Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 110 - Eating Lifting Living

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

If Mark Bell is going to teach you how to lift, he must first teach you how to live. Today we're talking about Mark's current diet, what his lifting looks like post bodybuilding show and as mentioned above, Mark want to help you become a better person by teaching you how to live. Rewatch the live stream: https://youtu.be/zrKpvtQQQAI ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

What's happening? Oh, wait, what? Yep, it's that time again. What are we doing? What? You just hit the button? I hit the button, so you gotta speak into the... Oh my god, are we gonna go without any advertising or anything? We're just gonna roll right into this? We're not gonna tell people about the, uh, what is it?

10% off they can get? That's just crazy talk. We wouldn't do that. No, we wouldn't do that. We wouldn't tell you guys how to get 15% off all slingshots at markbellslingshot.com. Enter code POWERPROJECT. I don't know why I got tongue twisted on the easiest part.

Yeah, but we don't want to have advertising on the show. Nope. No. Not here. But if somebody wanted to, they could use that. Yeah, we just wanted to help someone out. We can, but we're not going to. Hypothetically speaking.

We don't do that here. And there's a rewards program on markbellslingshot.com that you can sign up for, and you can learn about different sales that we have going on and different things that we have going on. You can get early access to some new stuff. We've got a lot of new shit going on over here. That sounds interesting.

I know. A lot of new things, you know. But, you know, if you don't want to be part of it, I guess, there's no big deal. It's on you. You don't want to be a champion. It's understandable. You want everyone big deal. It's on you. You don't want to be a champion. It's understandable. You want everyone else to get an edge on you.

Hey, how about the football game the other night? I don't know if you had a chance to check out Aaron Rodgers, but he was going nuts. That guy was going crazy. He's so consistently good. How's he so goddamn good? You know, he ended up going out of the game with a knee injury. Guy kind of fell on him.

And it actually looked like it hurt pretty bad because, like, both of Aaron Rodgers' knees, like, slammed together. And then the guy landed, like, 280 pounds or whatever on top of him. So it didn't look like it was fun. He probably hasn't been using the hip circle as much this offseason then. He would have been able to push his knees out. Yeah, he would have been able to push his knees out. Yeah. He would have been able to survive that. No problem. But, uh, as it turns out, you know, they were getting crushed and he brought

them back and they, they won. And, um, it was just cool. It was just cool to watch, you know, football this year, right off the bat, uh, has been awesome. It's been fantastic. And, you know, people, so many people are making such a big deal about the rules and the hitting, you know, people hitting each other in the head and stuff. Look, man, this is a real, this is a real thing that's happening.

These athletes are putting themselves on a line. And, um, I agree. It can be too much sometimes. Um, when I played football, uh, back in the leather helmet days, uh, when I was playing football, like with a quarterback would scramble out of the pocket and you were taught just to kill him. You know, you were taught just that's the best guy on the team probably. So it's your job just to absolutely go level them. Like, and if you got to stick your helmet in the guy's back or whatever, then you go and you punish the guy as much as you can and make sure he tries to never run the ball again. You know, that's, that's what you're trying to do. And that's football. And it does have an aggressive, uh, nature to it. And, uh, you know, I agree with some of the comments where people are like, well, Hey, if you don't, you know, that's, that's what you're trying to do. And that's football. And it does have an aggressive, uh, nature to it.

And, uh, you know, I agree with some of the comments where people are like, well, hey, if you don't, you know, don't want football head injuries and don't play football, but at the same time, it is a great sport and it's a lot of fun if we can play it safer. And if we can end up, uh, with not such a negative result, I mean, a lot of these people, a lot of these guys are, uh, that have, um, uh, some of these brain injuries are hurting themselves, hurting other people. And, um, you know, it appears that that's kind of the way that we may have lost our buddy, uh, Jason Harrison, uh, looks like he had, you know, some head injuries and,

uh, he ultimately, uh, took his own life, which, you know, who he can't really predict, uh, what's going to happen to somebody, you know, one way or the other. Um, but you know, it seems like in this case, it definitely was a determining factor. And if you ever saw the concussion movie, I know a lot of people had a lot of negative things to say about that too. But I think the guy that discovered this and the guy that uncovered a lot of this information, um, I think he did a great job. I think he did a great service and I love watching MMA. I'm a huge UFC fan. I've watched every UFC from UFC one all the way to watching the one that was on the other night with Tyrone Woodley, which is like 228 or 226. Yeah.

And you know, I've, I've seen every single one of them. I love watching it, but if they can figure out ways, uh, to keep these guys safer and, uh, they, you know, prevent the other athlete from kneeing the guy in the head while he's down or, or kicking him in the face, you know, that in pride, he used to do that soccer kick, which is pretty kind of cool to watch.

I ain't gonna lie. It's kind of fun. But at the same time, look, do we need that? Does that have to be necessary for the competition? Probably not. So if we can make it a little safer, and UFC, they wear gloves, and they got some different rules, and they change the rules with how much weight the guys can lose and some of these things

to try to make it less insane, less barbaric. Right. Did you see, uh, Jessica Andrade or Andrade, Andrade, I think that's how you pronounce her name. That, that one punch KO. That was a really nice knockout. Dude, that was a chick in a strawweight division. That was a really, oh my gosh. That was a really nice punch. And you know, that's the thing that we like to see, right? Like we like to see the hard collision, you know, like to see the intensity because that's kind of what a lot of competition is about. And unfortunately, sometimes that's the thing that could lead to a lot of these head injuries. But the quality of the football in the first week I thought was really good.

You know, the offenses, they're stumbling and messing around a little bit, and it takes the offenses a little bit of time to get everything clicking just right. But once the second half and a lot of the games came up, then the team started to do a little bit better. But all in all, I saw a lot of close games. My stupid-ass Jets, they're on tonight. And it's not easy being a Jets fan, but hopefully

they'll do a little bit better this year than they did last year. I think the Raiders are on tonight too. I think so. I'll check the schedule right now. The one game that I was able to pay attention to was the Niner game. I've been a Niner fan since forever. I just haven't been watching much lately.

I thought for sure they were going to get blown out. Then I blink and I look and I'm like, oh gosh they're one score away and then I was like hey this is getting interesting then dumbass jumped off sides I don't know who it was oh and then they but they still had another chance like an illegal man downfield or something stupid yeah but no you're right it was a it seemed like it was a great opening week. The 49ers looked good. They played pretty well.

It's a strong defense. Their quarterback. Jimmy G, yeah. Their quarterback was doing well. Yeah, they made some good plays. You know, speaking of a Niners quarterback, I know we talked a little bit on the last podcast, too, about Kaepernick. And people get all up in arms about this guy too.

And, you know, life presents some really interesting and weird opportunities. Like, I don't know how Colin Kaepernick ended up in this situation. I mean, I know he didn't kneel for the flag and the anthem and that kind of thing. But man, what a weird, I don't know, what a weird turn of events. Colin Kaepernick's on a commercial. I don't know if you guys have seen this commercial.

First of all, this commercial by Nike, like Nike should just run our country for us. They might as well just run our, they might as well just make decisions for us. I know people are thinking, oh, it's a bad idea, but Nike, they always know how to get attention. They always do a good job of it. And the commercial is great. It's really well-written. Um, it's Colin Kaepernick is talking the whole time and you don't realize it's him. Then you see this giant

ass Afro and he realized it's him talking the whole time. Um, but he talks about like, Hey, it's not, you know, why just, why just be the best runner in your school? Why not be the best runner ever? Uh, why not dream bigger than just basketball? And it cuts to a shot of LeBron James talking in front of a group. Um, and it's just this kind of concept of having big dreams and stuff that we talk about here on the podcast all the time. Don't just play a sport if you only have one hand. Make it to the NFL.

It shows the guy that's in the NFL right now with one hand. It's just a cool message. I really liked it. I thought it was cool. But, yeah, then Kaepernick's at the center of all this. And the thing that's weird about it is, is that Colin Kaepernick in no way, shape or form is on the level of some of the athletes that they showed in this video. You know, they showed LeBron James. They showed one of the Williams sisters. Like they showed some of these all-time greats in their

in their field and capper yeah here it is yeah it's a skating in the beginning and stuff and kaepernick uh in his own right was a fantastic athlete he was a great athlete and he did well for the 49ers for two or three years um but then for whatever reason whether it's his skills diminished or people figured him out or whatever the case was, uh, he just wasn't able to, uh, keep up. And so that's kind of where some of the controversy is too. Obviously there's a lot of people that genuinely hate the fact that he wouldn't stand for the flag and, and those kinds of things. But whatever your opinion of him is, really did step into uh he stepped into

something awesome with this uh this whole nike thing and nike's sales and all these different things have uh improved quite a bit this is like a little bit longer version of the commercial even looks like it's actually the first time i even see any of it i just heard about it and i've just been seeing the memes but i haven't actually watched anything. Yeah, it was actually, you know, I think what sparked all this and what made it into the memes that you saw was a billboard that was in San Francisco. That's a sick dunk by LeBron, by the way. Puts the ball through his legs. He's like in junior high too, I think. I know.

LeBron has one of the highest verticals in the history of the NBA. I don't know if people know that. But LeBron can pretty much touch his head on the rim. It's pretty insane. It's scary. And there's Kaepernick. But I don't know. People just want to tear everything apart all the time.

And I'm just thinking, shit, man, that's a retired football player. He gets to make some money. That's cool. But people are just so mad. And so they get so, I don't know, they just get on these sides and they get all fired up. Yeah. And I don't really know what there's to be mad about, I guess. But I don't know.

Yeah. I've been kind of thinking about people just getting off teams. Not talking about the NFL, but I'm pro this, pro that. Fuck Android, I got an iPhone, even though we know iPhones are a little bit better. But no, because it causes unnecessary arguments and bullshit like that. It's kind of stupid.

Yeah, to be so pro- or so pro powerlifting or pro vegetarian or pro, um, you know, actually it's not, it's definitely not a bad thing to be pro anything. Um,

the problem is when you become anti something else, that's the biggest issue. Um, and, and I've made the mistake, you know, I made the mistake of saying,

you know, being a vegetarian is dumb. I've never tried to be a vegetarian. So I actually, I have no experience with it. So I really don't know. Um, and I also don't know what the research says on being a vegetarian. I never really like even looked it up. Um, but we're so quick to judge.

And that is kind of the fun part of being a human being is that we do get to kind of sit back and play armchair quarterback and be like, Oh, look at that guy. He's an idiot. Or, Hey, did you see what this girl posts on Instagram? She's so stupid.

Or she's, you know, I can't believe they did this or she did that. Or he did that. It's like, it is fun to like kind of do that kind of stuff. If they really want to do this, they need to do that.

Not what they're doing. Yeah. Right. We got all the answers. Yeah. We know, we know what's going on. Just need to get my shot. Yeah, exactly.

But it is just funny how we're so quick to judge everything right away. And people do that with me a lot with the diet stuff. Obviously, I have a book called The War on Carbs, which is sitting here on our table. I call it The War on on carbs just to get, it's a way to grab some attention. And the book is about not eating carbs, but it doesn't mean that I think that you should do that for the rest of your life. I've explained the diet many times over, but at the ketogenic style diet, in my opinion, and from what I've seen and from helping a lot of people here and a lot of people around the globe. Whenever I put anybody on a keto diet for two or three weeks, it's a really good introduction to other forms of dieting because they're like, if you can survive not eating some carbohydrates

for, I don't know, two, three week period, then everything else that you do will seem easier. I don't know if it is easier or not, but it will seem like it's easier. And also just the awareness factor that goes with it. I'm like, Andrew, no carbs next two weeks. And you're like, shit, man. If you don't really know much about nutrition, you're like, what does that even mean? Like, wait, can I have yogurt?

Like, nope. Can I have fruit? Nope. What about orange juice? Yeah. You got to really investigate and pay attention and, uh, read a lot of food labels and do a lot of things for yourself,

which is the magic of, of, uh, of growth and the magic of, um, of getting better is going to always come from the things that we do for ourselves and not the things that are done for us or the things that are done to us. Absolutely. Um, things done to you would be like a massage things done for you would

be like stretching um my sister-in-law the other day she sent me a message about how she got a massage and she felt really good and the person uh recommended an epsom salt bath and uh i said you know what i said that's first of all that's, first of all, that's great. You got a massage. It's great to take care of yourself that way. I get massages too. But I want to share some of my experience with you just in general of how I feel good nowadays, because she was saying, you know, she's got some injuries getting banged up a little bit. And I just said, when you start to take care of yourself in as many different areas as you can, then your body doesn't need anything fancy to heal from.

The body will heal itself. So things like icing, which I just did a minute ago because my elbow got a little throbby because I went a little heavier than I should have when I was lifting. But the point is, is if you are paying attention and you don't lift a little bit heavier than you should, and you are, like, I knew that that was going to be a little bit of a roll of the dice today. But when you keep things consistent and when you start to pay attention to all the things that your body values, which is the food that it takes in, the sleep that it needs, the activity that it needs. How are you coping with stress in your life? You know, how are you doing with relationships in your life? There's so many things to really look at, right?

And it can be overwhelming at times, but when those things are intact and somebody says, hey, how's your training going? You can say, you know what? This is the best training I've ever had in my life. And you'll be able to say that one month, two months, three months, 12 months, 24 months from now, you'll be able to tell that same person when they ask you again, you'll be able to say that again if you're taking care of yourself all the time. But if you're just thinking that a massage or a complex or some of these things are

going to like kind of heal you abusing the crap out of yourself and doing these things that your body's not really normally prepared to do, then you're making a mistake. Those things are all add-ons. They can all help. They are all there to assist uh you but if you're not doing your 10 minute walks if you're not getting proper sleep um if you're not don't have proper nutrition you can just throw a lot of these things out the window and you bet your ass to your elbow your knee your lower back all these things are going to hurt all the time so they're just supplements just like actual supplements right a hundred percent and and again, I'm not saying they're not effective because if somebody listened right now being like,

no, not my ART doctor. I go to him and he fixes everything. I'm not saying those things aren't effective. They are extremely effective and I use them all. I try to use as many as I can. But I also can honestly say that in some sense, they are a waste of time and money. The only reason why they're really worth anything is if you feel like they're worth something.

That's about it. I can't really tell you for sure that I've ever had a specific work done to the point where I'm like, yep, that really fixed me. I've had things that make me feel a little bit better. I've had things that help a little bit, but I've never things that make me feel a little bit better. I've had things that help a little bit. Uh, but I've never had anything. Um,

I never had anything help me as much as me helping myself. And just put it to you that way. It is nice to spend money and to say, which sounds kind of funny, but it's nice to spend money and say, yep, I spent 50 bucks on my health and, and that should be better. That's all serious. I'm taking it. Yeah. I just, I spent 50 bucks on my health and that should be better.

That's how serious I'm taking it. Yeah. I just, I got a hundred bucks. I got a gym membership and I paid the trainer. I paid him 325 bucks a month. I'm spending almost 500 bucks a month on my fitness. That's taken care of. It's not taken care of because there's a lot of things that you have to do to set the wheels in motion to make sure that's great.

That's really good. That's good that you did that. I'm happy for you because that's smart, especially if you don't know what you're doing. Um, but you could keep the money and, uh, you can just make sure that you're moving and grooving and doing all the right things. Andrew's been obsessed with this sleep doctor, so we're going to have to have him on the podcast. And maybe, you know, maybe as a trial run, we can have Andrew sleep with him. And you can tell us how he is, how is the sleep doctor in bed?

That would be great because I tried to get a sleep aid in the form of a breathing strip. Oh, a sleep aid. I was like, is this some breathe right strip so just to sleep aid i was like some hot chick or something's gonna be sleeping well i did have a hot chick with me but as far as for snoring i try to get you know just some more airflow going and my girl was like nope you still snored just not as bad i'm like oh that's good to know does she have a pillow that she can smother you with i i believe so. Yes. Okay. Those are good. That'll help her. She's really nice though. So she'll try to like nudge me to get me to like roll over, do something to where I won't, but it doesn't help. And oddly, she said somewhere around the

six o'clock, uh, 6am hour, I'll just go full on bear mode and just snore like crazy. That's awesome. So I don't know what that has to do with anything, but. Have you snored for a long time? Yeah. You're like 30 years old, right? 33. And yeah, I have. And, you know, I've never really done anything.

What about your dad? He snore? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't know. People, you know, people that don't snore, I think, are they more rare nowadays? I would imagine so, yeah. Any idea if you drink, do you snore or you're not sure? You don't really drink, but I'm just saying.

Back in my day, when I did, when I'd get, like, hammered, yeah, I would wake up, like, sore throat because I was done. Mouth open. Yeah, yeah. yeah, I would wake up like sore throat cause I was done. Mouth open. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, if, if, if I'm really tired and I pass out, like just from just living, uh, I tend to snore significantly more. I wonder if there's anything good to snoring. That's what we have to ask the sleep doctor. Like I asked Joel, uh, when we had, uh, Joel Green on the podcast, I asked him about like pooping and farting. And he said that,

that pooping is like, yeah, pooping is pretty healthy. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty good for you. Yeah. Someone on the live chat just said people who do steroids fart a lot. That's awesome.

Oh man, that trend. Yeah. Uh, but no, yeah, this book's been, it's been awesome because,

uh, just a quick quick like uh what's his name matt matthew walker matthew walker and he was on joe rogan's podcast yeah he set out he he wanted to be a doctor but he kind of found out that you just oh you have a problem here's a pill oh that causes another problem. Here's something else. And he was going in a big circle of finding answers to questions that just make more questions. So, he's like, okay, well, let's get into neurology and study the brain. And he wanted to learn more about sleep, only to find out we didn't know much about it. So, he said like, all right, cool, this is it. And he went out and started studying, doing tests left and right. And it's really fascinating.

Yeah, he had tons of information when I was listening to him. And that is somebody that we'll be getting on the podcast pretty soon. We got some great people coming up on the podcast. You guys are going to really, really enjoy some people that can kind of, you know, some people that have simple answers to things that you've always wondered about, whether it's like getting bigger, getting more jacked. We got, uh, my boy, our boy, Doug, uh, coming on, on the podcast soon. He, yeah, he was, uh, or he is a professional bodybuilder, uh, Doug Frusci. Um, we have Ian Danny, who is a, uh, like a performance enhancement, like specialist.

He works with a lot of NFL players, a lot of, a lot of other athletes as well. And he's a guy who's going to know, like when we're talking to him, he's going to know a ton about like amino acids, sleep. He's going to know a lot about supplements for recovery and just nutrient timing and all these things. Right. And we've been working on, uh, I'm forgetting the guy's name right now, the wheat belly guy. Um, I believe his name is Davis or Davies. I'm having a hard time remembering his name right now, but anyway, a lot of these people are brilliant. They start to, they, they have the information. Um, they have a lot of information

that can really help a lot of us because we don't know, you know, I'll say, um, they have a lot of information that can really help a lot of us because we don't know, you know, I'll say, Hey, have you ever tried to eat this? And somebody will say, yeah, man, I don't know, man. I, you know, eat that. And I, I feel really tired. And you're like, what? Like, I love eating that. What are you talking about? You know, Hey man, you ever try, uh, you know, you ever try eating New York strips or like whatever it is. And then you find out that someone's like, yeah, man, it really rocks my stomach. And you're like, huh? But we're all just very, we're all very the same.

And the human body needs protein, carbs, and fat, and we need them to run off of. But the way that we digest everything is so vastly different. And the way that we digest them, certain parts of our life are different. Maybe you have extra stress in your life and nothing's going down very well, or, um, maybe you just have had poor nutrition for a while, or maybe you're coming off a big diet or whatever, you know, and it's really hard to kind of make sense of all these things. Um, Joel Green helped me a lot with my, uh, diet and, um, you know, people talk a lot about reverse dieting and, uh, you hear that a lot from, um, uh, you hear that a lot from a lot of, uh, people that help people with like diet prep and some of these different

things. And, um, for myself, you know, Joel was able to have me do some of these unconventional things that you wouldn't think about, uh, to kind of reverse diet me out of, uh, the bodybuilding show. And I couldn't believe the effect that it had. I mean, at first my body kind of swelled up a lot. I gained a lot of weight. I was holding a lot of weight, a lot of water weight and like my ankles and shit got a little swollen. My fingers got a little puffy and I was like, damn, I was like, Joel, what do you, you know, what do we got going on here? But I never really went over, I never went over 20 pounds over my like stage weight, which is probably 230. And I weighed 250 at one point.

And that all leveled back out and I'm normal-ish. I'm not as lean as I was on stage just because the dietary restrictions aren't as harsh and the cardio is not as intense. Yeah. Someone was asking earlier, did you have any issues with like excess skin or anything from just, I mean, in general, I don't think you had any issues, but like when you were 300 plus and then you slimmed down. Yeah. No, you know, I never, I never got any, I never had any excess skin. I never had anything like hanging off. And I think, you know, I can sit here and kind of like say that I think it's some sort of, you know, way that I dieted or whatever, but I think it's probably partially luck too.

I've seen people sometimes just lose like 30 pounds and they end up with like loose skin. So, I mean, I do think that, uh, uh, the knowledge that I have and the knowledge that I have surrounding me probably did help. Um, because from what I've heard, uh, keto diet, uh, can help quite a bit with some of that. And also, um, you know, I did some fasting and some different things. I think the way that you lose weight and the speed that you lose weight, I think is crucial. I did weigh 330 at one point, but I didn't go from 330 to 230. You know, I went from 330 down to like 290. And then I went back to 300 and then I went down to 275 and it took a long time.

I weighed 330 over 10 years ago, basically. So the whole process, uh, I took my time with it. Um, I like to think about it in stages and I think that that's the way everybody should do it. And I think that that's the way everybody should do it. For example, if you think you need to lose like 100 pounds, I would suggest that it's like a five-stage process and you just lose 20 at a time. But imagine if your goal was to lose 20 pounds over a three to four-month span.

Let's just say it was over a season. Like in the winter, I would like to lose 20 pounds, which you're like, oh shit, the winter, we got Christmas and Thanksgiving. But you could still lose that weight. Um, 20 pounds in four months is really not much. So if you were to think like, okay, it's a year and one month that it would take, or sorry, a year and maybe two months, uh, that it would take you to lose, you know, a hundred pounds, 125 pounds, something like that. Um, that, that would be, that wouldn't be that hard to do it if you're really thinking about taking your time.

Yeah. And then during the holiday season, it's almost like you're getting the most bang for your buck because if you do lose 20, you're actually probably losing somewhere closer to 30 because you would end up gaining 10 through that holiday season. That's a great point. And that's something that people, people should prep themselves. I mean, we should do a whole podcast on this, uh, coming up maybe like late October.

So as Halloween gets closer, it'd be really good to make a note of something like that for us to do, because a lot of people gain weight, um, and they hold it on, they hold on to it the rest of their lives. You know, people talk about like the freshman 15 where girls go away to college and they gain 15 pounds. Uh, well, people just don't even go anywhere necessarily for the holidays, but they will gain, I want to say the numbers like five or six pounds and that's for men usually. And probably women's probably in half, but could you imagine that?

I mean, imagine that you just, if that's all the weight you gained for the year, five or six pounds, but it happens, it happens every single year. That starts to add up. Yeah. It's like, oh man, what happened to Bob? And like, I don't know, he just, he keeps getting fatter and fatter and I don't have no. Yeah. Last Christmas, he wasn't that fat. Right.

Like, well, this year he did it again. But, you know, in terms of some of the things I did with Joel, it's kind of complicated and he and I will, we'll release information as I need to know more about what we did because I don't have a good understanding of it. I don't want to release or back information that I don't understand a little bit better. But I guess Joel refers to a lot of these foods as functional foods. And a functional food of choice that we utilized was grilled cheese sandwiches. sandwiches and I would just pound a fucking big ass grilled cheese sandwich with, um, some mustard on it and some jalapenos, uh, extra cheese, you know, it was important to have a lot of cheese on there. How about butter?

Like on the bread? Yeah, there was butter on the bread. I didn't even ask him about that. I was like, I might even ask. Um, and the most, most of the rest of the day leading up to that was low carb. And then we hit it hard with these. And it was two. It was two pretty big sourdough bread, which is your favorite.

Two sourdough. Andrew's like salivating. He's like, I'm listening. Because every time I go to Costco, I text Mark and I'm just like, so, sourdough back on the menu yet? Sourdough. You can have one sandwich. Okay. So I put these two nice bags back. That's awesome. Yeah. Now you have to just go somewhere and order a sandwich. Which is good because then I can't just keep

plowing through it. Right. And you know, that's a strategy right there. That's a strategy and people, it's a good strategy to have. Where do you have ice cream? At an ice cream shop, ice cream parlor, a yogurt, you know, uh, one of those yogurt places. Just don't buy ice cream because you know what's going to happen to you.

You're not going to slaughter it. Um, yeah, so we, so we did that. And, uh, part of the reason, you know, he's got the jalapenos. He, he likes those for fat burning purposes and he likes the calcium. Um, a lot of these things that we did, more information will come out on this kind of stuff and it'll become more commonplace to utilize these strategies. But if I had to sum it up, I would basically say Joel was able to counterbalance meals. So not in a caloric fashion though, in more like a hormonal digestive, digestive, digestive

way, rather than just it flat out being like a trade-off of calories. It wasn't like, Hey man, don't eat any food all day. And then we're going to have this grilled cheese sandwich. I still ate normal. And then I smashed a grilled cheese sandwich. Then there were some other things that we did where he said, okay, you know, you come in close to, we got to start to get you back towards your regular diet. Cause this is our luck's going to run out, you know? And the grilled cheese sandwich, by the way, was, was just every other day.

The eating in between that on the grilled cheese sandwich days, it was a keto pattern of eating a very low carb style of eating on the other days. It was just more like my regular bodybuilding style diet, um, except for still less restriction, a little bit more fat because the bodybuilding shows over. There's no reason to eat like a rabbit. And, uh, the other strategy that we employed is he said, okay, over the next couple of days, I want you to just to smash, absolutely smash breakfast. I want you to have a two to 3000 calorie breakfast. And, uh, I tried man. And it was, it was actually, uh, it was actually pretty hard. You know, for me, I have to be a little bit careful of like what it is that I eat.

Um, I can eat pancakes, but a lot of times if I go to like, um, just a regular restaurant, they're going to cook the pancakes with some weird oil and they're going to cook it with, they're going to have milk in there and it's just going to blow my butthole apart and it's going to be a nightmare. So I gotta be kind of cautious with, with what

I do there. But anyway, my point is, is that we did some of this, you know, this weird version of reverse dieting and it worked great. You know, I feel really good. Yeah. I'm fatter than I was on stage, of course, because that happens to everybody. Uh, you're going to hold a hold a little bit more body weight and, uh, stuff like that. I was still, I'm not as tan as I was.

Um, but I feel really good. I feel really strong. Lifts are coming back. I did 405 for a triple with a pretty close grip today. And just two weeks ago I did, or three, right before the meet, I did 405 for one. Just a few days out from the competition. It was kind of hard. These three weren't that, weren't that difficult to do and, uh, getting stronger and working on getting bigger. And, uh, so some of

these techniques have helped now, uh, you know, food wise, I've moved back into a, uh, I would say it's probably almost more like a vertical diet. You know, it's very similar to Stan Efferding's vertical diet because the vertical diet is a hybrid between like a low carb diet and a bodybuilding style diet. We have carbs for energy. We've got carbs to supply us for good, strong, powerful workouts to make sure that we have really, really good workouts. But you don't have so many carbs that it makes you fat. That's a really critical thing. For those of you that are checking out the vertical diet by our boy, Stan Efferding, that's something that you need to understand.

Brian Shaw is eating a thousand carbs a day. Haptor Bjornsson's eating a thousand carbs a day, but that diet's not for you. A thousand, a thousand carbs a day is most likely not in the cards for a lot of the people that are listening to the show what i've had andrew do is andrew is in between andrew weighs what about 180 pounds yeah i haven't checked um a couple days here but i would be happy right now if i jumped on and said 180 some of the main things for andrew to do he already knows about sleep you know he knows how important that is so he needs to get minimum seven hours hopefully you're getting more like eight that'll help a lot because because we're trying to pack on some size pack on some

muscle pack on some more strength the main thing for andrew is to get in frequent meals and he's been doing a great job of that. The other thing that's equally important is the types of food that we have meeting. And we've chose, now we've mixed things up a little bit. We just went from a lower fat phase to now bringing in some more fat again. And that was just to kind of reset everything.

I think it's important to reset and refocus here and there. So we had to move into some leaner steaks. He can have any form of lean red meat. He could have bison, elk, any of those things. If he's got access to those things, you don't actually need those things. If you don't want or if they're expensive, that's fine. You find what you can make work for yourself.

expensive, that's fine. Um, you find what you can make work for yourself. Um, back in the day when I, uh, was broke as a joke, I would just drain fat off of my burgers, you know, like there's a lot of ways of doing all these things, you know? Um, and, uh, I think that's meat wise. Oh, we got some fish in there. Cause you like a yellowtail. Yeah. Thank goodness.

It's the first, any type of seafood that I've ever liked and it's really good. Guys, you got to try different foods. You have to try some different foods. I know the fish thing is not always easy for everybody because the texture can be weird, but you got to try some different foods. Don't just try it once.

Try it a few times. It could be something that can really have a positive impact on your physique because the more food options that we can get, uh, the more likely you are to not be bored, the more likely you are to not be craving everything. That's another thing that Andrew was pointing out earlier today in reading some of this stuff from Matthew Walker was that your decision-making skills go out the window when you're not sleeping. Yeah.

Your cravings are just insane when you're not sleeping. You're going to make bad decisions. And that's been proven too, not even just food-wise, but it's probably been proven more so on the road. People get into accidents all the time. I mean, unfortunately, Aubrey Marcus got in a really bad accident. Yeah. It was because he a really sleep deprived yeah scary uh statistic and it's it could be a combination of both but

it's basically saying um falling asleep behind the wheel kills more people than drunk driving does and it's it could be a like i said, a combination of both, but one, you're reacting really, really slow. And the other, you're just gone. Like you're not, you don't react at all until it's, you know, well, obviously until it's too late. Man, it's, it's bad, man. When you fall asleep, like, I don't know about you, but I've fallen asleep pretty bad in the car before. And I'm like, man, how, how long was I out for? You know?

I had a job where I was driving six hours every single day so it was from uh woodland to tracy to livermore back around south sacramento i know all those areas that's rough yeah so i would make that loop every single day wow and dude i tried everything nothing would keep me awake have you ever hallucinated before when you're not tired yeah yeah heck yeah it used to happen to me all the time when i when i would drive i'd drive from uh Nothing would keep me awake. Have you ever hallucinated before when you're not tired? Yeah. Heck yeah. It used to happen to me all the time when I would drive. I'd drive from Columbus, Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky. And man, I would see some weird shit in the road.

The scariest part is I would be on whatever freeway and exit this, exit 127. And then I blink and I'm all of a sudden at like exit 500. I'm just like, how the, where did I go for that? Like two hour drive that I just did. Like I didn't experience any of it. Ended up in a warp zone. Yeah. That was, that always tripped me out.

But as in regards to the decision-making, yeah. If you're sleeping less than six hours, you basically get the munchies. Like, like the exact same effect as weed. Right. You start wanting to reach for bad foods. I, uh,

during that prep that I did for the bodybuilding show, and, you guys are going to hear me refer to this bodybuilding show. I'm going to be like, uh, like Al Bundy, you know, like Al Bundy, always know, like Al Bundy

always talking about his old football days. His prime. Yeah, I'm going to be talking about that bodybuilding show that I did in 2018. That bodybuilding show.

I'm going to bring it up all the time. People are going to be like, fuck, man. He's still, you know, it's really sad, man. I remember Mark Bell,

he squatted 1,000 pounds, benched 800, and he's just fucking hanging on to that stupid-ass one bodybuilding show that he did. Or he didn't even look that good. We're going to have a flashback Friday, this Friday. Yeah.

What's he doing, man? Every Friday. Why does he keep talking about that? Anyway, those of you that have done a bodybuilding show, you know why I'm talking about it because it's something that you're never going to forget. It's funny because I know what a joke it is compared to these competitive bodybuilders that do it often, um, that I stuck it out for this nine week period. Like, you know, uh, anyway, it's just silly, but, uh, the discipline, the discipline for that show, um, it was, it was really intense and it was something that I can take the discipline from that show and I can utilize it in some

of these other aspects of my life. And the eating six and seven meals a day is something I'm going to use often. It's something I got Andrew using. And it's not like I didn't know about it before. Shit, man, I've been doing that stuff since I was probably like 16 or so. But you fall out of patterns with things. You fall out of favor with certain things. And you just get tired of doing certain things. What I really liked that Joel Green talked about on that podcast was how

human beings, they're going to ad lib their eating. And they've done it forever. They've been doing it since the beginning of time. Whatever's around, they're going to eat. I got berries. I'm eating them. There's a squirrel. I'm going to kill it.

I'm going to eat it. There's certain vegetables around. You're going to eat them too. Now, just you know that already, and so you know that you're going to grab for these different foods, and you're going to eat them too. Now just, you know that already. And so, you know that you're going to grab for these different foods and you're going to eat these different things. And it's just, it's just the way, it's just the way things are. So if you're on a diet and you're, let's, let's say that you're on a diet, but you have no plans of competing in a show, you're just trying to lose some weight. Every three, four, five days, whatever you deem necessary.

Let's just say once a week, if you're real apprehensive about even trying this once a week, just stay on your diet, but just kill tons of food that day. Still everything, everything within reason, maybe like, maybe you don't use butter. Typically, maybe use a little bit of butter. Maybe you normally use butter typically, maybe use a little bit of butter. Maybe you normally don't use ketchup, use a little bit of ketchup. Just try to make sure those things don't creep into the next day, but just have at it. You know, go ahead and go ahead and eat a large meal, even something like the sourdough bread. Crush your meal. And then if you want to eat some sourdough with some butter on it, crush like two or

three pieces, but try to do it after your meal. So that, that way, uh, you're not eating 17 slices of sourdough bread, you know, um, you should be killing it in the weight room. You should be training your face off. And so these extra calories are going to get from this one particular day. Shouldn't be breaking the bank. We're not, we're not in it for the moment. We're in it for the long term.

And I talk about it all the time. You know, if you want to be good at something, then it's going to take some effort. But if you want to be great at something, it's going to take a lot. You know, Andrew's made some huge improvements. Arms are getting bigger, getting in better shape. But it's going to be a while before he goes to a trade show with us and somebody that he doesn't even know goes, damn, dude. Like somebody that he knows and somebody that you've seen before and haven't seen you in a while, you'll probably get that reaction from some people. But it's going to take a little bit.

Not a little bit. It's going to take a lot of bit. It's going to take a lot of training. It's going to take a lot of training. It's going to take a lot of eating. When we go to one of these trade shows and they're like, dude, what the fuck? Why is your cameraman so jacked?

I'm like, I don't know. It's the way we roll around here. I'm sorry. I can't do anything about it. I can't make him any smaller. He just wants to be jacked. Yeah. And so all that kind of plays into all this.

And you have to pay attention on all fronts. It's not just the food. It's not just the food that you select. The food you select is important. Andrew and I are pretty much on similar diets. We got rice, we got potatoes. I like oatmeal, so I throw some of that in there. the carb list is like, there's not a ton. You know, if you want to throw in some vegetables, you can have some vegetables in there. Avocados are fair game. Those things are delicious. What about just like your everyday fruit, like strawberries, grapes, bananas? Yeah, I think fruit is totally fine.

You know, if we're trying to really like sharpen up at some point and we're trying to just, not that fruit would prevent you from getting tight and getting in good shape. But a lot of times you just start to eliminate a lot of stuff just to get rid of excess calories. And maybe the fruit would be like, if I think if I had fruit available to me during the bodybuilding stuff I was doing,

I probably would have eaten a lot of it because I'd be like, Oh my God, the taste, the taste is so damn good at that point. You're just like, oh my God, the taste, the taste is so damn good at that point. You're just like, oh my God, this is so good. When I'm trying to pound more food in, like I'll go to In-N-Out, normally I'll have like just hamburger patties, but if I want to eat more, I'll get cheese.

Is cheese okay? Yeah, cheese is great. You know, cheese, I love cheese. I love the calcium is a big factor in there. I don't remember particularly why Joel and why Stan Efferding likes it so much, other than just the bones and things like that. But I want to say there's some proof that calcium helps you lose weight, and I don't know the mechanism behind it. I don't remember if it was through your thyroid or what it is. But there's been some evidence of that, and I think that that's part of the reason why they like it. Now, cheese has protein in it.

It's got fat in it, and it just tastes great. You know, I saw a video with Rich Piana a while back, and I actually saw it right at, right, maybe it was right before I did my bodybuilding show. I can't remember if it was before or slightly after. But he said in the video, he said in the video, he said, I don't usually do things that I don't want to do. I've created a life for myself where I ain't got to do what I don't want to do. And he also said, I don't eat what I don't want to eat.

And that's actually a good rule to start to learn. Now, that doesn't mean you eat whatever you want though, because that's not a great option either. Because if you eat whatever you want, you won't have whatever you want. You won't have what you need. You won't have what you desire. You'll have what you desire in terms of taste, but those tastes only last a little bit. Those cravings, they come and they go. You get those cravings and they feel really strong. They usually only last a few minutes. They actually, and I've said this before on the podcast, you have a really rich, hardcore craving and it's freaking 11 o'clock at night.

Don't even think, just start to cook whatever it is, is like, that's one of your favorite things that's still on your list of foods that you're supposed to be eating. For me, one of the, one of the best things that I would make is just an omelet. I'd start cooking bacon. My wife would be like, what are you doing? It's 1130 at night. I'm like, I'm dying. I don't know why, but I want ice cream and it's a mess. So I don't want to eat ice cream and then eat all the cereal and then eat everything else that's in the thing.

So I'm just going to make this 3A omelet. It's got some avocado in it. It's got some cheese in it. It's got some bacon in it. And I'm going to be, you just omelet it's got some avocado and it's got some cheese in it it's got some bacon in it and i'm gonna be you just killed you killed the craving yeah mine is uh just eggs over easy with rice yeah there you go you just crushed it you know and again like maybe you do something that's a little outside of what you normally do you throw some butter on it so what you're not gonna get arrested right yeah it's mainly because i want eggs over easy with that sourdough bread. Oh, so good.

Because it turns all doughy. Gets all mushy. It's so good. But to stay dedicated to all this stuff is a really important thing. And when it comes to getting in enough sleep, this is a huge battle. It's not like you just all of a sudden say, oh, yeah, I'm going to get eight hours of sleep. Getting eight hours of sleep is hard. It's actually a pain in the ass in some ways.

It's a really long time to be on pause nowadays. I mean, you feel like, I feel like I can't afford it. I'm like, fuck, man, eight hours every day. I got to give up eight hours every day. I don't want to. I love waking up. I love working. I love getting up early. I love waking up. I love working. I love getting up early.

I love seeing the sun come up. I love cooking breakfast for my kids. I enjoy coming here to do the podcast. I love coming here and lifting. Maybe I don't love everything all the time every single day, but in general, I love all these things. I love seeing you guys. I love my family. I, you know, I don't want to be sleeping, you know, sleeping feels like I'm kind of missing

out on everything. I'm like, fuck, I want to get up. But the dedication to get to sleep in is really important. And I would like for the people that are listening to this message today to just try to pay a little bit more attention to it. And you don't have to go from getting five hours of sleep to getting eight. Just start slowly. Whatever way it is that you can get your ass to bed a little earlier, figure those things out. Does it make more sense for you personally to shower at night? Or does it make more sense for you personally to shower in the morning?

These are all things that you should have a discussion with yourself about and you should start to make sense of. Does it make sense for you to prepare your breakfast at night? And so it's ready in the morning. It may or may not work with your schedule. It may not work with your lifestyle. But if it makes sense, then you should probably do it because the day, the day will kick your ass. The day will kick your ass. The day will kick your ass.

And when you look at the clock and you're like, holy shit, it's 9.30? I know 9.30 doesn't sound late, but if you're falling asleep at 10.30, you're going to start to creep into missing out on the eight hours of sleep that we talked about. I always try to get everything done today because tomorrow is going to kick my ass. The day always figures out a way to mess you up. Something pops up. I got to go get gas. That means I got to

wake up even earlier to get to all this and that. Shit, I didn't meal prep potatoes like I did this morning. That slowed me down this morning. And potatoes take forever to cook. Who's got time for potatoes? I mean, you can pop them in the microwave.

Yeah, that's what I did, but they're the size of a football. You know, like, they're huge. So, you know, you check it. Nope, not done. Check it again. Damn it. Like, come on, man. I got things to do today.

Yeah. But, yeah, you're right. Just doing stuff today that, you know, prepping for tomorrow I think is huge you think you're going to have enough time but something always happens and then you're left with that excuse like oh well I meant to prepare but I'm just going to go to In-N-Out yeah yeah and you end up making making that mistake but I think that if you're I think if you're prepared I don't think I think that if you're, I think if you're

prepared, I don't think, I think that that will happen a lot less. Yeah. You know, the, the move of, I got food in the fridge that's already paid for, it's already accounted for, it's already cooked. It tastes pretty good. And it will go bad.

Yeah. It doesn't taste as good as, as, as in and out. But for you to walk past the fridge, get in your car, drive over to In-N-Out, and just stuff yourself with foods that will probably keep you more full, and they're going to make you miss other meals too, later in the day, and probably have you get the case of the fuck-its, right? Where you're like, I don't care what I eat now. It's just fuck it's right where you're like i don't care what i eat now uh it's just you're it's not even about willpower at that point you are plenty reasonable of enough person

to where you're like that doesn't really make any sense now if you forgot your food and you're like man i'm shit i'm i'm really hungry. You know what? I'm out of here. Me and Fat Marcus are going to In-N-Out. And you go to In-N-Out. That's different. That's different. You were put in a compromising position.

And you had a moment of weakness. And you couldn't fend it off. Those types of things you will lose on. But you can win if you work on getting ahead more often. And I see a lot of people, a lot of people just kind of get through their day and they're not getting enough from their day. And I think that if you are able to switch that mindset of, you ever ask somebody how they're doing and they're like, oh, hanging in there. you ever ask somebody how they're doing and they're like, Oh, hanging in there.

It's like, what do you like? First of all, asking somebody how they're doing, you know, if you're not, if you don't really know them that well, it's not that great of a question anyway.

If you're generally asking somebody, how are you doing? And it's different because if you know somebody, Andrew, how are you doing today, man? And you're like, great. I had a great day yesterday.

I went to see a movie with Jasmine. We had a good time, hung out with the wife, but if we don't really know each other, it's kind of not a great question because you're just going to be like, right. Yeah. It's almost like, Hey, how you doing? Is this an extension of hello? Yeah. Right. It's just a little extra, right? But what I see a lot of people doing is they're just, they're barely getting through their day. They're barely getting anything from their day. And therefore, when you ask them how they're doing,

they're like, well, I'm okay. I've been better. I hear that a lot. Oh, I'm hanging in there. What does hanging in there mean?

Like that sounds, that doesn't sound good at all. Like one slip and it's all over. Yeah. Yeah. Like I picture Tom Cruise. I picture Stallone cliffhanger. Yeah. That's what I picture Tom Cruise. I picture Stallone cliffhanger. Yeah.

That's what I picture. Yeah. He's hanging and you got to do the dramatic one arm. The other arm has to come off. Super dramatic. Yeah. It's like, and you know, some of this mindset of like that you're barely getting by or barely scraping by and you know, you know, these kinds of people. They're like, they have one bill after another

that just keeps piling up and piling up and piling up. And they're late on their rent. They're late with the phone. Their phone gets shut off. You go to go somewhere with them and their card doesn't work. You know, like just these things. It's like, man, you can prevent a lot of

this i understand like misfortune happens everybody we all get shit on and sometimes life can really be mean and unfair and people die and things happen right uh but those things happen to pretty much everybody and there's always these certain guys that it's like, man, can't you kind of see the light that all these things are snowballing on top of your ass because you're the actual problem and you need to take charge of this a little bit. If you can figure out ways of getting ahead, and a way to get ahead is when you start to prep a little bit for tomorrow. I'm not an organized person. And so I still end up places late. I was late here today. I wanted to train at 9. I got here at organized person. And so I still end up places late. I was late here today. I want to train at nine.

I got here like nine 40. Um, there's luckily for me, I set up my life to where it doesn't matter that much. Like no one's life was on the line or anything. I'm not a, luckily for everybody else, I'm not a surgeon or anything like that. Um, but it does suck because it puts the rest of the day, uh, back a little bit. Part of the reason why it takes me so long sometimes to get somewhere is because I do like to prepare. I like to kind of over-prepare. So even though I was prepared and I had some stuff ready from last night, I still am prepping.

I'm like, I need socks and I need underwear and I need this because I'm going to do the podcast. So I need that. I mean, those are things that I could still take care of earlier and get here at a better time. But luckily again, for me is I don't have these other things mounting and pressing that are going to all get jacked up. If I had a regular, if I had like a regular nine to five and I was late, first of all, they're not going to tolerate that very long before I'm in a lot of trouble.

Right. And maybe let's say they even do tolerate that a lot well now if i was supposed to go to the bank that day or i was supposed to run other errands i chewed up all my time by being late i don't have time for anything else now and that's what you see happening. And the day just keeps piling up and piling up, piling up. And you can actually extract some really awesome things from every single day rather than just getting through the day. So start to think about it that way. Start to think about how can, what can you pull from each day? How do you get the most out of each day?

Even just from a really simple perspective, I want to learn something today. Education is going to be what pulls you out of everything. A lot of people are searching for inspiration and they're looking for motivation. Those things are great. But education and experience are going to trump everything that you, anything else that you ever do. Those are going to be the things that are going to really, truly move you forward. When you say education, what do you, what types of education do you mean? I'm talking, you know, about expanding, expanding your mind, expanding

where you are currently. And that can look, that can look so different because sometimes traditional education can get in the way of being creative. Sometimes it can get in the way of actual true learning. There's a difference, too, between just getting information and actually learning. Learning stuff and learning a skill that you can actually like acquire and utilize is mainly what I'm talking about. Like when you can actually put something to use, then you become more useful and you become more useful. You become less useless and you become more valuable and you're more valuable to other people. And when you have more value to other people, I mean, this is human nature.

Like we want a pat on the back. We want somebody to say, Hey man, that's a good job. There's a reason why the craziest people in the world can't handle being in solitary confinement. You would figure, Hey man, that guy, that guy lost it, man. That guy's, that guy's off the wall. What's he care if he's by himself? Well, he cares about being by himself just as much as you do.

It's going to make him sad and depressed too. He doesn't want to be by himself. He's going to go even more crazy, right? Yeah. Like Hunter McIntyre was talking about, like, if you try to get somebody who's hyperactive to calm down, you're just going to make it 10 times worse. Oh, yeah. I remember him saying that. and he would know yeah that's crazy he had a rule that said he couldn't wake up before eight o'clock when he was a kid that's amazing yeah i know he he that guy's got that guy's that guy's a ball that guy's a ball of fire we gotta have him on the podcast

again um but yeah you know so in terms of like educating yourself maybe you're thinking about like oh where like i don't even know where i'd start well the easiest thing the easiest thing to do is to start with things that you actually like because that's going to be the stuff that's going to be easy to stay excited about. So if you like cars, maybe you're educating yourself on cars. But a lot of times when you do some of these things, when you go down some of these rabbit holes, maybe you're just listening to YouTube videos. Somebody's talking about a new truck that came out or a new Lamborghini or whatever it is. Or maybe you're dreaming. Maybe you're dreaming about like one day I want to own, you know, this car.

I'm going to figure it out. I know I ain't got shit, but I'm going to figure out, you know, how to, how to earn this, uh, this $1.6 million. I'm going to figure it out. I don't care what I got to do to get there, but I'm going to figure it out. And all those things are healthy too, but you don't really know where things are going to take you. Maybe you just learned, maybe you're learning more about the car. Maybe you want to be a mechanic or maybe you want to open up your own shop one day. Maybe it turns out that you actually get in line somewhere and you end up, you know, working on some of these cars. You find a job somewhere.

You just don't ever know. Like you might, you look at like there's these guys with these TV shows and stuff too that fix up cars and bikes and stuff. Diesel Brothers, you ever see those guys? Yeah. Yeah, they do some wild shit. They like run over cars and stuff. Like those guys, they probably at some point in their lives

didn't think they were anybody. They probably at some point didn't think, you know, maybe they didn't think that they were nobody, but they probably didn't really know that they were going to be on TV. They didn't know they were going to do the things they were going to do. And your education experience are going to be these things that are going to be able to lift you up. But you can't just keep doing the same shit day in and day out and expect a different result. That's the definition of insanity. You're going to have to learn and grow and expand.

When we're lifting, when we're in the gym training, and the training, you know, as of late, we've been working on hypertrophy. We're trying to work on gaining muscle mass. Gaining muscle mass wasn't always the main focus for me. Gaining strength was. But you'll notice with anybody that switches back and forth between gaining muscle mass and gaining strength, they end up excelling. They end up doing really well. When they refocus in on whatever it is they want to do, they want to focus in on gaining some muscle for, you know, four months, six months. Boom, they'll pack on some muscle.

Because their body's already strong enough to lift heavier weights. The heavier weights, the resistance is necessary to get bigger in the first place. When they go from the hypertrophy training, they are in better shape. They can handle more training. They can handle more training. They can handle more volume. They can handle more overall work when they go back to powerlifting. When you are a powerlifter, it is the biggest mistake that you can ever make is to just powerlift all the time. If you powerlift week in and week out, you will not be the best powerlifter that you can be.

There's 52 weeks in the year. If you split up half the year and power lifted for about half the year, in my opinion, that would be the magic number. Half, maybe upwards closer to 70% if you really love power lifting and can't help yourself and you want to compete a few times a year. Doesn't matter what it is that you're doing. You have a tech job. You are, uh, let's say you're a computer programmer. You will be smarter and you'll be better off by not being a computer

programmer. You need to learn other things. You need to, I don't even know what those things are. I don't know what they would be, but let's, um, I visited the Tesla, uh, uh, factory

with my son and with my dad. Maybe if you're a computer programmer and you went to the Tesla factory, it would inspire something in you. It would motivate something from you. You'd get educated in something totally new that you didn't even know existed before because you expanded what you currently know. And that's what all this shit's about. It's about acquisition. It's about acquiring stuff. You don't have to acquire things.

You will automatically acquire things when you're a savage and when you're really insanely smart. Look at Elon Musk getting on Joe Rogan and having people, I mean, there's a reason, I know he smoked, I know he smoked the joint or whatever, but that podcast went nuts live. It went nuts live before he ever spoke the joint. And it's going to be the biggest podcast in the history of all podcasts. Um, the reason for that is, is when people started to hear what Elon Musk said, they started to get a look inside of his brain and they could not believe what they saw. They were like, holy shit.

9 million views. Yeah. They were like, and just on YouTube, right? Yeah. Imagine what the downloads on iTunes. Oh, they're going to be insane. I mean, uh,

shit. I, I'm going to imagine it's over a hundred million. I mean, I even, I don't even know. Yeah. But it's gotta be the most listened to podcast of all time.

Um, but again, it's because people got to look into his mind. He mentioned when he was six years old that he started to recognize he had all these like ideas that were different than other people. And he started to kind of get quiet about it because he thought that somebody was going to come along and like steal him or steal his ideas because he kind of felt like he had a power. You know, he felt like he had this, this, uh, this crazy strength. Right now, Elon Musk, he's South African.

Uh, his mother, uh, his mother was like a model. There's a history of entrepreneurship in the family. So creativity and education and motivation and inspiration that he was, he was set up for all of it, you it. Not like it was handed to him. Obviously, he's still the one figuring out how to build rockets, despite conventional wisdom of everybody else's advice or whatever. He's still the one figuring all these things out, but he had a lot of things in place that allowed him to have a mind that was going to be probably bigger than most other people's. The perfect storm. Yeah, Yeah. The perfect storm.

Yeah. It's a perfect storm. You know, when you get, um, there's a reason why a lot of parents are big on something like Spanish immersion. You know, some of these courses that kids can take when they're really young so that they can learn multiple languages. It's not just Spanish immersion. You can do it any language, but you're, you're thinking to yourself, wow, my child could really have some amazing opportunities if when they're 12 years old, they know three languages. You know, it's not just show off and it's not, oh, he so-and-so knows three languages.

Yeah, that is kind of cool, right? But what opportunities do they get? What opportunities do they get? I never, I never, I never thought, I never thought about having some job in Germany, you know, cause I don't, I don't know anything about Germany. I don't know the language. I don't, I wouldn't know. But what if I spoke it fluently since I was 12?

Maybe I'd be like, you know what? I'm going to go over there and teach people how to lift. And I'm going to make a living in Germany. You know, like all these things, they allow you to just kind of squeeze the juice out of the day. And they allow you to get the most from your day. The more that you're able to expand and you don't have to always, it doesn't have to be from conventional stuff. It doesn't mean that you have to read necessarily. Although I do think that most people that are really successful read a lot. necessarily. Um, although I do think that most people that are really successful read a lot. Um, my experience is different. I don't, I don't read at all, but, uh, that's, I have a hard time reading and it takes me forever. So I, I, uh, I still try, but it's just like, it's a really,

it's a really tough, uh, task, uh, for me to get enough momentum to, to have it be something that is manageable on a daily basis. And, uh, so what I do instead is I listen to like a lot of YouTube videos or iTunes stuff and, um, I'll go on YouTube and I'll research, you know, uh, different names or different titles of books. And a lot of times you find a lot of this stuff on there. Yeah. Um, there's a book called Iron Will that I'm a huge fan of.

And there's different versions of like people just reading that book. And obviously you can get an audio book too. But I found this out about myself too. I don't give a fuck about an audio book either. For some reason, I need music in there too. So it's a weird thing, but a lot of people, you know, listen to music and read a book at the same time. So I'll find audio clips that have music in the background and I'll be attracted to those way more. I learn a lot more.

Even some of these old seminars and stuff that are from Jim Rohn and some of these other people that I'd like to listen to. When there's a little bit of music in the background, it has that much more impact on me. And I'm able to remember it a lot more. I wonder what connections like made when you have music, but that's interesting. Yeah. It just, it tends to help me a lot, you know, and the, some of these older books are really like Iron Will has some, the, the way everything is worded and the way everything comes together in the

book, it's just really powerful. You and I talked the other day about like Metallica being powerful and ACDC and Guns N' Roses and, and NWA, how it didn't matter. And, and Biggie Smalls and Tupac and like,

it doesn't matter that it's white music. It doesn't matter. It's black music. It doesn't matter. It's rap and it's metal and it's, you know, this is devil worship music or any of that stuff. Like none of that stuff bothers me. I don't care what style it is really. I just liked that it has power behind it. Pantera. Like I'm not, like that it has power behind it pantera like i i'm not i'm not a huge fan of when people start really yelling and screaming and going crazy and you can't understand what they're saying i don't like that about hip-hop sometimes either i like when you can i like when you can hear the beat and it's real distinct and you can clearly hear what the guy is saying and the guy's got a really good flow to him and you can kind of, you can get into it. Um,

and same thing with metal or any, anything else. Um, but you know, sometimes these guys are screaming like a Pantera or some of these other, but if the song still has power to it and it's still strong, uh, I'll look at,

listen to fucking hostile all day long from Pantera. That's like one of the greatest lifting songs, uh, of all, all time or suicidalencies has a song called Bring Me Down. That's a great song. Guy just goes absolutely bonkers. I mean, it's just something that if you played it too many times, you'd be like, I need to get out of here. This is killing me. But it's something that will get you

fired up. Interesting questions. Yeah, fire them my way. uh well this one's cool we've well you've talked a lot about um you know uh drug abuse um leading to bad things here and there uh thomas asks if you've ever witnessed somebody abusing anything at the gym as far as like substance abuse you know i mean like uh i'm assuming he's talking about pds or steroids or something you ever seen somebody go way over the top um no um i think the people here have enough respect for the gym and what the gym's about you know steroids are illegal and uh i would be a fool to think that, you know,

that this is a steroid-free zone altogether, but I've never, you know, no one's ever done it, and I've never seen anything like that. Yeah, like I said, I mean, I think that people have enough respect for the facility and stuff that even if they were to do something, uh, I'm sure somebody has, I mean, like, I'm sure people have fucked at super training gym before. I mean, look, you know, there's certain things I can and can't control. Right. Like I, I don't, I'm sure people have stolen stuff from me before. I don't know, you know, but, uh, in those terms, like I, I, I have never seen anything, you know, where people are like, you know, people aren't, steroids are not really, it's not such an emergency to take them.

You inject them most of the time. With the oral drugs, people take them every day. But with the injectable stuff, people might take it once a week, twice a week, maybe three times a week. But it's not like, oh, it's a Monday and I got to take a shot. Like if you take the shot on Tuesday or Wednesday, it really, it doesn't make a difference. You're always level-headed when you take it. Yeah, at least for me. I never had a situation where I'm like, yeah, like raging to take it.

I mean, you kind of hate taking it. You don't really want to do it. Yeah. What's your training looking like now then after the show? Yeah, so the lifting right now is, the lifting hasn't really changed much, you know, from what I was doing before. And the only thing that has changed, and this is the biggest change, and this is something that I really like that we're doing right now, is we kind of have a singular focus. So, you know, today was biceps and triceps, but most of the other days it's just chest. It's just back. And what that allows us to do is, when you get like three exercises

deep into a workout, and you're going to do like five exercises, it's really nice, or even when you do two really hard exercises, you still have like three more to go. It's nice to know like, you know what, most of the hard work is over. I still have to push as hard as I can through this, but there's really only like 20 minutes left in this workout. That's a really good feeling to have because you can push through really hard. And when I was power lifting, our workouts took way too long. I started figuring out like shortening them up, you know, later on. But, you know, I just felt like it was just too much of a task to try to figure out, okay, it's a lower body day.

I need to work my lower body. I need to work my quads, my hamstrings, my lower back uh and my stomach because you have to work your when you're powerlifting it's smart moves to work your stomach and so you know i'm like man this is a lot and you want to do a minimum of like two exercises per body part i mean it's the only thing it makes sense you do anything less than that it just doesn't seem like you're doing enough so if i'm going to do two exercises for the quads two exercises for the hamstrings two exercises for my stomach and an exercise or two for the lower back, I mean, now we're looking at like eight exercises. It just gets to be a lot.

Yeah. Or for smaller muscle groups, you can do more because there's more ways to hit things from like different angles, but it's just too much. And then you don't have to worry about the half an hour warmup that we were laughing at yesterday. That would, that would kill me. But, um, I don't know. Today's workout was awesome because we went heavy and then we went back to the cable machine, which of course we were able to blow out biceps and triceps.

Yeah. You know, the, um, the thing about the warmup is, um, you know, there's two, there's some main things going on here. When you warm up for an exercise, your body needs to actually be warm. So your body temperature needs to come up as it gets colder. You should take more time figuring out how to get your body warm. Uh, whether that means you go for a walk or you walk on a treadmill or you do some exercise to where you get yourself almost sweating, that would be a smart move because your body temperature should be up when you're exercising. And when you're going to exercise

intensely, it's important to get warm. Other than that, what you're looking to do is just to simply get your body used to the movement and get your body used to the weight, used to the movement, used to the weight. So that's why a lot of times you'll see me just use one rep in a lot of movements because I don't need to do a ton of reps to, like, stretch and move around. It actually makes me kind of feel worse when I do that. My mental preparation, my pre-workout happens, you know, kind of the night before and sometimes even earlier than that. I really, I love working out. So like, I'll start thinking about the next workout. Sometimes even after the last workout just ended, I'll start to kind of think about it. I'll start

to get excited for it. And I, I mentally envision how the workout's going to feel. I mentally envision, um, I envision myself lifting and doing well. I kind of just see that happening. That's always helped a lot. And I learned that from the dynamic effort speed days that we used to do for squats, the box squats we used to do. And I would think, you know, all day, you know, maybe Thursday night after we were done benching. So all night, Thursday night, all day Friday, I would think about squat and fast and how I'm just going to tear it up. And then Saturday morning, we would all squat together and, you know, it didn't always work out the way I wanted it to, but, um, I always went in there

feeling good and I didn't have to do a lot of warmups. And right now, because of the way we're training, I don't even feel like I need a whole lot of warming up on anything. I don't really mess around with other movements. I just do the movement that we're going to do for the day usually. A little bit different with the arm training. I try to get some blood into the elbow because the elbows, you know, it could be a sensitive area. Same with shoulders. I try to take a little bit of time.

But knees and stuff like that and low low back hips they always feel good so i always just i always just start going i always start going all in yeah and then what's the deal with the elbow that's just because you went a little too heavy yeah yeah you know the right elbow it's it's been hurting for you know both elbows have been jacked up for years um it it's uh it know, I probably just need to get some work done to it and then also figure out, yeah, like how can I push it? Where can I push it? When can I push it? I don't know what's going on there, but it's just like a little annoying

something or other that's been bugging me. But I feel strong. Everything else feels really good. Yeah, so the main difference with the training has simply been, uh, just that we're focused in on chest or focused in on back. And we have this, uh, rotation. It's like a seven day rotation. So things are just getting hit like once a week. But when you think about it, when you train your back really hard and you're doing pull-ups and when you're bench pressing and doing various pressing movements really hard, you're working the shit out of your triceps. You're working the shit out of your shoulders.

In terms of sets and rep ranges and things like that, most of the time, most of the exercises we'll probably be looking at anywhere between three to five sets. And we'll probably be anywhere between like three to six reps for the first movement and then as we move into uh some of the other movements we'll just do the same thing we did today let's add reps um because you're already going to be fatigued at that point and so there's really no point in trying to continue to hit the weights real heavy so the first movement or first two movements will be as heavy as we can handle and then uh from there we'll start to uh do more reps and then at some point too like um just to keep everything fresh and make sure we're not beating the shit out of ourselves too much we'll also pre-fatigue the muscles i was thinking about doing that um

for maybe our next chest workout, because we went pretty heavy this last time. And also I'm not supposed to be doing any singles and stuff like that right now. So I went a little heavier than I was supposed to today, but sometimes that's just, that's just the way it goes. But anyway, yeah, pre-fatiguing the muscles is something that works really great too, because then you're going to get a lot out of using less weight. And that's something I recommend to people when it comes to training their triceps, because a lot of people will do really heavy tricep extensions, skull crushers and all this shit. And those are all great exercises. It's great to build up your triceps, but if you pre-fatigue on some other exercises, closed-script bench presses and some cable work or some machines, then when you actually get to the tricep extensions, you get the ability to use less weight, still get a lot out of it, and still

pump up the hell out of your triceps. And really focusing in on squeezing everything and flexing and all that good stuff. Um, yeah, that, that, that makes me feel really good too. Yeah. Yeah. What about cardio? Cardio? Cardio right now, just walking.

Um, I've been walking probably about 30 minutes every day, usually about a 20 minute walk in the morning and sometimes a 15, 20 minute walk at night, depending on the day. Um, and then this, and then on the weekend, this weekend, I, I, uh, just went into my garage and did some, uh, walking on the treadmill, stuff like that. So, um, I still been getting in some cardio, uh, but you know, real cardio, um, I still been getting in some cardio, uh, but you know, real cardio,

um, that'll be added back in soon. I'm trying to see like, I'm trying to see how much I need and at what intensity the walking on a scale of one to 10 is probably, I guess in terms of walking, it's probably like a seven or something like that. But in terms of where it matches up to the way i was going on the step mill or whatever stairmaster uh it's probably only like a five you know so it's not real

uh it's not real intense it does certainly doesn't replace uh what i was doing on the stairmaster but i'll bring all that stuff back in whenever i feel it's necessary i want to get really lean for around the time of the Arnold classic. And so I have a long ways to go before that time. So as long as I have good habits and as long, I don't get too far away from my body weight. And as long as I don't get too far away from like doing cardio, then,

uh, should be totally fine. Can we pre fatigue cardio? Um, I guess you could uh i guess you could uh maybe get tired before you get tired well you could do sprints or something but it would make the cardio even harder yeah i just thought of that right now but that's all i got for you buddy um in terms of some of the bodybuilding stuff that I wanted to share with people is that,

you know, doing all these, all these, um, not necessarily reps, you know, people, I think they have the misconception that you're just going to be doing tons

and tons of reps and they want to kind of chase the pump. Well, what I've learned so far is that when you chase the pump, it's hard to, it's, it's hard to get the pump the way that you want, and it's hard to keep it. So that's why in a lot of our training, we've been going a little heavier first. Like, for example, on a chest day, we might take our time with that first movement.

The first movement could be an incline bench, and we could do sets of six or sets of eight. And when we're doing sets of six or sets of eight, Um, and when we're doing sets of six or sets of eight, you're not really getting a pump there because the rest interval is, is not super short. We have two, three, sometimes four guys going a lot of times just Andrew and I too, though, but the rest interval is decent because of the amount of weight that we're using for the six, eight rep range that we're doing. And so you're not really getting a pump, but then the next exercise, that's when the, the rest period starts, starts to shorten up a little bit. The amount of reps we do, uh, get a little bit less and we're, we're moving at a much rapid, uh, more rapid pace.

And then we might move into machines and cables and stuff like that. But I think a lot of times people are trying to, you know, right off the bat, they're trying just to, to do the same style of workout every single time. Don't be afraid to switch it up a little bit. Don't be afraid to, you know, go after something a little bit heavier first, uh, before you go and, uh, you know, try to get that pump. Cause I've had a pump before in the beginning of the workout. And then I had it just kind of like disappear. And I'm like, what the hell happened? I had a pump.

You know, I was feeling really good. And all of a sudden it, you know, just whatever reason diminishes on you. You're like, what the fuck? And what's cool about the, when we switch to a lighter weight, the rest period is usually just another movement. Yeah. the rest period is usually just another movement. Yeah. Like today was a closed grip bench and then easy curl bar curls,

which felt awesome because you really felt the pump. And then when you go down to try to squeeze into that closed grip, it's like, oh, what is this? Oh, it's a bicep. Yeah, that was pretty challenging. The other thing too is if you want to save time, you can work the opposite muscle group. So if you feel like you're somebody that's pressed for time and you don't have time to,

you know, have this training split of training seven days a week, well, you train about three. You can have a, uh, you do chest, chest and back together. You do biceps, triceps together, and you can do all your leg training and you can have, you know, days off surrounding that. And you can still have really effective workouts. And, uh, when you work the antagonist muscle, when you work the opposite muscle group, your, your rest periods are going to be cut in half because normally for strength, you would rest anywhere between two to five minutes, depending on the person.

And even just to handle, like, not just necessarily just for strength, but you don't want to handle less and less weight each set. And so a minimum rest requirement is going to be, you know, about two minutes if you're really trying one exercise to the next and it's the opposite muscle group, then you can shave down some time on that rest interval quite a bit. And that's what we did today. We went back and forth, bicep, tricep, bicep, tricep, bicep, tricep. And you can also do that with other muscle groups that aren't really involved in the movement. I've done that before many times on the bench. in the movement. I've done that before many times on the bench.

I'll actually bench press and in between I'll put a slingshot on because our group would always take so damn long. I'd put a slingshot on and I'd work my rear delts. I would just pull the slingshot apart and I would do a set of 12, 15 reps and then I'd be ready for my turn again to bench press. And it would never take anything away from my strength benching because it's the opposite muscle group. And so that might be something that some of you guys might want to try. Any opposite muscle or muscle that is opposing or muscle that doesn't have a lot to do with

the functionality of the muscle being worked. Like you can mix, you can go back and forth between shoulders and biceps or triceps and back. You know, you can, you know, you can, if you think about it for a second, you can just and forth between shoulders and biceps or triceps and back, you know, think you can, you know, you can, if you think about it for a second, you can just kind of figure it out.

Yeah. Pretty straightforward. Superset your shin training with your calves. Yeah. Front and back. Think things like that. Um, last thing before we,

uh, drop off of here. And, um, this is just something I, I kind of heard somebody talk about the other day, and so it's just something I wanted to add to this, and it kind of fits in with what I was talking about earlier about, you know, don't just get through your day. Make sure you're getting something from your day. And then, you know, one thing to look at is, you know, why do you feel other people are getting ahead? Why do you feel other people are getting what they want

and you're not? And I think that's a question that a lot of people have in their head of, they kind of look at somebody on Instagram or they look at somebody, uh, you know, live in this lifestyle that, uh, they feel is better than them. And it's making them feel like shit, you know? Uh, there's a bunch of things to think about when you think about these things, but, I mean, number one is people are always giving you a snapshot of what their best version of their life can be or what their best version of their life may be, right? But it may also not be the truth.

Just because the person has a nice car might not mean that they're happy. Now, there's also situations where, yes, the person does have a beautiful wife, the person does have a beautiful car, and the person does have a beautiful house, and they do seem happy all the time, and they maybe are happy all the time. All those things are kind of irrelevant, and it still kind of comes down to you and what it is that you want and what it is that you're looking for. Are the things that you want, do they match up well with the things that you do? They match up okay with the things that you're doing or the things that you're trying to do or even the

things that you're about to do. The things that you at least set forth or have a plan to do, your actions have to start to match up with the things that you're talking about. Often we say all the time here on the podcast, cowards talk about what they'll never do. And you don't want to be referred to as a coward. You want people to know you for being sincere. You want people to know you for being sincere. You want people to know you for working hard. You want people to know you for just being a good person, right? You don't want to be known as a fucking coward. That's kind of the worst.

Like, oh yeah, that guy, he's a little bitch. He's always talking about doing this and doing that and he never does anything. Or he never follows through with what he said. Yeah, he never does anything. Or he never follows through with what he said. Yeah, he never follows through. And it's a shitty characteristic to have. And so, you know, why, what are some reasons why other people have something that you want? What happened, you know?

Now, are you just, what's the conversation you're having in your head about that? Because it can be really unhealthy, but, but when you look at it, you have to look at the most important person that's involved in all this. And it's not the person that you're looking at. It's yourself. And it all always comes back to that. You got to take responsibility for yourself. responsibility for yourself. If you said that you want something, if you went to somebody and said,

I want to double my income this year. Well, man, you just kind of, you just really put a lot on the table right there. Um, how are you going to do that? Now, if you said, I'm not sure, then that would tell me right away. okay, well, you're a lot further away from making double the amount of money that you want because you haven't even figured out a game plan yet. Now, if you said, I want to make double the amount of money that I make now. And I said, okay, well, how do you plan on doing that? And you said, look, I got it all set up. I'm going to start doing this. I'm going to start doing that. I actually already started doing this one here and I got these five things. I'm going to put all these things in place. I already got two of them underway and I'm going to make these things go. And I'm going to increase

my value. Let's say you work for somebody. I'm going to increase my value as an employee, and I'm going to take on this other chunk over here, and I'm going to go in with that, and I think that will help me get to my goal. If you have a plan, you mentioned that you wanted to do something, but then someone said, hey, well, what are you going to do to get there? You said, oh, that's not a very good plan, right? It could be the same thing with losing weight. It could be the same thing with you formulating an attack or a plan to spend more time with your family.

You know, that, I mean, that's the way these things got to be viewed. They got to be viewed as an attack or a plan or however you want to say it. But you do really need to kind of take on a more aggressive approach. And probably whatever it is you're doing, because whatever it is that you're doing is probably not working very well. Yeah. Keep doing what you're doing. You always, you always get that right and there's just a lot of people that will i i think what i'm hearing from a lot of people too they'll say uh you know that guy has this that guy has that because of because of a b and c and they're not really actually examining why

the person may be ahead. The person might be ahead because maybe they work really hard. Yeah. Yeah. But they were just in the right place at the right time. It's like, well, they took a couple steps to get into that right spot. That's right. Like, literally, like, physically that right spot.

You know, like, they went and got coffee and they found that you know whatever head of the company well like uh remember uh ray lewis you know when he played football he was like always i mean i know he had a murder case where he's in the wrong spot at the wrong time but for the most part like on the football field that guy was in the right place the right time every time you're like how do you intercept the ball again? I mean, the Ravens are not a good team. And he forced them to win the Super Bowl. Because he worked really hard. He was always in shape enough. He always knew the game plan enough. He did all the things that he set himself up to be in a position where

he was always going to be able to do whatever it was that he wanted. And there's, you know, I've said it on the podcast before. I said it last time we were on here. There's kind of two kinds of people in life. There's people that get what they want and there's everybody else. You've got to figure out which person are you going to be and how. You know, the how is the key. But the how is not, the how doesn't come from going to school. The how's not going

to come from some book. The how's not going to come from some motivational speech. It's going to come from you figuring out what you need to do, and that's where it can get complicated, but if you just try, if you just fucking try, then you should be able to get some of the things that you want. You ever have, you know, like in high school, you see like the hottest chick in school. You're like, oh my God, why is she with this guy or whatever? Then you ask the guy, be like, hey, how'd you get her? He'll just be like, I asked her on a date. Sometimes it's that simple.

And so make sure you're just kind of setting some of these things in motion. If you want something, go out there and try to figure out on ways that you're going to get it. Figure out ways you're going to get it. And don't just get through your day. Try to get something from every single day. Got anything else? It just reminded me of, there's another really good book uh steven pressfield the the war of the war of art not yeah the war of art um you can get the audiobook on

youtube if you know what to search for he talks about essentially like what you were just talking about now in regards to like being an artist, but you can implement it anywhere, but he calls it appeasing the muse, meaning like if you want to be a full-time photographer, uh, go in and do shoots for free, like, Oh, how's that going to get me paid later?

It's like, well, just keep doing it, keep working towards your goal. And eventually you'll get there. Right. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get there tomorrow. It doesn't mean that,

uh, doing, um, eventually you'll get there right it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get there tomorrow it doesn't mean that uh doing um editing someone else's pictures for free is going to be the thing that clicks and all of a sudden hey tomorrow's the day i'm full time but it might lead you to oh shit you'd edited those photos okay can you do these ones and then like oh you're an editor no actually i'm a photographer you know i can shoot as well and that leads to another gig that leads to here that leads to there. And it's all just because you were working towards something, not necessarily like right then and there becoming it. Right.

And that book, the war of art is huge. It was like the first book actually like read and it was published not that long ago. So yeah, other than that, that's all I got, dude.

That's again, that's kind of like acquiring a trade. You started just working more. And so therefore you understood it better. And it wasn't like, oh, how are Andrew's photos? They were pretty good. But pretty good, it's definitely not good enough because it doesn't leave a strong enough impression on what you're setting out to do, which is you can't live without me kind of thing, you know? Yeah. Like, you need me.

Like, check out these, you know, check out some of these fucking pictures. It's very clear. And you don't need to tell anybody anything. It's just clear that they need you because they saw it and they were like, oh, okay. Shit, the guy knows what he's doing. I need to figure out a way to have this guy around. Figure out a way to get this person around.

And that's the impression that you're going to want to leave on people. I look forward to some more futball tonight. Going to check out some more games tonight. Kick it with the family family Kids are back in school Jake is doing his homework It appears so far Quinn Bell just had her birthday She just turned 11

That was pretty cool She's We were all partied out Like we had like Two or three days of Partying at the house. Things got kind of wild. Um,

when I woke up, uh, the night after her birthday party, we had our, um, our niece and nephews in, in, uh,

at our house too. And it was like a, a kid's version of the hangover. There was, um, in the, in the, uh, in the refrigerator there's ice cream and in the bathroom there was like a box of cereal that was like thrown out dang you know i was like okay there's not a lion in the bathroom or anything but or tiger in the bathroom but it's almost the equivalent i was like like, what happened here? And there's just like kids everywhere.

I'm like, what the hell is going on here? That's awesome. But yeah, she's 11. Uh, we got her, her birthday present, which was a,

uh, a, she, for some reason she wanted a mini fridge. I don't know what she's doing with that, but that's what we got her. And, uh,

we had a great time and, uh, that's pretty much it. I think that's it. That's it. Strength is never weak. This weakness, never strength.

Bye.