Mark Bell's Power Project - The Hidden Secret to Building Real Strength (Hint: It’s Not Just Heavy Lifts)

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

What if building real strength has nothing to do with just lifting heavy weights? In this episode of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and guest Mike Aidala dive deep into the hidden keys to true strength that most people never consider.From mastering stability and mobility to the benefits of Zone 2 training and incorporating movements like Turkish getups, this conversation explores how strength isn’t just about raw power but a blend of skill, control, and endurance. Mike shares how focusing on flexibility, controlled progress, and emotional resilience can take fitness to a whole new level, even during ultramarathons and extreme endurance challenges.Whether you’re a weightlifter, runner, or just looking to add more strength and longevity to your fitness journey, episode 1143 provides insights that will change how you think about your training. Tune in to discover how the real secret lies in balancing strength, mind, and movement in ways you’ve never imagined.Follow Mike on IG: https://www.instagram.com/mike.aidala/Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained:   ➢ 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/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang ➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=enFollow Andrew Zaragoza➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewzChapters:0:00 Why stability and mobility matter1:54 Training like an Olympian5:34 Acrobatics and performance7:34 Zone 2 training benefits11:15 Preparing for ultramarathons13:02 Starting ultramarathons16:30 Walking 100,000 steps18:06 Recovery from endurance events21:22 Strength during endurance22:59 Defining true strength26:25 Turkish getups and control28:07 Hard work vs talent31:14 Protein diversity for muscle32:49 Gymnastics for balance36:00 Yoga builds strength37:34 Yoga for focus41:06 Balance for strength42:44 Arm positions for lifts45:47 Stability prevents injuries47:31 Functional strength tips50:59 Stability in heavy lifting52:39 Home exercises for stability56:08 Balancing strength and flexibility57:45 Intentional strength training1:00:58 Gradual strength progress1:02:27 Calisthenics skill-building1:05:38 Picking the right weight1:07:14 Learning from mentors1:10:27 Emotional focus in fitness1:12:01 Emotional resilience training1:15:23 Conflict and communication1:17:10 Expanding emotional vocabulary1:20:18 Relaxation aids strength1:22:07 Stress impacts progress1:25:29 Disconnect to refocus1:27:07 Planning record lifts1:30:20 Water bike adventures1:31:56 Knee sleeves for support

So you showed us some pretty miraculous feats of strength today in the gym. We talk about strength, I think like a lot of strength comes from stability. So something like a handstand push-up. If you're balancing in the center of the room and then you're lowering down to push yourself back up and maintain balance, you're coming through a lot of stability that entire time and you're able to recruit more of your musculature and your lifts are probably going to go up. For people at home that want to start messing around with building this type of like level of stability and mobility so I'm just wondering what are some of the easy things that people can just

start adding in to their movement practice? Calisthenics is fun because there's a lot of different types of skills. If you have a really strong push you might be great at a handstand push up. If you have a great pulling you can try to do a strict muscle up. You're doing these lifts, you got 300 pounds, you're squatting below parallel, holding 300 pounds overhead with one hand, and you're doing it for like three reps.

You're crazy, dog. Something else. So you showed us some pretty miraculous feats of strength today in the gym, and then we've been seeing your Instagram, some of the crazy lifts and things that you've been doing. And then we got you here and we asked you some questions and it turns out that it seems like some acrobatics and some yoga are like some of the background

that laid down some of this strength that you have. Yeah. Yeah, I started off in Olympic weightlifting, but then quickly got to yoga and hand balancing and then partner acrobatics from there. Did you start lifting at kind of a young age or did you start playing sports or getting in like exercising at a young age?

Yeah, my mom has this funny line. She says, Mike never met a ball he didn't like. So I played every sport except for lacrosse, which I actually regret growing up on the East Coast because that was when the cross kind of blew up. But I love hanging out with my friends, running around, being outside. And then from there, I went to play college football, Division III in New York. And went to, I was a quarterback in a corner in high school.

And they wanted me to play middle linebacker. And so I was like, I need to gain some weight. I was 190 at the time. And you know, you look on the roster as you're 17 years old and you're like, okay, I got to get bigger. And my buddy was working out with this guy, Mark Chasnoff, who used to do Olympic weightlifting for I think the women's national team. And I went there, learned how to weightlift, kind of had a Mr. Miyagi moment with him, and gained like 30 pounds going into college,

and that's kind of what started me with truly taking strength training seriously. Okay, what was the Mr. Miyagi moment? So, he's a eccentric guy, Mark, and he has, in his house, he's a PT, but in his basement, he had, you kind of go down these dark, doomy steps, and there's a platform and a metal chair, the bench press and like, you know, the squat racks, which

are just the single posts. And you would use the, you'd use the barbell. It almost felt like a sword. Like you never could step over the barbell. You can never kick it. You treated it like something that was super pristine. Yeah. there's no music, no TV, no talking, no nothing. It's just sit in the metal chair. There's this other guy, Mike also, who would train there and he'd been there before me. So I kind of visualize off of him and learn the positions. And then for the first two months, we just used the bar.

We did some squats and some pressing to build overall strength, but any of the skill snatch or clean and jerk was just a bar. And then the third month, by that time I gained like 20 pounds, because he actually told me this. She actually struggled with it now a little bit, but he said, if you want to get bigger, you need to eat more.

And what I want you to do is eat a rotisserie chicken every night after your regular dinner. I love these coaches with their suggestions. They're always so ridiculous. I mean, I had no idea. I was like, okay, that's what we did. I gained a ton of weight. Got really strong, wound up clean and jerking like 3.15, I think, on that third month.

And then I was like, okay, this is fun. You're like, mom and dad, I need to eat a rotisserie chicken every night. They're like, huh? Yeah, exactly. That's exactly how it went. Yeah, whatever. I guess whatever how it went. Yeah, whatever. I guess whatever you gotta do to, whatever you have to do to gain the weight.

It seemed like you, you know, at some point got really hooked into like the strength culture and like studying strength. And we've had a few guests on recently that have talked about, you know, stone lifting and some of that sort of stuff. And you were telling us about kind of a, sounds like a magical place in Texas

that has like a history of some of the older weights and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, it's a Stark Center in Austin. I never learned about it until this year actually, but I was down there teaching a workshop and it's like this humongous 40,000 square foot facility and they have like original barbells and original kettlebells and like Denny, Donald Denny's who has a Denny's

down in Scotland, like his championship belts. It's a really cool space for strength history and physical culture. What got you kind of started down this? I mean, I know you mentioned the Olympic lifting and stuff, but now you're doing lifts that are just different, you know, and it seems like you must have to learn about these lifts from obscure places because it's more obscure than Olympic lifting, more obscure than strongman,

more obscure than powerlifting. Yeah, so from the calisthenics and learning different like arm balances and poses that you might see in yoga, I kind of understood that there are different things you could do with your body. And then that got me into learning about the acrobatics. And out in Venice, California, there's a big culture of just strength and performance. And that started, I think, in the 1950s.

And so I started diving into that. And then that kept bringing me back to like the late 1800s, early 1900s and learning about these odd lifts that would happen. You know, it's your, your history of history is really cool though, because it's like you have these high level skills. You're very, very strong with the barbell, right? You can Turkish get up with one hand, 250 something plus pounds. But then you can also hand balance. You have great mobility, great flexibility.

You can do ultra marathons. Your versatility is wild. So before we get into this, how do you think you're able to build all these different abilities? Pretty stubborn. Okay. No, I'm really curious. I'm curious about what my body can do. And I like challenges.

I like solving different types of puzzles. So I like learning new things. So I got me one of my good buddies, Eric Hinman, he really was into aerobic training and got me kind of learning about zone two and different heart rate based stuff. And for a while I was like, I don't wanna do this cardio shit.

I wanna like lift weights and get strong. And then eventually I was like, all right, let me put three months towards like really building an aerobic capacity. And after that I was hooked. That three months turned into two years and 15 ultra marathons and ended six months ago. What got you hooked about it?

Good question. I mean, the thing is a progression. So when I first started, my aerobic capacity pace was 16 minute miles. My heart rate would just jump right away. When you first started, 16 minute miles in order to keep your heart rate at approximately like 140 or something like that.

Yeah, 150. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I have a high, I can get my heart rate up to 200 beats. Wow. So from what I've, what I learned was, you know, at least the test I used, I didn't do any blood testing for my zone two, but I warmed up for 10 minutes

and then I ran 40 minutes as hard as I could to build my anaerobic threshold and then did 80% and 88% off of that to find what my zone two was and it was 161 was the highest. So I'd keep everything below that. But when I was first starting, I wanted to stay a little lower. Okay. Can we adjust his mic real quick? Yeah, what do you need to do?

Yeah. Because he looks like he's kind of like on mic, but it's not high enough. Wait. Cool. Don't move. Yeah, you're, I mean, that is like a pretty high heart rate, you know? But over time, in practicing the zone two, you're able to run faster with a similar heart rate, right? Yeah, even a lower heart rate. And so that's what got me hooked on it because it started

16-minute miles. I had a big ego moment there for I was like, I thought I was athletic. I thought I was fit, strong, but then the next time it was 15-30 and then 15 and then 14. It quickly got down around like the 12 minute mile zone, and then from there, I just, I liked that, the progression. I could see that I was improving, that kept my motivation high, and then the best I've ever gotten to was like 8.15 in the zone too, and that took about a year and a half.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a big difference between jogging and running. When you first start and you're just jogging, to me, I don't think jogging is like that fun. It can be okay and it's nice for the brain and you get yourself to be able to do 20 minutes straight of jogging. It feels good and get yourself to 30, 40 minutes.

But when you can get yourself to be able to run and still have a comfortable pace or a comfortable heart rate and stuff like that, I think that's the game changer. Those workouts are not that bad to recover from. They don't feel that bad when they're, actually they feel more positive than anything. Even the recovery from them isn't grueling. Yeah. I like, that's the part I liked.

I could run almost every day because I had the strength base. So I wasn't beating myself up as much. But I wasn't doing a lot of speed work when I started off. Because I was like, I'm fast, I can run, you know, I could sprint. But I didn't have that slower capacity. So I dove maybe a little too hard into that. And like, you know, my mechanics at that like middle space,

I had to take some time to practice. But yeah, it was a lot of fun to feel that progression. And just, people have heard us talk about Zone 2 like a million times on the show, but I think it's important. If you were out there just running, and I don't know, maybe you've had this experience and you were not paying attention to your heart rate,

you were just like, F it, I'm just gonna run faster, you wouldn't have gotten the same results. like, F it, I'm just gonna run faster. You wouldn't have gotten the same results. Yeah, that's what I believe. And I think the hardest part of zone two is it doesn't quite get you into that runner's high. You don't quite feel like, ah, this is fun, like I'm running, I'm working out.

And so you have to keep yourself just below that, which is really mentally tough. Because by the time you've run for 10 minutes, you're like, hey, I want to push it. And usually then I'm peeking at my watch and my heart rate strap is going to slow it down. So I got to either dial back the pace or walk. But if you can commit and be disciplined to that over time,

that number will come down. I think a big thing too from what you mentioned there in terms of getting better at that, it kind of also goes into how it seems you've progressed with everything. Because you mentioned that that progression for you was like a year and a half? To get all the way to the eight-minute ones. Yeah.

Right? And that's some time, right? That's some time spent doing boring zone two work consistently, chipping away at that time month by month. And it's probably not perfectly linear because you probably had some runs that seemed like regressions. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it was, that's 50% basically of my speed. So I gained a lot. I mean, some of the people I talked to start off maybe aren't at 16-minute miles, they're at 13 or 12, but it can be really enticing to want to just push to that 10-minute mile because it feels slow running there. I mean, you're not even running, you're walk running. Pretty wild change, you know, going from really not running much at all to jogging into like running and be able to keep that pace. But then you said that you've done some ultra marathons and, you know, some of these races you were mentioning

can take like almost 30 hours. That's a long time on your feet. Like, how did you prep for that? What are some things you ran into? Cause I know people have a lot of questions about like the shoes and the feet and the shin splints and all that stuff. Yeah, so I didn't have any shin splints or I mean,

I had problems with my feet actually on the last race so through blisters, but that was a sock kind of mix up that I had. So being able to change your feet to really help change your socks out, change your shoes that you're wearing is helpful. But finding things that are motivating to you, like we're looking at this Leadville 100,

which was the trail run I did six months ago. And for me, that's really motivating race. I'd like being up in the mountains. I think the history of the race is cool. It's beautiful. And so that would give me the motivation to keep pushing through maybe those boring zone two runs. Do you have a little history of hikes or something?

Because to me this is nuts, being able to go like this. I mean, not anything crazy. I hiked with my family when I was younger, but nothing like... Wasn't like every week or every day or anything like that? No. But I became definitely obsessed with wanting to be able to do an ultra marathon.

And then honestly, once I did the first one, I was like, oh wow. I mean, I had never ran a half marathon or a full marathon. I just went to a 50K or 50 miler. But having, being able to be in nature, be with your friends, be with your family, for me that was a lot of fun. Kyle Dacuyan Did you at least, I mean, did you see yourself way into this?

Did you like a half marathon and a marathon then an ultra? Or did you just like, ultra? Michael Meyers Ultra. Kyle Dacuyan Really? Why, dog? Like most people are like, okay, I'll do a marathon or two, and then I'll do a 50 miler, right? That's like a half ultra, most people are like, okay, I'll do a marathon or two, and then I'll do a 50-miler, right? That's like a half-ultra.

Yeah, okay. So, ultra marathon, for a definition, Lisa, I'm aware of, is anything more than a marathon. Oh, really? So, it could be any distance, but the classic ones are- 26.4, boom, ultra marathon. Right. So, you did one of those.

I did a 50K, which is usually like the first step, which is 31 something miles Okay, okay still that's gnarly. I mean I I live in Boulder, Colorado now And so some of my buddies how I got started they were like hey, we're gonna do this thing in the Grand Canyon Rim to rim to rim. Do you want to do it? It's 50 miles bunch of vert But it's in the Grand Canyon and so I was like sure let's do it And so I started training for that, but that was before I even knew about heart rate training.

So I would be the guy, just like run and figure it out. And when I finished that race, I was at the top, it was like 11 p.m., it was a lot later than we thought. I got in the car, we drove 15 minutes to some Mexican restaurant, and when I got out of the car, it took me 15 minutes to walk from the car to the restaurant. And my body locked up like crazy. Yeah. Just feeling like you're going to cramp up and just cramp up and so much because I didn't have that aerobic capacity. It was so much

like lactate that was being into my body that I was just constantly fighting against. And so once I had a little bit of pause, it just froze. And it was difficult to break through. But I didn't have that experience once I started doing aerobic training. Kind of randomly a few years back, I did 50 miles, just 50 miles of walking. And Ryan did it with me. And to this day, one of those definitely,

it's the hardest thing I've ever done by far. Just walking 50 miles. It was on and off, like I would stop and get a drink and like sit down and like try to chill. I did not know that that was gonna, I walk a lot. And especially at that time, I was walking even more. And so I didn't think much of it, but that 50 miles that I got home,

just even like trying to put my leg up, like in the shower on this like thing that we have in the shower so I can kind of like wash my legs or whatever, I couldn't even get my, I couldn't, it just seemed so far away, it seemed like impossible. It's just like a normal step, it's not that high. But it is, you know, it's like two and a half feet off the ground or something.

But, cause my leg, you know, wanted to cramp up even trying to get it in my hot tub. My body was like shaken. There's no like rails on my hot tub. Like, you know, sometimes you can, you know, uh, hold onto something as you go down into a pool or something like that. It's just steps. And so like, I'm all wobbly.

My wife's like holding me and I'm like, she's like, why'd you do this again? I was like, I don't know. My son basically put me up to it because he's like, why'd you do this again? I was like, I don't know. My son basically put me up to it because he's like, how many steps do you do in a day? And I was like, I do like, I don't know, 15,000, maybe 20,000 sometimes. And he's like, what's the most you ever done? I was like, I kind of lost in New York City one time

and ended up doing like 35,000 or something. And he was like, you know what would be a cool goal is to do 100,000 steps. And so that's what I did and I paid the price for it. You're an ultra marathoner. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, How long did it take you?

It took, it just took all day. I mean, I think it took like 14 or 15 hours or something like that. I mean, we weren't trying to go fast, but we did in the beginning, we were like, oh, maybe we should like jog some of it just to get it over with quickly. But we stopped like pretty quickly on that because we were like, this is going to kill us. Yeah, the, with certain ultras, they have cutoff times, which makes certain ones more difficult than others.

You got to get to certain pace or certain like mileage by a certain time. And for the Leadville 50 mile race, it's 14 hour cutoff. So if you can do it in 50 and 14 hours, then you can finish that race. 100 miles, 14 hours. That's 50. The 100 mile cutoff is 30 hours. Okay, okay, okay. But every race is different. Like there's one hard rock in Colorado, which has like

a ton of elevation gain and descent and I think that one's 42 or 46 hour cutoff. Shit's scary. It was scary for me and that I mean it's fun to put something out on the date kind of work back for me. I mean I was super scared when I first signed up for the Leadville 100 race. I was like there's no I don't know if I can do this thing but after completing it you know feels and I didn't complete if I can do this thing, but after completing it, it feels like I didn't complete

it my first time. I DNF'd, did not finish at mile 62. What was like the, because you mentioned after your first 50k, you had some weird body stuff, but I've heard a lot of like 100 miler ultra marathoners having just like weird stuff happen to them after races. So did that stuff happen to you after finishing some of those? The only thing that happened was

I had this terrible blister in my foot. There's actually a gross video online of it. But it, the ball of my foot just got suction because we had to run through some puddles. So it got suction to my sock and by the end was, I had to peel that off. But yeah, that was the worst besides the like neurological stuff from a ton of stress, you know, because running a hundred miles, in my opinion, is not healthy on your body.

It's not the healthiest thing you can do. And so it takes a long time to recover mentally, emotionally after that. Like took me a couple of months. A couple of months. A couple of months to feel like my nervous system had that pop again. Okay, so you just didn't feel like powerful when doing stuff, you kind of had this lag.

Yeah, but that would kind of be like if you're lifting and you're just like at 90%. And so you don't feel like you have that vigor to just like go for it. I think like the next day you kind of recover 50%. The next few days you can get to 75. But to close that last 25 towards 100 takes months, at least it did for me, to be able to then even really lift

and put a lot of pop back into it. We can train ourselves for all kinds of stuff. Even a powerlifting competition, you're basically doing nine lifts. There's three different lifts. You have three attempts at each one. And usually people go, kind of like 85%, then maybe like 90, 95%, and then 95% to 100

on like their third attempt. You don't really realize until the contest is over, like how much stress and strain you may have put yourself under. And there's some power lififters who've gotten themselves in pretty good shape and condition and they know how to execute the lift the right way. So maybe they make it through a little easier,

just like somebody might make it through a little easier on some of these things that you're talking about here, these longer runs. But we just take it for granted. Like we don't really think about it. Like, oh, I did a powerlifting meet last week and then you're just back to training, and you might be sprinting, or you might be,

I've seen so many people get hurt after competition because they're really not, it sucks, but you have to find something different to do for a little bit. And so for yourself, have you ever ended up with some post-contest blues? Because you get done and then it's like, you know, you have to shift to something different

or do you, it sounds like you enjoy doing different things. So maybe for you, you didn't experience that. Yeah, I definitely felt like a blue. Like, and when you have such a high, you're going to have the opposite of that, at least to a certain degree. And so had that for, again, a few months after running. So I kind of just laid low, focused on some other things,

built up some mobility, hand balancing, a lot of calisthenics stuff. And then since then, for the past four months, I've really been into lifting. So I could, it was kind of fun. In the beginning, I could feel myself like not having that pop, and then, you know, it would start to continue to grow and grow and grow.

And now I feel, and now I'm the strongest I've ever been. It's kind of crazy though, like how, first off, as an ultra marathoner, you were, what, 210 pounds? Yeah. You don't see people that are doing those types of races that are that heavy. So you were able to maintain a good amount of muscle while doing that. So, you know, if anyone is interested in doing those types of miles, is there anything that

you have in mind that just to help them maintain a level of strength while doing such a high endurance activity? Yeah, I mean, I didn't maintain a ton of the strength. When I came back, my first front squat is the one that stuck in my head. I remember the first time I maxed out my front squat four months ago, I think it was like 285. And then now I PR'd my front squat the other day at 200 kilos, so 440 pounds.

So, and my best ever was 405. So it's, again, but that was fun for me because I didn't have an expectation of being strong. Right after I finished 100 mile race, I knew I was gonna have, kind of be down, but then I was able to kind of get those kind of beginner gains again and come back and see even surpass like a personal best.

It's so amazing the different attributes that we can gain and the different strengths and the different endurance and all these different things. And, you know, we have a tendency to say, this guy's the best, you know, cause he's the most well-rounded, this guy's the best runner, Kipchoge is the best runner,

or Bolt is the fastest runner. And I saw someone pose this question the other day. They're like, where is the intersection? Where is the intersection where Bolt loses to Kipchoge? Like how fast does that happen? 100 meter, we know who's winning that. 200 meter, we know Bolt is winning that. 400 meter, Bolt does weigh 205 and he's a big guy.

Not saying he can't fly around the track for 400 meters, but Kipchoge regularly is doing those 400 meters, regularly doing those 800 meters. And he's just a much lighter athlete. So it's just super interesting to see how, we can say someone's the fastest, we can say someone's the strongest, but it's hard to really define these things.

It's hard to define strength. And that's some of what we've been talking about since you got here was, I think you said you could squat, maybe your best squats around 500 pounds, which is an awesome squat. Not yet, I mean, that's, I think I'll be able to squat around that now. Yeah, 455 maybe, something like that.

Wait, you never squatted 500? No. That's shocking, what the other shit's at, you're doing a what? How strong, I don't know. What? What? No, I'm not even saying that 500 is easy,

but it's just like the fact that the other stuff you're doing is so ridiculous. A 500 pound squat isn't that ridiculous. Not even close. Yeah, my single overhead squat is limited by my squat. You're crazy, dog. You're something else, dude, what the fuck? It is interesting, too.

I do know a handful of people that are like this where they have great mobility, they have really good athleticism, and because of that, they can actually front squat really well, and sometimes they can front squat more than they can back squat, which I think is kind of fascinating. But yeah, you're doing these lifts,

I mean, where you have 300 pounds, we're watching a video of you, you got 300 pounds, you're squatting below parallel, holding 300 pounds overhead we're watching a video of you, you got 300 pounds, you're squatting below parallel, holding 300 pounds overhead with one hand. And you're doing it for like three reps, I think your best on that's around 350 pounds. I'm doing some absurd stuff, I mean, and Seaman and I have had,

we've had so many guests on the show. You know, this Power Project show, I think, is like kind of the longest running show of its kind. And we've had every, we've talked to everybody. We've talked to Shaw, we've talked to the best power lifters, Jesus Olivares, squatting over a thousand pounds, benching around six, pulling around 900. I mean, just people are absolutely ridiculously strong. John Hack comes to mind, the powerlifter.

John's deadlifting 900 pounds, bench pressing 600 and squatting like 800 and he weighs, you know, under 200 pounds. Like he's this absolute beast. Now he's interesting because he's able to actually translate his strength over into some other pretty cool things. I've seen him do some strongman stuff and be pretty proficient,

but haven't seen him doing like some of this stuff that you're doing, which I'm sure he would be able to be coached on this, because he's a hell of an athlete as well. But yeah, it's just, it's fascinating, right? Because we can say, oh man, you know, Mike, you know, I saw him squat 405. It's like a lot of guys squat 405,

but there's hardly anybody in the world that can do some of the stuff that you're doing squat 405, it's like a lot of guys squat 405. But there's hardly anybody in the world that can do some of the stuff that you're doing and you're actually loading up this weekend and going for a Guinness World Record. That's right, yeah. What's that about? Yeah, so going for the Guinness record for most, the heaviest Turkish getup ever.

And so I love the Turkish getup for me. It's fun to play with those different planes of motion. I'm really good at, again, keeping my arms straight, so being able to kind of move from one pillar, one stacked pillar, to another, and then get all the way up and then control all the way back down. But I'm having an event, raising a bunch of money for veteran mental health suicide prevention.

My grandfather was a veteran and died by suicide. And so mental health and emotional health are things that are really important to me. And so I want to mix the physicality with the heart-based mental emotional work. And so that's why I'm doing the Turkish Getup. What's the fundraiser? Can you plug it so people can, if they want to support? Yeah. So it's on my Instagram, Mike.Idea.

There's a GoFundMe and the money goes to Mission 22, which is an organization that helps veterans and their families. I guess this will probably come out after your event, but hopefully maybe in future ones. Yeah. People can, people can support. Do you think that you have some of these attributes that your grandfather had in some way? Or do you feel like you're fighting that a little bit

when you're doing these runs and doing some of these things? I think so. I mean, no one in my family is really athletic. Like, I mean, my dad said that he, him and I stopped having to catch when I was seven years old because he was like, it hurts. We can't throw anymore. And so, um, I just have always loved sports and the only person that I can think of in my extended family that really liked it too was my grandfather. And so him and I, he died when I was five.

And so we never got to have a big relationship, but from what I've been told, him and I are similar in the fact that we like physicality. He was always super active and maybe that was to help counteract and counterbalance some of the thoughts in his mind or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. One thing that I find is actually really cool about that though is like, you know Some people when they see some things that people do they're like, oh their mom or dad was probably just like super gifted to etc But with all the things that you're talking about you had like I mean everybody does have to work for these things

But you had to work for all of it Like you didn't show extreme talent when you started distance running I'm not sure if you showed extreme talent when doing the calisthenics stuff either, but. Yeah, I mean, my mom and dad have a lot of amazing attributes and athleticism is not one of them. And so it was, I think a blessing in some ways because I never had, they were extremely supportive of me,

like coming to almost every game. I mean, think every game. And always, you know, signing me up for different things, but they were never like that parent in the stands that was constantly yelling and pushing at me because they didn't know what a first down was. Or, you know, like, I'd explain all these things to them. So they were supportive when I showed interest in that. And I think that gave me, I mean, I'm thinking about this now, it gave me some of the confidence to feel,

okay, I'm allowed to go and try things that I'm curious in because I've had that support from such a young age. Your parents gave you those beautiful feet. Yeah, oh my gosh, yeah, my toes. His second toe and third toe are both longer than his first toe. That's true. There's always a podcast first, you know?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're a lot longer. And an aspect of your strength, though, that I think is really cool, going back to the strength conversation we were having, is like, okay, you haven't squatted 500 yet, okay, whatever. But the thing is, is you have great mobility,

you have great calisthenic strength, you have great strength with a barbell, but nothing... It doesn't seem to be taking away from other movement capacities, which is something that you sometimes notice when people get very strong. Sometimes when people get very strong, they don't have the ability to put their arms straight over their head anymore. When they do, it's like, here, that's all they've got, but you have access to it all.

And I think, like, for me, I find that super motivating. Like that's the type of strength that I want to build so it doesn't take away from anything else. What do you think helped you with that? I think, I say often I want to make a go body versus just a show body. And so I want to be able to do things that are really fun. And like for me, hand balancing is fun,

partner acrobatics is fun, doing Turkish get ups is fun, seeing how much I can farmers carry or yoke carry, like all those things are fun. And I don't want to do things that are going to limit me from being able to express myself in those ways. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it?

I got a secret, man. It's called good life protein. Okay, tell me about that. I've been doing some good life protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of good life proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops,

all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of. all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of. Lamb is another one that comes to mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy kind of depending on the way that I'm eating.

So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat. And that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80, 20 grass-fed grass finish, ground beef, I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style, where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts

of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why like neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating and protein, you talk about protein leverage all the time. It's satiating, it helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal and I can surf and turf. You know?

I could cook up some chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorites. So it's hard for me to lock one down, but I really love the bavette steaks, and I also love the rib eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rib eyes.

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Wild watching you in the gym the way that you're able to you know balance and articulate your movement patterns and it almost seems like You know when I see when I see people do stuff like this, I'm always a little envious. I'm like, man, I should have done some gymnastics when I was younger, but I think the cool thing about what you showed us today and shared with us today, there's different levels of all the different things

that I could try right now. And then Seema can try a lot of the different things that you were showing us today. And there's a lot of regressions. And who knows about the progressions, like where some of these things will end up. But what's interesting about something like just pushing your wrist, you know,

pushing your fist into the ground and trying to see, you know, what kind of strength your wrist has or those, what were you calling those pushups? These are first knuckle raise. Yeah, like a first knuckle raise. Those were really interesting and my forearm started to burn

and some areas that I wasn't even sure of, I was like, what is that? I guess it's like my wrist. I don't know if I've felt my wrist burn other than like on like a wrist roller, like the old school wrist roller thing. So it's interesting because sometimes we think about like, oh, I'll watch some of your videos

and I might think about like, oh, you know, I'll watch, you know, some of your videos and I might think to myself, well, you know, I shouldn't really try a lot of these things, but I can try my own versions of these things or other versions of these things and start to explore movement. And Seema, I think you put that really well as like, we've seen a lot of people and myself included when you go after strength in a particular avenue

with everything that you have, sometimes it's at the expense, not all the time, but sometimes for a lot of people, it's gonna be at the expense of other types of movement. And for yourself, it doesn't seem like that's compromised. It actually seems like it's enhanced. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing I'm a big fan of is positive psychology and aspect of positive psychology

are flow states, which I know you guys are familiar with. And the way I like to think about all of these movements is how can I put myself in a state of flow? Which the way I like to define it quickly is like, if you think of a graph, on one axis you have the skill and on the other you have the challenge. And so in order to be in flow, you need the challenge to be high enough

to require all of your skill. And so for me, that might be, you know, 250 pound Turkish getup right now, but maybe for one of my clients, Cheryl, she's 75 years old, you know, for her that could be like putting her fist and doing a shoe getup. And we're having the exact same experience,

it just with different weights. So inside we're getting those same hormones released, we're having the exact same experience, it just with different weights. So inside we're getting those same hormones released, we're getting that same challenge. Just like if I'm doing on a 90 degree handstand pushup versus like, you know, someone else doing a crow pose, but it's bringing them that challenge skills balance. It's the exact same internal experience, which is what I love. You know, I'm curious about how long ago was it that you started yoga? I would say 13 years ago.

13 years ago. And you did some Olympic lifting before that. Yeah. Now, within like, there's been a lot of people that have kind of said yoga is something that messes up bodies because it builds a lot of joint laxity, too much flexibility, et cetera. Maybe there is some of that. But do you think that, like,

what aspects of yoga do you think are very beneficial for people to meet and just go try it out? Because I think people are scared of becoming too mobile, getting weaker doing yoga, so they don't even give it a shot because of all these negative things they hear. But what are some good things about it that really helped you out? Yeah.

I mean, I got into yoga after a breakup and so I was in a spot where I wanted to focus on loving myself and I had no idea what that meant, but I heard in yoga you could do that. And so after the first Shavasana, which is the corpse pose at the end of class, I was like, wow, like I feel different sensations than I had felt before. And then I started going to class more and the studio I went to, the teachers would teach different arm balances in the middle of class. And I would gain some success because I had some strength.

So I could do- What's like an arm balance? Like a crow pose where you place your hands down and your knees are on the back of your arms and you're up balancing on your hands. And so if you kind of fall forward and you're up balancing on your hands. And so if you kind of fall forward, you go to a headstand, which would be, you know, another balance that you would do in yoga. And for me, that was, those were fun.

That was bringing me again into that flow state. But I personally now love yoga and you know, yoga has a lot of different aspects to it. Asana is what they call, is what the poses are. And so I like a yoga asana practice for the emotional and nervous system benefits more than just the physical benefits. Because you can practice the physicality within that for sure, but it's bringing you to a different type of edge. And if you think about, you know, if you're holding a lunge position with your arms out and you maybe can squat 500 pounds,

you might be shaking in that one position, but it's bringing you to a similar edge in your mind than you have before you go to maybe a PR in your squat. Yeah, yoga is super interesting. Even just like aside from the actual, even aside from what's actually going on or occurring in class, you have an instructor there

that's usually just feeding you a lot of positive affirmations. And it's a moment to like be still. You know, they talk about being still all the time, being still, being in the moment, relaxing, calming down. You might even, you know, at the end of class, you might even be like in a rested position

and they might say, you relax your left big toe. And you're like, oh, I didn't even realize that was tight. I didn't even realize my toe was like this. And they'll just cue your fingers, your hair, your head, your body, just let your body sort of melt into the ground. I don't think we're really normally mindful of a lot of these things. And we had our friend Steven on the podcast, he created a product called the Body Lever.

And when he was on the show, he felt like there was a lot of secrets in yoga that need to come out and they need to be like more in the center of fitness in general. And I thought that was interesting because I haven't really heard that take. We've had a bunch of people come on the show and kind of bash yoga and some of the principles and how people have gotten hurt. Kind of, where do you, what do you think on that? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't think yoga as like a workout is maybe the best thing to do just by itself, but mixing

it in, in like a holistic format for taking care of your health, I think is amazing. And so one, what yoga nidra is a form of yoga where you're practicing releasing tension in your body. And if you're struggling with sleep, it's an amazing thing to do before you go to bed because you run through a visualization of like your pinky toe, your second big toe. For me, that's the middle toe. You continue to go through and it's hard to maintain like focus on yourself for that long. And that's an area that if it is difficult, then it's probably, Mike translates other

aspects of your life, like difficult to maintain presence with your wife or with your business or with your kid. And so you can gain a lot of that focus and attention through a physical practice like yoga. And, you know, I pulled up this video now. It's not quite yoga. It's Pilates, but this guy, Jarell Carter, he does these videos sometimes where he doesn't goes and does some Pilates or goes and does yoga. And I think this is one thing that again, if you're on the spectrum of being super into

lifting and that's the main thing you do, like you mentioned, some of these practices would be good to add in because like if you, if we pull up this video and let it play, because it's not playing right now, but you'll see like the small lady in front of him is using these light weights so easily and like the dude's gassing out and shaking, right? And it's like, it's not necessarily a fault to him. It's just a lot of his work doesn't have anything to do with these holds, with this stability, you know? So it's like, what happens if you are weak at that,

then it just becomes something that's very easy. I think you said it with the stability word. We talk about strength, I think, like, a lot of strength comes from stability. So something like a handstand pushup. If you're balancing in the center of the room, and then you're lowering down to push yourself back up and maintain balance, you're coming through

a lot of stability that entire time, and you're able to recruit more of your musculature. So then when you take that over to a barbell you can apply all of that pressure into the bar and your lifts are probably Going to go up, but I don't think it works in Reverse Yeah, yeah, just cuz you're good at bench in 315 for reps. You might not be very balanced in a handstand I mean, I imagine a little but you could you could be if it's not if it's a skill set if you worked on both Skill sets you could be good at both Definitely. Yeah, I mean I imagine a little- But you could be. If it's a skillset, if you worked on both skillsets, you could be good at both.

Definitely, yeah. I mean, I imagine Olympic gymnasts with rings are gonna have great benches. Oh yeah. And so I always, I try to think about what's the best way to build strength? What are the best tools? And like, again, it depends on how you define the strength,

but I do think the gymnastics rings are one of the best tools for the upper body. Because being able to maintain all of that tension, keep your body still, just holding yourself up in the rings with straight arms and keeping yourself still is incredibly difficult if you've never done it before. But then after you practice that for a while, you can then take that strength and apply it to a barbell,

however you like to do it. I happen to like doing it with one arm overhead. Yeah, I want to add, Ryan, if you go to my most recent video, you'll see the new ring setup I have at home. That looks cool, by the way. Yeah, yeah, I got the idea from Chris Chamberlain. So shout out to Chris, eroding weakness. But like you mentioned, I have two setups, right?

But when I go into the dip position, the first day I was like, this will be easy. When it's the dip position on the other rings, I was like, why is this so hard? Just holding a dip position is so fucking difficult. Yeah. It's like, what? I'm not doing it in this video.

This is just my setup, but it's just like, yo, rings. I'm so happy these are set up now. And they're not hard for most people to set up wherever they live, so. What you just did here, which is a skin the cat movement where you start full hang and your legs come back, you did it in this time with your arms bent, but if you want to practice that straight arm strength,

practice coming through with straight arms, and even right now, you're probably going to bend, because it's hard to maintain the arms straight on the way down. And so next time you do that, keep your arms straight the entire time. And pretty much with the majority of the things that I'm doing with this, I should keep my arms straight. I mean, obviously pull-ups,

you're not gonna keep your arms straight, but like, you know, the dip holds, all these things. Yeah, arms as straight as possible. Yeah, it depends again what you're doing. I like, I've studied with a Edelportal one time out in Copenhagen. Okay. And so he breaks things down with like bent arm strength

and straight arm strength. And so depending on what you want to do, put all of those movements in those different positions. And so a skin to cat, that's a straight arm exercise, a dip, obviously bent arm. Gotcha, okay. Yeah, that kind of establishes a different level of stability or instability.

If you wanna do something where your arms are bending more or even isometrically hold something. The thing that's interesting about the rings is like, it's such a beginner newbie thing for a gymnastics athlete, you know, somebody who's been practicing it for so long for them just to get up in that position and their palms are facing outward. That's just like the start of their routine. And then they're like, yo, what's up? And then they start doing like a bunch of other moves from there.

Yeah. And so it's easy to look at it and be like, oh, that's like, how hard could that be? But it's easy to look at it and be like, oh, that's like how hard could that be? But it's extremely difficult. I mean, it would just be like if we went and played basketball right now, but we never sprinted before. It's easy, they're running up and down the court. Let's just go, that part by itself would probably be

difficult if you don't sprint a lot. And then they're sprinting, but they're dribbling at the same time. Well, I guess they travel all the time in the NBA, but. Yeah. You know, on that note though of stability, like first off, I think there's a lot of easy ways for people to add some of these ideas into their exercise. Because one thing that I find kind of annoying is I see sometimes coaches dissing people

for like doing certain exercises on one leg or doing things with a single arm sometimes. They're like, oh, these are circus acts. I'm like, stability isn't a joke. Just because you can move a lot of load with two arms and then when you go on one leg or one arm, it's like, it becomes extremely difficult. That shows a hole. Like me trying to get onto those dip bars

and then my arm's shaking. There's a big hole in my system that I need to, it sounds so out of place. Big opportunity. Big opportunity, big opportunity. That like, if I built that level of stability, everything would be structurally sound. And you know, we were talking to you in the gym,

and you were like, when's the last time you felt any pain or anything anywhere? You're like, I don't feel any. I think a big aspect of that is you're just so stable everywhere. You don't have, I don't want to say you don't have holes. You have minimal weaknesses, you know what I mean? I have a lot of weaknesses.

I know you have a lot of weaknesses, but that stability I think is what keeps everything together because you can do like the handstand and these exercises and be very stable, then you could load it up and also be very stable. Whereas another athlete can like push a lot of weight, but they have a lot of back pain and a lot of these issues because there's levels of stability that they just don't have.

I think we've gone over this on the podcast. I think he, Mike has seven holes. Are you going over how many holes does a person have? Well, I mean, it's, a woman has nine, right? I think so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think so. Or is it eight?

Do you have to Google this? But, oh, you see what? He speaks of a rowing machine. It's her who's gonna put the rowing machine. That's a high risk kind of reward right there. Oh my God. Do you think some of the benefit of this is because, like your move, okay, so the object is moving, obviously,

but you are also moving your body around the object. And we see that a little bit with Olympic lifting, I guess you would say. You know what I'm saying? Like a bent over row is like, it's just like you just like moving the weight around. You bench pressing is you moving the weight around. Your body's really not going much of anywhere.

And I think in the case of what you're doing, especially like a lot of single arm type stuff, you have to really maneuver your body. I don't know how familiar you are with functional patterns and some of the stuff that they do, but when you watch them rotate and you watch them do certain movements, that looks like what they're trying to coordinate.

It looks like they're trying to coordinate, like not just this weight is moving and I'm shifting this way, but they're trying to move their body kind of around the object. Yeah. I mean, I think that stuff's fun. Like, I like, we talked about the yoke earlier. The yoke's something I really enjoy

carrying and figuring out how can I maintain pressure and keep my tension to then walk with thousand pounds. Like I can't even squat half of that, but I can walk with it. And so learning how to brace, how to breathe in that like 360 diaphragmatic breath, just allows more movement and allows more force transfer through my feet out into whatever it is I want to do but there's also the balance like you mentioned creating enough tension So you're not creating so much tension where you can't move which I think is another strength of doing some of those things through movement Creating just enough tension so you can go through space with it and not break down. Yeah, right Yeah, we're just applying it at the right time,

in the right position. Like a baseball player hitting a home run, it's like there's a lot of tension that's moving from the feet through the hips, through the core, out to the band, to the ball. It's fluid. But it's fluid. Yeah.

What's the deal with some of the Waldo type shirts? That's just a subtle nod to the old timers. Yeah. Oh, because yeah, the old like the old timers. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The old like strength circus type things, right? They had like those like stripes almost like prison uniforms almost. Yeah. I think this shirt specifically I think is designed after like a 1980s motorcycle shirt.

But yeah, I think a lot of that strength culture came from circus. So, circus was big in the late 1800s into the early 1900s and strong men would go around challenging other strong men to their lifts and what they could do. And then that transitioned into some calisthenics and then bodybuilding and all the stuff we do today. How fake or real are some of these lifts?

Because nowadays it's like a little, nowadays it'd be harder to fake, because we got, I mean people can, I guess they could use AI and people can cheat all different kinds of ways, but. Yeah, that's just the thing, it's just AI. That's just AI. AI or like fake plates or whatever, you know?

But you know, like somebody doing a lift in a circus tent, you know, 150 years ago, you know, have you come across some records where you're like, oh, I don't really know about some of these? Maybe there's one for the two hands anyhow. Arthur Saxon has the lift on that. It's like four, almost 450 pounds where the two hands anyhow. Arthur Saxon has the lift on that. It's like four, almost 450 pounds, where the two hands anyhow lift is you hold two separate weights over your head and you can get them up

any way possible from the floor. So I like something like that because there's a lot of creativity involved with it. But he did a bend press with, I think, like 335 pounds, which a bend press is where you're holding the weight static here. And then you're moving, you're rotating down and around. So similar to what you were talking about before, moving your body around the bar and then bent over and picked up like a hundred pound kettlebell and lifted that overhead.

And actually it was more than a hundred pounds. And so, I mean, I don't know if that's real or not. I'm guessing it probably was, but- That's a record you're trying to break. No, I don't know, maybe. I'm like, yeah, that would be the next one. I think my best now is 385, but to get to 450, yeah, that's the classic picture of him there.

So question, wait, wait, wait. Does that mean that the total amount of weight in one hand is four something or he had four something or 350? 335, and then he bent over and picked up in one hand is four something or he had four something or three... Three-fifty... Three-thirty-five and then he bent over and picked up like a hundred and something pound kettlebell and got that overhead.

Okay. Wow. But that's the part that's really hard because I like to think I'm pretty strong. And I mean, you guys are obviously strong. Like, do you think you can just like curl up a hundred something pound kettlebell? Momentum. Using a lot of momentum, yeah. But what's hard is having this over here because even for me now I have like, I think my best is 385 and so overhead is over 300 pounds and then I have to clean and so this arm's kind of like the bar is floating for a second and then I like stabilize it and then I have to press up, you know, I can strict press like 80 pounds.

Boy, yo. But I'm curious if some of these like world strongest men guys could do more. They could probably do more, but do they have the, like the stability to be able to pull that off, the mobility and stability to pull that off? That's a thing. Cause you gotta bend over and pick up the second weight.

And that's the hard part. Yeah. How come you don't go for like the curly mustache thing? I don't know. You could do that, yeah. Right, for one of the competitions. I mean, at least for one of the competitions. I did give it a try once, but it's too much work.

I'm not. Yeah, you gotta twist it around too much. Hooper might be pretty good. Mitchell Hooper, right? Like he might be pretty good at some of these things. Yeah, I bet. Oh, if anybody, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I know the best, like,

I think it's called the Cirque Bell, is like 330 pounds. And so that lift is extremely difficult, and they're pressing that overhead. But... Let me ask you this. Before we continue on on this, for people at home that want to start messing around with building this type of like level of stability and mobility, are there some like easy things

or maybe easy implements that they can add into what they use at home? For stability for what? Um, general shoulder stability, core stability, because like you, you have like there's a lot of at levels of stability that are happening with what you're doing. But I think sometimes when we lift, you just think about big compound movements and not working on hand balancing, et cetera.

So I'm just wondering, what are some of the easy things that people can just start adding in to their movement practice that could help them out? I think that's a great way of thinking about it, is in to their movement practice, you know, that could help them out. I think that's a great way of thinking about it is it's a movement practice. And so when you think about practicing something, you're consciously trying to improve it. And so it's different than just squatting,

you're practicing squatting. And so, you know, if you've ever been taught how to squat, a lot of teachers will tell you, like, try to twist your feet through the ground, create some torque as you're lowering down. And maybe you continue to focus on that. Maybe you don't, but that would be an example of something to work on improving or like if your arms are down, showed you this guy's this one in the gym, your upper arms externally rotating, that's going to lift up this like first knuckle of your hand,

but then your lower arms internally rotating and those are working both like 50% and that keeps your arm straight and locked in. So if you're doing a plank, how much can you focus on maintaining that while squeezing the ground, while pushing the ground away from you, tucking your, like there's so many of these cues that in a yoga class, a good teacher might talk about. But how often are you doing them in the class? Because you're then focused on the next thing and moving forward.

So slowing yourself down enough to create that stability is step one through the practice that you mentioned. Do you utilize maybe like a little bit of typical like a strength protocol at some of the stuff? Or is it like, or do you do that separately, you know, on like a more traditional lift? So do you do like a five by five, or is it like, let me work on this movement,

let me practice this movement, and I'm gonna do so repeatedly until the form and technique either feels perfect or it starts to kind of like almost dwindle away a little bit. Yeah, I'll break those up. I mean, the stronger I am, the heavier I can do some of the lifts and so I'll definitely focus on building strength because that's an area

that I can improve relative to the other lifts that I can do. So you might do like a just traditional like military press or something like that. Yeah, like my overhead press, my best is 220 pounds, that I can do. You might do like a just traditional like military press or something like that. Mm-hmm, yeah. Like my overhead press, my best is 220 pounds, strict overhead press. But again, I can hold a lot of weight overhead

with one arm, so it's, my lockout's really strong, but my pressing can improve comparatively. Do you find anything tends to, does anything lack in the chain as you begin to hypertrophy your muscle? Like as you were getting bigger from your ultra marathon, right? Did you notice any drawbacks in anything else, maybe potentially aspects of cardio, but were there any drawbacks as you were getting bigger and getting stronger?

Drawbacks in what regard? Mobility, levels of flexibility that you have. Yeah. Because I wasn't focusing as much on those. So, you know, when I just finished the ultra marathons like six months ago, I took about a month and a half, two months to focus on my hand balancing and building back some of that mobility. Yeah.

But then I focused on getting a lot stronger. And so I wasn't as focused on maintaining something like my splits or a deep pigeon pose or something like that. But after maybe hitting this world record and maybe doing a little bit more, I think I'm going to move into a more of a holistic, like well-rounded program, which would be like heavy lifts, not as worried about just like gaining maximal strength, but building some more hypertrophy, possibly some aesthetic stuff.

I've never really focused on aesthetics, but that could be something that I'll focus on. And what does that look like potentially as, I mean, I wouldn't call it necessarily a split, but in terms of some of maybe the things that you practice on a daily basis, what do some of those minimums look like for you? I don't have something that I practice like every single day.

I try to practice as many things as I can do. And this might seem like a little cheesy, but there's a great line from one of my mentors, guy Dan Millman. He wrote the book, Way the Peaceful Warrior. And in that book, he talks about practicing everything. And so he's like, practice the way you do the dishes, practice how you put the dishes in the dishwasher Try to bring that intentionality towards things

Yeah, and that intentionality then can go into my lifts. And so I don't know my exact split yet will be but it'll probably be me allowing myself to go down by like 85 or 90 percent of my max is now Working out a lot more with my friends like the downside of doing some of these things is there's not a lot of people that also wanna do them. And so often working out alone when you're doing them. And so I have a lot of friends who are super strong, like to work out, just not always like to do these types of moves.

I like that idea of like, you know, practicing and just honing in on how you can get a little bit better at everything, you know, something as simple as taking out the garbage. You take the garbage bag out, you tie it up, you throw it in the trash, and then you come back inside, but you don't immediately put the bag back in there, right? You're putting dishes away, maybe you leave a cabinet open

or you're just, you or just grabbing a glass for water, same thing, you just, you don't shut it. It's all these things that you're going to have to get back to anyway, and that they might be more disruptive unless you kind of take care of them right at the moment. And everything sort of works that way. And when it comes to lifting, we sometimes forget that it is a practice. I think machines don't really take a lot of practice. Although you can make an argument for like

when you're bodybuilding, it gets very specific of how you're trying to like really get connected to the muscle and everything. But when you're strength training, one of the reasons why, so if you're doing three sets of 10 and doing three sets of 10 of curls and stuff, there's really not a lot of practicing going on or in my opinion, not a lot of practice

that even really needs to happen unless you're kind of in the beginning phases of that. Whereas if you're doing a strength protocol and you're doing like 10 sets of two or 10 sets of one or even Olympic lifting, like a lot of practice comes from Olympic lifting. Olympic lifters are good at that. They understand the idea of, I need to kind of perfect this.

Maybe some of them, they get a little overzealous and sometimes they are using weights that are a little too heavy to really truly practice with. But we see this in a lot of sports and we sort of forget about it sometimes in the weight room. But when you do something like 10 sets of two, you can kind of think of it as it's 10 opportunities,

if you're a power lifter, the 10 opportunities to do the first rep and get the first rep right. Cause that's the one that you're gonna be, you're doing the second rep right, it's fine, like that's cool. And you're ingraining a movement pattern, that's great. But rather than having your legs shift around,

your knee shift in and stuff like that on your first rep every time, if we can reduce the weight a little bit and have, we want all 20 reps of those 10 sets of two to be really, really clean and sound. And you want that kind of get embedded into your head. And imagining with some of what you're doing, it's probably important that you're not ingraining

like some bad habits. So that the weights aren't too heavy because they're too heavy. I mean, not only can you not lift them, but you're going to be lifting them way, in a way more strenuous fashion. And as you mentioned with running, the way you were able to make a lot of progress

with running was through zone two, a more controlled environment. And I think the same is very true for lifting. It's just that for some reason, we don't think that way. We want the percentage to be 105% of our max. Yeah, totally. I think, you know, loading up to what you're comfortable with and then every so often pushing that comfort, that's how you get stronger. Powerpods family, how's it going? Now over the years, I've learned a lot from guests

that have come onto this podcast and I've taken the time to learn many different movement practices. So for example, if you wanted to learn rope flow, which is a practice I think is just beneficial for everyone, I have a free rope flow foundations course at school.com slash the stronger human. Now the stronger human community actually has over 11,000 members. So it's a great community there,

but you'll also be able to learn rope flow for free, along with many other things I teach in there, like kettlebell flow flow kettlebell juggling All that good stuff so head over there along with that if you're looking for where to get your equipment as far as ropes Maces and clubs sandbags all that good stuff You can head over to the stronger human dot store and on that site is where I have all of the different Functional fitness equipment that I use to become a strong human. So check those out. Let's get back to the episode.

If somebody is interested in building up some of their body weight strength calisthenics, I don't think that's we haven't had many individuals on this podcast who that's their they have a level of mastery in that. I know that you can't really master calisthenics have you mentioned as you mentioned in the gym, but you are extremely proficient, right? So for the lifters that want to start progressing in that, what would you say is like some minimums that they can maybe start with

as far as like going down that rabbit hole? Because I think some people get this, like you feel a level of discouragement because the things that they can do are so easy for most, right? Or so easy for people who are actually good at calisthenics. So where would you say people start when it comes to that? I'd say if I try to find something that's motivating to you. Like calisthenics is fun because there's a lot of different types of skills. And so you can find, you know, if

you have a really strong push, you might be great at a handstand push up. So you can find, you know, if you have a really strong push, you might be great at a handstand push up. So you might be like, let me think about how I can do a freestanding handstand push up versus, and if you have a great pulling, you can try to do a strict muscle up or something like this. And then I like to reverse engineer a lot of the skills. So a handstand push up in the middle of the room, you're going to need to be able to hold a freestanding handstand. So that's going to be step one. And be able to hold a freestanding handstand. So that's going to be step one.

And then how to hold a freestanding handstand. There's many ways to do it. I can give you a quick kind of rundown of how I think about it is get really good at hand standing at the wall. If you can find a handstand coach, someone that's going to be able to find the inefficiencies. If you're a great athlete, you're also probably a great compensator. And so you find ways to make things work, but that doesn't always allow you to continue to progress, especially calisthenics. And so for a handstand, you want to have your

arms as straight as possible. You want to be pushing into your fingertips. And then you want to build the skill of how you kick up to the handstand and have it be consistent every single time, just like any other skill. Like you wouldn't step into the squat rack like, you know, differently every single time you're doing those 10 by twos. And so you would want to build that movement pattern. And then I would really get comfortable kicking to the wall. And we talked about this in the gym, like doing sets of three, no more than that. And after each kick, if a hundred is a perfect kick, give yourself some type of score and don't make the same mistakes three times In a row, so if you kick up, you know

You don't get it to the wall the first two on the third one Don't even try to get to the hundred just make sure you get like 110 and get all the way to the wall And then once you can consistently tap that wall softly Now you pull off into the middle of the room and it gives your brain time to make an adjustment. Cause with balance, you're actually never balanced. You're always rebalancing. So you're constantly falling out of a handstand and making these micro adjustments in order to stay

on your hands. And so the faster your brain can recognize when you're falling out of alignment, make the appropriate adjustment, you'll be able to stay upside down. Don't make three mistakes in a row. I think that's pretty awesome. When I was powerlifting and had a group of powerlifters

all training together, in order to go up and wait to the next weight for some of the max effort work that we would do, you had to make the lift, but you were allowed to miss the lift. If you miss the lift, now your option is, you got one of two options. You can go down in weight and try to pick a weight in the middle, so it'd still be heavier

than your last attempt. You can pick a weight that's in the middle or you can take that same weight but now you have to do the lift and make the lift. And if you make the lift then we can progress to having you go heavier but you can't miss the lift three times. You know, you miss the lift twice and that's it, it's done.

And it got to the point where a lot of times I wouldn't even allow people to really, I wouldn't allow them to even continue with that same movement at all. Cause I was like, this movement got zapped, it got drained. Like we got everything from this movement for today. There's nothing more else to learn here. The only thing I can think of is like,

you could maybe reduce the weight a lot and move around and just maybe feel the patterns. But just feeling a pattern isn't really enough. You need the correct input. Sometimes you need like an optimal type of weight to kind of get you there. So I really like that idea and that principle. Yeah, thanks.

I think what's hard with calisthenics is it's easy to skip out on a standard. And that's something that if you can apply certain standards and hold yourself to those standards, you're gonna progress really fast. Cause it's easy to, you know, say I wanna practice handstand, just kick up in the middle of the room and fall over every time and maybe hold for a little bit

or have your buddy take a quick picture and oh I did a handstand. But that's not very, that doesn't give you the discipline of being able to fight to maintain that balance. Cause you're so easily allow yourself just to fall out. How did you end up getting yourself in a position to have, sounds like you have had some great mentors, but you gotta kind of, you know, if you want good mentors,

you gotta chase them down. That's right. And so how did you kind of acquire, you know, you're telling us about the guy that wrote the book and a couple other mentors that you mentioned here today. Because yeah, I mean, like going into like an ultra marathon, I mean, I guess it's something that you could do kind of blindly, but I'm imagining that you have a friend

or have somebody that you know, that you communicated with. Cause there's a lot to learn, hydration, the socks, the shoes, just even what race to sign up for, maybe your first one shouldn't be at high altitude in the middle of summer. There's a lot of things like know and learn. And so yeah, how did you kind of acquire or find some of these mentors? I think you got to get comfortable asking questions, being okay to be in that like beginner's mindset.

And so that's something that I've learned from a long time just through playing sports. Like the only way you're gonna improve playing basketball is if you miss a lot of shots, cause then you know how to make the shot. And so it's the same idea for some of these things is if I wanted to learn handstand, I would look up if there's a handstand workshop

or a handstand teacher near me, and then I would invest in something that was valuable to me and go and learn from that person and ask them a lot of questions. See if they could look at me. Wasn't afraid to put myself out in those types of positions. And it's helpful like with the running, for example, because I had no ego attached to running because I'd never done it. So I'm like, oh, I've never done this.

My first miles are 16 minute miles. Like what do I have to lose? Let me just try to improve. And if I kind of move my barometer of success towards myself versus like my friends who are every day running six and seven minute miles in zone two, then I start to feel successful. But if for a while, if I was, you know, would have compared to them, I would have never done it. I'm curious about this, man, because seeing you lift and kind of seeing how you go about this stuff, are you someone that needs to get yourself very wound up before doing some of these strength, like, movements

or before going on a long run? Do you have to hype yourself up a lot, or do you just kind of get yourself there? I get yourself there? I get myself there, but that sometimes requires more hype than others. Like for the lifts we did inside there, those were probably submaximal for me, so I didn't need to get as much hype, but I needed to create an appropriate amount because I'm holding, I think it was like 250 something pounds overhead with one arm.

So just enough, but too much hype kind of will make me a little jittery and I won't be able to focus on The skill that I'm doing yeah because you know one thing that mark mentioned like when when we were watching you just like Clean and press 255 right and then you get that overhead is There's there's a level of like how impressive something is is when you see someone do it and it Almost doesn't seem like it was that difficult. I'm not saying that's what you have to aim for, but it just showed a high level of control

over not just what you're doing, but a control over yourself to be able to do it so easily. And I'm wondering if that's something you think about when you're training, not having it almost, not having it stress you out too much. Yeah, I want to be in control. And so if I'm too emotional with it, then I'm out of control.

And so, I mean, I think about that through almost everything that I do. How can I control my emotions to meet the conversation, the lift, the whatever it is that I'm doing. You're super positive. You did mention that some of that maybe came originally from yoga, but has there been some other studying you've been doing, reading books, watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts?

Like, where do you think some of that positivity came from? And I use this example a lot when I played high school basketball. We were at a championship game and it was towards the end of the game and one of our buddies missed a wide open layup and everyone on my team was yelling at him like, how could you miss that layup? It was the easiest thing ever. And so I called the time out, went over to our team and I was like, guys, do you think he meant to miss the layup? Of course not. He, do you think, do you think yelling at him is going to help him make it again? No, let's just build each other up. We could talk about it after and practice it after, but right now we have to maintain

positive so we could win the game, which we did and it was great. And so I think about that now is like, what's the most effective way of achieving any type of goal? And I've just learned that if I beat myself up or beat up other people, it's not as productive in the long run. And I'm not by far perfect at this, but I do try to maintain a sense of positivity when I can. And I'm also not scared of the negative emotions.

So I think I talk a lot about emotional health and lead a couple of men's groups and things like that. I think it's really important as guys and as strong guys to maintain all of this with people in their lives. But I talk about emotions on a scale of one to 10 and 10 being like the absolute best elated emotions you can imagine and one being the worst. And we all want those seven, eight, nines and tens.

And we all don't want those one, two, threes and fours. But if you don't have the capacity to achieve to feel those one, twos and threes, then you're not going to feel the eight, nines and tens. And so what I focus on is building the strength to maintain and like deal with the one, twos and threes through something like yoga, meditation, journaling, so that I can allow myself to experience those highs. Otherwise, you deal in that middle space where like, yeah, nothing's great.

Nothing's terrible. Life's great. Nothing's terrible. Life's okay. Everything's fine. And I don't necessarily want to be in that space a lot. What do you find is the drawback of being in that space of everything's fine all the time? I don't necessarily think that there is a drawback unless you feel like there's a drawback. And so I have a business that we help people with that.

And I say like our ideal client, someone who thinks like 60 to 80% of their perceived potential. And so oftentimes now, especially with social media, people are constantly comparing themselves to other people. And so that can lead to a lack of self-confidence, which then shows up in the way that they view themselves and then other people that are close to them. And it hurts relationships, it hurts their business, it hurts just society in general. So those are some of the downsides, I guess, from being in that space. And the more that you're comparing, the harder it's going to be to maintain or achieve whatever that peak potential is for

you. It's hard to not put a cap on the things that we think we can do. I could say like, oh, I'm pretty positive. I don't usually say I can't or, but maybe with something you showed us today, maybe I thought that. I participated in a little bit of stuff, but there's some stuff where literally in my head, I was like, I'm not necessarily ready for that, but maybe a better opportunity for me would have been to just say,

which I saw Nsema do a couple of times, what's the regression for that? You can watch someone do something wild and say, hey, like, you know, like if Nsema did something in Jiu-Jitsu and I'm trying to like learn it, that would be my first question. Like that was a little fast, I don you know, like if Ensima did something in jujitsu and I'm trying to like learn it, that's would be my first question. Like that was a little fast. I don't know what's going on.

What's the regression for that? And that's a great question to ask. Yeah, I think that's great for everything. Like I like to make a lot of analogies for like physical strength and emotional strength. And I haven't always been the best at dealing with my emotions and say like a relationship. And so emotions would get high, I would meet those emotions and then I'm not able to effectively communicate with someone and it damages the relationship. So now if I need to take space or slow something down or ask to repeat something that helps me then formulate my response, that's going to lead to an improved relationship. I had a friend tell me one time, he said a fight,

like a argument, simply like inability to communicate with each other. That's like, man, that's kind of the cold hard facts, isn't that? It's like, that's what it is. And even a war, think about how crazy that is. A war is like an inability to understand maybe another group of people and what they're

trying to do and their goals and you not understanding them and them not understanding you. That's really all that it is. And people die over it. Like a lot of people died over it over many, many years. I think everything, and I use this consciously, everything is relationships. Your relationship with yourself, with the food, with your wife, with the weights, with everything. And a tool for building better relationships is communication.

So how can you communicate better with yourself, with someone else? It could be at war with yourself internally over a drug, over a girl, over food. Could be literally just about anything. But the iron is my therapy. Iron brothers. Curious because I think a lot of men generally too,

we kind of use physicality, working out, running, physicality as a way to deal with those things. And obviously, a lot of times you feel better after you take a long run, after you go to the gym, after you go to jujitsu. Now you mentioned you lead a lot of men's groups. What you also talked about like journaling, etc. But you know, if somebody does feel that like, just going through physicality is something

that helps them, do you think do you think that there's any benefit in trying to figure out other ways to study, examine, deal with their emotional health? If you want to engage other people in your life, I think so. Because you can definitely work through some things on your own in the gym or out on the trails. But I think the magic comes when you take what you've learned and then apply it to your life. And so one thing I like to do at my men's groups is I have a list of feelings that I printed out. It's like 50 different feelings and we practice, I call it emotional fitness.

We practice expressing ourselves. So every guy, we sit in a circle in my backyard. Everyone brings a camping chair. I smoke a bunch of meat because that helps get some of the guys over. And then... Oh, it's a barbecue. I'm there. Yeah.

Exactly. And then, you know, I give a little spiel on emotional fitness and each guy gets two to four minutes just practice, like literally just practicing out loud some of these feelings. Because when I grew up, I had like three main feelings, happy, mad and sad. And if I was frustrated... What else is there? Frustration. Frustration is real.

So if I was frustrated, it would go into angry. And then I would never be able to effectively communicate my frustration. And so then my relationship with that person would suffer because I would say, oh, they don't get it. They don't get it. But really it was me. I wasn't expressing it in a way that was effective to them to understand it. Because I don't have the tools, the emotional tools.

So it's been really fun. I mean, it's a practice and I call it fitness because it's uncomfortable, just like training in the gym. Oftentimes you get sore after. And what I mean by that is like, if you've ever gone through a breakup or a difficult conversation, that can kind of stay with you a little bit the next day.

You get some emotional doms. And so it, but it improves and you get better as you continue to lean into it. So that would be a tool is like you're building your feelings vocabulary. People on week one probably are quite a bit different after they've been there for four weeks. Definitely. And they're happy to express that. Week one, maybe they barely say anything like, I'm not going, I'm not saying nothing. Like, I don't want to look like an idiot. Yeah, I'm not as messed up as that guy.

And more people go and then you probably get more comfortable with the people that you're meeting and then you probably open up a little bit. Totally. And it's cool. You know, you don't have to share. I'm not like forcing it. It's a free event. Like you can come up a little bit. Totally. And it's cool, you know, you don't have to share. I'm not like forcing it. It's a free event. Like you can come and just eat meat and hang out and make some friends.

But when you start to, people start to open up, you recognize, oh, we all deal with stuff. Like we all have these mental battles that we're fighting. It might look a little bit different, but can we be present and support each other through it, which there's no advice given at this group. You share, I say, thanks so much for sharing, and then we move to the next person. And as a guy, it's difficult when you're trying to express something that's difficult to express by itself, and then you're getting all this unsolicited feedback. And so it's been cool. It's tough when your Nigerian friend

opens up about his wrists being inadequate. And then he comes to find out that his wrists is pretty much similar measurements to everybody else. All right. You know what? I'm going to stop you right there. I am like, I weigh 60 pounds more than a man. That's a good point. And my wrists aren't that much bigger than his. So exponentially they should be a little bit larger.

But truthfully I think, you know, his wrists are just a little bit bigger than mine. So I mean, I don't think I can lean on... Where's the tape measure? I don't think I can lean on the small wrists anymore. I just look at them and they don't look at... They don't look like Dan the caveman. I know. Yeah, right?

Like his wrists are so large. But this guy's over here doing handstands and stuff with his wrists. He's got some beefy forearms. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of grip. Yeah, I think to your point of people getting together, in the beginning, we were talking a little bit about yoga

and that practice and having that instructor, basically have you have an hour where you're not with your phone, an hour where you're just, you know, some yoga, like the yoga that I've done, which I even forget even the name of it, but it was just like basically lay on the floor and like don't move. Most of it was like that. And you're just like in a pitch black room. And it was awesome.

It was like really soothing and relaxing. And you're making me think like, man, I should probably go back to that because I don't feel stressed, but I feel like I literally don't know how to relax. You know, I don't feel amped all the time either. I feel like occasionally I can be relaxed, but like I have to really kick the shit out of myself to go home and just to be relaxed, but I have to really kick the shit out of myself to go home and just

to be like, and just sort of like, just chill. Not want like a drug. And I don't mean like any hard drugs, but not want caffeine or kratom or kava or whatever it is, it could be just about anything, or food, it's rare for me to just sit and just be totally and completely calm and chill. So thank you for that recommendation, because I think I'll go back and check some of that out again. Yeah, I think it's really helpful.

I mean, especially if you feel like the inability maybe to do that, or the challenge of that, is negatively impacting your life. If there's something that is causing some type of stress, then it will be more motivating to maintain that. I think where it negatively hits me probably was with sleep. Like I have a little bit of trouble with my sleep, I think, because I'm just like a little dysregulated

throughout the day. I mean, I train hard. Sometimes I'll train a little bit too much. My training intensity isn't crazy, but my training frequency is pretty high. So I might overdo it that way. But I think, yeah, some just, you know, go outside and like, don't try to do anything.

Just like sit down, you know? But in my mind, I'm like, I don't want to sit down. I want to like walk to like burn calories or, I'm always like, my mind is drifting towards gamifying stuff or just try to figure out a way to like, just almost like not be in the moment, almost avoid the moment in some way. And I could sit there and just chill and like zone out

and watch TV and like watch football and things like that. But even that is like another, it's another distraction, right? It's another distraction. So just completely calm, like doing zero. I need to focus on that here and there. Yeah. There's, have you ever, are you familiar with any like rites of passage, vision quests? So something I'm passionate about is like quests for young men to move emotionally from

adolescence to adulthood. And one way that I was integrated through this was through a company called Rites of Passage where you do a fast in a wild place. So when you're looking for your own truth, I believe you want to put yourself in the most honest place possible, which is wilderness because animals are going to eat and piss and drink whenever they want to. And so when you fast, you're bringing down, I do this for this emotional reasons, just water fast for four days, but you don't have the capacity to gamify something.

It strips all of that away from you and sees... Some of your energy is a little lower. Totally. And it creates space for like any type of, you know, spiritual ritual or ceremony that you might want to create. And you gain a lot of clarity, like that you can get from fasting. And then you can take that and apply it, which is the most important part to your life afterwards. One thing I think about though, Mark,

as you were mentioning that, I don't know, I feel like it's pretty normal to, like, I can't go through a day without using my body a bit. Like, you know, I wouldn't be able to relax if I've done nothing. Maybe that is a problem, but like, I find even if I'm able to take a bit of a walk,

do something somewhat physical, I don't need to empty the battery. I do not empty the battery every day, but I need to do something. So I actually feel, this is something that's bad about me actually. I feel like I have to do something so I deserve to chill. That's one thing that maybe is a negative, but at the same time I also can't chill

if I have this reserve of energy. I feel that that's fairly normal. I mean, what do you guys think? Like from what you said. Oh, I don't think that it's like abnormal. I just think it's fairly normal. I mean, what do you guys think? Like, from what you said. Oh, I don't think that it's like abnormal. I just think it's something that I could probably work on. I think these are two different things.

Like, you're talking about a physical load, you're talking about a mental load. And so, in order to let your brain recover, your brain doesn't know the difference between being on a podcast and watching TV. It's still focusing on something. And so, if you're constantly on your phone or watching TV or to relax, you're actually not relaxing. But going out for a walk in nature, maybe without your phone or without a podcast on totally lets your brain kind of recover. So then you can come back. And

I mean, this is a lot of the stuff that you think about with time blocking. Those are some things that I do. Like I will go out and run with no phone, no headphones. That's great. That feels great. Yeah, and that just allows you to kind of think about like interval training, maybe your work. If you kind of talk about this a lot with people is like, if you can kind of stack some of your work,

maintain hyper-focus during that time, you have a better chance of getting into a flow state and then recover from that, which will be 15 minutes outside for a walk or doing one of these like yoga nidra practices. But not something that's cognitively demanding because there's this thing in your mind called attention residue, which happens when you're switching from task to task, you're leaving some of that attention over on the other task. So if you say a writing an important document and you get a notification task to task, you're leaving some of that attention over on the other task. So if you say a writing an important document and you get a notification for an email, you

peek over to that, you come back, you've just left 5% of your attention there. And say you had a perfect night's sleep. Now you start the day with 100, which most of us probably don't get 100. But you can imagine how often you get pinged in these different ways. And now you're reaching for something like caffeine or something to maintain that focus versus allowing yourself to have that cognitive downtime. Awesome, and well, good luck with your world record.

Yeah, thank you so much. Hope you smash the hell out of them. Yeah. How much do you need to lift? So the current record is 200 pounds. My best in training was 245. So it's happening here in four days. I'm hoping to hit over 250.

Okay. Do you get to do like, can you chip the record with like 220 then go ahead and do 250 something? Or are you just going to like, what are you going to do? Yeah. I've been thinking about this recently. So I think I'm going to give myself two misses, But there's no rules on how often you want to miss it I am hosting an event and making a lot of food for people and having a lot of folks come there and teaching and up a Workshop afterwards, so I don't want people just watch me miss weights for an hour, but I'm gonna do one

125 180 225 okay Then from 225 I'm gonna go to 250. And then depending how that feels, I'll kind of adjust from there. But not too many misses, because it's a big output once it gets up to that weight.

Gotcha. Anything else you're looking forward to after that? Is there some other record that you're gonna be going after or you're gonna chill for a little while and move on to something different? I think I might chill for a little bit, but that Two Hands Anyhow record is one that is enticing to me. Maybe not if I need to just continue hammering myself so much in the gym.

One thing that I am curious about is long distance swimming. So there's a cool endurance run or race through Tahoe, swimming across Tahoe or the distance race on it. So Mike get into that. But nothing's on the docket yet except for the Leadville 100 mountain bike race, which is at the end of August. Yeah. I know some people swim Lake Tahoe and sometimes they do it like in the middle of the night or something like that. I don't know if that's something you heard of. Yeah. You got to start. I mean, depending on when you're gonna do it. I've done a paddle board race from the Bahamas to Florida,

which is 80 miles across the ocean. And so that one, you start at midnight. How did we just hear about this now? That sounds kind of crazy. Why is this coming up? Isn't there a lot of sharks there? There are, yeah, we saw a lot of hammerhead sharks, which aren't so dangerous. What's your ethnicity? I'm a lot of hammerhead sharks, which aren't so dangerous.

What's your ethnicity? I'm a mixed bag. I asked Ecuadorian, some Native Americans, some Italian. Italian, okay. How much of that? About 50%. How much Caucasian? 50% Caucasian.

That's perfect. That's what hammerhead sharks love. Yeah. It was cool. I mean, we had, we start at midnight and it's for this organization. It keeps getting worse. This is a really cool venture. I'm getting nervous.

All right. I'm going to sell you on this now. It's an organization called Crossing for the Cure. And this guy, Travis Suits started it. His daughter has cystic fibrosis and he wanted to think what's a cool event that we could do to raise money for people that have cystic fibrosis. And the ocean is great because it helps kind of clear up that phlegm that happens. And so he and his buddies did this paddle from Bimini, Bahamas back to Florida.

And then that was like maybe 13 years ago or something. I'm not exactly sure, but. Wow. So now you can go and you can paddle board, you can see kayak, you can do a relay, and it's 82 miles across the Gulf Stream. How long does it take again? Took us 16 hours.

Yeah, I've done a paddleboard and on a water bike, a Schiller water bike too. I don't think I've ever seen a water bike, but that's cool. It's like a bike with pontoons on it. But this is a great, like if someone's looking to do some type of a big adventure and likes the ocean and likes water, this is very accessible. Because it sounds crazy, 80 miles on a paddle board. You do get a little bit of a push from the Gulf Stream, so that's helpful.

But it's a great time, you go out there in the Bahamas. You have your own boat, so that's helpful. But it's a great time, you got there in the Bahamas. There's other people out there with you. There's other people. I mean, you have your own boat, so you have your own support boat. So you're able to get food, get water, stuff like that. Okay, okay.

It's more chill than I'm thinking. But it's still hard. It's still very hard. I mean, it was the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen in my life, because I've never been awake for that long, and then just let my eyes naturally adjust to the sun coming up.

Cause you start at midnight and you only have a red light cause you don't want to disrupt the animals. And so you're paddling with three other friends. I'm already done. I don't want to disrupt the sharks. You don't want to attract them. Yeah. So you're paddling and then all of a sudden

your eyes just naturally adjust to that sun coming up and you're in the middle of the ocean. Like you don't see anything around you but ocean. And we had a buddy who fell in right around that time and the water was really calm and the boat captain goes, shark. And so we all freeze like this. And then all of a sudden this huge great hammerhead

like from the size of one wall to the other, like 15 feet, maybe a little bit smaller was swimming right underneath our boards and I thought it's fin was going to hit my board. It was wild. Wild, just wild. You know, dude, you're so sick. Talk, why?

It's one of those like type two things, you know? In the moment you're like, don't fall, don't fall. I did have a question before we end. What is the world record for this single-arm squat? The single-arm barbell overhead squat that you're doing. Is there a world record for that? Not officially by Guinness. So I'm claiming it. Someone wants to come grab it. Go for it. Yeah, but 350 is the best I've done. Okay. Okay. I was like, yeah, that's probably one too. All right.

When do you decide to put your sleeves on? Because you're wearing some strong sleeves in a lot of these videos. Those things are like, they feel like cheating because I never used sleeves before until then. And that's like all of my lifts go up, especially the knee sleeves, I really love those. But I was getting a little elbow pain on my left arm. And so like on this video here, I'm not actually wearing it on the arm

that's holding the weight. But those are super helpful for me to maintain the arm straight. Some people have questions sometimes on like when do you put these on and do you start your workout with them on or do you put them on after you got to a heavier weight? It depends. Right now I usually put the left one on in the beginning for the warmth factor, so it helps keep the joint a little bit warmer. One of my buddies told me recently

to just do a lot of like tricep extensions, like super light to bring some blood in there. And then yeah, just having the sleeves on just gives you a little compression, makes you feel a little bit more confident type deal. Definitely, yeah. Where can people find you? Mike Idella on Instagram,

and then my business is The Offense, so theoffense of the offense co Wow great to have you here, man Yeah, thanks so much strength is never a weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later. Bye