Mark Bell's Power Project - Say Goodbye To Pain When Building Muscle & Strength || MBPP Ep. 1018

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

In episode 1018, Richard Aceves, Dr. Ed Caddye, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about the importance of breath during lifts, how to make gains without experiencing pain, and the various techniques Richard and Ed take clients thought to get them out of pain.   Follow Richard on IG: https://www.instagram.com/rarebarracuda/ Follow Dr. Ed on IG: https://www.instagram.com/dredcaddye/ Follow Moved Academy on IG: Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! The Athletic/Casual Clothes we're wearing! 🕺 ➢ https://vuori.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   💤 The Best Cooling Mattress in the GAME! 🛌 ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Best STYLISH Barefoot Casual/Training Shoes! 👟 ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   Best 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      You Need Greens in your Life 🥦 ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

your maybe 10 to 15 second explanation on the archetype of these types of athletes. Crossfitters. Okay, let's go. Their booty will actually start to get smaller. Their outer quads will get bigger. They won't have true confidence. They falsify their confidence because there's no lats. Powerlifters are usually more on the depressive side or manic depressive side. They falsify their anger quite a bit. They start to lose the obliques and that's why they lose the confidence towards themselves. I'm not a coddler. You waterboarded your world champion boxer i would watch him as he's going and the key was you had to stay at 350 watts if it went under i would basically waterboard him with a wet cloth so he

couldn't breathe the second or third one he started crying you want to be a world champion you're crying i started to see people with daddy issues and it was all right side pack issues how you create tension shows you how you've perceived the world and your current perception of the world. Hey, so while I was sneaking off to get this water, I actually snuck in another set of bench press. Oh, you did?

Of course you did. The best one of the day. I was working on my grunting. Yeah? Did it help? It did. It helped a lot. You know, it's new for me. I audibly make some noise when I lift it. Okay. But it would be more like breathing. Right.

I would breathe like that sometimes when I would lift or sometimes even before I'd lift. But trying to do some of the stuff that you were showing today was interesting and it was also difficult which is also interesting uh in of itself considering i've been lifting for so long right and then even yesterday you were showing me a couple things where i was working on some breathing and just almost like a i think i was doing like a squat on a slant board type thing or something like that and that was challenging so what is like the breathing like it, it seems to matter a lot. We know that it matters a lot, but maybe there's some places that people in fitness

haven't been looking at breathing. Yeah, I think it's looked at as a reactive mechanism. We automatically breathe, so therefore everything that we do will automatically adjust to the breathing. I think part of it is you get used to things and it's a lot easier even though it's not right.

But even if it's uncomfortable or it causes pain or it's incorrect, the body gets used to it and knows it can survive that task. So therefore, you get to conserve more energy. And so that's why

doing 10,000 steps every single day works until it doesn't, because the body gets adjusted and it's like, oh, okay, we're going to do this. So now I can conserve energy for something else. And I think we do that a lot with movement is, you know, bench press. We bench press a lot, but you get comfortable understanding how you bench press and the body can get reactive to it. And so the breathing forces the active side of your movement to come back. And so it is a skill to move and breathe at the same time and keep tension.

And so it allows, you know, part of it, your brain's going like, whoa, why is this different? And now you're actually going to get better neuroplasticity. You're actually exploring the movement again, and your body's going to have a different interaction to it. And so I think that it's a lot of the body's like, okay, we're going to go to bench press. You've done hundreds of thousands of reps. So even though you want to do something different, the body's like, we've been here before. It's okay. We know what we're doing. And so you're like, no, I want to change it. So you're trying to change how the brain, the body, the heart, all of the body is interacting with that movement, which then makes

it a lot harder. We had our buddy, Graham Tuttle. He's the one that helped get you guys here to Sacramento. And you guys did a seminar here. Can you guys explain who you are and kind of what some of your backgrounds are and maybe also how you guys kind of linked up. Yeah. So I was a chef when I was younger, got in a rock climbing accident and a mountaineering accident and broke my hip into a bunch of places, had a few ulnar replacements, was basically given the diagnosis that there was no damage to the spine, but I should never lift heavy. I should never think about climbing. I should never think about doing sports. Essentially, my diagnosis is you're going to be in pain the rest of your life and you're going to be a lazy piece of shit for the rest of your life and be happy to be alive. And I was like, ah, I'm a

stubborn and against the norm type of guy. I was like, fuck that. And so I started to really dive into training, movement, and all about it. Got myself to learn to walk. So I was in bed for about four months, got out of bed, decided that I wanted to do my own rehab. I was deadlifting 420 pounds three months after I learned how to walk. Naturally gifted, right? And I've loved learning fitness and movement and training methodologies,

but I was, it always felt something was missing. So I would get the understanding or the principles of it, but I would still try it every type of the way. So owned and operated a gym, a corporate wellness program was always breaking. And physiotherapists and all the specialists in Southern California could not give me a solution or an understanding why. The solution was don't lift as much or you're just going to keep having injuries until you break and then we'll do surgery and I was like there has to be another way like there's it's not it's me it's not the exercise right so that was kind of my pursuit um into trying to figure out more and more how do how does the body actually function and work not just as a segmented physiological from point a to point

b but how do we get there and why do we get there and that's kind of did seminars around the world ed came to one of my seminars and yeah we've been talking ever since and he's a he's a brain in his own right he's a he's an extremely smart guy so for me it's i'm a very much an experienced guy i didn't go to university didn't go to college for any sort of sports physiology for any of that um everything has been by experience and working with others and so i have ed whenever i have any sort of crazy questions he helps re kind of add more depth to what i do and what we do. I do my best. I am a medical doctor from the UK, from England. Started very much in the heavy science. So I studied biochemistry, did that for four years. Actually ended up studying mTOR because all the bodybuilders

were talking about mTOR at that point and everybody wanted to understand it. Got very into the details of nutrition and then i spent a year working in special needs and realized that human behavior is far more interesting and useful to help other people than just knowing the science you say special needs yeah i was gonna say like autism like working with young kids with autism difficulty regulating their aggression the whole spectrum of human emotions, which was a great experience that forced me to realize that I wanted to work with humans and not Petri dishes and cells. So I went to medical school, started doing CrossFit in medical school

and developed aches and pains quite quickly. I always say that CrossFit is a good screening tool for all of your issues. And I have always wanted to understand everything as much as possible. Spent a few years in pain, not really making much progress. And the medical system said to me, well, I actually spent time learning from the chronic pain specialist saying that if you have a pain for longer than six months, it's going to be there for the rest of your life. And I thought, well, I don't necessarily believe you. So I, by the way, was there something specific you were dealing with or it was just like general, like certain things hit you in different spots. Um, mostly it was lower back pain on the right hand side on my right hip, which we can maybe go into the reasons behind that later in the podcast

so I ended up going to Richard's seminar and I think I finished my medical school finals and within a week I was like there must be more to understanding humans than everything that I've just spent five years learning so I got into Richardard's content and uh the assessment seminar that i went to was life changing in that i saw things happen very quickly for people that when you come from the medical world where everything's very chronic and you never really make those acute changes in people's health and behavior i thought this is something that i need to dedicate a lot of time to and then i started seeing clients using the skills that richard taught me. And then we've gone back and forward on ideas since then. And here we are today. What was something that jumped out to you that you saw that made you want to go

to the seminar? And then maybe was there something at the seminar where you're like, whoa. So for me, I love understanding the foundational principles that I can then build off of. And I do the same in the medical world. So I'm trained in something called health optimization medicine, where we look at the fundamentals at the cellular level of what people need to be healthy and defining a standard of care for health. And for me, it was a way of looking at the body that was basic principles first and then moving from there and that it

allowed me to troubleshoot in a way that I always felt like I had a framework to work with anybody as opposed to somebody that came and I didn't have a solution for which is always a difficult thing when you're a practitioner when you don't have a solution for somebody who's obviously in pain there's a lot of people in a lot of pain, and you were mentioning that lower back pain. We have a lot of people that ask us questions about lower back pain. Andrew had to unfortunately deal with it for a long time, and he's moving on to bigger and better things nowadays.

Let's go. What are some solutions to pain? It seems to be like it's very hard to um it's very hard to have any like hard science behind pain you don't know what somebody else's pain is uh one person might have be able to tolerate certain pain uh one person by all accounts you would think that they should have pain and they don't you know someone you someone, you say, hey, does your ankle hurt? And they're like, nope. And you're like, oh my God,

I've never seen someone's foot move that way before. That's insane that you're not in tremendous amounts of pain every day. So how do we kind of like, I don't know, get to like maybe some of the root cause of pain and then how do we start to like solve some things for pain? So pain is intensity. Intensity can be painful or pleasurable right so i always give the example of if i were to give you a purple nurple out of the nowhere you'd be like what the fuck that i would be aroused

i will be the guy that relaxes. Right? If it's out of the nowhere, though, the intensity might be like, oh, it will be more towards the punishment painful side. Now, if we're doing warm up and we're doing foreplay and everything, not you and I, but you and your wife. I've been a bad boy. Go ahead. I'm listening. Right?

Then that intensity starts to feel good. So when we look at low back pain, again, the body is great at having information coming in, stress coming in, information going out or expressed. The pain can come from the physical, the mental, or the emotional, the physiological, psychological, or environmental. And so most of the times when you're looking at it, people want to segment to one third of that branch, right? To one of those branches. And that's where we can start to have issues is then you don't know, you're trying to say that this is the cure-all, but there could be other layers to it. And so that's where for me, it's, I started to find that anything to do with the muscles, the bigger, more structural muscles had behavioral cycles directly correlated with them. And so when I look at somebody, I can get you out of pain. Most of the time when people are having low back pain, we have to understand, is it low back pain, like meaning on the lumbar

erectors directly on the spine? Is it radiating around, meaning more towards the iliac as the QL starts to give hip pain? Is it just the lumbar fascia? So where is the discomfort in the hip? Most of the times you'll find that the discomfort is set in very specific regions, and those are very small muscles that you don't contract at will, right? So you could have like the coccygeus, the iliacus, the lumbar erector, you can kind of contract it at will, but it's mainly when you go towards, you need to move the position. And if you don't have the capacity to keep the psoas major engaged, what are you going to do? You're going to start to rely on the iliacus to stabilize the hip to keep you upright, and then eventually the lumbar erector. So when there's discomfort in the low back or in the hip region, most of the time is a low neural output to the

psoas major and the transverse abdominis. And so why do most people have low back pain as a general spectrum that I've looked at that, you know, maybe they're not in fitness or movement when even if they are, they're sitting most of the day. That shortens the psoas major. It shortens the muscle. And then they go move and they're supposed to have this muscle that's been shortened, lowered neural output, being able to keep doing the hip hinge and walking, any of that sort. So what happens is that muscle isn't strong and you're still forcing it to complete an objective. So what do you do? You need to find out as a human, you need to complete the task that makes you fit enough, right? So the brain wants to will you to go to the gym and move, but rather than

using the psoas major, you start to stack on the iliacus or the lumbar erector. If we can get better connection to the psoas major, you're going to have less discomfort. And I've seen this over and over again. You need to do it under stress. The problem that you're seeing, or that I see a lot of, is they go see other specialists, and they do passive assessments without actual stress, physical stress or load, weight, whatever. And they go, you have a tight hip flexor. Where are some of these assessments, by the way? Because people are probably like, oh, yeah, probably. So like what are this average thing?

One of them like where the guy has like the knees off the bench type thing and then you bring one leg up and you – what is that called? I forget what it's called. But anyway. Yeah, I don't – There's different stretches like that. It's not stuff you focus on. You don't fuck with it. Yeah.

Fair. Because it's – again, we'll get into this a little bit later. But yeah, so all the different passive tests of like where can you put your leg and if they say that the psoas is tight, the point here is that they're not actually making the psoas stronger. They manually release the psoas. So they do like a massage to try and get the – they're like, oh, your psoas is rock hard and they try to release it. There's a reason that it's hard because it's weak and it's trying to protect itself. And so if we actually release it or we take down the tightness, what you're doing is you're shutting off the psoas major.

You're lessening the neural output of the psoas major. So, you know, this is going to be probably a little bit in-depth. But if you have a muscle, right, you have the muscle fibers and you have a Golgi tendon organ on the insertion and the origin, yeah? and the origin. Yeah. The job of the Golgi tendon organ is to understand by your surrounding, the observation of your surroundings, and is the muscle going to be overloaded? And if it is, we're going to turn off the muscle. We're going to relax the muscle because we don't want to tear. Because maybe not nowadays, but if you go back 150 years, if you were to tear your pec major or your glute or your hamstring, you'd be kind of screwed. Very screwed, yeah. So the job of this Golgi tendon organ is to look at your surroundings and go, can I handle this load or not?

And that load can be physical, mental, or emotional. can be physical, mental, or emotional. And so if it feels that in this surrounding I cannot handle it, it is going to turn off the muscle, have less neural output of the muscle, and take that tension somewhere else. And that tension is usually somewhere that is more afferent, higher intensity, which creates pain. The reason for that is the body is trying to communicate with the brain going, guys, we're not doing so hot down here. Can we send reinforcements? We're not moving correctly. You know, and if we're looking at strength and conditioning, squatting, bench pressing, any sort of exercise, it's telling you you're not moving the right, you're not using the right

muscles. You're just doing the exercise. You're displacing the tension. That's the only way the body can get you to stop. Because if your back hurts, you're like, I'm not going to back squat today, guys. I'm not going to deadlift. Or you go through it. Or you go through it and then pop, right? And then that's where you really start to have the issues. And so we have been told to move to a range of motion like the depth of the back squat due to a competition. So we're teaching people to exercise based on the range of motion that is for a competition,

sports-specific competition. We're not looking at each individual or you're not looking at yourself going, how far can I squat today for my range of motion that I currently have? And that's where we start to run into problems. So the low back pain is, again currently have. And that's where we start to run into problems. So the low back pain is, again, it's something that's triggered either because you're physically moving incorrectly and you're overdeveloping certain muscles and underdeveloping others. You have the mental issue. It's a feedback loop because you've gotten hurt doing back squats. So now mentally you get anxiety that you're going to hurt yourself squatting. So it sends signals like we're going to hurt ourselves in the back. It's like, yeah, you're going to get hurt.

And now it goes back and forth and the low back starts to tighten up because it wants you to stop. Or it could be environmentally, meaning that there is triggers. There are psychologically creating the intensity of certain muscles because you're learning to have a certain perception of your world. So that's where my niche is coming in is that I look at muscles and I can tell you the type of personality that you have, the traumas that you have had, and how you react to certain stresses. And so this is why I get upset when people do test and retest in 30 seconds or in 50 seconds, I'm going to get you from pain to no pain. That's a stroke of the ego of the person that's helping you. Because we understand that none of this progression is ever linear. And we

understand that not every day is exactly the same. So we have to take into consideration the mental, the physical, the emotional, in order to assess how you're feeling for that day. How do we get better blood flow to the bigger structural muscles and the discomfort goes away. When we started the conversation, Mark mentioned a bit about like the breathing that you have people do. And like you took us through something called Swami breathing. I know you can explain that, but it seems that I was talking to Ed about this earlier.

When a lot of people start to learn how to breathe deep and breathe correctly and not all the breathing is shallow it tends to help deal with a lot of global issues and then there's more things you can go start with from there but can we talk about like how people can apply breathing to lifting and breathing to help them access their psoas. Yeah. So breath is a wonderful thing, right? And there's, again, we can't segment and just talk about breath. It's all. It's global. Yeah, exactly.

So there's a lot of systems within the human body that are at play. And breath is a great tool to allow you to create interoception, which then allows you to have proprioception, and then action. And by the way, interoception is your feeling of what's going on inside. Proprioception is what's going on. The capacity to exactly to understand where you are in space. Where you are in space. And then you have perception, which would be the environmental way to look for triggers and then act on them, the action side.

And so when you inhale through your nose, and again, I'm sure there's books written about it. I'm going to go on the record right now. I haven't read them. This has been a lot of just practice and experiences. And that's what we like. That's what we like. If you guys want to, know anywho so when you start to inhale it allows you to connect to your vagal tone it allows you to vasodilate but more importantly it allows you to have interoception understand where you are in space so i you know like i gave

you like that simple exercise if you bring right now if you guys are listening and not watching but if you can put your hand on your opposite chest, so I have my right hand on my left pec and I can contract my left pec, right? And I make a fist, like I'm going to press overhead and I have that contraction. If I inhale and start to press overhead, I will not be able to go past my breath with the chest engaged, which is amazing. That is your mobility. Mobility is active range of motion with the proper tension. And by the way, guys, pay attention to when your chest gives out. Because I was doing this the other day when you mentioned, I was like, I can keep my chest, but there's a point where you start to lose a bit of tension. That's what you want to pay attention to. Exactly. And so that right there

gives you the best tool to stay out of pain. Because a bench press for a competition should be it touches the chest and for a perfect human being, right? It should touch the chest and it should lock out at the top. But maybe you had a very stressful day or maybe you're feeling slightly sad and you're not loving yourself as much or maybe you're lacking a little bit of confidence towards self or towards the outside world. That's going to dictate the neural capacity of the muscle.

And so that's a beautiful thing. So the inhale allows you to find your proprioception through interoception. When we go towards the exhale, it allows you to take action on that mobility and add a little bit more because it's understanding that now we're able to the, when you inhale, you're going to upregulate. When you exhale, you're going to downregulate. So on the exhale, you're able to downregulate the mental stress and you can upregulate the physical stress, which is beautiful because now if I know that I'm just looking for a chest pump, what did we do? We started to inhale on the way down on the eccentric phase and then exhale and press.

We start to find the range of motion for the pec. Now that I have proprioception, I understand where I am in space and where my true mobility is for that day. Now I can start to do long exhales as I'm bench pressing. Three, two, three reps per exhale and then inhale. I never stop breathing. I never stop moving because I'm not analyzing the movement. I'm acting on the movement. And as soon as I do that, now I start to get a pec bump.

And if you guys want to see this in action, because when you were talking about those exhales, it's hard to visualize if you haven't seen it. You were doing a bench press workout with Mark. It might be on the STO6 channel right now. If it's not there, it will be. We'll link it in the description. You'll see it in action.

Yeah. And so obviously the goal of, you know, bench press, anything else is to get stronger, right? To overload the system or at least overload it enough to have positive adaptation to stress. So once you start to go there, then we can start to go into the grunts. And so the grunting, vibration of the back of the throat. It doesn't need to be a, you know a prima donna scream or anything like that. It depends on the amount of exertion that you want to have on the muscle and what you're trying to do.

But then you can start to go. It's a deep vibration. It's not a hum. It's not a passive way to get through it. That deep vibration allows the vagal tone to go up. It allows the disconnect of that mental stress to go up. It allows the disconnect of that mental stress to go down. It allows even more action on that muscle. And so then you start to go, and then if it gets really, really heavy, then that's where I had you do the loud grunts where

it's like, and so that allows you to have a complete disconnect, a maximum fight expression of the muscle and allows you to essentially not feel, not build up the inflammation within the joints and the movement pattern. So again, I'm not trying to get you to go from point A to point B. I'm teaching you how you're going to get from point A to point B. That's the important part. And breathing is a perfect tool for it. Mark, did you notice, what did you notice when you were because i heard you grunting when you're doing yeah when he had me doing uh uh breathing that he was talking about the first time where it was more like just breathing continuously and kind of the shorter reps definitely felt a lot more blood uh to the chest just by continually breathing and breathing out um a little bit excessively. And then with making noise, like while I bench, I've been doing that

forever, but just, I never tried it before with like a grunt. So it's something I got to practice, I think, to get a little bit more with it, but I did feel in rhythm. And what I noticed when you did it was it almost as, it was almost as if your body was like almost unaware that you did it until after you did it. Yeah. So the grunts allow you to, again, completely disconnect. And I always, when I'm working with clients or working with myself, it's like, okay, so where is the physical stress? Where is the mental stress? And where is your heart rate?

Because the heart rate will tell you a true sense of self. And so when you do these grunts, it's amazing because you basically disconnect completely and then the body like 45 seconds later goes, whoa, guys, what's going on here? So if you're doing a powerlifting competition, if you only have like three reps that you have to do and you're doing something where you truly need to disconnect and just have that pure action, that's exactly when you want to use it because it still allows the coordination of the mental cognitive side, but you have the skill, the coordination, but there's no stress until about 45 seconds to a minute afterwards, which means, and you had that conversation, it's like, you should not be doing

this every single day because not every single day you're going to war. This is where we also need to understand that we're oscillating, right? You train to go to war and then you have to come back and you train to go to war and you have to come back. So the way that you behave in the gym is the same way that you behave in real world. And so that's the beauty of it. So when you start to see people that are constantly killing themselves in the gym, they're probably constantly killing themselves at work or enduring a lot of the other aspects of their lives. So that's why I love movement as medicine, but proper movement as medicine

because there's a lot of people that get into movement or training or some specialty or some discipline, and they change the constraints of I'm doing it because it feels good to what's my mile time. And I need to run my 10-mile time at this pace because that's what the program says. So now it's no longer about how it used to make you feel. Now it's chasing a certain objective at any cost necessary. Now it's no longer going to be as healthy or create long-term longevity. It's no longer going to be as healthy or create long-term longevity, right?

So that's always a big thing is you have to understand how you behave and act in the gym or under heavy stress is going to dictate exactly how you react and behave in the outside world. At this point, nasal breathing while you're asleep is no longer something that just us bros do, but people are realizing that it can make a big difference in your sleep quality, your recovery, and all aspects of sleep. That's why hostage tape is so important because many people have their mouths drop open while they're asleep. They're snoring, and that really affects the quality of their sleep, and that's why many wake up groggy and not feeling extremely rested. Hostage tape will allow you to tape your mouth shut even if you have a beard. Us bearded folks can put the tape on and can be confident enough that when you wake up in the morning, the tape will still be on your mouth, which will help you breathe through your nose. And they also have nose strips if you're someone who struggles breathing through the nose. Those nose strips

will help you open up your airway and breathe a little bit easier while you're asleep. How can they get their hands on some hostage tape? Yeah, you guys can head over to hostage tape.com slash power project where you guys can receive mouth tape and no strips for an entire year for less than a dollar a night. Again, hostage tape.com slash power project links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I just want to add in something that's like so to make to bring this to a basic thing. And I know you guys will be able to add onto a lot of this. Um, when I lift, I do a lot of cyclical breathing. I've been doing that for years. And when I started doing that years ago, I noticed that my recovery from session to session in the gym was so much better. Like it was like,

it was like night and day. I could do a good session and I wouldn't be fucking wrecked the next day. So if you can learn how to breathe and then the aspect of the breathing that you're talking about here, you add some of these things in, your recovery is going to be better. And the thing is, is like when you watch powerlifters lift

or when you watch videos of hardcore bodybuilders lift, there's certain lifts where it's like, there's holding of the breath and it looks dope because maybe all the veins come out and whatever and it's like intensity but you get beat up right and you need to beat yourself up too in in terms like building muscle and stuff there's a level of beating up that needs to happen but it doesn't need to be that stressful right and yeah and it's, understanding the intent for it, right? You definitely need physical stress, and I'm never somebody to say, I'm not a coddler.

You waterboarded your world champion boxer. You're not a coddler. I understand what the vision is and your mission, and I make sure that we execute correctly. What? Yeah. Oh, my God. With no context. You'll tell us about it. Don't make me look like an asshole. We just correctly. What? Yeah. Oh, my God. With no context. Don't make me look like an asshole.

We just met. I'm a kind human being. I am not a soft human being. There's a difference, right? And so that's the key is you need physical stress to get into the mental stress in order to have the emotional expression. Yeah. Right? In order to have the emotional expression, right? And so understanding that you're going to be training towards something, you need a clear vision of what that something is.

And then we can decide how we want to approach it with the proper guidelines. When you're just doing it to beat yourself up every single day, that's a different story. And so the holding of the breath, yeah, the pains are like, if you're training and you're constantly in pain, you're not training. You're just punishing yourself, right? Because you have a, I always say like movement is always to heal the past or to say a big fuck you to somebody in the past, whereas yourself or somebody else, breathing is a tool to allow you to change the state that you're in in the present moment or get you into a present moment.

And nutrition is what you can use to predict what's going to be happening in the future. So you always eat for the future. You should never eat for the past. That's why when you have a bad relationship with food, you binge eat. Because you feel shitty about yourself and you start to eat. But if you actually understand that, hey, I'm going to go work out. So if I need sugars and carbs and things like that, cool.

Hey, I'm going to go to sleep. I should probably not be having so many carbs. I should have more protein so I can rest and digest. Right? So if you look at that as a term, then it's beautiful because the movement, again, always starts to go for a fuck you towards somebody else. So I used to beat the shit out of myself in the gym. Believe me, I used to do like eight workouts a day when I was in CrossFit.

I would, I would go nonstop for like six to nine months and I'd crash completely. But it was a, I'm going to give you a fuck you to the doctors that told me that I wasn't going to do anything. So, I mean, I got to the point where I was squatting close to 600 pounds. It was like 585 and I was able to go do a five, six mile back to back. Wow. You know, and so I was able to do a whole lot. But then I started to realize that, bro, it's taking me 45 minutes to get out of bed, you know, and I'm popping ibuprofen like it's cotton candy.

And, you know, and then I'm like, that's not what I'm supposed to be teaching. And, you know, with my gym, it was like I'm selling health. I'm selling performance. But I'm like, I'm selling health. I'm selling performance. But I'm like, I'm breaking. So is that really health? And then I started to see my clients and they would come in, not healthy, but, you know, not out of shape horribly or anything. Like they would come in without pains and aches. And a year, a year and a half, two years in, they're having to come in 45 minutes early to mash the shoulder and to do this and to do that.

And now they're seeing the physiotherapist every six weeks. I'm like, bro, I'm not getting people healthier. I'm giving them the aesthetics of what looks healthy. But in reality, I'm actually making things a little bit worse because in the short-term reward, yeah, you can do this stuff. But if you keep looking in the long term, if you start to need a hip replacement, if you start to have labrum tears in the shoulder or bulging discs in the neck or in the spine, that's not a long-term health solution. And so that was, for me, it was a very big punch to the gut and it split my principles of what I wanted to do

versus what I was doing. And that goes, again, back to the gym. I wanted to be healthy and say, fuck you to the, to the surgeon, but I was actually leading myself to exactly where they told me I was going to end up. So I was like, I need to change something. And that's when I realized, I mean, I realize that now, and it makes more sense. It was a good black swan moment, but I realized now that, you know, I was essentially pushing myself into regurgitating information, not having the knowledge.

So people would say things and I was like, oh yeah, we'll just apply it. And then if you would have asked me why and why and why, I get to a point where I was like, I have no fucking clue. And I was like, that is not what I want to do because I'm extremely passionate about what I want to do and how I want to help people. But I'm just regurgitating what other people are saying because it sounds smart or, you know, it is what it is without me truly understanding what I was doing. And that's what that's led me into the rabbit hole of like, I don't want to be a strength and conditioning specialist or a mobility specialist or breath specialist.

I'm a human specialist. The first and foremost thing that I do is connect with you as a human. Like if I were just giving you the exercise, you'd be like, cool, whatever. We'll see you later. Like that's awesome. Also wouldn't have understood the intent, you know? Yeah, exactly. So I needed to find a way for you to understand that I wasn't just trying to pick on you because

the psoas wasn't connecting. I needed to show you. I needed to have you question it. Because otherwise you would have been like, yeah, okay, cool. Do the exercise. It's just like, you know, it's a fixed test, retest. And you would have never tried it again. But now that I was able to make you think, you're like, oh, well, shit.

And now you start to process things. That's knowledge. Because I have wisdom. I've been there. I've been with the little niggly back pain. Like I told you earlier, I was like, I feel sometimes like Cassandra. Like you can see the future, but you don't believe me. And it's like a meth addict that just starts doing it on the weekends for the parties, right?

You know where that's going to end up. But for them, like, bro, I'm having a good time, man. Meth on the weekend is wild, dog. Once a month is okay. Every weekend, not so much. But you know what I mean? You're stuck in your own forest and you create, you justify for wanting to continue to progress. That's regurgitation of information, right?

You having the wisdom and going like, hey, okay, so that kind of makes sense. And how come I almost fell on the barracuda smash? Like maybe there's something here. And now you start to go, okay, questioning. That's me having the knowledge and wisdom to transcend to you, not just going do the exercise, three sets, 10 reps, and you're going to have the results because you won't. You're a great athlete.

You're naturally gifted, meaning you pick up skills very quickly. So you could have done the exercise but still kept going to the thoracic spine and the iliac is on the right side and actually ended up worse. So that's the difference is becoming a craftsman and always being the student. Like we talked about the Swami, like I still do three hours of Swami. Like I coach it. I watch people breathe. Can you explain Swami? Yeah. Yeah.

So Swami is an old Hindi word. It means a true connection to oneself. It's the capacity for people to continuously breathe. So it's not just breath work or a method of – I guess it's a method of breathing that I've done, again, through experiences, but it forces you to be active. So you're breathing while contracting the muscles. It is not a passive way to breathe. And so what it does and what I've seen

is that it allows you to create a true connection of your one's self, of your true self. And if you do it enough with the contractions of the muscles, then you get to see why you have certain behavioral cycles or certain triggers. And then from there, we can take it to movement and change those behavioral cycles or your perception of who you are. And by the way, guys, I don't know if there's any video, but like, you know, you had us use

some load on our lower abdomens for some tactile feedback to make sure that we were expanding and contracting that area. There's a bunch of things that you had us doing. We weren't just breathing into that. You had us contract our glutes. There's a bunch of other stuff, but it's, it was, it's, it's something like if you, if people can understand the practice, it's something you could easily do at home in the morning when you wake up. It can turn into a great habit to kind of just help you find those things. So, fun story. One of Ed's friends, his wife was needing a double hip replacement. Now, this is after years and years of low back pain.

So, we talked about hip pain and low back pain. Ed called me up. Well, I was going to introduce that like that they'd they'd been given a label a diagnosis of something called auto pelvis so it goes back to what rich was saying is that they were trying to use a system so my friend jack bought a course for auto pelvis and they went through and actually made it much worse and then they'd been to i think three or four top sports surgeons in in Canada and the first three actually didn't really think that surgery was maybe a a solution nobody really had a solution and the last one said well I don't know if surgery is the fix but it's the fix that that we have um so i actually jack was an old friend from school we

just ended up having a conversation at the end he was like oh do you mind having a look at this x-ray um i'm trained in psychiatry so x-rays are not really my realm but i through the work that i've been doing with richard i can start to see how the body can shift um depending on tension and it was in a few minutes i got rich on the call and he had a look at the x-ray, and then within a week, they flew over from Canada to see him. Yeah, and again, just to kind of give, they diagnosed it with the autopelvis. I always bring them on because he knows all the fancy terms.

But when you looked at the x-ray, they said that essentially the femur was pushing up on the hip bone, and it was just going to continuously get worse. And both femurs? Just one, just one. You always hear the doctors say it's bone on bone. Yeah, right. And then like imagine what that does to you for the rest of your life.

Right. Oh, that's just bone on bone. You're like, oh shit, that'll never be solved. That's always going to be there. And just to take my opportunity as well, there's another label we like to use called femoral acetabular impingement syndrome, which is a very, very similar thing. And Rich has had two or three cases where somebody actually

ended up having surgery on one side for that. And then they ended up, I think they saw you and they canceled the other surgery because it took 15 minutes and the pain was gone on the other side. And again, it's not a test retest. So don't to be clear. Yeah. Right? But it allows the awareness. So anywho, I saw the x-ray and you could see the femur going up. But I was like – but there's no structural damage. That's why there's no solution because they don't – since there's no structural damage, they don't even know what to do. So I told them. I was like, if you can fly to Amsterdam, you give me a few days.

I was like – I don't like – i wanted to sound confident not not like an asshole but i was like i'm almost positive that the pain will go away right like i was very certain i was like if you can come to camp if you come and he was like buying a ticket and so they bought a ticket they flew here and we literally went later on the floor had her do the breathing like i did with you two and a half minutes in and she was like what was that and i was like how does that feel she's like what the fuck she literally looked at me she's like what the fuck and i was like yeah i know i was like let's keep going and so on so real quick what did you know like when she was breathing what was it that you noticed?

What like that opened up or that she started to be able to sense with the breath? So she has no connection, no capacity to truly contract the psoas major. And there's absolutely no glute max. And those have some emotional past traumas caused the neural output to go down because they find it as fearful. So there's a massive disconnect to self. And so I saw that there was just absolutely no tension. She's somebody that runs on a hyper alert side,

so extremely hyper vigilant all the time. So breathing, holding your breath, holding the breath. There's never an actual exhale. So I just started to notice, notice again not just the physical but the mental and the emotional and so we did the the psoas race she was able to very quick she's again naturally gifted athlete she's very good at understanding and taking cues she was able to breathe she was able to contract the psoas major the pecs you know all of it not hold her breath um i saw some tears come up and i was like hey I just want to let you know like there's gonna be traumas that are gonna come up it's do you have a hard time truly expressing

anger have you had you know I went through a list and I'm able to talk about it because we've done a podcast she's okay with me talking about it and she kind of looked at me she's like shut up And she kind of looked at me. She's like, shut up. And I was like, well, I'll be able to help you up to 85%. But in reality, like to really make the hip feel good, it's going to need that emotional expression. You're going to have to face some things in the closet. Not all cases, but for her, I was like, you have to. And she was like, I'm not ready for it.

And I was like, well, keep working on the physical stuff. ready for it. And I was like, well, keep working on the physical stuff. But you know, this is going to take me about two years because the body likes to be comfortable, even though it's in a very uncomfortable state. It's much easier to go passively and be in pain than to truly take the work that it takes to be out of pain. And that's part of your identity to yourself and the superego. And so for me, we kind of did the breathing we did a sandbag carry and she was like what the fuck and so it took me an hour this is somebody that hasn't been able to run in years and within an hour I had her running with a sandbag and she dropped the sandbag not out of breath right which is also an important thing to note going like what the fuck just happened no

pain I mean she she couldn't bend down to tie her shoelaces herself yeah that was how bad it was does the pain that someone have uh is it almost irrelevant um yes and no i mean there's a same person could have like somebody could have came to you with a foot injury yeah so potentially yeah So then it's always looking at what are the structural damages and how much can we get out of it? So I've had a guy that came with me that, you know, again, the only solution that they were going to give him is to cut off the nerve endings to the spine because he had a herniation going to the left, a herniation going to the right.

And I was like, oh, this is what's happening. And so when you're walking, you're hinging on one side, you're squatting on the other. So crazy. Doctors say stuff like that. We're just going to cut this off and then we're going to put a metal rod through here. Surgeons like to slice. Wait a second. Sounds wild.

But nobody's been able to come up with a better solution. That's the problem. And so they think that that's the only way to go. He'd gone through four, he'd done three cortisone shots. The doctor's like, we can do one more. But after that, like, there's nothing else we can do.

And so he contacted me. I was like, yeah, like, come on over. And, you know, again, very simple approach, not a test and retest because life still has stress and kids and the whole thing. we need to just slowly keep developing the neural output of these muscles with very simple exercises so that you can understand how to create the proper tension because you need to reteach those hundreds of thousands of reps how to start from point one again. So I'm working backwards and then we can start to work towards performance. It's going to take time.

But once you do that, you know, I don't need you to, you can go back to doing, for me, it's like, I just want you to do what you love to do. So if we can add in three to four exercises that you do consistently five days a week and everything else, you can kind of, you know, slowly start to reintegrate back in, your body's going to start to react differently to the exercises and your actions will start to be different in those exercises. So this lady now, Terry, she's, you know, I told her it was going to be two years. We're coming up on the one-year mark, and she came to see us again in the UK,

and now I got her to do a longer Swami session, but it was one year where the pain is completely gone. She's able to walk again, carry the kid, have, you know, exercise. She's doing sandbag squats and sandbag deadlifts we're now starting to get her back into powerlifting because that's what she loves um but i told her it's going to be two years and we're one year in and then she just recently said she's like i'm ready to take on the emotional stuff which for me is like it makes me emotional because it's so badass to see you see the the true want the capability the willingness to truly make change but it's on

that person's it's up to her i'm just here as a navigator so that's why understanding the knowledge is so important but now a year in she's doing sumo deadlifts again she's doing barbell deadlifts again she's still a little bit scared of the back squat so i was like keep the sandbag squats and then we'll start to incorporate goblet squats and then we'll slowly move back to the back squat but now she's actually able to get angry and express and have emotions and crying when she was so forced to just shut all of that off so now we're regulating the whole human being just from physical movement proper physical movement how do you guys know when someone isn't going to do what you're suggesting? And why do you think that happens?

I mean, they're like somebody. Two seconds. I guess sometimes it might be proximity. So it might be a family member. And you're like, hey, man, I got this thing in my knee. You kind of know they're not going to listen. It's just words. They're just having a chat with you, I guess.

And they, but anyway, how do you guys determine whether someone's like going to do it, not do it? And why do you think some people may block the information and not do it? Because you're having to recreate your identity. You're having to face things about yourself that you won't like.

So people are pretty intuitive then. I've said the same thing about diet and nutrition for a long time. I'm like, people are recognizing something really smart, that this is an undertaking. It's going to be difficult for them. Go for it. From a neuroscientific perspective, we have these brain networks. To make it easy, we have...

You have a brain network. I've got two. We have our task positive network, which is the one where we can just take action without analyzing anything. And then we have our task negative, which is more commonly known as the default mode network, which is the one that's becoming more well-known

because of psychedelic science. So it's the one that gets dampened down by LSD and all of those other psychedelics. The storytelling, the autobiographical words that we use, our self-chatter lives in that default mode network. And between these two hubs, so when we take action and when we're just kind of thinking about things or not really doing very much is the salience network.

And this is the one that allows us to take in salient features so one way that you can access this switching mechanism so you go from the negative to the positive is through the salience network it's the switching hub and the way that we can do that is through the breathing but when somebody is very good at not taking action on things that they should be doing or living in these ruminating thoughts of, oh, maybe I'll never be better. The brain is plastic and it learns to stay there. So this is a hallmark of depression essentially is that you're stuck in this default mode network and you're unable to take action on things so it's a sometimes people just need time

and to go inwards for a long time to then realize that it's it's time to do something about it and we we have people that um maybe after a year or two they come back because they've kind of realized that there is there's some work to be done that wording of that is really interesting because you mentioned depression and i think it might be good for every person to recognize that you might not be depressed and you might not have clinical depression whatever that term even means but in this one particular case it's you know anyone can have some sort of depression or some sort of uh i don't even know what you want to call but yeah someone can have depression in this one category.

And I think we're blind to that because we're thinking, well, I'm pretty upbeat. I'm pretty go with the flow. I'm fine. Yeah, I'm fine. I feel good. What are you talking about? Depression.

And I think it's how we perceive it, right? Depression, anxiety, they have a function. how we perceive it, right? Depression, anxiety, they have a function. And so if we can change the I have an illness to I am just stuck in an autopilot mode, then we can start to look at it differently. So do you want to start driving again or do you want to stay in the Tesla

and have it drive you to work? I mean, the Tesla's kind of cool. Let's not use the Tesla. Don't use that one, right? But you know what I mean? the Tesla's kind of cool. Let's not use the Tesla. Don't use that one, right?

But you know what I mean? Like there's the point of depression or sadness is because you've lost a fight and you find a reason to get back up and work. The problem is that in order to get back up and go to work, you have to go through anxiety, right? So the selfish brain theory, there's five ways to learn a lesson or to gain something new.

You go from boredom, depression, whatever you want, sadness, right, to anxiety, to frustration, to anger at others, anger at yourself. The higher the stress, the higher the lesson learned. We're constantly going through this. to bring it back like i can tell who's going to want to change and who isn't just by the first conversation and by how they how they start to tell me about the pain or discomfort or mental health issues that they may have what does that sound like is there maybe like a lot of blame or they're making it uh they're they're giving me all the reasons why they're in pain. Right? So not giving me the history of like, hey, I blew out my back when I was squatting in 2010. I've been doing powerlifting.

Then I got into running. And I want to get back into powerlifting. But there's like a shift in my squat. It doesn't feel – it feels off. What do I need to do? Right? Versus, no, well, my back is hurting because of this, this, and this, and this. But if you really think about it i like they you can just like then this doctor told me to get these shoes my back

hurt worse and i went to this chiropractor they adjusted me and now my neck is hurting too and my back and then and even more so they go yeah even more so if i go you're right so as it's working you go yeah but my physiotherapist told me this this and this then you already know right so not yeah i just use it because i'm using a hypothetical yes a hypothetical you know but you know it's like you can you can essentially tell and for me i can tell by the way that they are communicating right so the face gives off a lot so if we're actually connecting then i know you're going to listen if if you're already kind of like you're here in a passive way, meaning you're here to prove to yourself that nobody can fix you, then you're right.

Because nobody can fix you except for yourself. And so for me, it's always that. Like if they're coming at me and going, I'll pay you, just fix me, it's not going to work. Yeah, it sucks because a lot of people are there because – and they – people have proof you know they have a little bit of proof they've they've tried they literally have tried a couple things right and unfortunately they haven't worked out well or they had a doctor maybe uh lead them down the wrong path or i'm not picking on doctors but just sometimes you just get uh i don't know shoved down the wrong path and you don't meet the right person that can help you well this is where my passion lives is i'm very careful now with people when they come to me for help in how I speak to them.

Because as Richard always likes to annoy me about, people listen to doctors sometimes more than other people for whatever reason. We're held in some regard for a lot of people. I went to school for a long ass time. That's one reason why people do. Yeah. Um, so Richard, Richard will tell somebody something for a couple of months and then,

and they peer over at you and they'll come, then they'll come. Basically. Seriously. I want to hear it with a British accent. I'll say the same thing and they'll be like, Oh, that's really good.

I'll go. Yeah, definitely helps. Um, he says something I could I could yeah just picture them being like oh yeah thumbs up usually what happens but that's I want to start educating more more physicians and healthcare practitioners on the approach because then maybe in over time they're getting an answer that gives them the autonomy to solve the problem for themselves. It's time to step up your wardrobe. Now, we've partnered with Viora Clothing because their clothes are stuff that you can wear in the gym, but also on the go to a dinner, on a date, pretty much anywhere.

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me show you something real quick this is their echo insulated jacket and it is so warm and since the winter months are coming i'm going to be rocking this so much more guys there's endless stuff for you on their website that just looks so good and performs so well how can they get it you guys can get it over at viore.com slash power project that's v-u-o-r-i.com slash power project and you guys receive 20 automatically when you go to that uh links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes um what are some bad approaches like have you had i mean when you're new i'm sure you end up going man i shouldn't have fucking said that like have you had experience with any of that or are you just kind of focusing on?

From my experience, the medical system in the UK is becoming very overrun. It's very busy. The doctors are very tired. They're getting burnt out and you work long hours and you reach the end of a four-day stint of 12 hours a day and you haven't been able to keep yourself healthy over that time you're just kind of burning the candle at both ends when you know that there's three or four fairly urgent things that need to be done in the hospital and somebody asks you can i have a sleeping tablet or something that seems very mundane and you just kind of autopilot say oh yeah

it's um it's not the way I like to practice. Or even you kind of come down on them and say, these are bad. People get addicted to these. I don't want you to take it. And then you were short with them. Exactly. And that wasn't great either. Yes.

And that's, so I went through my basic training and then I chose psychiatry because it was the only specialty that gives you a long time to have a conversation with somebody and assess somebody and i also started to see the the psychological benefits of the stuff that we were doing and i thought maybe if i can start to influence that field as well then we can have a big impact on the world um it must make a difference to be able to communicate with somebody um like nowadays there's a lot of like telemedicine and some people will go to psychologists uh via uh text messages now right yeah yeah better help yeah that's that's amazing um for somebody to be that autonomous it must really help some people.

I know like Sigmund Freud, he would like go behind the person and they would talk on the couch. He wasn't like face to face with them. He wasn't confronting them. So that must help people to open up in some way. But then the interactions that you guys have that are in person,

those are probably much stronger, but that takes a person that's really ready for that step probably, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's, again, it's how in depth do you want to go, right? And so it's about connecting with the human. And for me, it's, you know, my craft is like, I can help everybody, not everybody can be helped. And so people, you know, usually people find me after they've gone to seeing everybody, their mothers and the specialists and, you know, snake oil and everything. And then somehow they get, I get referred.

And the goal is like being able to connect with somebody, but then having them understand that it's going to take action. Like that's the biggest thing. Like we need physical intensity and action and some people aren't ready for it. So starting with the verbal stuff is a great way to, you know, get there. But how many times have you told somebody that you feel great and things are going okay and it's kind of stressful? You can tell whatever story you want. So the physical intensity allows myself

to not go through the bullshit, right? Like you can just get to the core problem because the body doesn't lie. So that's the beauty of what we're doing and like the help that he's bringing is like it doesn't matter where people are coming in, understanding that the outcome of this is to change perception right because the changing of perception allows you to change the way that your cells are communicating

once you gain perspective and you have physical intensity you have the capacity to change how you're feeling that's the importance of. And so the written stuff for me, some it's all of it is important. It's, are you, are you wanting to gain wisdom or do you want to continue a victim? That's the biggest thing. And so how you start to communicate with people,

how you connect with somebody, I think is the important part, right? It's like, if you can actually make a connection and not do a Tinder swipe left, swipe right, that's the biggest change, right? Like, can we sit down at a bar and just have a conversation, you know? And so some people need to start with a few swipes. And then eventually at some point, the change needs to come from the conversation, not from the information being put out there.

I'm curious what you guys think about full range of motion. I just find in fitness, things are interesting. People, they're going to compare each other to each other and things like that. And there's somebody squats X amount of weight, somebody's X body fat percentage and stuff. But those are things that you look at as kind of a skill set. You're like, oh, that guy benches 300 and that guy benches 400. There's some genetics involved. There's all kinds of other things involved.

But when it comes to range of motion, I don't think we really view it as a skill set. But yet we're still comparing ourselves to somebody that has this, you know, full range of motion within their limbs and their body. And it seems to be a mistake. And same thing with, you know, stretching, flexibility, mobility, whatever words you want to kind of use for some of those things. You know, one person doing a movement might feel like a stretch to them versus another person, you know, doing the same movement doesn't feel like a stretch at all. Right. And so are you guys fans of full range of motion practices?

How important do you think they are? And if they're important, what are they important for? I think setting the proper rules of what mobility is and what the range – like if you're trying to get the range of motion, is it for the joint or is it for the muscle that is going to be handling the load? So, you know, I hate to have like this broad thing, but there is no absolute in it because somebody that wants to be squatting 600 pounds

versus grandma that just wants to be able to go buy groceries, two different extremes, right? And so the range of motion is important as long as you are not putting your body at risk. And so the way to understand that is gaining mobility. Mobility is moving the muscle through its end range of motion with proper tension. It's not about the position that you need to be in, but maintaining that position or getting to that position with the proper tension of the bigger structural muscles. And a big thing that happens in the fitness industry is that we start to go from a health perspective into a performance perspective. And in order to get better performance,

especially when you start to get into very specific kettlebell work, weightlifting like snatching, clean and jerks, they stack the bones up because there is no tension of the muscles, which then leads to injury. And so I'm all for mobility. Just make sure that it's under the right tension. We're looking at people through position, not through tension. And so you can, you know, like we'll take the bicep curl, right?

Like how many different ways can you do a bicep curl? Let's do the bench press. Like you've done hundreds of thousands of reps of bench press, and today I showed you two new ways or three ways or maybe one way, right? You were able to learn that there is another way to press the bar. So when we're saying as an absolute that we need the mobility to be here, I just ask why. And then from there, we can start to understand that if we have the right tension, for sure. Can we get into this position?

We can get anybody in this position. If you're not going to build an extreme amount of stress or load on the muscle, on the joint, then awesome, right? Like, you know, for grandma, for example. So she can put her groceries away. Okay, not that big of a deal. She has some shoulder pain, do a little bit of trigger point therapy, get the discomfort to go away. She feels good. Okay.

For modern-day athletes, right, for somebody going to the gym, that's not going to be so helpful because I'm going to teach somebody to get to a position where the muscles cannot maintain the tension, which is great. It will work until it doesn't. And that's where my frustration comes in. So understanding that mobility is proper tension of the muscle through its end range, now we can start to work on a human-by-human basis of your true mobility of the bench press is how much depth do you have while maintaining the tension of the pecs and the lat dorsi or the teres major. When you say it will work until it doesn't, what do you mean until it doesn't?

Like until injury, a tear or something? What do you mean? Right. So we talked about the Golgi tendon organ earlier in the podcast. So if you're being forced to get to a position and that is your form of survival, if you will, right, of completing the task, your body will find a way. So it's going to work. Let's say, for example, we can take the incline bench press.

I don't know if you saw Larry Wheel's friend, the bodybuilder guy that tore the pec. Yeah. It worked until it didn't. He got to a point where the body could not displace the tension anywhere else. So it had to go back to the pec and that's when it tore. I tore my pec basically a very similar way because like I would bring the weight down pretty quick and then I would reverse the weight and I didn't have constant tension on the bar. Right. And something I had to do when I was rehabbing the injuries, I had to figure out a way to keep constant tension throughout the entire range of motion.

Yeah, exactly. So again, the goalie tendon's objective is to realize if we're in a stressful situation, do we need to shut off this muscle to get to a position? Right? right? So if you're running and you're being chased by a bear and your psoas stops working, it's not like we're going to tell the bear to slow down because I'm getting tired. You're going to find a way to keep running away from the bear. So what are you going to do? You're going to start to go to the iliacus, to the lumbar erector, whatever you need to do to get away from it. So it's the same thing with movement. If we're being taught to bench press to get the bar to the chest and then get it back up, it's going to work until the chest doesn't have mobility anymore.

So what I usually see as a big pattern with a lot of people that either haven't built their pecs or have shoulder pain when they bench press is when they go down, they have maybe a lack of mobility. Oh, yeah. That video. I haven't seen this angle. Oh, my gosh. Oh, this is going to be rough. Dude, prepare yourselves. See, there's nowhere he can't escape it.

I told you to be quiet. Oh, my gosh. That's a different video than what I've seen. Yeah, that one was real. I was thinking it was Larry Wheels tearing his pec. Yeah, so can you go back to it? Larry Wheels catching 600 pounds. Yeah, right.

Can you go stop it right there? Go all the way up. Go up a little bit more. Oh, sorry. My bad. Okay, so stop there. Just hold it there. So look how he's already putting all of the load. And it looks like he's pushing the load

over to his right side. But he's not. He doesn't have the lat. So see how the bar's already starting to dip down. So what's he doing? You do see a little discrepancy there. Yeah. And look at how short the pec is compared to the left side.

Look at the right versus the left. The right pec is extremely tight. So what is he doing? He doesn't have the capacity to maintain tension in the pec and the lat. So he starts to stack the joint. Retraction of the shoulder,raction of the shoulder elevation of the shoulder right and then go down like maybe a quarter of the way down that he goes down there's a compromise going on exactly you can put it on slower speed and then stop there so right there you can see

the shift again so now he's completely retracted the shoulder which is what he might have been doing for a while and now it's so much load that the body goes, there's nowhere else I can put the tension. Now we need to put the pec in. And now as he starts to go down a little bit more, you'll see the full collapse right there. See the shift stop? So you see the slight shift that happened at the oblique. So it wasn't necessarily a pec issue. The whole rest of his body shut down a little bit.

Yeah, it wasn't a pec issue. It was a lat issue and an oblique issue. The whole rest of his body shut down a little bit. Yeah, it wasn't a pec issue. It was a lat issue and an oblique issue. The lat dorsi and the external oblique have the same insertion. Weak oblique means that now he's having to compromise. There's so much load, the body's like, we can't send this anywhere else, and it pops. These guys are stupid, man. I don't know why they care about pressing so much weight anyway. That's not going to lead to them to anywhere. But that's exactly what happens, right? It works until it doesn't. So the way that the Golgi tendon works

is if it's going to be overloaded, it senses something. We do have to say that you bench pressed 225 for how many reps? It was 275. 275. For a few reps. No, no, not a few reps,

but you said you did 225. Oh, for 67 reps on a cold set. 67 reps in a row. Yeah, so I do these weird things. One of them for a long time was doing cold sets because I was running late to a seminar one day, and I just kind of wanted to get a pump on, so I put some weight on the bar and started going.

And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And then like a few weeks later, we were at a seminar. And it was like afterwards we were having a couple beers. And I wanted croissants for breakfast. And they had 50 kilos on the bar. And they said, if you get 100 reps, we'll get you all the croissants you want tomorrow. So I did 104 reps. And so then that just became a thing.

Like I would just show up to the gym and that would be my warmup. I just set up the bar at 100 kilos at 225 and I do as many reps as I could. And I was able to build up to 67 reps on broken. Damn. That's a lot of reps. Yeah. But that's the beauty of it, right? So if you understand breathing and you understand the proprioception,

I could start the bench press with my lats and then I can go to my pecs. Then I can go to my front delts. I can go to pure triceps, I can use the bicep actually, I can do more with my obliques, I can go to the glutes. The body carries tension. It's where you want the tension to be. And so the goal of this is that you have the Golgi tendon organ. If it starts to perceive danger, it shuts the muscle off because you don't want that. Because if that happens, you're going to have a hard time doing rehab. If you just have pain or discomfort in the shoulder where you can't raise your arm, well, now the body is actually able to start to heal up a bit.

But the problem is that rather than learning how to contract the pec, you just mash the shit out of your scapula or your pec minor or your armpit so you can actually get yourself to bench press again. Do you think that maybe addressing these deeper ranges of motion in some various ways would be a good idea? So for example, maybe loaded, maybe you do a shorter range of motion and maybe unloaded or with very light weights, you learn these lower positions such as like maybe squatting on a slant board and sitting in the bottom squat yeah so exercises are a byproduct that's the skill so we need for sure we need range of motion we need muscle quality and quantity we need neural output the capacity to contract the muscles at will so for me i don't care about the exercise. I care about creating tension through the whole chain.

So, you could be bench pressing and having shoulder pain, and we could, let's say, fix the shoulder up, right, get it out of pain. But if you have a weak oblique, every time that there's stress in any sort of pushing exercise, you're going to displace the tension. So, that's why you'll keep having the recurring injury of the shoulder. Not because the shoulder isn't moving correctly. It could be because the oblique can displace the tension. So that's why you'll keep having the recurring injury of the shoulder, not because the shoulder isn't moving correctly. It could be because the oblique can't handle the load. So if you're back squatting and you have a weak oblique, what's the first thing you're going to see on the barbell? It's going to hike up because I can't take the load on the oblique

that's crushing me down. So what do I do? I elevate and I retract my back so I can stack my joints. My iliacus will take most of the load. And now I'm going to start to have pain in my neck and my shoulder. And they blame the rack position. Well, part of it is the rack position and the capacity to keep the chest engaged while you're in that rack position. But it's also the oblique.

So if I fix the oblique, now I can actually get myself in the proper tension. Does that make sense? So should you be doing lighter weights for full range of motion? 100%. Should you be doing partial weight and, you know, or more concentric work? 100%. The exercise doesn't matter. It's the capacity to have interoception and proprioception that matters with high neural output of the bigger structural muscles, physical intensity. Because if my body is physically, mentally, and emotionally aware of what it can handle today, then there's no stress or there's a very low risk of injury. Like some of what you were showing us today with the breathing, it just reminded me of some of the stuff I've seen from Joel Seidman where he has people do these like really small ranges of motion, quarter reps, half reps, somewhere in that range. And he's taking these people to ranges that it looks like he could probably work on teaching people to squat in these deeper positions and stuff. But from what I've seen, and I agree with Joel Seidman in a certain way, but what I've seen most of the time when someone does a full squat, they give up something

somewhere. They either like dump extra energy into the lower back or more energy into their knees or what have you. Not that that's even a bad thing. It could potentially be a good thing in a lot of ways. But it does exponentially make the exercise something that you have to think about a little bit more. Right. Yeah. So there's the – I would say this is where you have like the justification of your ego and you have a little bit of a justification of with heavier weights, pain will happen. And so is there a lot of work to do to move correctly? Sometimes you get stuck in that mental side where you're doing paralysis by analysis because you want to make sure you're

moving correctly. So you're never actually squatting. You're just analyzing your squat constantly. People get into that when they get hurt. So yeah, we need a balance of it all, right? The beauty with very partial or isometric holds is your mind will quit before your muscle does. So that's where you can get the neural output. So for me to take somebody from zero to a hundred on a back squat or whatever, I would start with isometric contractions so they can find the awareness. Then I would do mainly concentric movements with very low skill and very low weight bearing on the on the structure so that i can actually get high amount of blood flow higher neural output and i'm essentially teaching them the movement pattern of a hinge without them

having to have the high skill of where they are in space then i can start to teach them the skill of an actual squat so you you have a whole spectrum of things that you could be doing to better somebody in a back squat without having to back squat. So I threw out my back, you know, and I have the structural issues and everything, but I got my back squat from 545 to 605 in a span of seven or eight months. But most of my squats were being done at 50%. Most of my structure that I built up was through extremely heavy sled work, heavy sandbags and Atlas stones, some strongman work and yoke carries and Anderson squats. What's the advantage of the sled?

So if you do a sled, especially when you go heavy, it's high neural output. There's no skill involved. I mean, a little bit, but not much, right? You can always take another step. Yeah, you walk, yeah. Yeah. There's no eccentric whatsoever. So meaning that there won't be any tearing of the muscles and there's no weight bearing on the structure. So you're essentially not going to hurt yourself by creating, putting a lot of load on the structure. The beauty of it is, you know, you can do, so if you go into a sled and you go a full sled drag, so going backwards with full hip extension, you're forcing the psoas major, the VMO, the glutes, the hamstrings,

all to start to fire. When you're doing a sprint, if you sprint with your arms straight and you're bent down, oops, sorry, I forgot. Right? So what are we doing there? We're creating mobility in an overhead position and teaching people to squat. So if you think about doing the sprint, you're having to go here, which is what? The depth of a squat. So I'm teaching the body to have a hinge movement pattern with maximal neural output and very little risk of injury. So you're making somebody extremely strong with the risk of injury being, I don't want to say close to zero because I just saw a video of a guy that popped his Achilles. Oh, it looked horrible. So there is a little bit of risk of injury. There's always a chance.

But everybody can push the sled, right? And so the high intensity actually allows you to, there was a study that came out, I think it was from Stanford that showed the, the stem cells and the high amount of testosterone, everything that you develop with doing high intensity on the sled, because you can always take another step. So you advise sometimes to sprint with a sled? 100%. At least once a week, or if not twice.

And are you heavy and hard? Okay, I was going to say, do you like to see people actually move fast or? Yeah, 100%. Because if the weight is heavy enough, you're going to kind of not move super fast. Yeah, so you want to, and again, you should have like super long ones

that you go into, you absolutely die for a very long distance. You should do short and super, super heavy. Yeah, you can play with the wide range. But with the sled, you can get super strong. I had a 13-year-old client when I first done my gym. It was before everything that I was doing. But we did sandbag carry, so grabbing a sandbag, hugging it, doing walks.

We did sled sprints, sled drags, and harness bear crawls with the sled and then taught her how to do sandbag squats. Barely touched a barbell after six months. She was a 13-year-old girl, 155-pound back squat by five, and it looked beautiful. Ass to grass, no pain, no discomfort. And probably not hypertrophied in weird areas. Sometimes if you go in and body build,

you might have bigger arms or some shit like that. And that all, again, goes to where you're holding on the tension to complete the exercise. I want to mention something real quick. Mark, he asked about the full range of motion thing. I think a lot of it also comes down to, I mean, what are you trying to do?

Why are you doing the full range of motion? Because myself as a grappler, well, the reason why I'm benching all the way down here and the reason why I'm getting tension in these areas is because if somebody were to put me in an arm bar, I need the – the tendons and ligaments in all these areas need to be able to handle the force that another human is putting on me. If I'm in somebody's closed guard and they pull my back down, I don't know if somebody can visualize this, but my back comes down and my torso is parallel and I need to push off of them with my spine in a rounded position and get back to that position. That's where like a pancake good morning or some one of those movements is good because the load is in front of me. I'm maintaining my position. I can literally get my torso to the ground and I can work against load. You need the range of motion and you need it to be challenged.

I need that range of motion. I need my body to be able to access these ranges. I still need to be doing things within my workout that creates tension in the muscle groups, but I also need to create tension on those ligaments, joints, and tendons in those ranges so that when somebody puts me in those ranges or I get to those ranges, I'm resilient enough not to snap. Because a lot of people are so weak that they get into that position and instead of being able to come out of it or create tension or create looseness, they snap.

So we have to strengthen these structures. But if you're someone who's just powerlifting or you're doing something, that's your sport and you never touch these ranges, you can still do it if you want to, but it's not an absolute necessity. Right.

Well, a very simple example of power lifting how many of those guys have popped their bicep oh yeah why because there's no again they're able to go at it works until it doesn't right the bicep was not mobile so what happens is they go to a point where they're doing their one rep max and now they need the bicep and they never actually gain the mobility to have the tension the bicep and they never actually gain the mobility to have the tension in the bicep elongated. And that's when it pops. Well, a lot of lifters too, they naturally start to walk around with their arms bent

and knees bent. And have you noticed that it's always the arm that's supinated, never the pronated one? Yeah, a lot of times, yeah. Right? Why? Because there's no mobility here. They cannot maintain tension. So again, very simple exercise you can do if you're powerlifting or, you know, if you're looking for that end range is you start with the weight at

the strongest end range of the bicep and you start to inhale on the way down and you can only go to your inhale. And maybe today's a quarter of a bicep, but at least you're doing a true bicep curl with the bicep, not going to the side delt or going to the, uh, the forearm flexors, right? So that's the beauty of understanding these tools is if we understand the fundamentals of the exercise more by what are the muscles that we need to engage and what range they need to be at, then there's no need to have these pains and aches because you're moving to your end range and then you're challenging it with the breath. And that's how you essentially, you know, properly overload the system by what it

needs. If you do it correctly, there may be, you know, based on the skill and the amount of eccentric work that you're doing on those bigger structural muscles, there might be some soreness, but there won't be inflammation pain. That's the difference. Doctor, is he full of shit or not? No, I mean, it reminds me of the conversation we had in the gym earlier about more evolutionarily consistent movement patterns like we were talking about carrying for long distances and using things like sandbags where that we hold the weight and create the tension within ourselves as opposed to having the weights on the outside yeah you were mentioning how uh

there's some differences in the way people are built just by that alone just by people lifting you know a barbell where the weights are way outside versus the strongman guys having the different implements that they have. That's interesting. It's something I've never – obviously I observed it, but I never thought of it. If you look at Dmitry Klokov who almost stands like this, ready to catch here compared to somebody like Puzanovsky

or the strongmen who are almost more in here. But yeah, the body is clever and it knows biologically what it wants. And when you give it something like a barbell that maybe it was never programmed to deal with in nature because it was nicely cut in a specific diameter and it's a certain length off the ground compared to a sandbag where you have to physically grab it with your hands and create the tension with your biceps, the whole body starts to work as a unit and that's the problem is when you start to do something the body is not useful you're probably less likely to injure yourself in a grappling sport with another human in a it's a more natural thing to do to grab arms and hands

and wrists and things but they are trying to break you, so I guess you do get injured. What do you guys think of some of the training that you've been kind of messing with recently? Is it range of strength? Is that the guy on Instagram? I forget which guy. Range of strength, yeah. What was I messing with? Just like letting the weights kind of like...

Oh, DAC performance. DAC performance, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if you've seen it. You can pull up DAC stuff. But I actually – one of the reasons why I like it and you'll see it is because when you're working with another human being, there's a variable gradient of pressure that they're going to be putting on you. I can push you or pull on you or I can push you and pull on you. push you or pull on you, or I can push you and pull on you. So when he's like, you'll see some of the stuff he does. But for example, when I'm doing a bicep curl where I curl it and catch it

at this point, like I catch it when my, my arm is extended, I can feel, and I can strengthen my ability to absorb that tension in that area. And you can, you can load that over time, but you'll, you'll see he's using the reverse hyper for this. And I do this stuff on the cable machine too. But, yeah, what are your thoughts on this stuff? Or, like, Andrew will pull up more. In a way, it's like a little bit of, like, full body and slash weighted, like, plyometrics, I guess you'd say. Yeah. I would look at the deadlift.

No, go back to the deadlift. Oh, my bad. He's coming in soon, actually. But, you know, you see people do some things like this that are somewhat – I know this looks so drastically different than what most people are used to seeing, but those dropping down and jumping off of something is not too uncommon and throwing med balls and so on. He just happened to apply it to like barbells and cables and stuff.

Right. Not bad. A bit of the mid-back and cables and stuff. Right. Not bad. A bit of the mid-back and everything. But yeah, it looks good. Pull up something. Oh, yeah. Like the catches. Yeah.

I mean, listen, I'm all for it, right? For me, the stuff that I like to implement is always simple and less of a chance of crashing your sternum with dropping a barbell, right? less of a chance of crashing your sternum with dropping a barbell, right? And again, the key is if you understand the principles, the method doesn't matter. So if it works, again, if it's applied correctly, then that's great. But like I was telling Nsema with the Barracuda Smash, the video that we did,

the key is to understand what you're looking for because the capacity to complete the exercise. Okay. there you go it goes back to the swami as well where you're actively creating tension but you're also learning to actively release tension as well so it does apply it's like you see that one right there like it should be the psoas

but he's not using the psoas he's actually using the iliacus and then he's going up to the neck to pull. So that exercise that is supposed to be a reactive mechanism for the psoas major is actually going to the iliacus and the trap. So again, if you understand what you're looking for, then go for it. I love that people have all these, you know, start doing crazy exercises. For me, the way that I approach it is, you know, if my mom is

coming to me with pain, I just want simple things. If you're coming to me with pain, I understand that you want to be running and doing powerlifting. I don't want to do a whole program. I just want to say, Hey, Mark, you do, you know, Swami five, 10 minutes a day. You do some psoas raises. Maybe we do, you know, do the breathing with the bench and that's it then go run and go do because all i'm trying to do is make making sure that your body feels safe confident and able to perform physically mentally and emotionally so yeah i mean if you want to do all that stuff awesome yeah a lot of what a lot of what he's uh showing um a lot of like depth jumps and things like that I found to be –

Oh, you missed it. You always take it away with a deadlift, bro. You can see on the deadlift, now he's starting to rotate on the deadlift because now it's getting heavier where it's truly challenging the structure. Some people that are listening that – See the rotation? And then he hyperextends to the left. Sorry, I got extended. Oh, that's okay.

Some people that are listening that maybe just haven't explored any throwing, catching, jumping, I just want to encourage you to just play around with some of it if you're healthy. 100%. Obviously, if you got something twisted up or something, you're going to have to wait. And then also, with jumping in mind, keep in mind that you may not have done it in a long time. But jumping or throwing a med ball i understand like not everyone's going to end up enjoying running like people just they just kind of despise it right and that's i don't really enjoy it but i'm yeah it's fine i don't care i don't think people like need to necessarily run i think having a capacity to run uh you know two

miles or something like that would be nice but i think the beauty of it is you need to move. Find whatever you enjoy. And that's like I'm always – you get the Uber and they're like, hey, so what do you do? And they're like, so do you have any tips for me to go train? And I was like, find something you enjoy doing that you want to continuously search for and learn. Like that's the whole point of movement and training. It doesn't need to be a specific, you should not be married to the discipline or the methodology like a cult. Because as much as you're running, those principles

translate over to powerlifting, they all start to translate over. And so for me, it's always that it's like, we need to find what you enjoy. And then from there, we can build up. I want to make sure that you can do what you're doing to the best of its ability. So again, going back, like I was working with some guys in Belgium that are the top sprinters and long distance runners, and they're giving me all these like crazy dynamic exercises. I was like, that's great that you can do them. I'm just saying your calf isn't working and neither is your psoas. If we fix that, you can keep doing all this because you are a great athlete.

You can get yourself in the position so you can be dynamic. You have the coordination. That's great. I just need higher neural output in your calf. And we literally did calf raises and he's like winded, tired, and exhausted. And this is a guy that does like crazy amount of conditioning. And I was like, because now you actively trained the calf muscle and that helped with the hip pain. trained the calf muscle and that helped with the hip pain so again it's for me it's just can we go down to what is not working and let's make it better so you can keep doing what you want to do that's it like i do the i had a client of mine that was doing a range of strength and could do splits and was doing like jefferson curls and like 12 inch deficits and all this but the groin was hurting and all it was is like, you've trained yourself to

get to a position. So what happened? The Golgi tendon at the inside hamstring would shut off so you could get to the position. And that means that when you start to go do sandbag squats and barbell squats and goblet squats, instead of the hamstring, now the adductor starts to take over and then you start to have groin pain. So what do we do? We just connected a little bit more to the psoas, gave some safety and connection to the hamstring, and now there's no groin pain and there's no hip pain. Power Project Family, we talk about beef and meat all the time on the podcast. That's why we partnered with Certified Piedmontese Beef. But did you know this?

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Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Fuck yeah! Cool question because the psoas seems to be something that's continuously coming up in this conversation. Yes. What can athletes do so that they can – things that they can do to start connecting to their p psoas so that it's not something that's inactive for them? Yeah, so very simple. The swami. There's a video of it on my YouTube page.

I'll have that in the description. Swami. And then psoas raises, like the one I did with you. So you just sit on a bench. You kind of elongate the body because if you're sitting in a crouched position, you're actually going to psoas minor. So you need to elongate the body and then just start to breathe. Use the breathing as a tool. Don't let your ego get in the way. If you're raising your leg, it doesn't necessarily mean the psoas is working. The goal is to connect to the psoas.

And an interesting thing is if a physical therapist is currently listening to this or somebody who's uh not physically but like somebody who's super into anatomy they'll they'll say you can't lift with your psoas they're gonna say that so how does someone understand what you're saying like how do they feel the sensation because they would say you can't lift with your psoas right yeah the body works as a unit so i understand like the whole body needs to help bring the leg up. It allows you to find the awareness of the psoas. So the psoas major that comes from the inside of the femur wraps around and connects to the spine, right? Its job is for flexion and extension, the lifting and dropping of the leg.

It works eccentrically and concentrically. It's always active. Yes. It's what allows us to stand up if you start to get tired you start to arch and you start to go to the iliacus so that's why people that even are standing are like oh i have back pain but i'm already standing because the psoas is tired of keeping you standing so what do you start to do you start to arch your back kind of overextend a bit yeah or you start to put your foot out like this so you can go towards the outside

and you start to go a little more towards the it band and the and the outer quad and the glute med so that right there if you put your hand in your hip crease you can start to raise the leg slowly and you can create tension even standing here you can put your your fingers into your like if you find your hip bone find the top go down about three to four inches and you can push in there. There's a little spot there where you can kind of push in, and I want you to try and think of pushing in like a V. Can you breathe into that when you breathe in? Can you push it out? Yeah, there you go.

That's also going to, in unison, activate the transverse abdominus, the obliques, everything else. I was fired on that one. Careful, bro. A more direct answer for that physio or somebody is the fact that rich did. So it's raises for a year, every single day for however many minutes a lot to learn how to contract his

psoas. So the answer to them is go do it. And then they will know as a backstory. So I told you guys, I got hit by a rock slide. My hip broke, um, in one of the surgeries where they took the hardware.

So I had, um, pins in my pubic bone because my pubic bone got pushed up, my pubis. So they had to bring it back down. They put five screws in it and then they took that out and I was in a very big fuck you face. And I was like, I don't need the recovery. Sometimes you should listen to the doctors after structural traumas. So I started squatting way too early and I popped my perimodalus and all my lower abs. So I have absolutely no lower abs on my left side. So I need my psoas major to have high neural output or I get miserable back pain.

Again, I teach this stuff because I've been through it. I understand pain. I understand that shit cycle. And so you do lift with the psoas because it again, it's a matter of creating tension, not studied by a cadaver and how point A insertion and origin work. It's how you create tension. And that's the biggest thing that I've seen missing in a lot of the disciplines. Gotcha. So we need tension of the whole body.

And again, once you kind of take – is it we need tension of the whole body. And again, once you kind of, you know, is it the red pill or the blue pill you're supposed to take in the matrix? The red pill, right? You start to understand, like I said, like the exercise doesn't matter. It's how well you can create tension through the range of motion.

And if you find the weak spot and you strengthen it, the whole body will work better because it's not just about the physical movement. It's about the perception, the way the body, the mind, the heart, all the systems see what's about to happen and how is that stress relating to you and how you're going to express it. That's the key. So if you can do psoas raises, I put a post out the other day, and this may happen to you guys. If your feet ever cramp, more than likely, I won't say an absolute because there are no absolutes, but more than likely, it's a weak psoas. And so what happens is, again, the psoas is there to help you hinge and walk and move.

And if you don't have that, you don't have the capacity to ground. So your foot has to work harder and harder. And so I put that up the other day and a physio was like blah blah blah blah blah and i was he's like and where's the proof and i was like listen i have had like over 100 clients that you know have low back pain and their feet keep cramping and we get better and a little output of the psoas and now the foot's not cramping and there's no back pain. Like, is that enough proof? Sorry, it's not in the medical. Where's the paper? Yeah, right. So, you know, but those are small things. Like if your foot's cramping, more than likely the psoas major is starting to turn off. And so the psoas major, you know, on the behavioral side is the true connection to yourself.

On the left side, it creates a very big empathetic expression if you get a good connection to yourself. So if you're somebody that disconnects quite a bit, that is always doing things for others, that is always constantly busy or that is in a high-level sport and needs to turn off their mode, especially like endurance runners are a big one. They start to turn off their true connection to self, which makes them become more type A, very ritualistic, very much attention to detail type person. And so it can have an empathetic expression. So you have a hard time dealing with emotions. It's a little bit harder to connect. On the right side is the affirmation of the self. So how secure are you about your true identity, your identity within you,

not the one that's going out to the superego? So this is where things get really interesting because it's like, you talk about like the physical side of things and people are like, yeah, yeah. And then you start to say, well, that is actually the sign that you're not connected to yourself.

And people are like, what the fuck are you talking about now? So like, first off, because a lot of your, some of your stuff is called emotions in our muscles. I think that's what your, was your, that was the workshop.

Yeah. When someone hears that, they're like, what, where's the proof of this? What do you mean? Like, how did you come across these concepts of like this side holds this and this

side holds this. And where's that come from? Did you get some of it from ghostbusters too? The pink slime underneath the city it's all angry it's like boiling over it's still there

yeah it must be it's okay for you to confess it all came from Ghostbusters 2 yeah so again I'll go on the record there's great books out there The Body Keeps the Score I haven't read them just as a preface to it Um, yeah. So again, I'll go on the record. There's great books out there. The body keeps the score. There's all of these. I haven't read them.

So just as a preface to it, because people are like, well, what book did you read? I was like, I've just worked with thousands of people. People don't understand that in my head, I'm walking and assessing people. And so it, for me, it's, it's, it's the obsession, right? Like I'm constantly running assessments and working with clients in my head because I want to be a human specialist. I want to be able to understand what is going on at the mental, physical, and emotional level. Please don't lose your train of thought. But I have a question for you. Do you ever feel that, cause you were mentioning like, you know, doctors,

they work with so many people. So they start to like like they see this person so many times like let's just toss them that medication do you do you work on trying not to even though you see a lot of similarities do you work on trying not to bin or does that kind of like do you see so many things where you're just like oh this is here this is here this is here i've made assumptions and it always gets me in trouble and i've tried to stroke my own ego and that always gets me in trouble i'm here to provide a service for my client and I black out. Like you can ask these guys, they've watched me do assessments and work with clients. If I'm into it, I'm just zoned in. And so my eye has gotten very, very fast. So now it's like, I can just see you standing and I can see, I can see parts of how your system is working. And you know, as I spend more time, especially under stress,

right? So even if it's like a, if that's why I like deep conversations, I don't like the superficial shit because that stress also gives off what's going on behaviorally. So, um, yeah, now you lost my train of thought.

No, what are the emotions and muscles? Yeah. So I've worked with a shit ton of people and I've gotten a lot of, you know, I've, I've gotten things that come up. So the first step was the phylogenetic hierarchy.

So the nervous system, Steve Porges came out with the phylogenetic hierarchy. So basically states that you go from your newest nervous system to your oldest. So you start with the ventral vagus nerve, which is the flow state. This is socialization, coordination, active, being outside, so on and so forth. Then you go to the sympathetic, the fight and the flight. That's what they used to say now. They say fight or flight. We can all understand that the fight and fleeing are not the same thing.

So you're hunting or you're being hunted. Today when we were bench pressing, I said dominate the bar. Don't let it dominate you. And then once you start to lose the fight, right, you go into the flight, you go to a freeze. That's the dorsal vagus nerve. That is part of survival. That's playing dead.

That's the collapse. That's depression. It's a parasympathetic collapse. They keep it in the sympathetic, but it doesn't make sense to me to play dead and be in a sympathetic state. Anyhoo. They keep it in the sympathetic, but it doesn't make sense to me to play dead and be in a sympathetic state. Anywho, so for me, it was that, seeing that as a macro part of a human, right? So somebody comes up to you, you think you're going to socialize, he slaps you in your face. You very, I would never slap you in the face. I know.

But a person that would, I know that's a dangerous human. It's going to be a dangerous thing, right? And so that became part of, okay, so as a simple example, right? We're here having a conversation. Somebody comes in and slaps you in the face. That immediately is going to take you – you think it's going to take you to an immediate fight, but that's not true. It's going to take you immediately to a flight because you need to assess in a macro of a billionth of a second, can I take this person? Was he armed?

It could have been, you know, your girlfriend playing a joke on you. You're not going to hit her, right? There's a need to understand where you are. And then you decide, okay, so do I joke about it? And then you kind of get, and then you can go into either back to the flow or you go back to the freeze.

So you're either going to win or lose a state based on your interactions. Those interactions are based on the body as a whole, not just the cognitive brain, makes observations of the surroundings. And then from there, it creates a prediction and relates to the experience. You always want to live out the experience that you predicted. We're like cats, right? You want to make sure that everything's in control. Then came the breathing with the Swami. And I started to realize that, you know, at first, we just used it to teach people that the body works as a unit. You can create tension through either internal or external torque. And I started to get teary-eyed myself. And I was like, what the

hell is going on? And so we started to play with how the phylogenetic hierarchy could be applied to movement and training. So I create phylogenetic workouts. So a little bit of it would be like the glue bridges that we did. You went from the flow, we were socializing, to a fight, to a flight because you quit, to a freeze because you really quit and you were laying on the floor going like, fuck, what do I need to do this? And I'm yelling, I'm saying, you're quitting. So now we all have to do more. It makes you go to a fight again, going back to the selfish deeper brain, boredom, anxiety, frustration, anger at others, anger is itself. And so from there, you start to understand that we can use movement to buffer the nervous system, which then allows us to change or create

true moments of presence, which allows you to gain perspective on your environment and yourself and externally, and then allows you to change your perception. That with working with clients and seeing people that were either on the depressive side or that had been abused in certain factors, I started to notice a pattern of less left pec. They all had shoulder pain on the left side and the left lower pec seemed to lack a lot of mobility and neural capacity. And then I started to see a lot of military guys,

a lot of athletes that weren't, that never got exactly where they wanted to. I started to see people with daddy issues and it was all right side pec issues. There was a lack of pride for self. There was a constant thrive to create acceptance from the fatherly or the mentoring figure. Then you went to the lower body and it was taking on stress from others. So people have more radiating pain towards the left side of the hip.

It starts to be usually somebody that's very empathetic and you're the rock of taking everybody's stress. On the right side, it's always more frustration to others. So I started to take these patterns. Do you want to say something? Sorry, I'm going really fast. Just from the medical school and seeing the way that we were missing some things, that's when my right-sided back pain, hip pain started to come on. And in hindsight, it was the frustration at the system that perpetuated that.

Okay. So I basically started to go deeper into it because for me it was like, okay, people can get very stuck in their ways. Again, you can get very comfortable. I love helping people, but I don't feel like coaching somebody through a CrossFit class going like, all right, guys, you have 10 more reps and we're going to focus on this position and you're one, two, three. So I was thriving for something deeper and I noticed it. Like you've been at a gym where you're squatting and then out of nowhere, like the fucking rage comes on or you're doing a bench press and you're failing and you're shaking.

You start laughing hysterically. You know what I mean? Like movement emotes emotions. Nobody can deny that. If you, if you deny that, then you're, you're absolutely bullshitting yourself.

Right. And again, emotions is like this kind of like, Oh my God, you're so soft. No, no, no.

It's, it's, it's, it's how you express how hard you pushed yourself. Cause sometimes you can, how hard you pushed yourself because sometimes you can how actively you push yourself if you really push yourself hard you're going to be thinking all kinds of different thoughts and emotions are going to be 100 and so that was one of the biggest things that i started to just i just started to pick up patterns and you know i i'm crazy 100

but i was like fuck like who do I talk to about this? And so, like, you just started to learn and you start to pick up things and I would just pick up patterns. And I would be like, okay, so am I crazy or am I not? So I'd go to a bar, I'd order a couple of whiskeys, I'd hang out, I'd start talking to somebody and I'd start talking about their lives. And, you know, so we're like actual conversations, you know, not superficial shit, like really get to know the person.

And then towards the end, I'd be like, hey, so do you have like pain in your left shoulder ever? Does it feel heavy or do you? And they're like, holy shit, how do you know? And these are people that don't go to the gym. So I was like, okay, cool. So there are feedback loops. How you create tension shows you how you've perceived the world

and your current perception of the world. And it can change. So then I started to realize, like, it's a feedback loop. People are like, yeah, but what if you just stub your toe? Like, you stub your toe. I was like, yeah, it's a chain reaction. So you stub your toe. Now you're going to start to walk differently.

So, you know, if you continue along those routes, you will start to perceive the world differently. Or you may start to take relationships differently or conversations differently. They're feedback loops. There is no A plus B plus C. It's quantum. It's just, there's reactions. You know what I mean? And so there's reactions and actions. And that's really how I got to it. It's just, I've been doing it over and over again. And, you know, I've missed a couple of times and that's usually when I want to stroke my own ego or where I want to get something out of the client, not allowing the client to be the captain of their ship. But for the most part, you'll start to see it. And of course, it's like you could do some broad strokes, but I could get very specific with certain people.

get very specific with certain people. And, um, you know, I work with a lot of intense clients that have had some extreme situations and my medium is movement. I'm not a therapist. I'm not, I just listened to you. We have a conversation just like when you go to a barber, you go to a bar and you talk to the bartender about your problems. That's what I do. The problems are physical, sometimes can be emotional, sometimes mental. But the one thing that I can guarantee you movement, proper movement and guidelines with breath work will help you. So you've gotten your labs done, whether it's six months ago or a year ago, and you want to know where things are at, but you don't want to get a full panel again. That's why I partnered with Mary Calthone by Derek from More Plates, More Dates, and we have something called the Check It Panel. This is an affordable panel with 55 different labs that allow you to see all those different biomarkers. And you can get this channel every month or every two months, whatever frequency

you like, but it'll give you all the specific labs that you want to know so that you can make sure that you're moving in the right direction for your specific hormones. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yes, that's over at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. And at checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save 10 off the power project panel the checkup panel or any individual lab that you select again that's at merrickhealth.com slash power project promo code power project at checkout links in the description as well as the podcast show notes i'm just gonna say care probably is just a big factor right like uh yeah the fact that you're caring for someone the fact that you're listening to somebody

and the fact that you're now listening to them talk about when their mom got divorced when they were seven, how much that impacted their life. And even aside from whether it helps in like a scientific way, it helps this person's hip or helps this person's back, that's got to be just helpful anyway just to get into that conversation. I mean you're trying to heal someone from pain. So some of the people that are listening to this now that think it's like kooky, I think it's a great assessment because again, we're talking about pain, talking about trauma and trying to release all of it, not just the pain in your back. Yeah. And it's kooky,, we have DMT in our body. That's my new rabbit hole that I'm digging into. Right. But so it's, it's kooky. Yeah. You know, but the, the, it's been super interesting to see how I had a guy that was

pretty high up in the corporate world, lots of stress. And, you know, we started having these conversations and the way that the body was showing pain, I was like, there's some abandonment issues. There's some dad issues. There's some things going on. So I call it ninja fucking. It was Dane Cook. I remember. Yeah. Graham reminded me, you know, it's called placing seats to make you question, not saying this is the problem because that doesn't help anybody. I'm planting seeds to see if you want to make the change because it's not up to me. It's up to you. And so we started working on a pure physical level.

He had these issues and I was like, hey, so the other day I had a great conversation with my dad. How's – I haven't asked like how's your dad doing or what's the relationship with your dad? And he was like, no, everything's okay. I mean, you know, I didn't, I never met him. He kind of disappeared in my life and, you know, he was never this or that. And I was like, oh man, sorry to hear that. Sorry. I didn't want to, let's go back to movement. And so then we kept doing these movements and things started to change. And then he's the one that came to me. He's like, hey, so I was doing the pressing and I started to think about my dad again. I started to express the anger and now my shoulder feels better. world, and they go towards it's pure science and the paper says it, or they take it to this whole spiritual law.

You know, like when you watch Wild Wild West with Osha, Osha? Ash? Yeah, something like that. Wild Wild West? Will Smith? Not that movie, right? No, no, no, no.

It's a docu-series of the guy that created this cult. Okay. You know, it's like... Not a very good movie. It's a docuseries of the guy that created this cult. Not a very good movie. Hey, I dug it when I was a kid. Will Smith was a great rapper. I will die on that.

Anyway, let's go. Let's not go too spiritual. Can't we all just meet in the middle? There's reasons these things are happening. Some we can't explain. When we can't explain, we take it towards kooky, foo-foo, spiritual. That's what I'm trying to not do. I want to make sure that we can explain it i'm trying because what's up i'm trying yeah well he's we're we're gonna get there well there's a lot of things uh you know that have been passed down from one generation to another and um there's you know people have been talking

about uh cold exposure and heat and sunlight and like these things that, again, people might think it's like spiritual or they might think it's weird in some way. But if you get around other people and let's say you're around a fire and you sing or you have a chant or something, it's powerful. It's energy. It's undeniable. And then the stars are out and the moon's out. Like that's – those things, they have energy in them and we don't really it's really rare for people to engage in stuff like that anymore yeah and and energy is just waves it's just waves and frequency and physics explains that really well but the these ideas that specific areas of the body hold on to certain behaviors and cycles and traumas and

things there was a paper that i i got really interested in because it was um again it came from my mentor in health optimization medicine but it's this thing called the cell danger response and this guy robert navio wrote about it in 2014 and he explained that if you zoom down from the whole human we're just an ecosystem of of cells so if you just look at one cell what happens in one cell should happen into the whole human and when you expose a cell to stress and the stress can be from any form it can be physical chemical uh uv sun all of the things he talks about it responds in exactly the same way and it only does eight specific things when it responds

to stress and one of those things is walling off certain areas of the membrane and i think when you zoom that back out to the whole human is when you expose a human to stress it will start to wall off parts of its outside being and i think that's what we see in the contraction of certain muscles that the tension needs to be reconnected and that what's associated with this change in the membrane is changes inside the cell so it starts to change its epigenetics its genes it changes its metabolism so it starts to produce things like lactate as opposed to glucose or more monomers as opposed to polymers so more amino acids to proteins and it did all of these things as a way to prevent it being overridden by viruses and that was the the archetype for

for how a single cell responds to stress um and and by understanding what one cell is doing then we can start to begin to understand what's happening at the whole human level and i think our our disconnect in is not assuming that that is what's happening we like to have stories about things which is again this brain network which is very good at telling us or having cognitive biases that maybe we want to explain it in one way but I like to approach everything with an open mind and if if you look at the data for long enough these things that we're seeing don't seem so crazy after all but he did find a crazy doctor to help him with this yeah people uh you know they

want to there's they want their story to to be unique yeah you know they want to you know uh i don't know what it is about it but like you want your thing to be like complicated, complex or special in some way. I'm not even sure why. Like, oh, you've never seen a back like this. Like this one's really messed up. This one's really hard to figure out. I just think it's like it's some sort of human nature. I think you're trying to get like a different empathy or different response from somebody maybe.

You're trying to stay a victim. And that's going to hurt some people. You're trying to be a victim because you're, again, you're approaching anything that's trying to help you in a passive way. This isn't solvable. Yeah. You're approaching Richard's going to heal me. No, I'm not going to heal you. You're going to heal yourself.

You have to put in the work. Right? But what do they do? The ice bath is going to help my mental health. No, you're going to help your mental health by getting some exposure, right? But then what's going to happen when you get used to that exposure? Then we're going to have issues. So again, the goal is to not be comfortable and to constantly add exposure to positive stress,

to learn how to adapt to stress because stress is never going to stop. But we keep teaching people to go away from stress. You have pain in your back, take ibuprofen. That's not dealing with stress. Or you had a stress day, smoke a joint. That's cool. Like, okay, I get it. But then if you start doing it every day,

then it's no longer a social thing, right? Like I have clients and they're like, oh, don't ask me to do anything before my coffee. And I was like, you should be able to go do things without your coffee, right? Then you're using them as crutches. And so that's the biggest thing is don't do things passively. Nothing is going to heal you. You're going to heal yourself. We'll have tools, but don't put them as a crutch. And movement is a tool to help heal and to help perform. But even with pains and aches, like you go through the exercise hoping the exercise was going to fix it. No. Engaging the right muscles will help get rid of the inflammation.

Right? And so it's never the exercise. And that's where people get caught up because we've been conditioned to exercise is from point A to point B, and that's what it should be. How long were we conditioned with diet? And you tell people, oh, no, I only eat steak and eggs. And they're like, are you fucking kidding me? Your cholesterol must be through the roof. So we've been conditioned. And even if you want to try and get out of it, you still go back to the same thing. It's crazy.

So it's the same thing. We live in cycles. And so we like to be comfortable even though it's uncomfortable. When you want to keep living that victim card or you want that kind of complex cycle, there's very complex cases. But usually those are the simplest solutions. But it takes work within. And if somebody doesn't want to change who they are, they're going to find a way to stay that victim.

I had a guy that was like, you're talking, I always say like, on a scale from one to 10 on average week, like how's your pain in your lower back? And this guy had two hernia discs and a bulging disc. And he goes, on average, I'm an eight and a nine on average. That's after smoking weed and taking the pain pills. Ridiculous. We were there for about two and a half hours doing Swami.

We did psoas raises and we did sled drags going backwards. No pain. Well, there was pain. We went down to a two, though. So from an average of eight and nine, it went down to a two on that session. I was like, okay, so you're going to go home, go to sleep. Let me know how it goes because I didn't want to stress the body too much. We need to see how much stress it can truly accept before we can kind of keep building on it.

Woke up the next day, he's like, holy cow, I'm only at a four. I'm like, phenomenal, instead of an eight. So I was like, keep doing this and keep me posted because he lived far away. Two weeks later, I haven't heard anything. And it's like, you paid me for the one session, but I'm willing to keep talking to you to haven't heard anything. He writes back with me two weeks later and goes, you didn't fix me. My back's back to an eight. And I'm like, well, have you been doing the consistent work? Oh, well, I had work and I had this, like you said, they're not willing to put in the time. I was

like, you want to be a victim you don't want me to help you you want me to be another person you want to go see that could not help you so I told him I was like I don't think we can work together if you want I'll refund you the money you have the tools necessary if you want to put in the work to get out of pain and it is going to

be oscillation again getting people to feel better is the easy part because they get on that upswing like, ooh, and there's that glimpse of hope. It's when things start to get comfortable at that point where it's like, eh, and then they start to go back down. And that's the hard part because they can revert all the way back down. And that's where Ed really comes in because it takes, what is it, two years for the cells to start to change

the way that they're behaving yeah all of these parts of it even the membranes of cells the fats and the lipids it's i think it's like 700 days of half-life before they're all recycled or at least half of them are recycled so you can see how you can change one part of your life um but it takes time and consistent practice. And then the whole system is built with a different stimulus and a different intent. What you got going on over there, Andrew? Oh, man. So the psoas, I know we've talked about it a lot.

And Richard even gave some examples of what you can do. But I'm just thinking – so like I would joke around with people and they would ask me like, Oh, what do you think caused your back pain? And I was like, well, I had two jobs back to back where I sat down and I didn't get up for 12 years. Yeah. So, um, I know for sure that like, just because of all the sitting that my size is probably not in the best shape. And I know there's somebody listening like right now they have us in their ear, in their office, you know, in their cubicle, and they're sitting down.

They're doing the same thing that I was doing. What else can we give people to do in order to help like improve and treat their psoas a little bit better? Yeah. So if you're sitting in a chair, you can almost slouch all the way to the edge and allow your upper body just to rest against the back of the chair. And then you can basically put your legs out in front of you if you've got enough space under there i don't know if you do hopefully i don't unplug anything and if you find your hip bones

like we did earlier and press your fingers in just a few inches below and into here and then as you raise one of your legs you're going to inhale into that area and then when you stop inhaling you're going to put your leg back down on the floor and this is going to allow you to see whether a you can generate tension in the low abs and the psoas and b how much tension and how much range of motion that muscle has and for most people who have been sitting down particularly have been sitting down for 12 years that muscle is going to be really weak and short and tight and you may only get a few centimeters if not half a centimeter of movement and it's accepting that and then just building up slowly over time

and once the body feels safe that it can connect to the muscle and contract the the progress is fairly quick but it can change day to day yeah and then so like how about some of that like uh like art stuff where they are stretching or at least i don't know exactly what they're doing but it seems like they're stretching because when they when i get it done it feels like it feels like my skin's about to start bleeding because it's like so tight and the friction and the tension that's all there. Is any of that beneficial in conjunction with what you guys are talking about? Or is it just kind of like if it feels good, go for it. But this is really going to be the key. So ART, what they're usually going for is a bypass of shutting off the muscles that are sending intensity.

So like the trigger point therapy, again, where are the muscles that they're shooting for? They're usually much smaller muscles that have a much bigger percentage of afferent muscle fibers and nerve endings. So more afferent meaning information going in and going up to the brain, not efferent going from the brain out. And so I'm against it if nothing is going to change afterwards. Again, it's great to get that release because the hip is tight or the pec minor or the supraspinatus is tight or in the scapula, right? The rhomboids are tight and they're giving discomfort. Why is there discomfort? And so that's the key is we can release but then understand that afterwards you need to go back to creating safety and neural connection of the pecs and the lats so that you don't go back to the scapula. The problem is that we go and we get this release,

we feel great, we can move without any load, but then we all know we're going to go back to the barbell and try and bench or try and dumbbell press or do any of this, which is going to do what? You're creating, with this, you're creating a false sense of safety and confidence. And then when it goes to performance, it's still not going to work because you have not changed your movement patterns, or you have not changed the way that you maintain tension through a movement.

So in understanding that, it goes back to understanding the fundamentals of what is it that you want to work actively, which means usually more efferent. You take control of that muscle, which would be more of the structural muscles, so psoas major, transverse abdominis, sternocostal pec, glute max, inside hamstrings, VMOs, right? More efferent ones, the ones that you can do the pec dance, right? You can't do a supraspinatus dance. You know what I mean? So- Only. Not yet. Right? So that's the key is all this stuff is great if we understand that we're going to change things afterwards. But we don't change things afterwards because afterwards they give

you a prescription that is based on sets, reps, and positions, not tension of the muscles. So if you understand what you're doing, and let's say you release the TRAP3 and the rhomboids, or you release the supraspinatus, immediately afterwards, go lightweight because the muscle cannot handle that much load. And as we talked about, the Golgi tendon organ will be like, this is going to be overloading. So you're going to displace the tension right away again. So start very lightly, start to create movement and then build up from there. So Nsema is a very strong man. I'm not, I'm kind of putting on the spotlight, but very strong man. We were doing lat pull downs with, it goes like 50 or 60 pounds, and he could not maintain the tension in the

lat. He would retract the shoulder and roll the shoulder forward. So rather than doing, he was doing a beautiful execution of a lat pull down if you look at it from a position standpoint, but in a tension standpoint, the lat was not pulling the weight down. It was a retraction, which went to the scapula the low trap and then he would roll forward to be supraspinatus and mid-trap so him releasing discomfort in the shoulder he didn't have discomfort in the shoulder but i was just showing him why the oblique wasn't working that

was one of the examples that i used and you could see that the shoulder was rolling and retracting rather than actually depressing and protracting right right? Which you see again, it's like you see people that have upper trap dominance, right? That's like a really big one, especially like dentist, hairdressers, crossfitters, functional fitnessers. I don't want to get in trouble, right? So they roll the shoulder forward and they elevate the shoulder. And how do they try to fix it? Retraction.

What the hell? Isn't the opposite of elevation depression? So those are the simple questions where you're like, that doesn't make any sense. But again, they're teaching based on positions and they're teaching based on cadavers. So they're teaching of a segmentation of the pec. So the pec is supposed to be what? An internal rotator. Yet you can still create tension if you externally rotate. It's a matter of tension in the muscle and capacity to move it through the range that's important.

So ART, all that stuff, I don't, I'm not against it. I'm against it when there's no active changes afterwards. It is not a cure-all because you're treating the symptom of the discomfort. You're not treating the true dysfunction of the tension that is lacking. And that's where we start to get in trouble because then it doesn't work. And now that we have this beautiful thing of social media and influence, people will choose more and more skilled exercises to try and progress people to help. And that's where I'm like, ah, it's like, have you ever gone to like

a really nice restaurant with a brand new chef and they try to give you everything in the kitchen sink, like in the plate. But when you really go to a really nice restaurant, what do you get? A steak on a plate. And it's delicious. You know what I mean? Like the plates will have three to four ingredients. They understand they're not trying to, they're not trying to stroke their ego with all the techniques that they can do. Simplicity is the key to true knowledge and wisdom. That's when you know that somebody really understands what they're doing. It's very simple in how they express it and they teach it. When you keep adding more and more skill, for me, it's almost like a toxic red flag sign

that you're just regurgitating information because you're trying to see what works and what doesn't. It might work for some people, but again, if I can do a bicep, like you've done 100,000 reps on bench press and I've just taught you three new ways, it means that, again, there is no absolute and these exercises are only as important

as the tension that they're in. Otherwise, it doesn't matter. Do you think technology has led to a lot of just like what you guys are seeing or do you think that people have always been in pain? You think that cavemen had weak psoas? They're lazy as fuck, right? So that's the biggest thing. So like that was one of the things I was talking. Lazy as fuck, right? So that's the biggest thing. So like that was one of the things I was talking like a lot of the treatments that are coming to train more, the problem is now they're using it as a chase of the objective, right?

So if we go back to like a caveman, the goal was kill the animal and then – or do the farm work and that was it. It wasn't I need to – they didn't need to measure their progress. The progress was I eat dinner or I don't eat dinner. Or I got eaten. Or somebody's going to come and kill us, so we need to be strong enough and be warriors. So the problem is that we've objectified the constraints. So rather than just becoming better, we're putting an objective of a time domain. So rather than saying, hey, I can run from here to there, it's like, can I do it faster?

And now you're chasing the faster or the distance, not am I feeling better while I'm doing it. And so then you start to get caught up in this cycle and this paranoia of saying, so success is being strong, for example. What is strong? It's going to be variance, right? So it's going to depend. For me, I'm training so I can play with my kids. If I come to meet you guys, I can do some bench press at 275, you know what I mean? Like that's my measurement of success.

But when I was powerlifting, my measurement of success was I need a deadlift 700 pounds. I didn't care if my back was broken or not. Right. Because the object was the 700. So that's where you start to have the issues, right? Is it's measurement and laziness. How did you kind of shift your,

your mindset from being the like F you, everybody, I'm going to prove you wrong. I'm going to do the thing that's probably going to break me again to, I need to fix this. And then how do you advise other people to do that? Because again, like a lot of our audience, they're going to be power lifters and they're going to be like, yeah, that sounds cool. Maybe, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to follow these methods. I'm going to get out of pain and then I'm going to go hit that PR. But they're going to probably jump the gun on that PR.

So what's the advice on trying to get somebody just to switch the mindset to just ignore that stuff for a while now? What is the level of pain or discomfort or the recurring injuries that are coming? What is the end vision for your powerlifting or your PRs or what is it that you want out of powerlifting and knowledge versus information, right? So, you know, you have a lot of people that have a lot of information, but don't apply it. It's a G.I. Joe fallacy. Now, you know, right? Now, you know, but now you need to take action on it. And so the question is like, okay, so do you want to, and a timeline, I think is also very important. You know, but now you need to take action on it. And so the question is like, okay, so do you want to – and a timeline I think is also very important. I stopped powerlifting because I was like, okay, so I could go to Worlds for powerlifting or I could go teach people.

And so for me it was like, I'd rather go teach people. And it was like I'm investing all of this time into a, that isn't necessarily going to make me a superstar. But yeah, I think it was partly that. And I got humbled. You know, it was, I sincerely wanted to perform to the best of my abilities. And I was tired of constantly breaking. I was the guy that would get to 595 and then I'd pull 600 and my back would go out. And I had it on speed dials like, all right, let's go get cracked.

Let's go to the dry needling. Let's do the massage. Let's do the cryotherapy. Let's give it six weeks and then we start lifting again. And then I was like, I'm fucking breaking. So I found somebody that knew what the fuck they were doing that didn't just say, I'm going to sell you the program that's going to fix you, but said, hey, your lat's not functioning and you can't hinge for shit. And I was like, bro, I pull 600 pounds. I think I can hinge. I couldn't hinge. Who was that person for you?

Julian Pindell. Julian Pindell. Yeah. And amazing content. He was the guy that allowed me to, he was the mentor that I needed because he gave me a new scope on what fitness is it stopped being that obsession addiction to the pr and the progress and the data and all this bullshit and so it really aligned with my values because i didn't like listening to people and he just had the right approach to it and i was like the first time i went to go see him he had me do bicep curls correctly and the sleds and i was like that's it that's all we're doing

because i was doing seven workouts there i was like that's all we're gonna do it's like just keep doing it and go find your left lat because it doesn't fucking work it's not firing just bicep curls and sled yeah okay we did a bicep it was called the bicep opener and then we did uh we did rope pulls uh overhead yoke carries and i finished i was puking because it was heavy heavy heavy it's a bicep opener like a incline curl or rolling with a sled a bicep opener is like laying on the bench and then you will extend the arm to the capacity of the pec and then you're going to inhale on the way down exhale on the way up now we do inhale on the way down but essentially how far can can you maintain tension of the pec and the bicep?

So from here, it's essentially the same mobility you need for a dip or for a bench press, right? And so it's important because if I can't maintain tension here at an elongated range with five pounds, how do you expect me to do a dip? So what do people do with dips when they have shoulder pain is they disconnect at the pec, they go to the mid-trap, so on and so forth. So, yeah, that's all we did and i was like this is kind of bullshit but i was like i'm a fuck you kind of guy and i was like how

dare you say my left lat didn't work and so i did left lat for fucking 30 minutes every single day with all the different exercises of arnold's encyclopedia bodybuilding and i finally found a one-arm barbell row that I was like, holy shit, that's the left bicep. How have I not been using this? I mean, I was able to do 70 unbroken butterfly pull-ups. Like I was doing 385 on my clean and jerk. How is it that my lat isn't working?

But it wasn't. And so he was the first one that came to me and said, yeah. But because everybody else was like, well, you're just a strong dude. Like you're going to get injured. Or here's the ART or here's, you know? And so nobody actually ever gave me a solution. So now I was like, Holy shit. So I would show up there and I was like, you know, I'd have my, I go see him once a week and my class was at 10.

So I showed up at nine and I'd watch him coach his first two clients. And then I would hang out afterwards and I just started to pick up and I was like, man, this is fucking amazing. So that was like a big, big boost on the next level of, you know, where, what the body is capable of and more than anything, understanding the knowledge. Not just saying, oh no, well, if you follow, you know, starting strength, then you're going to get stronger until you don't, you know? And so that was the biggest thing. And when, you know, for the powerlifters that are listening out there, understand that it is one of the only exercises in weightlifting that is bilateral. Nothing that we do in nature is bilateral. It's all unilateral. So all the sports that you did pre-powerlifting created a

muscle imbalance that when you put on a barbell is going to shift the load and how you handle the load. So that's why those injuries are coming from the first place. It's not your elbow. It's not your wrist. It's not your shoulder. More than likely is going to go down to the psoas and the oblique and a misalignment of those for a large percentage of people. How did you have the confidence to start doing seminars? Because sometimes I think people, they get excited, they get passionate about stuff, but then they kind of have a hard time monetizing it. They're not sure how to go about doing it.

What was kind of a confidence booster for you that you were like, you know what, I need to get this information out to even more people? Yeah. For me, I have three very basic values in my life, passion, knowledge, and respect. So I know that I can always learn something from somebody. I'm very passionate about what I do. If I don't have the answers, I tell you, I don't know. You know what I mean?

So for me, it's like I'm going to go to a seminar and there's people that are much more intelligent than me that come to these seminars or that have a different spectrum of knowledge and wisdom. working with and I was able to not just be saying, oh, if you do the bicep opener, it's going to work, but really understanding why I was giving the bicep opener as an exercise. Then I was like, yeah, people need to understand that, you know, movement isn't just about the position. And, and yeah, just, I think my passion threw me out there to want to, to change. So after my rock climbing accident, um, I got into the, I really started to get more into coaching because before I used to work in restaurants. And one of the things that I wanted to do was revolutionize the fitness industry. So CrossFit I think did an amazing job of doing that. I think it deserves a lot of credit.

It's changed how global gyms are setting their places up. It's done a lot for fitness. And when I opened up my affiliate, I wrote to CrossFit. I said, I want to revolutionize the fitness industry just like you guys have. And so that's been the goal. So I figure I can't do it by myself because I can only help so many people. But if I can get coaches that are passionate on truly connecting and helping with people and wanting to understand and develop their knowledge,

then we can slowly keep building a group of people that are just wanting to understand and develop their knowledge, then we can slowly keep building a group of people that are just wanting to provide answers and long-term solutions for pains, aches, and all of the above. One thing that I really do love about everything that you're doing and the way you're educating is that movement is – because I think, Mark, I heard you mention this a little bit ago. It's how like something about – you know what I'm talking about, where you get linked to your mind via the body, et cetera. There's a way you put it that was like pretty solid.

But either way, you're helping people link to their emotions and tap into these things through movement and using their body. Because it's like a lot of times people have issues and they're like, oh, let me go see a therapist. Let me do some talk therapy. And not like those things are bad, but it's always it there's there's nothing involved physically it's like you go to a talk therapist you talk you go home you don't oh i think i said something effective like uh you get to your mind through your body and you get through your body through your mind yeah and one of the first um it was a coach's week so rich used to do seminars but for like four or five day intensives for groups of coaches and i remember my intent my

goal for one of those one of the first ones was to learn to connect better to myself so i could connect better to other people and it sounds like a metaphor but i meant it in the true sense of I wanted to be able to contract actively the muscles in my body which would then allow me to help other people by contracting muscles actively in their body and only by learning myself to contract them would I be able to help them learn to contract them and it transcends the physical the, and the emotional layers of this whole thing so that we can evolve. And I think it takes the struggle with the whole kind of mental health movement is there's a lot of stigma around maybe talking about how you feel.

But as we've said, maybe talking is not the best first step for some people. Sometimes moving your body allows you to kind of open up those conversations. And I think that's super important for us to do. That's why we always move before the podcast. Yeah. It helps so much, right? Yeah. There's a lot of benefits.

And so, you know, it's, again, it's understanding what you're doing. Because I know a lot of people that, and this is like another thing that drives me nuts, because I know a lot of people that, and this is like another thing that drives me nuts, is like when people are talking about their struggles and they're trying to talk about movement as medicine and all of this, yet they seem to be in their same anxious or depressive cycles and not wanting to confront them.

And so, you know, same thing with like cognitive therapy. Like you can talk about it all you want. At some point you're going to cognitively accept that, but you've, you're just instilling the identity, you know? And so for me, it's like, why can't we evolve from it? Like an addict is always going to be an addict, but what if we were to get to the root cause of why you started to become very addicted to something? Then maybe we can change the way that you perceive the whole world. You can get perspective of why was the reason that you needed to become dependent on a substance or on a relationship. Like I've met a few addicts and this is not a, you know, again, not an absolute, but just

from the experiences that I've had, and this is from CrossFit, addicts got into CrossFit, somehow became born again Christians and are now doing bodybuilding. Or jujitsu, one or the other. They've seen the light. They've seen the light. Addicts, get into CrossFit. Can I get an amen? It's healthier for sure.

You know what I mean? It is healthier for sure. There's nothing against it. But it's their approach that they go within it. Because it's not... There's a few that have come to mind. I know. Yeah. I know. Yeah.

Patterns, right? So they still haven't faced the root cause of the issue. You know, and I don't have anything against any of this, but it's against it. Again, better addictions, cool. But it's still not allowing you to be present with yourself. There's a reason that you're escaping it. Sounds like the name of a book, Better Addictions.

Better Addictions. I would buy it. Maybe that would be the name of Emotions and Our Muscles instead. I like it. Can we play a quick game? Oh, yeah. I love games. As long as it's not bench press.

So, Nata, I want you to give me your maybe 10 to 15 second explanation on the archetype of these types of athletes. Because at your seminar, you're talking about how like different athletes have different traits, right? Or different people in sports have different traits. And when you were talking about it, I'm like, wow, that actually runs true with a lot. So I want to name off a few and get. So functional fitnessers. Okay, functional fitnessers. Especially the women, if you look at them.

Their booty will actually start to get smaller. They start to get a lot – yeah. Their outer quads will get bigger. So they'll start having bigger quads. Mainly going towards the outside, more towards the superego, caring a lot about what's going on about them. Their psoas will start to disconnect. They'll start to endure a lot more.

The forepack will start getting bigger and so will the iliacus. So they'll actually start to arch more. They won't have true confidence. They falsify their confidence because there's no lats. When you say functional fitnessers, you also mean crossfitters? Is this a through line between both of them? I'm not getting into that. Crossfitters.

Okay, let's go. Keep going. Keep on. Yeah, so you'll start to see a lot more anxiety. They're never, ever, ever, ever, ever present. They're always hyperactive and they start to develop this sort of ritualistic behavior that revolves about their performance and their data. So they start to dictate their data goes directly towards performance and being better. Jiu-jitsu people.

Oh, Jesus. We're going to go into all of them. Love conspiracy theories. We'll usually have a into all of them. Yeah. Love conspiracy theories. Uh, we'll usually have a, I mean, that's all right. My bad. Um,

they'll start to have a stronger oblique and a weaker oblique because they're always dominating on one side. Usually that tends to be more towards the left side. Um, the left oblique will start to become weaker, which is essentially their confidence towards their ego in their internal environment. So they start to feel less secure about themselves on the inside. On the outside, they look a lot more confident and hence the conspiracy theories.

They'll have the psoas major issue on the right side, which is the affirmation of self. And then eventually they'll start to have some identity issues of where their values are misaligning. And they start to question because they want to be something, but now they have the face of something else, if that makes sense. So their identity of the self versus the identity of the superego is having a hard time battling each other. Okay. Power lifters. Power lifters are usually more on the, oh my God. We're going to do one more after this. Beautiful. Power lifters are usually more on the, oh my God. We're going to do one more after this. Beautiful. Power lifters are usually more on the depressive side or manic depressive side. They tend to have big highs. They falsify their anger quite a bit.

They don't like to show any form of empathetic expressions. So any sort of sadness and more joy, things like that, you'll start to see a lot of insecurity starting to develop. And that's usually by the overdevelopment of the thoracic spine, the mid part of the mid back. They start to lose the obliques and that's why they lose the confidence towards themselves, which then starts to go towards the lat dorsi not working as much. But they have big teres major. So they have a big confidence of the ego going outwardly, but not of the superego. And so that's why they boost confidence, but they're not necessarily extroverted.

They tend to be more introverted. Bodybuilders. Last one. Bodybuilders are interesting because they are beautiful, but it is not necessarily the neural output of the muscles that they develop. It is the muscle quality that they have. So there's a difference there. They reactively move to the muscle. The muscles reactively move to the exercises to develop, not actively. They tend to go a little bit more towards the type A personality because they never

truly express intensity. Everything they do is at 60% to 70%. So they need to have actual more intensity, so super heavy sleds, short distances, or one rep maxes and deadlifts and back squats that can actually push their true physical intensity to change. So as major tends to be turned off, so they have absolutely no sense of self. They do everything for the superego, and they have a lot of anxiety on the

four pack. That's why usually the outer quads are a lot bigger. If you look at it, the VMO will usually be a lot smaller. And then they have the overdevelopment of the intervastus intermedialis. That one, the middle strand of the quad. So they start to disconnect

more and more at the swaths major and that's why a lot of these bodybuilders will stop doing any sort of barbell lifts because it's bad for their back and their back is super weak and that's because the iliacus and the lumbar erectors are doing more work than the psoas major and again that that is as a general pattern right then you start you can start to look at the muscle development and how again for it's it's more important how are they handling the stress that teaches me a lot about their quitting mechanisms, but as a

behavioral trait, you'll start to see it quite a bit. And that was for me another interesting thing. It's like, you can go into any discipline you want and within two years, you will have a completely different perception of your world and your behavior will change completely,

which is by far, it's, it's human behavior, right? We're trying to fit into the social construct that we're in, but it's interesting that they start to develop the same imbalances and they start to develop the same behavioral traits. Yeah. It's, it's mentally and physically, mentally, physically, and emotionally. And, uh, what happens, uh, what's something that you recognize with people that when they're at your seminar in the first five minutes, they just like melt? Because I think you were mentioning something like that. And you said, I think he mentioned something that they don't know themselves well or something like that. Like the people that really need your practice. Yeah. So when I do like a – I have like the seminars that I try to teach either movement enthusiasts or people who want to understand more about their body. And then I have like a – I call it movement ayahuasca, which is we don't do the ayahuasca route. But I can get you the same – I can – now I'm pretty good. same, I can, now I'm pretty good. I don't want to say guarantee, but I can guarantee, depending on how well or disconnected or connected the body is, I can give you the same exact feeling through actively moving. I allow you to see your truest self. And so when you come at it from a point of

humility and sincerity, and I want to be here for you, not to try and, again, I don't want to stroke my ego, then it allows a sense of you to connect to your truest self. Because, hey, I've been in, I was in Australia in the middle of a room with massive bodybuilders and I was sobbing like a baby and I couldn't stop it. This is when I was first playing with the nervous system and movement. And I was like, what the hell is going on? And I was, my body was changing a perception of how I felt and how I viewed the world. And so I can allow you to see your truest self without, with you being the only judge and you get to decide if that true you wants to come out and change how it perceives the world, or if you want to be stuck in your own and current behavioral patterns. And nobody is perfect in this world. I never come from a place of judgment. We all react and behave in certain ways because that is the best way that we have learned. Each individual has learned to survive their circumstances. So again, you get to, when you come see me, you get to decide if you want to keep playing in this cycle, or if you want to have a change in evolution of the self.

And that's up to you. It's not up to me. And there's no right or wrong answer. Some people have the willingness, but the body is not capable yet. So I have clients that within three days have this massive epiphany moment and have changed completely. And I have clients that it's been two years and we're getting there. But each time they're like, dude, I'm noticing that I'm going back into this. I was like, beautiful. You're noticing it. That's phenomenal.

Do we want to change it? Yeah. Okay, let's go move like this. And they're like, bro, now I'm focused. I'm zoned. I get it. And now, so that's all I do is I want to create humans that are independent and that have a choice to change if they want to or if they need to. But it's up to the human.

So it creates a beautiful space where my last retreat, I had a very flamboyant, beautiful gay man. I had a Muslim woman. I had a very religious Christian lady. I had two English rugby players. I had a French man that was obsessed with data health, health and data, like just data, everything. I had, and I had a lady that has had a tremendous past. So we got all these different lives that came together in a house in Australia. And we got along so well. It was so beautiful. And everybody had their own experience because everybody went there for their own reasons.

And so just being able to have the knowledge to give people the tools to discover what they want to discover and change if they want to or not, again, from the Because, hey, I still do stupid shit that you're like, fuck. But you fall back into it. It's part of we're humans, man. Life is very comfortable. And so we need to – it takes a lot of work to try and change some of these cycles. And you think you do, but then that cycle could be six months and then you start to fall back into it. So the key is after six months, when you start to fall back into it, do you go, Hey, do I want to change? Right?

Like I still get pain in my back and I'm like sitting in the couch going like, fuck my back hurts. I was like, wait a second. Three days later, I could have done the size raises. Oh shit. We get comfortable, you know? Yeah. Going through a, like an awakening is a difficult thing so the people that do start that journey it's it's going to take them time it's going to be disruptive you know and that's where for me like the psychedelics again nothing against them but they're opening up channels that maybe you're not ready for and that's why i love movement with the breath is that your body speaks loudly and so if you're not ready to change some of these things the body will tell will will I love movement with the breath is that your body speaks loudly.

And so if you're not ready to change some of these things, the body will tell, will, will tell, right. And then I can see it and I'm like, Hey, we can move on.

Right. I'll still get you without physical pain, but maybe the body's not ready for that. And so when you do things like the cold plunges and when you do things like ayahuasca or a combo, you're opening up things that maybe the person isn't ready for. Can you mention the when you do things like ayahuasca or a combo, you're opening up things that maybe the person isn't ready for. Can you mention the thing you said about like there's a certain sect of people that have had cold plunge experiences that you've worked with, but they were negative? Yeah. So the cold plunge activates the melanocortin access, right? And the melanocortin

access puts you into a sympathetic state. Essentially, what you're doing is you're raising blood pressure, you're raising body temperature, and there's intensity. The intensity is through the skin. So knowing that you have, right, looking at it from my perspective, maybe you have a little twinge or a low back pain, like deep into the sacral part. For me, that's part of the id, part of the repressed memories and thoughts from Freud, maybe you go into an ice bath and that ice bath forces the coccygeus, this little tiny muscle that holds on to a lot of this,

it forces it to release. And then it's going to force, because of the intensity of the cold, it's going to force the glute on the right side to start to fire. And that is going to subconsciously, not like a full hallucination, subconsciously is going to release information about past things, right? And then we're talking about an extreme case. And that's going to extremely crash the person.

And there's not going to be a solution. So when they're going through a panic attack, you think it's a physiological response. What if it's a psychological response and you're trying to tell a person to calm down? You're doing the same thing that happened in a past event. So I've had clients that have gone into it and they crash and they go into a crazy depressive cycle

or in a crazy panic attack afterwards and they cannot regulate anything again. So this is where we have to be, again, understanding and having the knowledge of what is capable of happening in these situations. It won't happen for 90% of the people, but if it does and you don't have the tools necessary, you don't even understand that this could happen, you're making somebody's mental and physical and emotional health worse, which you're trying to do the opposite. So for me, those are always the cases. You have to be careful. I have had 16 cases of people that were doing ice baths on a regular basis. Somehow they stopped doing it for whatever cycle, and now they cannot regulate their body temperature.

They have physical symptoms of panic attacks and our mental case so it's interesting curious with some of those people and i i'm just wondering because i've heard of some people like yeah i've sat in 40 degree water for like 30 minutes i'm just like were they doing that for a long period of time or is it just they just ice bathed off and then they stopped they did did the two, three minutes every single day. Again, it's one addiction to the next. But this has some – it can have some severe issues, right? I mean it can.

I'm not saying don't ice bath. Listen, there's the studies and everything that show that it's good for you. I'm not saying stop doing it. I'm just saying understand the implications that could happen for certain people. Take a look at yourself after you do some of this stuff and see if maybe. Yeah, it's like with CrossFitters, right? They start with one a day,

three times a week, then they're at five a day, so they're doing three a days, and then you're like, bro, can we do something else? You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's that. It's okay to have like a slight obsession on things and wanting to craft and master the craft. But when you're just continuously using it as a coping mechanism, it's like the coffee. If you need coffee to get out of bed in the morning, we need to have a deeper conversation. You got anything else over there, Andrew? Yeah. Do you ever have to do the hard thing and coach somebody when they're saying like, oh, I'm in a ton of pain and they might just be overweight?

And what issues have you seen that overweight can cause? And then do you have to coach them and ask – or not ask them, but recommend that like, hey, let's get you healthy everywhere, not just your psoas or something like that? Yeah. So, well, there are feedback loops, right? And again, I don't coach people and just do Swami and psoas races. It's like we're going to do work. We're going to talk about the waterboarding before we end because that still has no context. So we will – I will implement physical stress. I will implement physical stress.

The key with working with... When you're looking at people that come in with pain, it's more of a, where's the discomfort? What have you tried in the past? What hasn't worked? Let's get you moving better. And that's a completely different conversation than, hey, I want to lose weight or I'm obese. Though I'm obese for me, when I work with clients,

it's like, okay, so within the system, the internal system, do I need to develop safety, confidence, or performance? Right? The safety comes in usually with people that are overweight because they lack the confidence, and so therefore they stay in what's comfort. Usually that comfort tends to be food, right? And so what we do is you need to change

the behavioral cycle to not look at food for comfort and you do that by aligning the body physically mentally and emotionally so i had a client that we did like the my three-day experience and it's movement it's not exercises right so the movement is gradual based on whoever but there is a lot of physical intensity to allow you to teach. By the end of the third day, there was no cravings, no food, no binging, still no binging. So that's the key is losing weight physiologically, yeah, the macros, nutrition, this and that,

but why don't we talk about your relationship to the food? Why don't we talk about that you're in a constant state of flight, of wanting to flee and not wanting to be present? That's what's causing the inflammation and all of these issues. Yeah, we need to tweak the diet here and there, but you know, like when I work with overweight clients, it's like, okay, so what does your diet look like and why does it look like that? Do you enjoy what you're eating? Do you not enjoy what you're eating? Let's just change a couple things here and there. I want to change the relationship that you have with food. I don't want to make it another thing that you're stressed about doing. Like how many people have you met that have gone – like I have friends that are still doing Atkins and they still haven't lost the weight.

But that's because they're constantly stressed. So if you're constantly stressed, how are you going to digest the protein that you're eating? You don't. Right? So let's, let's get that going first. It's about understanding where the human is, what state are they mainly in and how can we get them to be more on the flow and the fight part, right? We need to express and then we need to accept that expression. Now, before, I don't know if we're going to end, but can you give some context to the terrorist, you know, the terrorist training that you did to your boxer?

You tortured him. So when I get, when I'm joking, when I work with clients, I have a very clear conversation. I'm here to provide a service. And that is always, what are you willing to sacrifice if you want to be the best? And he was, he's a world level sacrifice if you want to be the best? And he's a world-level athlete. He wanted to be a champion. And so I was noticing that when he was training, like very good athletes do, once they find enough skill, they can go on autopilot.

So again, if you're thinking about doing your taxes and what's for dinner and this and that while you're training, you're not training. Your body is doing the movement, but your mind is elsewhere. Therefore, the systems are not in place. For most people, they can get away with it. For him, you have a fraction of a second to see a punch come in and how do you react to it. And more importantly for him, when I was watching his fight videos, as soon as he would get barely touched, he would zone out for two or three seconds. When he was moving around, you could see like half a second or a second of displacement of tension mentally and physically.

So that's like one time that I went to Las Vegas and I was watching this fight. See, you guys all zoned out and went to Las Vegas on a trip right now. It's very fast. So when you have lights, cameras, people, an opponent, you can lose focus. It happens. The best are the best because they stay focused in the situation. But I was noticing that he was zoning out. So I taught him that he can zone out.

You can't teach him by cognitively saying, hey, stay with me. Because he's used to a lot of stress. When you have somebody trying to fucking knock your head out, you know, snapping your fingers, isn't going to bring them back to the focus when there's heavy intensity. So I had him on the bicycle and I was noticing he was going to zone out and we do this thing called playing the ghost.

So your perfect self will not zone out for this workout for, you know, more than three times. So you have three times. That's the strike, and then we stop working out because you've been knocked out. That was the rule. And so we would put him on. We did basically every minute on the minute.

We had three exercises. It was the assault bike. It was sandbag carries. And then it was just jabbing, punching. And what I did is I had a wet cloth cloth and I would watch him as he's going. And the key was you had to stay at 350 watts. If it went under, you would get swashed or if I saw you sewn out. And so I would just start – he would start to sewn out and I would basically waterboard him with a wet cloth so he couldn't breathe.

And he would start to freak out. And about the second or third one, he started crying and he was and we start to freak out and about the second or third one he started crying and he was like freaking out i was like are you gonna cry in front of your opponent are you fucking kidding me you want to be a world champion you're crying what the fuck's wrong with you bro you have one more if you want to fucking just be a regular boxer then go do that you said you want to be a world champion pull your shit together and it's time to fucking go and you saw this switch and from then i was like just straightforward so you know it should you do it to all your clients no but if you want to get somewhere it's a caliber athlete that's a world level you need to have

you know i'm here i'm here to point out the gaps you You know, and sometimes you just have to be called a passionate asshole. You know, but like I could tell you, oh, well, it's because you do jiu-jitsu and you have these movement imbalances and that. But if I would have been like, your psoas doesn't work. You're like, no, it does work. I was like, no, it doesn't. What do you want me to tell you? Like, I'm not here to coddle you. Yeah.

Right? I'm not your mommy. And so there's a difference between loving and caring and i give tough love because i don't bullshit around movement or what it is and sometimes it pisses people off again it ninja fucks people but i've gotten calls from clients like three years they're like hey so remember that one time we had this conversation i was like no well it stuck me, but thank you very much. Now I see what you mean. So it's that. There's times where you do need to be caring, right? And embrace, but there's times when you need tough love. And so that's part of your job as a coach

is what role am I filling? Am I going to be dad? Am I going to be mom, brother, sister, little sister, big sister, little brother, big brother, grandpa? Do you want me to be the cool uncle? Right? I have a lot of clients that are so into the data and the health and the everything. And they come to me, they're like, oh, we're going partying, right? I was like, fuck yeah, let's go. And we go dancing. We have a couple of drinks. We have a great time. And they feel amazing. Low back pain goes away. Shoulder pain goes away. Because when they're at home, it's like everything is so rigid. So again, when you embrace people with humility, and you just

want to be there for them, then you fill that role that's missing. And so it goes the same with coaching. Where can people find you guys? We have richarddeceves.com, doctor at caddy. I should have let you do your own thing. The brain bullets are kicking hard

yeah so if you want to learn more about the principles that I teach movedacademy.com if you want to do more personal experiences richarddesevez.com on instagram

at rarebarracuda I'm dr. at caddy.com or at dr. at caddy on instagram beautiful thank you guys so much appreciate it

yeah strength is never weakness weakness is never strength catch you guys later bye