me use my hips. You can't really, you know, people, i would say sumo is only cheating if you're perfectly built to pull sumo you know and you have the mobility to put yourself in almost a leg press position like some of these new guys are but you give somebody that position that's not really built the deadlift it's going to work muscles that they really need to focus on what are some of your thoughts on uh athletes and as it relates to their strength in the gym you know and uh let's say a good athlete it's like a running back and just really struggles to squat like 225 like do you think is that something that's like uh do you think if you get the guy to squat 315 that he'll be a better athlete or where do you kind of sit on some of that i i think it's some of its individuals so

i'll give you a prime example when charlie francis talked at swiss conference before he died i got i didn't get to see it um dr knaken the guy that runs swiss sent it to me and i watched it and i thought it was really interesting so he gets a hold of ben johnson in the early 80s ben johnson was a fucking freak sprinter right he had the world record until they took it away from him in 88 you remember from, from the drug thing. But he ran like, I want to say it was a 9.8 flat or some shit back in 88. It was something crazy. Well, when Ben Johnson and Charlie Francis got together, he noticed that Ben Johnson wasn't strong enough to maintain top speed after 50 meters.

So Ben Johnson, I believe, still has the fastest start ever. But when he got to 50 meters, he slowed down because he couldn't maintain that amount of power. So Charlie Francis started looking at his training protocol. His training protocol, he slowed down because he couldn't maintain that amount of power. So Charlie Francis started looking at his training protocol. His training protocol, he was doing a ton of heavy singles. So Charlie Francis switched it to triples to match the time of the 100-meter. And he went from 550 for a single to 635 for a triple at 190 body weight as a fucking runner and broke the all-time world record.

And interestingly enough, his squats, they weren't below parallel. They were specific. They were intentionally a little higher. And Charlie Francis would spot him and assist him a little bit. And he would have knee wraps on. I just found all that to be in a belt. Well, so again, so what Charlie Francis talked about in this talk was neurological hyperadaptation. So what he was trying to get Ben Johnson to do is make his body weight to his mind feel insanely light.

So it didn't matter if he had fucking URAPs on or didn't go deep. He's trying to get the maximal neural drive out of maximal weights on his fucking back. So when he's set up in the blocks, he's used to pushing against three times body weight. And now he's just like, bow, out of the gate. And he's strong enough long enough to maintain that level of power after 50 meters and fucking smoked everybody. So the answer to your question is where's the weakness? Now, if you tell me that a pro running back or a high-level college running back is only squatting 225, 315 will abso-fucking-lutely make him faster. If he's already squatting 650, probably not.

But here's the thing is whatever you suck at is the limiting factor and a lot of times today in sports the limiting factor is strength the guys aren't that strong i remember clean as fucking day this is crazy as shit 2003 i'm doing my internship at ipi vince carter's there with the raptors so this is the first superstar i've ever even had my eyes on but let alone get to watch train because i'm just a fucking intern yeah so the rapper the rappers are down there and i'm watching watching uh vince carter and i'm just enamored by this fucking guy because this dude could jump so right before we start training they had some

rookies down there and some other guys they're all throwing money down on the floor and they're betting vince carter sitting on a bench with one foot off the ground so like a pistol squat sitting on a bench that he couldn't jump up to a 40 like a 40 something inch box with one leg he fucking does it boom one-legged and then lands a double leg and gets down give me my money i'm like what check this out 30 minutes later he can't fucking squat 185 could you imagine if that fucker would have been strong even it even at a Ben Johnson depth he didn't want to train weights and what happened to him he was so fucking fast he was injured all the time he was constantly injured he had a long career but there was a lot of times he was out for ankle issues knee issues okay he's kind of a lot of times he was out for ankle issues, knee issues.

He's kind of like a Bo Jackson. He was so explosive. So this is Ben Johnson squatting. I don't know if it shows the side of it. Sometimes he's squatting onto a box. He is on a box. Yeah, so people ask me all the time. Yeah, so he's squatting on a box. Quick question, Matt.

Have you heard of the Gota guys and all these guys that we've had on the podcast recently? Probably. Gota? Gota. guys and all these guys that we've had on the podcast recently probably go to go to they're uh they're against weight lifting um for for sport athletes because they're a big concept in their belief is like something like a squat would compress the ankle and it will compress the joints so that when these individuals go into cutting movements that may lead to knee injuries so like that's their take on this so they don't have many of their lifters lift they'll do other

things to build strength they do some forms of resistance training but not really lifting weights not my question is do they have anybody as fast as ben johnson nope no see this is where it gets confusing because maybe ben johnson's just a freak so most of the athletes are field athletes by the way sure i get it but i'm just curious curious what your thoughts are on that. My thoughts are bullshit. My fucking thoughts. Straight up. And here's the thing. Ben Johnson just disproved that completely 35 years ago.

Number one. Number two, the big thing is that where's most of those athletes weak? Right? Where's most of those athletes weak right where's most of these athletes weak and if and if that was really true you really think that charlie francis wouldn't have known that to do that to ben johnson to win a win a fucking gold medal one of their probably rebuttals would be he's a track athlete he's trying to create as much power going there as pot linear he's not changing direction swiftly right and his his ankles aren't having to swiftly change direction.

So their thing would be like these heavy forces compress the ankle. And if an athlete changes direction, all those forces don't travel the right way and boom, ACL, all these types of things. So my rebuttal to that is if you think that looks heavy for Ben Johnson to do and it compresses everything, them changing direction 100 miles an hour is 10 times worse than that on compressive factors. So why are they doing cutting drills? If it on compressive factors so why are they doing cutting drills if it's compressing everything why are they doing that because it's sport specific get my point yeah so everything that they do with field athletes that's compressive too and way more it's just the reason you and i don't think it's way more because you don't have a fucking force plate on the ground showing you how much it is so here's

the here's the check we did this with the fire department just to get an idea on the ground showing you how much it is so here's the here's the check we did this with the fire department just to get an idea on the last step off of a fire truck is about 16 to 18 inches okay not very high right we're talking here when they put 60 pounds of gear on 190 pound fireman weighs 545 when he steps off the thing like if he jumps down yeah so they're completely negating all those processes and thought processes if why do all those why do all those drills if they're compressive too because they're specific so what i started to find was if i got the guys stronger doing those kind of lifts their ligaments tendons and bones were more resilient to getting fucking hurt and then when they do the change of direction they're like they got a stronger frame they don't get hurt so it's kind of like you're avoiding one thing to possibly

cause an injury on the other thing there's never it's never clear-cut maybe they're right with the lifting but it's still going to happen in the sport just because it's changed the direction or linear doesn't matter so yeah i think i think what i found for myself is like that just be careful of the particular exercise you select like try i mean it's you can fuck around the gym a little bit but try to have a good reason on why you're selecting particular exercises on top of that maybe just think about how you want to do the exercise in accordance to the results that you're looking for and try to make sure that makes some sense. It doesn't, you don't have to like be crazy scientific about it or anything, but you know,

if you're trying to, you're trying to overload or handle weights the way that like Ben Johnson was doing, I think it's totally appropriate to not worry about the depth at all. He's not trying to, wasn't trying to be a powerlifter. No, again, he wants that neurological function. But here's the thing. If I were an athlete, there would be some different things that I wouldn't train like a powerlifter. Here's how I would do it.

One, and don't get it twisted. I'm not telling you this because I sell them. I would belt squat them more than I would back squat them because I'm going to get, as I posted a paper today, University of Connecticut studied my belt squat and showed it almost got the same amount of muscle activation with no spinal compression. So there's a savior because what's the probably number one thing that athletes have issues with in the weight room? Low back. So if we negate that and just do a lot of bracing work, a lot of GHRs, a lot of reverse hypers and belt squats, we'd be good there. The other thing too is if we know the posterior chain's a weakness, we could use a good morning

machine because now the pressure's pushing us forward but not directly down. So if we keep good posture, we're going to smash all those muscles on the posterior chain, but we're not getting any vertical compression. So now the joints are saved. So again, what we do is what we're going back to, I think, is compression versus traction. So what we need to do is find exercises that are going to attack muscle groups that allow us to gain what we want out of these big lifts but doing it in a non-compressive or moderate compressive state and leave the compression shit out on the field that's how i would do it and i don't give a shit what sport it is so you're right back squats deadlifts and sometimes even bench pressing are not viable all the time so i think back in the day if ben johnson would have used a belt squat instead of that squat, may have been better, in my opinion. If he had done more GHRs and more, you know,

reverse hypers, if they'd have been around at the time, I think it would have made his training a little bit better and a little bit more thoughtful, but they work with what they had. And so my thought process is I wouldn't agree with what you were saying and base it off of a compressive factor because that's what they deal with in sport anyway. Yeah. And with yours, traction versus compression is the only thing you need to go into education. When you walk into the gym, is this exercise going to make me strong without adding extra mileage? If the answer is yes, fucking do it. If the answer is like, eh, that exercise got high mileage and I'm not real good at it. You might want to just use that as a technical exercise and go smash your ass with something else.

Yeah. People think they have to do certain exercises too. They're like, last time I tried these squats, I hurt my knee. It's like, well, trust your intuition. Maybe do something different. Like you don't have to necessarily do a squat. Hell no. Pick some other version of a squat or something. My opinion is I would take, after being friends with Boyle for a long time, Boyle doesn't really do any bilateral back squats. He's a huge unilateral guy. And the more I look at it from a perspective of general population firemen, I'm a unilateral guy too, because it fixes left and right and balances, which is the problem of bilateral shit anyway. In field sports, you're never driving off the same two feet at once. Even Ben Johnson isn't.

And you notice even when he takes off linear, he still has to go left, right, left, right. So it's still lateral too. Yeah. Because if you watch him, he's still doing this. So it's not linear. I mean, his race is linear, but it's still single-legged each time. So I find that if you are limited in education, you don't know a whole lot, think traction versus compression, unilateral balance before bilateral loading, and then making sure that

your TVA, your core muscles, and all of that are ready for vertical loading. If you do those four things, you're fucking in like Flynn. If you avoid one of those, it's going to come back and bite you in the ass, and the timeline is just dependent on how lucky you get. That's my thought process on the situation. Anything else, Andrew? No, that's it. I'm just really interested in getting some advice on working those TVAs after this. Yeah, we'll do it. Yeah. Well, actually, we should talk about this too, because we were talking about all those weaknesses. And how about the mobility stuff? Because you mentioned that multiple times. I don't think we've kind of gone in on what you do or what maybe i i know you can't just suggest a general thing for everybody but that's

one area where a lot of athletes just kind of are like yeah well if i have enough mobility to get into my specific movements i'm mobile enough to squat bench deadlift comfortably why the fuck would i need to work on it anymore? Because the body starts to stiffen up to the point that those motions don't work well either. I mean, me and Mark could tell you straight up being older now and getting closer to 50 that for me to even go to slightly below parallel now is a fucking warmup to do it because the hips have been getting grenaded for 30 fucking years. So that's one of the reasons why I developed the winning warrant.

But mobility is movement under a range of motion. So what you want to try to do, especially as you age, is try to maintain mobility. Now, that might mean gaining some too. But I find that sometimes mobility and flexibility, some of that's genetic. My dad was tighter than a banjo string. I do some form of mobility work every fucking day, and I'm still not the most flexible guy in the world. So if it was training, I'd be flexible.

And a lot of that's a car accident too. Remember we were talking about that. Everybody asks, why the fuck do you wear sandals all the time? Because when I was big and I had all that damage in my legs, I couldn't put on my fucking shoes. Now I can. I choose not to. So the point is is mobility

is always about range of motion and movement it's it's exercise and that's where we got away from doing static stretching in the late 90s early 2000s and went to dynamic mobility which is like one twist reach alternate toe touching you know you watch if it'd be interesting for the average person to go and watch how n NFL players warm up before practice now. They're not going to see what they think they see if they're not into the field. They're going to see a lot of movement mobility, not just laying on the ground stretching. Yeah. And so there's a huge difference between mobility and flexibility.

Flexibility means you can stretch. Mobility means you can move. And movement will create flexibility, but flexibility will not create mobility. Not all the time. So I feel that just try to push your range of motion. Like you were doing in the gym today, push your range of motion just a little bit out of whack with lighter weights and sometimes make the exercise again,

law of accommodation, make it more difficult because it's higher range of motion. Again, I squat like Ben Patrick does every once in a while, but I don't do it all the fucking time, but I can still do it with insane weights if I want to. That's the difference. So you find that people that sell you a specific bandaid for a particular problem, well, that might work for a minute, but then it's an issue again on another way. So for me, mobility is all about maintaining range of motion.

And that's why a lot of times I do the winning warmups is to potentiate weak muscle groups, but also get the body ready for those actions of range of motion. So if I'm going to squat that day, I'm belt squatting a hundred reps before I even squat. Cause now that mobility factor is gone. It's all warm. It's ready, but it's specifically ready to do what I ask it to do in the task. Now, I have a question on top of that. Since you've done all your competing, you might do some more competitions in the future. Who knows? Are you trying to just maintain that or are you trying to increase your range of motion in any different areas?

So right now, I mean, I'm kind of trying to keep playing with my diet, find something that's manageable, but keeps getting me leaner and keeps my blood work good as I age. Yeah. That's really been my big focus while maintaining as much strength as I possibly can and show people that this is possible for many, many years without getting injury if you're smart. For me, it's all about, you know, when I started as a kid and I wanted to be as strong as I could possibly be, it was always a fact of trying to show people when other people want to quit, I'm not going to quit. And so I always have that in the back of my mind that I'm still strong enough to compete. But now my business is more important. Helping the people that work for me is more important because the problem problem with me competing, and I'm sure Mark's ran into the same issue, when I go into comp mode, I'm not fun to be around. I'm not a good business guy.

And I'm like this. And that's really hard to deal with when you're dealing with people of all different types and different abilities. You know, when I go into powerlifting mode, I'm fucking powerlifting mode. Everything. 100%. 100 miles an hour. And that's the greatest thing when you're competing, and it's the worst fucking thing in the world you can do when you retire. Because then people are like, oh, well, Matt, you know,

he's a fucking asshole, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, dude, I was prepping for meets, you know. So it's one of those things where, for me, the mobility is the winning warmup. That's what I do. Obviously, it's specific to staying strong. But I think the more important thing is I'm warming up the weakest muscle groups. I'm warming up the ones that I think are going to be the issue, and usually I'm right. So a lot of times mobility can also be a weakness.

So what is a tight hamstring? It's a weak hamstring most of the time. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Right? If I'm always having shoulder problems, it's probably weak in some area and I'm compensating. So, again, I've never seen tight hamstrings that were strong per se. So I find that if I get my hamstring stronger in a full range of motion exercise, they not only get more mobile, they get stronger.

So usually a tight muscle is a weak muscle. Not always, but I would say most of the time. muscle. Not always, but I would say most of the time. So in that example of the hamstring, how would you have a person work that hamstring through a long range of motion to have it become stronger? What would you have them do? Well, what I really like to do is I'll hang a band from a high squat rack. I'm laying on my back. I'll hook a band that's pretty decent amount of tension, say like an orange and a red. And i'm suspended my legs hanging in the air so if i scoot in close enough to the rack it's causing me to stretch and then i'm leg curling okay see what i'm saying yeah so now i'm creating some stretching and some strengthening at the same

time i'm really a big proponent of i don't think if you're getting it strong and mobile at the same time it's way better than just trying to get it mobile yeah yeah it creates jack shit in my opinion yeah so for me i will try or i'll use a ghr and i'll go all the way down till my head's trying to touch the floor and then i'll come up yeah and now i'm stretching that hamstring but i'm telling it hey motherfucker i want you to turn on to do a deadlift versus going i'm gonna stretch it out a little bit you know yeah to me it's not it's not transferring over to the movement i mean that's just my opinion on things. That makes sense. You know, the funny thing is what you're mentioning right there, the hamstring, there's a few things that Ben also, like, I think you guys would align more than be separate.

I think there's a lot of things that you guys have similar opinions with. Mark will tell you, I align with people that squat 800 pounds. Yeah. I love it. You pick up a weight and bleed out your nose. We'll have a talk about squats. Okay. There you go. You strain on something I can bench for 10.

I don't think we're going to talk too much. Fair. Fair. Because 475, I think I've done for 15 on the bench. But I'm not positive. I know I've done 500 for 11. Oh, man. Whatever.

Hey, the man has boosters, man. He can dunk. Hey, I guess. I guess. I mean, I can probably hang on the rim at fucking 270. I'm pretty sure you could. I'm very certain you could. I mean, we can do speed squats for speed and see who's faster.

That'd be interesting. Have you ever tried a dunk? I can hang on the rim. Oh, damn. Yeah. I can't dunk. Yeah. I mean, I don't know anybody at 6'2", 280, they can dunk unless they're in the NFL.

When you said when you came to the gym, you picked something different. Do you think in the future you might pick stuff that's way different? Like instead of like a bench press, you might, I don't know, do something that's different. I was looking at your machines with cams because I don't train anything like that. Like some bodybuilding that way. Well, I was thinking like, what if I did a five rep max with the prime machine and set the cam in an area that I'm not used to? So I was actually thinking about that because I didn't know those adjusted like that until your brother showed me. And then I was thinking, fuck, I almost would have rather done that than the Cadillac bar just because it's so fucking wild.

Again, so today I do a little bit of arm training now I'm retired I don't give a shit I went and found your bicep machine and changed the cam to something that didn't feel right so I could train with something different it was fucking crazy my arm was like boom I can usually always tell if my training's right if I get a massive pump real quick yeah because my body you've probably all been there but my body doesn't recognize the stimulus and it's going, fuck, what's this? If I'm training and I do two or three sets and I don't feel my body's getting pumped, I already know that's a bad angle. My body's already used to it.

It doesn't like it. It's not going to grow fucking shit from it. It sounds crazy, but it happens. Have you ever ran into that? Okay. I know exactly what you're talking about. curious what your guys' thoughts are on this because right now when people are looking at fitness on Instagram and TikTok, they're trying to reference everything. Show adaptation to training. You have to type in like it'll show neurological strength. You'll pop it up real easy. I can't remember how you do it on Google, but it's something about training adaptations. And what it shows is that strength is kind of medium if i remember it correctly

neurological adaptation is quick and then hypertrophy training is long so if you are constantly adaptation or training using your training to adapt to um that's super compensation but it's going to be on loading so it's going to be like uh it's going to show strength hypertrophy and neurological adaptation to training. But that's a good one, too, to talk about. So basically, this is how you set up your training, either in a one phase, like a workout, or multiple workouts. So super compensation is when you're better than you were before.

Yeah. Now, that usually, in a workout, requires 72 hours of recovery. So people that squat, like, every day, they're not ever hitting that super compensation. They're just digging a hole. Super compensation is about the timing of the session or developing every four weeks you have a deload so that the body can adjust to the training. Yeah. I just like this one because they highlight right here. Close.

Okay. Yeah. Badass, right? So there's me and Mark on the steroid one. All the way over. Okay, so. And then Natty over here. There's Natty down at the bottom.

So, all right, so let's take a look at this. This is really interesting. So if we look right now, the strength takes longer than everything, right? Hypertrophy comes a little faster the neural adaptation happens insanely quick. Now, the question that you're asking and the thing that's always baffled me on why that happens, this is my thought. When the neurological system sees an exercise or gets introduced to an exercise it's never seen, it requires more motor units to turn on and do the same movement because it's fucking confused, which creates more motor unit activation with less intensity,

which is exactly what you want. But if you use an exercise that's the exact same that you've been doing, the body's going to find a resistance path to not turn on as much and find its bare minimum to do the movement. So when doing this, then the body has to turn on more motor units because it's confused. And I don't like to use muscle confusion, but you get my point. I get what you're saying. The spinal cord and the nerves are like what do we need to turn on i

don't understand this fucking movement and that's when you get the growth with the minimal amount of work now if you look at the front cover i don't know if we can find it of thomas kurtz's book it's called science of sports training and this has one of the best um one of the best quotes i've ever seen on the front cover of a book you have have this book? You probably do, but it's been a while. It's like yellow and red. Let's see it pop up because I want to read this to you so you guys understand something that's – Okay, now let's read this bottom yellow.

Training is effective. We'll click on it and blow it up for you guys. Now, this book changed my whole thought process on how you should train. Read on the bottom for me. Are you able to see it, Nsema? Training is efficient if the highest sports result is achieved with the least expense of time and energy. Ooh, what the fuck is that all about? So let's not sell intensity anymore.

Let's get fucking smart and train smart and get better with doing less work. Shouldn't that be the goal of everything fuck yeah it should be because if you're running yourself through the same fucking gauntlet every day every week and every month and every year you are creating a resistance to getting better and you're not getting better with efficient movements but the excuse is these if these movements are the most biomechanical efficiently the most biomechanical efficient movements for these muscle groups. So why am I going to do something else if it's not efficient? Because biomechanical efficiency doesn't create hypertrophy. So if I have to do something in a weird lever, i.e. a band, a chain, or a weird angle, the

muscles have to fucking work harder. Therefore, they're going to grow faster. That's why. Yeah. So that means tempos. That means fucking different resistances, bands, chains, boxes, different foot positions. What is the determining factor of which ones you use at what time where your fucking weaknesses are? Yeah. So the easiest way to get better is find the weakest shortcomings, the weakest links in the chain and fix those links. And then the problem

is those links change over time. Now we know that if a hamstring quadricep ratio is off, it's going to take probably about three years to fix. But what happens when it goes one to one? What do you do then? Or what happens when it gets better? There's always another weakness somewhere. You just have to be smart enough to find it. But that front cover of that book, when I read it in graduate school, fucking blew my mind because it was everything Louie was talking about it was some things Poliquin was talking about it was some things Verkoshansky and all them other guys from the Soviets were talking about how do we get better with less energy because if we save more energy we can recover better and it all comes back down to how you can recover not how hard you can train it's not what you can do it's what you

can recover from so if you get better with less energy you have more energy to recuperate and therefore you can train harder longer yeah you know what i mean so that that book i recommend to everyone and and to kind of end this or top this off when you guys are like looking at movements for training how often do you pay attention to like how new stimulus feels? Because one thing too is people now are referencing biomechanics above the sensation of a movement. Yeah, not all movements are good. For example, a chest press with this, this is not a good movement. But I think what I notice is people are negating how a movement actually feels for a specific muscle group if it doesn't fall in line with what they deem as biomechanically efficient.

It's a hard question to answer, but I think what you're looking for is there is a fine line between biomechanical efficiency and accommodation. So basically, if I move, even though that movement pattern is perfect, sometimes a perfect movement pattern doesn't create a new stimulus, therefore doesn't create any new growth. See, there's only a few ways you can make something harder, right? You can add another set. You can add more intensity. You did it for eight last time. You could do it for 10. All those, everybody wears out. What about just changing the movement, making the movement more difficult or different to where the body doesn't understand the stimulus anymore? And that's really what I think is efficient is doing movements that are specific enough to give you transfer, but in specific enough that the body has to adjust to it. And then finding those movements and rotating them. So I'll give you an example. On squats, we have 30 variations of back

squats that we rotate. So I only do the same squat every 30 weeks, unless I'm in comp mode. If I go to comp mode, then every four weeks I do a straight bar and straight weight and I periodize it. But other than that, we have 30 different variations of squats, 20, 25 different variations of deadlifts, and at least that many on the bench press. And we constantly rotate. And if I want to, every time I do it, I will break a PR. So when I go back to a straight bar, some of the movements help me at the bottom. Some of them help me at the top. Some of them help me at lockout. Some of them help me in the middle.

Some of them help me stabilize better, like hanging kettlebells. All of those factors become huge issues, and one of them is the weakness. But at that time, which one is it? Well, if I train all of it, then none of them are weaknesses. So that's why I can hop in, jump in here, bench 500 with a bar I've never fucking seen, and still do it at a high level because I train that way. There is no weak spot as far as triceps, pecs, lats. Everything's balanced.

So, again, it's efficiency because transfer is high, but also weaknesses are very slim. And so if you follow those particular parameters, I think your training would not only be smarter, you're going to last way longer. And the person that lasts the longest usually is the one that gets the strongest. You can show me an awesome program that gets somebody strong in two years, but in general, if you were to take that same person and stretch it out and train a little smarter, they're stronger in 10 years than they are in two, just based on time. It's like jiu-jitsu. You might have a guy that's a freaky athlete,

and in one year he might be able to, say, fight in the UFC. But if you stretch that out and you made him learn everything in six or seven years, you're telling me the same guy wouldn't be better? He would be way better because of the absorbability of the training, the experience, getting in different moves he's never seen before. He might be good in certain ways, but other ways he might be really bad. You just don't see it yet. So it's always finding those weak links.

So again, time and experience is something that can't really be bought in a short period of time, and that's what everybody needs to focus on. Because at the end of the day, again, most of the sports that we're involved with, nobody's making any real fucking money doing it, so why blow your body apart for nothing? Now a if you're a pro running back in the nfl and they're going to sign you another 40 million dollars run the ball and blow your fucking knee out go do it i'm understanding and train any fucking way you want to do that but the average person that has to get up and go to work and feed their kids you're going to blow your fucking knee

off to squat 365 fucked up give me a fucking break true you know what i mean that's that's what i think about the situation and that's why i try to train so smart i think a lot of times it's a good idea like if you're trying to find something new you're trying and you're trying to get like a feel for something i think it's a good idea to either have it on a day where you have zero expectations of like really getting in a good training session at all like let's say you're like oh i'm gonna try going to try out the bands that Matt's talking about. Well, you don't have to necessarily go in and have a full workout with bands. Just put bands on the bar at the end of a workout.

You already did your workout. Play around with it. Yeah, fuck around with it a little bit and see how it feels and just take note. Okay, it felt that way with 95 pounds on. I think that felt pretty good. I'm actually going to give this a try the next time i come in well that's the way i've always done it go back and with all the shit on the on the internet right or wrong go fucking read a little holy shit i remember dave

just posted like a week or two ago about how pissed off he gets answering questions and he goes he goes i'll send somebody a fucking two-page article which is not that long and they're like no no i want the answer the answer is in the fucking article asshole. We call it ask holes, people that want to ask you something, but they're not fucking using it. And so that's, you know, that's something you got to deal with. But, um, here's my thing with that whole situation, Mark is it comes back down to what we were talking about already. Consistency. It's all about consistency. So go experiment a little bit. Play around with it

in a non-stress environment. If you're not competing or you're not trying to break a world record, what the fuck's your rush anyway? That's what I can't get. I get guys come into the gym all the time. They're like, man, I really want to get my bench up.

You know, I want blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, cool. How much you bench? 225. Shut the fuck up. Start loving to train first and then you'll get 500 one of these days.

But you can't go from 225 to 500 with a magic trick. It's a fucking desire to learn, experiment, and constantly progress yourself. You know, I mean, when I did my first bench beat, it's going to sound insane. I benched 250 at 13. Okay? Fucking crazy, right? Yeah. It took me a year and a half to bench 315. It took

me three more years to bench 380. Uh, sorry, two more years to bench 380. And then a year and a half later I did 475. Think about that timeline. Now here's where it really gets fucked up. I benched 500 at 19 at worlds and it took me three years to bench 520. Then it took me four more years to bench 600. Damn. I don't give a fuck. I just like training. But see, everybody goes, oh, I want to bench 600. Okay, stick.

And let me tell you something about that. Every time I stuck, I learned something. I wasn't doing enough back. I wasn't doing enough triceps. I didn't have my work capacity high enough. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the fucking sticking points are the learning points if you're willing to sit down and analyze what you're fucking doing. Sticking points are education points. And most people stick, then they don't get any smarter, then they don't get any better, then they fucking quit.

Instead of going, what's the problem here and how do I fix it? Same thing with business. Okay, I didn't make as much money this year as I did last year. What's the problem? Well, I wasn't marketing my manuals, right? Wasn't getting equipment out on time and people canceled their orders, whatever the fuck it is. But the point is, is that self-analyzation in both training, business, and life is the key. If you know where to take that information and actually make it work for you, you know, that's the trick. And that's why you find successful people don't care about roadblocks. They want to learn from the roadblocks.

So one, it doesn't happen again, and two, it's never that issue ever again. There's always new issues that pop up, and we constantly change. I mean who would have thought 30 years ago the internet was going to be this powerful for business and all this other shit? I mean your business wouldn't be successful if the internet wasn't around. No, it's only on the internet. You would have both just owned a fucking gym. Yeah. Am I right? So how did anybody know how was our parents going to teach us that? They weren't. We had to evolve. I would say, here's our PO box. Send me 50 bucks for a slingshot. Yeah. So that was a pretty close voice too. So think about it in that perspective, right? Like that's huge.

So the point is evolution is – and anything is key. You have to fucking be thinking about the next step or where your weaknesses are or what you need at this time. And sometimes it's not simple. And not to go into a deep story but you know i'm i hit the third highest total of all-time raw in 2013 so i go from equipment to raw and hit the third highest total right off the fucking rip yeah and what happened was is that i had just been 600 at a contest so i was like the 15th guy to ever do it and halbert handed out to me it was fucking awesome right because howard's like dude i know you can bench 600. So we trained for it. He got injured.

I didn't. Smoked 600. Long story short is, so now I'm looking at these records. Dan Kovacs' record, 2202. I'm like, I can fucking beat it, man. I know I can. So I go to the meet. I squat.

I hit like 788. Pretty good for, I mean, no knee wraps, no sleeves. Walked out. I didn't know it was a walkout meet until I got there. Fucking, that sucked. So anyway, I go to the bench, and I already smoked 600 at a meet. I only benched 574. I tried 606 or whatever, and I fucking got crushed.

I'm driving home like, what the fuck happened? Because I had just done like 565 for a triple. I knew 611 was there. And I drove back home, and I'm thinking in my car, and I had the epiphany that no other fucking powerlifters ever had. I wasn't fit enough. The squat kicked my fucking ass and I was too tired. So winning warmups started and I just, I put the bench. So I start and you saw me the next meet.

I'm doing 35 pound and I try to tell people it's not about progressing the fucking weights. Nobody wants to listen. 35 pound dumbbells for four sets 25 is all i use for the next six months just to get a little in my mind it was pre-fatigue and just conditioning what i was doing is potentiating so i did some lats some tries and some presses 35 pound dumbbells nine months later i go to royal unity and fucking smoke 606 you remember it yeah after squatting the world record so i had one of the highest subtotals in history especially under 300 pounds because at that point i was only at 295, 290.

And I started to realize like, holy fuck, I was on to something. So the next meet, I institute it with the squats. Squat goes from 832 to 865 and a half. Bench goes to 611. I was like, and I didn't change anything in my training other than I added in the warmups, conditioning, GPP before I did my big lift. So I couldn't get tired. And everything about the wedding warmups on your YouTube channel? There's some on there, yeah.

Some on there? Some on there, yeah. We show the workouts on the Patreon on how to do it because there's a lot of variation. You need variation constantly. But what I find is the biggest problem with most people when they do the winning warm-up is they try to go way too heavy. It should never affect the main lift. So depending on what you can do, how good a shape you're in is what you can do for the

warmups. So if you're a big fat power lifter, that's never really done any conditioning work, you might be at 20 pound dumbbells to not affect your bench that day. Then you work it up to 25s, then 30s. But this is talking over months and months. And it's four sets of 25. You might do something else in between, or are you staying on like the incline bench or flat bench? So whatever you pick is what you stay. So here's how it works. On the winning warmup, if I'm going to flat bench, the dumbbells are flat benched. I'm warming up and potentiating the exact movement pattern that I want. If I'm going to max on incline, it's incline.

If I'm going to max on decline, it's decline. If I'm going to do a floor press, it's floor presses. Pretty simple. That way my motor pattern is exactly dialed for what I need. The other two weaknesses for most people are going to be tries and lats so i go smack those i do four sets of 25 of those three exercises in 12 to 14 minutes i rest three minutes and i start the main lift i mean it's pretty simple but you're potentiating weaknesses you're getting more fit you're not resting so your body's just fucking getting conditioned out the ass but it's specific enough to get strong

yeah versus just say going running a couple miles. Do you do a running warmup for the lower body? Yep. So we belt squat and then we'll do hamstring curls and then core or glute activation like glute bridges. But I would say the belt squat probably reacts for, I'd say, 75% of it. But we'll go really narrow, knees over toes wide sit way back elevated heel flat-footed you name it sneak in a set of calf raises oh yeah always trying to get calves like you you know you know so my point is yeah i mean calves i don't do anything that's bodybuilding style for

the warm-up because i want to potentiate muscle groups in which i know need to function better for the movement coming ahead so it'd be like g well, not GHR because it's too hard, but like 45-degree back extensions, kneeling cable or band crunches, winning planks. So all these things I'll do for bracing and developing weaknesses, and then I smack right into the main lift. But what I notice is it actually enhances my motor patterns for the lift at hand because I just gave it –

it's like I just taught my body how to spell, then how to read. And now I gave it a paragraph. So the paragraph's the core movement, the spelling and the reading is the warmup. And now not only are you less injury prone, but you're also more dialed into your training. So to me, there's no downside to it unless you're out of shape. Or going way too heavy. Or going too heavy. And that's a huge issue.

But on average, I use 40 pound dumbbells and I can still probably bench about 585. So if you're going heavier than that and you bench 315, you're a fucking idiot. That's all I'm telling you. So I gave you the answer there. Take us on out of here, Andrew. All righty. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Please drop those comments down below in the old comment section.

I want to hear what you guys have to say about today's conversation. Make sure you guys like today's video and subscribe. If you guys are not subscribed already, turn on all those bell notifications so you don't miss any other uploads. Please follow the podcast at MBPowerProject on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at IamAndrewZN. Seema, where are you at? Discord's almost at 2200, so go to the Discord link below. I'm Seema Iny on Instagram, YouTube, and Seema In Yang on TikTok and Twitter. Sorry.

Damn, I got to ask one more question, Matt. This is too general. But yeah, this is going to be way too general for you. Hypothetically, if you're doing jujitsu and you're trying to get really strong. Exactly. But, you know, you're in encyclopedia of a lot of really good information when it comes to where people can find different sorts of information. And if there are strength coaches listening and they want to understand maybe where are some books, five or eight strength training books that you hold in high regard that should be in every strength coaches or individual's library that wants to learn more about this, what are the ones you would suggest? Well, again, it's going to depend on where your weaknesses are. So if it's mobility, you're going to need mobility work, you know, mobility books.

If it's strength training that you're deficient in, those would be issues as well. So maybe like two or three strengths, two or three mobility books. Okay. So Thomas Kurtz, Science and Sports Training, we just showed on there. That's a fucking awesome book. That's amazing. I also like any of the science and practice of strength training by Zatsy Horsky. I am a huge proponent of the original greenback that came out in 94 because

that was all the translated Soviet texts. As it progressed, I think the newest one's better because Andy Fry helped with it. But the one in the middle wasn't as good because they tried to water it down to get people less educated to understand. I open up the greenback every time and I learned something new and I've had the book for 20 fucking years. So that tells you how badass it is. The other one that I think encompasses a lot of great information, but it's more of a, more of a, I don't know what you call it, an index or a glossary is Super Training by Mel Siff and Verkoszanski. But that book, you don't open it and read it front to back. You open it with a question. You look in the front contents and you look up the title in which you're trying to find

and you go read that and you close the fucking book because you're going to go down the fucking rabbit hole. Am I right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's an amazing one. And then anything that Vorkoshansky or Medvedev wrote, which is going to come in like Lovati Press that's printed in Michigan, they're more like manual texts, but they were the old Soviet translated books. There's one called, I think, Special Strengths and Multi-Year Weightlifting. And you start to read that and go, holy fuck, these guys were way out of hand as far as what they knew. So strength training wise, those would be some big stop. Now, anything that Tudor Bompa writes for periodization is amazing. So I have a lot of his texts.

I'm trying to think of who else. You know, the old articles, if you can find them from Charles, they can go off the deep end a little bit, but they do have some very solid information. Some of the references that I've used from my book coming out is actually Charles's articles where he has references from shit that's not even in English. So like you would be surprised what came out of France, East Germany, Bulgaria back in the 70s and 80s that the Americans have never even seen. Again, like, you know, we were talking about RPE. RPE scale was switched to the Bulgarian system, I want to say in the mid-late 70s because what they found was that no matter how much they controlled

all the variables in training, their strength fluctuated 10% to 20% per day. So how in the fuck can you base that on percentages? You can't at a high level. So what they started to realize was RPE was a better scale to keep the guys – again, we were talking about how much water is in your cup today to train. So you have to adjust that so um those are huge i would say the book i showed you by leon chateau for soft tissue manipulation is fucking amazing and will open your eyes up to shit you never even thought of i can't wait for that one to come you're gonna love it yeah so you have to text

me and tell me how you like it i will um so track that guy down it sounds like is he alive i don't know i mean he was older guy back in the early 2000s my guess is he's probably dead but he trained all the physical therapists and massage therapists at ipi they had to be certified through him in canada before they could come work with the athletes wow and the shit they knew i was like what the fuck right charles knew a lot of that um so i would say those those areas would be great to start on. But the Thomas Kurtz book is nice because it doesn't just go into lifting. It's track stuff and plyometrics. There's a book, a Polish sprinting and jumping book. I think it's Trubisky.

He's talking about plyometric sports and training. And that book is where Louie got a lot of the information for not only speed work but different types of jumping activities to be better at sports. So like you saw in that video, Ben Johnson doing those hurdle jumps and then sprints. Yeah. He got a lot of that from the old East German training stuff. So this is what's crazy. In my research for my book, what I found was is that East Germany was actually the hot spot for the advanced knowledge that the Soviets had. And here's the reason.

So the Soviet Union had so many scientists and so much drive to learn strength sports, especially for Olympic lifting to win gold medals because they wanted to show they were better than us for the Soviet Union. And strength training they were. But the problem is they had economic issues. So although the training halls weren't very nice, a lot of the professors weren't getting paid very much, Bulgaria had the same problem. They had a great population to grab a hold of. They had great coaches, and they learned a lot from the Soviet Union how to develop that. But they were also economically strained. East Germany was weird.

East Germany had a lot of money as a country but had all the information shared from them from russia so i believe that at the iron curtain the berlin wall would have stayed up for maybe another 15 or 20 years the information would have been insane because east germany had the soviet literature some of the soviet coaches and the money so the shit you see coming from east germany from like 1983 to when the wall fell was like, holy shit. They had it dialed the fuck in, but it just wasn't long enough. So if you look at a lot of the big records that were broken, the 80s of East Germany and people will blame it on drugs and everything, but it's not. Is it is it true?

You might have knowledge of this. Is it true that like the Soviets, it appeared that they studied like everything, like if an athlete had milk before they trained, if they had milk after they trained, and people were just fired just like that. So check this. If they didn't get results, right? I would have to have my research right in front of me to tell you, but I'll give you the roundabout numbers. the roundabout numbers in st petersburg where the big lifting halls were for the soviet training center they had 650 researchers for just olympic lifting at that center now you fucking tell me that they weren't studying everything now the guy that starts this is how advanced the soviets were at this time and why i hope everybody listening is going to go and read as much as they can find

on the soviet training system 1910 there was a guy named Kravosky. Kravosky was a fucking physician that was telling 1910 was telling the athletes no smoking. This is when you're going to sleep. This is when you're going to train and started the first implementation of blood work. 19 fucking 10. If you were to come in and athlete comes, yeah, I'm at the USOC and they're drawing my blood every two weeks and they're telling me to do this you're like wow they really got it advanced they were doing that fucking shit 120 years ago in russia you're like what the fuck but kravosky was like a huge proponent of strength he wanted to see what the human body was capable of and he had within reason a decent amount of money because he was a physician. So he started the weight training program in St. Petersburg,

and he's the one that trained Hacker Smith and also had big connections with Eugene Sandow. Wow. So we're talking all the pioneers of strength training. Yeah. And so what you find is really interesting is that Kravosky was 75 years ahead of his time. The Soviets put so much emphasis in strength and power because the amount of gold medals you could win think about this in in olympic sports if you could win all the hammer

all the shot put all the discus all the track sports that are sprinting activities javelin shot put hammer sprints triple jumps 100 meter dash right let's go on and on now all the olympic lifting classes both male and female you fucking win the olympics that's why they cared so much they wanted to show look at the communist system look how much more advanced we are they just didn't have the money why why do you think the training is so similar for track and lifting like they seem to parallel each other pretty well because everything's usually under 10 seconds. That's why. Energy systems are similar. So if you look at 100-meter dash, it's over 9.5.

Well, I don't even know what fucking Usain Bolt runs now, but it's under 10. You look at a max effort squat, under 10. You look at a max effort clean and jerk, under 10. You look at a triple jump, under 10. Pull vault, under 10. So if everything's under 10 seconds, it's all anaerobic capacity, ATP, PCR. That's why it matches. it's all anaerobic capacity, ATP, PCR. That's why it matches. It's the energy systems match. And so when the energy systems match, they share similarities

on how to train. Sometimes when something takes longer, though, it seems to even match like in the case of like a 400 or a mile, the rest intervals that were associated with sprinting and rest intervals associated with lifting are somewhat similar. Because what you find is anaerobic capacity, which is the ability to do something fairly like 520 for 24. That transfers to maximum strength and endurance and speed. You can't do that if you're not quick because if it takes you six minutes to do it, you're fucking dead in two. Yep. So that took me – that's the sped up video that's because we had to fit it in a minute.

But it took me a minute and 47 seconds to do it oh man wow oh so imagine just the average person listening standing there with 520 pounds that's a great challenge that's a good winning challenge just stand there just stand there with 520 for a minute 47 you tell me how you fuck i think a good challenge would just be somebody just to squat whatever weight they felt they could squat for one minute straight yeah that alone would be brutal the hard part with 520 to do that many reps is that you have to stabilize at the top every time so you would come up stand rebrace baboon rebrace if you go like this boom boom boom by 12 you're toast yeah you miss one you have to boom boom reset boom boom reset so you reset on

every rep there weren't any reps for you held boom boom nope come up couldn't wow couldn't i won't tell you why because i tried this was like five six years ago michael hearn called me out and said how many times can you do 500 i said more than you fucking piece of shit so we do it we do it i think he's challenging stan too this was like 2017 and i'm still like beefy i'm like almost three wheels right but i don't have that level of endurance but i've been doing warm-ups so i'm pretty good shape so i get 20 o'hearn gets like 18 and stan gets like 12 because he's already on the way down and he was already he's older than well yeah he's older than both of us so the point was is i was

doing that and i'm like i'm gonna smash the first fucking 12, no breaths, no nothing. So I fucking pick it up, and boom, boom, boom, boom. I got to 15, and I was almost gassed. And I was like, fuck, I should have stopped between each one and got a breath, reset myself. Because a couple times, it threw me a little bit back and a little bit forward. Well, a little bit back and a little bit forward waxes the stabilizers. Well, a little bit back and a little bit forward waxes the stabilizers versus if I just stay right planted where I want to be, then I can keep everything minimal expense. Because as soon as something gets out of plane or out of your positioning, you're not going to have as much power and you're going to wear out faster.

You know, jujitsu, you get one inch out of position. How much more energy do you have to use to get back a lot but if you stay in position not much well minimal so the point is is that's the same thing with those kind of levels of squat so i'd already tried that and did 12 with no air yeah and i noticed it killed me so i i learned from that mistake five years ago there we go yeah uh what's the most valuable thing you learned from louis simmons that's a good one well how do we do this without going into a half an hour because there was a lot take your time okay well the first thing i would say i learned was the value and the intensity in

which it was going to take to be a world record order so you know as well as i do um especially at that time in the late 90s you walk walk in to Westside Barbell, you better bring your fucking Wheaties. Because every day is a contest and you training at Westside is about five times harder than doing a contest. Because not only are they going to push you past their expectations, you're going so far beyond what you think training is, you don't have a fucking clue what that takes. And that's why every workout we ever did passing in was fucking easy so i learned by and maybe it was too much but i learned by watching kenny and chuck and george the amount of veracity intensity and focus it was going to take to break world records because i'd already won a world but i was a teen and i wanted to be the best in open i wanted to be the best 275 three i didn't know i'd be a 308 at the time. 275-3, what I could be.

And so I'm watching these guys as a mirroring effect. Like, okay, this is what I need to be to be this good. And that's exactly what I needed at that time because I had gotten to that point, lifting in either kind of by myself or at a YMCA. They're playing fucking Backstreet Boys over the radio and they won't change it for me. And I'm like, I'm getting ready to go to Worlds, man. I need some shit.

No, we got Mrs. Smith over here walking on the treadmill. So I got my Walkman fucking cranked and I'm trying to do 600 over here in a corner while this asshole is walking on the treadmill. So when I got there, there was none of that problem. It was fucking like a rock show and chalk everywhere, fucking blood all over the floor. And I'm like, this is what it's going to take to be the best.

So that was probably the biggest thing I took from him is that switch. When I came into the gym after training at Louie's, I had a fucking switch. Like one, I felt invincible at anything I did. Two, the confidence level was fucking insane. And three, I hardly ever failed. I mean, when did you ever see me fail in training? Right. Not very often. It's because I was going to make my fucking self do it because that's how I got grenaded when I was a kid. So the intensity was high. The next thing is, is that Louie taught me that it was just as important to read as it was to train.

I was already reading and I'd already been kind of baffled by what he knew because he was bringing a physics equation into the training, almost like hatfield did 10 years beforehand he's talking about getting faster to get stronger and he's talking about all these special movements forces mass times acceleration yeah yeah it's you know doing the dynamic effort method i never heard to work on getting quicker to get stronger yeah from the fucking why and so we did linear periodization but this is what's crazy is that my shoulders my elbows my knees were already getting pissed at 20. When I switched to this system, it took a year to get my body to understand what I needed. I switched the system and pain-free.

I mean my joints felt like I was young again. Like young meaning I was young, but young like I wasn't already been lifting for eight years. And I'm like, motherfucker, I feel so much better doing this system. It was a no-brainer. years. And I'm like, motherfucker, I feel so much better doing the system. It was a no brainer. So learning to economize my energy, not specifically train one particular way too often, which we just talked about for three fucking hours, um, that, that helped. And then the next thing was, um, what he didn't teach me by doing something incorrect. And what I mean by that is that by the time I was there and almost had worn out my tenure,

I started to realize some things on how not to act, meaning like Louie would play favorites. Louie would have ulterior motives to get somebody stronger. I never wanted to be that. I wanted to be face value at all times. And that's what my firemen really liked me because I treat them all the same. I don't play favorites. I don't do anything like that. And I don't switch on people. So Louie could be your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next. And to me, it's about stability. Like when somebody comes in, you need stability, especially when I need to have these firemen stay around me for 25, 30 years. The reason Louie acted like that is because he didn't care if you came or went, and he knew your shelf life was probably about a year and a half, two years. So for him to be a dickhead was fine.

And I'm not saying that maybe some of the guys didn't need that, but he lost a lot of his best lifters because of his attitude, in my opinion. When he felt like Mark had had enough of him or vice versa mark didn't like mark for a while same with me when he thought i was spent and didn't have any more left to give then i was the ultimate asshole when i to me there's more to lifting than that you know i i'm still friends with mark even though we don't train the same way and i haven't for a while but you know the thing of it is is that Louie wouldn't be friends with somebody that he doesn't have that exact same passion with at that exact same time. And you start to realize that relationships are more important than numbers. And I think he realized that the last couple of years and why he sent me the

books and signed them and told me he was proud of me. But yeah, there was a couple of things that I think that made him, made me realize that there are certain ways I want to be like him and other ways I don't. So I think that kind of answers the question, sort of. What about from your grandma? My grandma was out of hand. So. Yeah, you had good stories on previous shows that we've done. Well, I mean, we could redo them a little bit, but so the motorcycle rides kind of was a fault. I didn't realize that was going to happen. It's like, well, I'll just meet you out in Glacier.

And we'll just hang out for like a week and come home. And my grandma's like, well, fuck you guys. I want to go. And that's how my grandma was. And I was like, Grandma, come on. Like, ride the chain with Grandma or with Megan, my sister, and I'll meet you guys out there. And she's like, no, I want to ride on the motorcycle. I'm like, seriously?

That's 2,700 miles one fucking way. And she's like, I'm used want to ride on the motorcycle. I'm like, seriously? That's 2,700 miles one fucking way. And she's like, I'm used to sitting on my ass all fucking day. It ain't going to matter. And the story gets funnier. But so he – so I'm like, okay, fuck it. So I'm like, she came over to Columbus, and I got her leather jackets and boots and fucking assless chaps and, you know, fucking decked her out. Yeah, yeah. And so we get that all done, and I take her back,

and I can't remember if we eat for, like, Labor Day or something, right before the trip. And she gives me this. This is one you haven't heard. She sits, and she gets all serious. She gets serious when she called me Matthew. I'm like, yeah, what's up, Grandma? She goes, when do you start going back to church?

And I said, why the fuck would I do that? Just like that. And she fucking gets beat red, dude. She's like, well well don't you want to go to heaven and i said well why i won't have any friends or family there and the whole the whole family's at the table and and she looks at me and my mom starts laughing she goes well fuck it fair enough like she knew we were all going to hell so it didn't matter so that's how me and grandma wrote so i'll give you another story you hadn't heard so the first

trip we ever do we go to montana and the first day we go from columbus ohio all the way to the finger lakes in wisconsin like two hours above chicago eight hour day on a bike with a 73 year old lady and so i get off and i'm filling up my bike and this lady's giving me weird looks like you can't figure out if that's a relative or my like my sugar mama you know like or maybe i'm into old ladies or something so i play it up so i'm getting ready to fill up my bike i'm a grandma go get me a drink and i smack her on the ass and the lady the lady is like is looking at me super fucked up right like thinking oh this he's banging this chick and and like i like she went and bought me the bike and i'm just out of prison and i'm just living off her money or

something and so i'm just really digging it, right? And so she comes back. I said, did you pick up any sunscreen? And she's like, why would I get sunscreen? I said, because your arm on the backside is burnt where your triceps used to be. Because I told her she had fucking Walmart arms. And so now this lady is pissed. She comes around the corner and goes, I wouldn't believe you would talk to somebody like that.

And I said, well, she it you know she likes a little rough and then i hop on the bike room if i can take off and she's on the back it's hilarious dude so yeah we had a blast you know but it was weird she was kind of a control freak yeah so she wasn't trying to control me riding but we get up in the morning well where are we gonna make it today and i'm like i don't fucking know we're going west yeah because i that's the funnest part she wants to know the plan she wants to know where we're gonna stay where we're gonna eat how far we're gonna go i'm like grandma when we take these trips we ride a direction i don't give a fuck where we go like i want to know structure i just want to hit the fucking road yeah you know

that's cool my grandma hated it yeah so like the first five six days that we're gone she is just trying to control the shit out of me and i'm like grandma you either sit back and shut the fuck up i'm putting you on a plane and you're flying back i'm not dealing with this shit anymore so this is another story you haven't heard so the second ride we're coming back and we rode all the way into canada uh-huh through the upper peninsula through sault ste marie and all that and then i got up to a point where it was all french signs and i didn't know what the fuck i was saying so i'm like we need to turn around because i'm like I don't know where we're

going. So we ended up coming back around Wisconsin and whatever. We stop at this fucking Amish place that she's somehow looked up and goes, well, I'd like to stop at this. I'm like, I'll stop wherever you want. I don't care. She comes out with this fucking gallon of lavender ironing water. I'm on a fucking motorcycle. And I'm like, what do you want me to do with that? Well, you have anything on the bike you can just throw away and put in there? Like, you mean my fucking clothes? She made me throw away five of my shirts so she could fit ironing water.

What the hell is ironing water? So it's like water you put in your iron, but it has smell to it. So it's like, yeah! I'm like, who the fuck uses ironing water anymore? My clothes are going to smell so good. Yeah, so I basically threw away like literally half of my clothes to fit her fucking ironing water and I was just so pissed

but you know I had to let her do it you know what I mean you still got your bike yep so I have a newer bike so you can pull up the clip of him at the old gym yeah so I don't have that one anymore I got a newer one so the big Ford dealers I work at the the seventh largest Ford dealership in the country.

And they built me my own facility. But they also own all the Harley dealers in town. They built you a gym inside the Ford dealership? Inside the Ford dealership. And that's where the employees and stuff work out? So I go there twice a week. And I train all the diesel mechanics, any of the gas mechanics that want to come in. Oh, you were saying, yeah, they got to lift heavy ass pieces, right?

All kinds of injuries. Because think about this. You know, you got a big, they also work on commercial vehicles too, like box trucks. So now you're leaning over these hoods, picking up these huge parts off these diesel engines. One of the tires and rims on one of those trucks weighs 325 pounds and most of those guys don't work out. Could you imagine moving those all day? Oh, God. Yeah.

That's where I come in on the bike. Yeah. You remember when we put smoky on the back and I pulled a fat wheelie with him on there. He was so happy. So this was me coming back from a trip. That was probably one of my favorite bikes. That's a sick bike. That was a one 20 cubic inch road glide.

When that bike was, that was one of my favorite. And you could tell him way more bloated. Face is a bit rounder. Got some more cheeks. Yeah, sandals, dog. So I rode sandals like literally all the way across the country. God, you're so fat right there.

You look like Jesse Burdick. I know. Way stronger though. Oh, look at the helmet. Yeah. Helmet bench pressing. Safety first. How many reps do I do here?

I don't even remember. Still got some veins on the bicep though. Mm-hmm. What's your best with 225? 63. Jesus15 ever do that uh 32 so i've done 32 with 315 32 reps with 323 with 225 20 22 with 405 and 11 with 500 we were we were both a little more bloated back then kind then you were already starting to get leaner then though y'all have some double chins yeah well you want a backup chin was this 2015 probably somewhere in there yeah this is about right after i squatted the all-time world record raw yeah yeah just whipped from equipment so i was already getting dude i was way thicker

than that five years before that oh so i was just starting to get more athletic there. This would have been around 2017. This is Bill trying to hang with me on the bench. And it not working out well for me. I could cheat better than you on the bench. You could. You were a fucking animal. Man, I can't believe this was seven years ago.

It's just time just goes by so fast. This was even at the other gym, wasn't it? Yeah. Was that gym bigger than this one? I can't remember. That gym was a little bit smaller than this one, probably. It was much smaller than this one. Yeah, we have the turf and all that shit.

This one's quite a bit bigger. The worst part about that whole thing is that's a 3X shirt. You filled it out quite well. Where can people find it where can they order uh the manuals you have on your website and where can they pick up a bench press and all the different stuff we did oh that was today or yesterday um so winningstrength.com has all the stuff obviously if you're on instagram uh real matt winning because there's a lot of fake ones out there um is i show a lot of fake ones out there. I show a lot of the training clips that we do.

The YouTube channel is just Winning Strength. We show a lot of different ways to train. We put a lot of the more detailed information, kind of like what we went over in the podcast, on the Patreon channel. And I show every workout, every rep, everything I do at the highest tier. The next tier, 25, we show three times a week and what all my firemen and my businessmen do. And then we have two other tiers where we show weight loss and 50 plus if you're retired. I wanted to create some other tiers that were really affordable for people. So they wouldn't go in and just do stupid shit like we see all the time. So with that, we put a lot of special projects on there. And then over the next six to 10 months, we're going to flip the website over on a spot to a membership.

And then what they'll be able to do is get special like seminar footage videos, me doing like one and two hour tutorials on squatting or delafting. And then they just pay a monthly fee and they can go on there and see anything they want to see at all times. And then they'll even get manuals for free. So I think that might be a better idea. idea plus we can protect it a little bit better too um but yeah the the manuals and stuff i mean in my opinion and like i said everybody has their opinion but have you have you looked into a couple of my manuals or seen any of them you used to program for our gym and stuff and then you uh you sent me a thing a long time ago uh for my son jake yeah and so I'm very familiar with it.

I haven't seen this manual, some of the manuals specifically. So the newer ones, we put a lot of, I put a lot of papers and research into them. So not only do we train smart, but we also back it in the manuals. And they can just get that from your website? Yeah. And that's why Human Kinetics asked me to write a book on training, which they didn't even ask Louie to do,

which I thought was really impressive. Louie had books out, but not necessarily a published author by a reputable publisher. They're the books that I had reading in college. And they're like, we want a functional conjugate training book from you with everything that you've learned. And I'm like, okay. So point being is a lot of that is spawned from they saw the manuals how successful they were how much information and time and effort i put into them basically just wanted me to conglomerate it down into an educational book we already got like 50 professors that want them to use them in their class how long do you think it's going to be until it's uh i know you said it's going to be a few

years i've been busting ass on i got nine chapters laid out in my computer i got them each about 60 to 70 percent done then it's going to go through editing. My guess is I should have everything done written wise by January, February. And then I want to have it go through editing. It's going to have to go through editing for probably four or five months to add the right graph. So I have the graphs that I want in the book already there, but they're not my graphs. So we have a copyright issue. So I'm going to have to make my own graphs well their human kinetics does all that with the editing yeah so i'm hoping that it's available by the end of 24 nice that's the goal but they said once the book's done and ready to

print it's one year to get it right to get it on the table because it's going to be a hardback which is like science practice strength training which to me is like putting me in that legend status you know like and kramer is going which to me is like putting me in that legend status, you know, like in Kramer's going to help me polish up the anatomy and physiology. It's kind of his last hurrah to help me with it. I messaged him and basically begged him like, dude, I know you don't owe me anything, but it would be an honor for you to help me with this book.

He's like, fuck. Yeah. Yeah. So he's, he's all about it. So him and Kramer, I'm going to get Voight to do a little bit probably on nutrition. So I got some heavy hitters helping me with this book, which I think is going to be one of the better ones ever written, especially in conjugate. But I read, I like Bompas and I like those books, but you can tell me if I'm wrong, but when I read those, I don't get as much out of them as I think I would. Like they're there. You have to be highly educated to really understand what they're saying. And the application of the knowledge is very vague. That's a piece, a lot of shit together. You have to piece. They don really understand what they're saying and the application of the knowledge is very vague. That's a piece of a lot of shit together.

You have to piece a lot of shit together. They don't really give you like a summary. So I want to break it down. Super training is really bad that way. It's really bad, yeah. Because super training is more of like a dictionary. Yeah. It tells you a lot of shit, but it doesn't tell you how to put it all together.

I haven't read super training. I need to get that. Yeah. I don't want to do a book that way so i want to do it that way but um but yeah so um i would say that the youtube is a great way to see kind of what i do what my thought processes are i mean it basically breaks down a lot of shit we talked about in a higher depth and we really just made the patreon to help with the cost of youtube channels and shit i mean i'm paying a fucking media guys like five Gs a month just to give out free videos.

That's what I try to get people to understand. I'm like, you're free to use. Ain't fucking free to me, you know? So it was more to the, hey, let's support Matt Winning and help him out with getting out better content. So that's kind of what we did. Do you have any desire to be like a teacher

and maybe certify people in all things related to Matt Wenning? That's Kinetic's idea. So they want to launch the book. They want to sign – they signed me to a deal. They want me to sign a three-edition deal. So it would be first, second, and third editions. We're talking like 15 years.

And they're like the next step is we want to create a certification on your training methods but through human kinetics, which is fucking crazy. I mean, that's like NSCA level shit. So what I would like to do is talk to the NSCA and see if I can have a branch off of the CSCS. It's a conjugate thought process because they did it with tactical, but I'm not really impressed with what they did with it because they piecemeal it together and it's a good test, but it's not great. And if I can have control over the test, because a lot of people don't know, but I designed the West side barbell certification but when i left i let louis keep it

and then he done the test down so people could pass it we gave it to the people at west side barbell and three people passed it me uh louis and george halbert that test was hard as fuck yeah the first couple questions i'm like whoa, whoa, I'm in for it. Fucking A. So I had an 85% pass rate, and it was brutal. We only had three people pass in the gym that trained that way, which isn't uncommon. A lot of them weren't highly educated. But my point is that I would like to have a really high-level certification that you really need to know your shit to get.

I think that's a big separator right now. They become about money instead of education. And I want to get to that point maybe in five years where the money's not an issue to me. I want people that have that stamp of approval. They're really trendsetters in the field. That's my goal. Thanks so much for your time today. Appreciate it.

Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.