Barbell Shrugged - Coaching Mentorship with 2 Strong Coach Graduates — The Bledsoe Show #135

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

In this episode Mike, Ben and Jeff dive into strength and conditioning techniques. They talk the Mase community tribes and Ben and Jeff’s experience going through the The Strong Coach . You’ll learn how to play in your workouts while still getting results.  What are mantras and how to use goal setting to get to a place of fulfillment. This episode will help improve as an athlete as a coach and anyone interested in health and fitness!   Minute Breakdown:   0 - 18  What is the steel mase and how Ben and Jeff found their way to it.  Learning to play again as adults. Getting results without measuring everything and using only metrics.  Learning whether your gym time healthy for you or stressing you out?   18 - 29   Generating the connection between mind and body in your workouts.  Connection to completeness allows you to be more engaged and prevents injury. Learning how the Mase can help with this engagement. 29 - 42  Ben and Jeff’s experience with the strong coach and now mentors. How this helps becoming the type of coach you want to be.  Why they call it the Rocket Ship. Saying mantras and becoming the person they always wanted to be.   42 - 50: What is a success story that you want to create and is it life giving to you. How Strong Coach helped get there.  The potential you get from investing in yourself. Using systems to document your goals and making things happen. 50 + The Strong Coach method of thoughts, feeling and emotions and actions lining up is what causes fulfillment.  Creating scenarios where these all line up and massive action happens. Why getting clients for Ben is now easy and retaining them. Becoming the person who is worth what you are charging and charging exactly what you want!     --------------------------------------------------- Show notes: https://shruggedcollective.com/tbs-graduates ---------------------------------------------------   ► Travel thru Europe with us on the  Shrugged Voyage, more info here: https://www.theshruggedvoyage.com/ ► What is the Shrugged Collective?  Click below for more info: https://youtu.be/iUELlwmn57o ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

All right, folks, got a big announcement to make today. We are going to be holding our very first Strong Coach retreat. Last month, I was hanging out in Austin, Texas, and for an entire day, I spent some time with four Strong Coach graduates. And we had breakfast, we podcasted, which you're about to hear the podcast I did with Ben and Jeff. And we worked out and we got some barbecue and we talked about coaching, business, life, and it was so much fun. It was one of my favorite days I had in Austin. And it got me thinking, we should do this. We should do this more and we should do it

intentionally. So I'm looking at doing three days, three days in person, getting a group of coaches together. Now, if you have not been through the Strong Coach program yet, that is okay. I'm going to open it up to everybody. So if you want to fill out the application, go over to thestrongcoach.com and click the retreat button. And so we're going to have limited spots. So go ahead and apply. And if you have been to the program, the Strong Coach program, this is going to be great for you too. This is really an opportunity for us to get together, have the community, talk about business, talk about coaching, and see where we can help level each other up. So go over to thestrongcoach.com to start the process now. And if you're not already

subscribed to the Bledsoe Show on iTunes or Stitcher, make sure to go do that right now. I'll be moving on my own here soon, and I don't want you to miss any of the stellar episodes I'm dropping. So I am coming off of the Shrug Collective very soon. But everything I'm posting right now is already going on my own channel. So if you're subscribed over there, you don't need to do anything. But if you're not subscribed over there, head over, stitch your iTunes, do a search for TheBloodsRShow. Make sure you're subscribed to my channel. So I'm also posting some extra episodes before I come off the network. So you're going to get extra stuff that you're not going to get if you're listening through Shrug Collective right now.

All right, now we're talking about our sponsor. We got to organify, uh, best greens on the market, best tasting mixes. Well, uh, makes me have energy first thing in the morning. So I wake up, drink my glass of water, drink my green juice, and then I go on about my day. I, I very often put protein powder. They have this protein. that's really easy to digest. It has an amazing amino profile. That means it's got all the aminos you need to rebuild muscle and it tastes really good. So I put that in my coffee in the mornings a lot of times. And if you're looking for a pre-workout that's not loaded with artificial sweeteners, sugar, or just too much caffeine, and you want something that's going to support your body instead of depleting it,

I really love the Red Drink from Organifi. It's got rhodiola in it and some other things that really support your organs so that your body can do what it needs to do. It basically reduces the stress during your training session and then allows you to downregulate more quickly afterwards so that you can recover faster. And then, of course, I drink their gold before bed. It's got magnesium and some mushrooms in it and some other things. It helps with digestion.

It helps with inflammation. And for me, it really mellows me out so I can get a really good night rest. So if you want to try out any of these, and I recommend trying them all out, go over to Organifi.com slash shrug. You're going to save 20% when you place that order. Again, that's Organifi.com slash shrug. Now we got our show with Ben Walker and Jeff Oaks. These guys are our recent graduates of the Strong Coach program and amazing coaches. What's really cool is inside of the Strong Coach, we have a mentorship program. And Ben went through it first. So he got to go back and mentor Jeff. And they knew each other before the program. And we dig into it. We dig

into the conversation. It's really cool. So even if you're an athlete, this is going to be really good for you. This is going to help you improve as an athlete, as a coach, or anyone who's interested in health and fitness. Enjoy the show. Podcast number two. What did you do before? Before? What was your first podcast you were on? I was on Adam Merritt at this podcast.

Imposed Will. Imposed Will. Cool. I'll check it out. I'm excited to sit down with both you guys. First off, anyone from the Mace community is so much fun. What I like about it is it's still cutting edge. It's still new. And anyone who is

willing to really throw themselves at the mace game is, uh, yeah, there's, there's a, a boldness and an amount of courage it takes because there's a lot of people in strength and conditioning and they're still looking at it going,

what's this silly shit that's going on. And then, uh, then they get the mace in their hand and, and get a proper introduction. And then they go, Oh, that's what this, that's what's going on and then uh then they get the mace in their hand and and get a proper introduction and then they go oh that's what this that's what's going on here so it's uh it's it's a real joy and i love the community that comes with the mace game so again it is so cutting edge that there's not that many yet and uh if you're in this crew at this point, there's a special, I guess you could say, brotherhood and sisterhood, community, tribe.

Yeah. That's really cool. I'm excited to sit down with both you guys. And the other thing is both of you have gone through the Strong Coach. Oh, yeah. And that's one of the things I'm really excited about. That program is the fact that it was adopted inside this Mace community from the top guys early on. So watching all of you work together, you got Leo, Serena, Ben, and Jeff,

and I think another one's going through. Yeah, there's Colin. Colin's in it right now. Colin's in it right now. Sullivan he's at Jared's yeah CrossFit Crack yeah and then and Mike Gonzalez as well they're like both

oh yeah and then and there's Clint who's all who's like Mike and Clint are my mentees in the program right now and they're both

finishing up yeah so I'm I'm fucking stoked about this because I fell in love with the Mace and I went to Leo's

first certification and then and then to see all these Mace people love the Strong Coach and then watching that help that proliferate the message is something I didn't plan on. And it's been a real – it's been cool to watch. Yeah, how long have you guys been doing Mace? Three years.

I started summer of 2016. Yeah, how about you, Jeff? Yeah april of 2016 is when i got my first mace yeah were you guys doing strength and conditioning before that yes yeah i was actually coming out of a power lifting phase all right you're coming out of power lifting yeah how about you ben i was i was actually about to go into a power lifting phase and found the maces as my, uh, as my playtime outside of that, or like the,

the rest is like, well, I don't want to just do nothing. Right. So like, I can like explore with this and like, I was finding, um,

like all the different resources. Like that's when I found Leo and Eric Milland and Rick Brown and all these other resources. So I was able to like play around with that and then have my like, I'm just going to pick up the heaviest fucking thing I can find days as well. One of the things I really like about it is the amount of play that comes in. So I'm doing strength and like I'm doing fitness stuff, but I'm not counting reps and I'm doing some flow and it's playful and I can lose myself in it

while I'm still getting that that fitness thing in so it's I think a lot of us had the play beat out of us growing up you know a lot of sitting at desks in rooms and being told that the mind is is really important but the body isn't and adults, having to learn how to play again. And I think that's one of the things I really got out of doing the mace with guys like yourself, which is, okay, here's the moves. Here's how to do it well,

but also here's a foundation in which you can start to play from. Because it's the play thing of, like you look at animals in the wild, like a gorilla doesn't get up and be like, in which you can start to play from. Because it's the play thing of, like you look at animals in the wild, like a gorilla doesn't get up and be like, I need to swing through 10 trees with like this amount of rest in between each swing. Like gorilla gets up and is like,

I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Hey, this is cool. And like that's how humans started. But we got in this idea of like, well, how do we like maximize efficiency of our training? Like I need a graphing calculator to figure out, figure out like down to the gram, how much weight I need to lift and down to the millisecond, how much rest I need to take. And sure that gets you great results, but then like getting so caught up in, in the, like the masculine elements of it. Yeah. Well, we live in a society where everything's about achievement.

Everything's measured. You know, most people are going to work and that's all achievement-based. There's metrics involved with, and there should be, with your work. If you're in school, there's metrics based on, you know, you're always having to make some type of grade. There's all these metrics in our lives and that, that doesn't leave a lot of room for play. And I

think that people have the biggest opportunity to grow as human beings by putting more play in. And so to, to go from a, you know, if you work a job and it's eight to 10 hours or you're going to school and it's, and everything is based on achievement and on um the numbers and the metrics and hitting those and then you go into the gym for your fitness for your health and then now you're playing the same exact game just doing more of the same yep and i and one thing i've noticed this is a conversation i've been in a lot recently, which is we have turned the gym into something that's supposed to be healthy and it's something that's unhealthy. And the way that it's on, this is how you know if your gym time is actually unhealthy

for you. And that is if it stresses you out. Does making yourself go to the gym, is being in the gym. Is it a stressful experience? Are you experiencing some type of – are you comparing yourself to others as you're working out? Are you – like what is your experience while you're in the gym or is it fun? And I say it's unhealthy because if you go in and there's a level of stress happening during your workouts, you're now practicing to be, you're practicing to make exercise stressful. And that's not healthy because we want things like cortisol and other stress hormones to

diminish it. It slows down recovery. So it's just more stress because more than likely your job is stressful and you get in the gym and it's like, oh, here's another layer of stress. Now I want you to go home and rest and just rest. It'll be fine. But everyone goes to bed at night and their mind is running because they're thinking about what's not happening with work, how they didn't compare very well in the gym to other people and all that. Yeah, I think to take it back to play too i think that's like a

basic human instinct so when we play with the mace or when we get into flowing with it um something clicks and it just this feels right this feels like i'm tapping into this this instinct like i like i compare it to watching my cats play when you're watching a group of people flow together because the cat will attack it'll play with a mouse or something for a little while and it'll kind of back off and it looks like it's thinking it's kind of plotting out its next move if you watch people flow they'll usually get into a flow for a few minutes they'll make they might find something it's like i want to do something with this and where do i go with this so you'll see these kind of like pauses like we're we're kind of playing with our prey at the same time

yeah what do you um i know i found this as i'm as i'm working with the mace i go oh this is actually really therapeutic i think a lot of people i i imagine a lot of people assume then when they see it that it's not as good as squatting with a barbell or doing a very specific set of reps with a kettlebell or doing some type of assistance work with some dumbbells. What do you, what do you say about that? I like the, uh,

it makes me think of Eckhart Tolle talks about this, how we watched two ducks fight and then the, the fight ended and they both swam opposite directions and both went shook it off, shook it all off. And then they were fine and went about the rest of their day. But like humans don't do that. We get in a fight and then we sit there. And then the like mace training is a way to like when whatever that emotion is that's building up in you, it's really easy to then transfer that energy into physical energy. Yeah.

Um, and I've, I found like I had an instance where, uh, someone stole something from me and I found out and I was really angry and I was sitting in my, in my chair trying to breathe it out. And then I looked and I saw my maces. I was like,

okay, if I can do it. And I just did like three sixties to squat until, until like my leg, I couldn't feel my legs. And I was like, Oh, that's all gone now. Yeah. So that's interesting. You bring that up. Um, I, I do a retreat every couple months, uh, training camp for the soul. And one of the things we do

is we teach people how to shake. And there was a psychologist, uh, way back in the day. He is in a war zone. And they had to go to an underground bunker. And there were a lot of adults and kids in this underground bunker. And bombs are being dropped. It may have been Belgium. Not Belgium. Bulgaria.

So these bombs are being dropped. And he looks and he sees that all the children are shaking. Like shaking, but none of the adults are shaking. Because when you freak the fuck out, when you get scared. Remember when you were a kid, you got scared and then you would shake? And so he went and started asking uh everybody you know like it's like went to the adults like why aren't you shaking and he started like started creating a theory and then he noticed animals in nature anytime uh so you've if you've ever been hunting and you maybe you they've got like video

recordings of this maybe a a deer gets, doesn't get hit and it, and it runs off and then it gets to wherever it's at and then it shakes it off. And then it goes back to just chilling out. Right. Um, there's a video of a polar bear that gets, uh, it gets, uh, shot with a tranquilizer dart. And when it comes back, like it was a stressful thing for that to happen. And as it comes back, it shakes and then it can relax. And so what he started looking at is adults at some point are human beings. At some point we learned that shaking is not cool. if you were walking around New York and someone fucking yelled at you or stressed you out and then you're walking on the street and your hands are shaking,

how cool would that look? You'd look like a little bitch, right? I say that with stuff like that. I guarantee it's not the weirdest thing someone's seen on the streets of New York. If I did just start to walk by, like... Yeah, but if you were like,

and you'd let yourself shake for like 30 seconds, you wouldn't like there at some point you learn not to do that. Yeah. So there, so what, you know, humans are interesting animals because we learn behavior that makes us look good or not. Right.

And shaking is something that doesn't look good. It makes you look like a pussy. So what this psychologist found is the, uh, the shaking is so the, the memory of that fear response gets stored in the fascia. And so what ends up happening is it creates tension in the fascia. And now you have this like negative emotion stuck because if you shake, it lets it come out. Right. Yeah. And so, um, and so what ends up happening is people end up, uh, for every time they don't, they have a stressful experience and they don't shake it out. What ends up happening is they store that over time and then they start breathing short you

know you've probably seen a lot of people that can't take a deep breath most people in the gym i tell them to take a breath and their shoulders go up and they come down i go belly and then your shoulders go up and i was like oh they don't even know how to bring their belly anymore because they've they've they've uh they spent so much time suppressing any type of movement to shake things out after stressful experiences that they're getting shorter and shorter and shorter on breath. You can imagine what that's going to do for your health. And so one of the practices we have, it's called a trauma release exercise. And so we teach people how to shake it out. And if you do these exercises before bed, it takes your nervous system and just completely down regulates it. You know,

it's 10, 15 minutes. And, um, so the work that we do, um, is we're, we're doing a lot of stuff around things that were traumatic at some point in your life. And then we teach you how to down regulate through that. And the next thing, you know, two, three days into the retreat, everybody is just like Zen Buddhas, right? And it's a practice that after a few days of practicing as a group, you can take it home for your own things. So it's interesting. I agree. It's something like the mace can be something. It's something that allows the energy to flow and keeps it from getting trapped. I would say also, I think there's something about shaking specifically that I think is really good, but also the exercise, picking up a mace and doing that, that's going to move a lot of energy too. And you can see it in, uh, in, I guess, what is like the conventional wisdom of training where it's like, no, you have to, you have to, like, this is your 85% and you have to take this much rest. And it's the same thing like in school where it's, no, you have to sit here. Like, but I want to play with the toys. No, you have to do

this assignment. Like when I was little, I was, uh, what my mom called a spirited child. And I would, I would run around. I'd be running around the playgroups and the moms would all be like, oh my god, Meg, when can you put that kid on Ritalin? So then I was homeschooled until high school. Hell yeah. I was homeschooled all the way through.

I know. I'm psyched about that. It was because of that. There wasn't anything wrong with me you know what's funny i talk to entrepreneurs now i have a lot of friends are entrepreneurs and when they find out i was homeschooled they're like fuck man you have such an advantage yeah it's it's seen as such an advantage if you're doing anything that's creative in nature anyways go ahead because like through that i was able to like get so many like life experiences. When I was 12 to 13, because my dad's family is all in England,

his brother got married in August. His sister got married in December. So instead of going there and back and there and back, we stayed the whole time. My mom's sister and I did a seven-week backpacking trip through Europe. My voice changed hiking in Switzerland. Who else gets to have that experience? That's pretty cool.

You don't get to have that experience watching it on your classroom television. Homeschooling is a way to, the way my mom called it was unschooling, so it's very little structure. I've read about unschooling. It is a lot of what you want to do. It's very attractive.

I've read about unschooling. It is a lot of like what you want to do. It's very attractive. I've read about unschooling and if slash when I have kids, I think that's going to be, that will be the route it goes. I mean, there's so many tools for education now, like reading, writing, arithmetic, you know, that's actually easy and everything else ends up being a lie at some point anyway so yeah and then the people who didn't learn how to handle their emotions they they graduate high school or college and then they have to go back to like whatever version of like some sort of education where like they get a therapist or they go through a coaching program because like oh wait like no one told me how to be a human yeah Yeah. There's three categories. If you want three categories of education that adults buy, that they invest money in, that's health.

You never learn how to be healthy in school. It's wealth, what to do with your money. I mean, they basically don't teach you how to manage money at all. There might be an accounting class. That's not even real. No, they teach you how to add it up, but it stops there. Yeah. And then they don't teach you about your body health, how you transfer energy from one person to another via money, which money is such a fucking huge part of everyone's life. It's

intertwined with everything you do. The majority of your life is spent trying to get more of it, and then you have to spend it to do everything. And it's not even fucking talked about. It's taboo, even. That shit drives me nuts. And it's imaginary, too. Yeah.

It's very abstract. It's constant. It's in everything you do. Everywhere you go, there's almost always a transaction. What do you think the longest you've gone without thinking about money is? Oh, geez. One week. Really? That's impressive.

That's very impressive. Burning Man. Well, there you go. Burning Man. That I imagine. Yeah, you want to reset your mind around money. That's a good one. What are you doing in August?

Let's go. Maybe going to Burning Man. Yeah. a good one. What are you doing? What are you doing in August? Let's go. Maybe going to burn it, man. Yeah. Awesome. We'll have fun. We'll have fun. Um,

Oh, what were we talking about? It doesn't matter. Something about this. So like, all right. My other question is like from a therapeutic perspective, like a movement therapy,

you know, um, it, are there, are there, I found it'd be very therapeutic for me like shoulders that were a little janky are now much smoother and stronger and hips too my core is much better um is there any you guys have any like i can feel it like that's yeah i've been training for so long that i don't what i've realized is it only needs to be true for me, for me to use it for therapy.

It's like, oh, my shoulders feel better and I can feel how. Do you guys have any scientific explanations for what's happening with the mace that makes it so awesome? No, I'm probably not the best person to talk about the science of it. What I can tell you is that what I observe is that it generates a lot of connection between mind and body. And that's something that a lot of people have spent a lot of time in the gym not maintaining. They're in there working on their body. There's no complete person there. You know, and in Lifted, you talk about unhealthy relationships with yourself at the gym all the time. There's a reason that that program is necessary. It's because people have lost that

connection or maybe it was never there to begin with. And for me, what I observe and what I notice in my clients is that generating that connection, you're so engaged that it's therapeutic in that way just by virtue of creating more completeness. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that most injuries don't occur because you're not working a certain muscle enough. It's because you don't even have the awareness that it needs to be engaged. And something like the mace requires engagement.

You stop paying attention for a second, you'll whack yourself, you drop it. It's an automatic, it's kind of like boxing or martial arts. You stop paying attention for one moment and it's obvious that you're out of whack. So that's what this nick on my nose is. I was watching my client and I was like, oh, Jesus, come Yeah, yeah. The pay for not paying attention with the mace can be, it'll wake your ass up. On the more science-y side, though, there is a lot, because everything about the mace is rotational. Yeah. So, like, I remember I had a shoulder issue, and a friend of mine who was a yoga teacher like asked her mentor like what do

you do for someone like i'd had surgery was still having issues and he said just do this just rotate your shoulder in and out and that generates uh synovial fluid to then leave your joint up yeah and that's like you look at the 360 it's like your your shoulder is basically rotating through the entire rotational range that it has with weight yeah on that so you're getting a little you're getting extra feedback and if you're doing it well you're engaging throughout the entire pattern and what i notice is the way i trained especially so much so many years in in weightlifting and crossfit where everything's sagittal plane it's front and forward and side to side. That is basically covering two out of 360 degrees of movement. You have 358 degrees of gap

that aren't being trained. Uh, something like the mace goes, Oh, 360. Yeah. So I think that's like the, for me, that was the biggest opportunity. I started thinking about the core of like, of my spine. How can I strengthen the muscles around my spine? And I stopped worrying about my wrists, elbows, even shoulders and hips. And I started focusing on creating strength in every direction from my spine. And all of a sudden everything else got better. My hips felt better, knees, feet, all of it. I go, oh. Weird. Yeah, the rotational thing is huge. If you've done very little rotation, that's your biggest opportunity. Two things

with that, talking about the spine, that's how we start a Steel Mace Flow certification is talking about the spine and mobile. The spine is the first thing that we do. Even if anyone listening right now, if you lift up your arm to the side, you might think,

oh, my shoulder, my deltoid was the first thing to turn on. It was actually the muscles in your core around your spine were the first thing to turn on. Or at least they should have. Yes. And if they don't, then you got problems. Danger city. That's how injuries get started. And then too, with like, everyone knows

strength is position specific so maybe like if you're standing in a perfectly braced like square to the mirror position and you can press like 200 pounds over your head okay what happens if you turn your right shoulder towards that mirror and rotate can you like how much can you press from there yeah i mean how many times you've taken uh crossfitters or weightlifters, him and Mason, just watch them because it's worked the other way around too. Like I remember when there was a phase where, um, you know, when CrossFit came along and you had weightlifters, powerlifters, bodybuilders, you know, they would be like, Oh yeah, I can do this CrossFit thing. And then they go to do the CrossFit thing. And they're like, Jesus Christ,

I just got my ass handed to me and so the same thing happens with a crossfitter with the mace actually i have i've got a client i'm working with right now um who have like mostly it's been mostly a 10 pound mace like you don't i can put anyone on the floor with a 10 pound mace i have people ask me all the time what size mace should i start with i get those dms 10 pounds for sure maybe have a 15 ready to go for when you're ready to progress. If you're big, like Danny, he's 220 pounds. Sometimes 15-pound mace is good for that guy. I had a client who a trainer he works with at another gym,

he bought his own mace and the trainer was like, oh, you're going to get so tired of that 10-pound mace. And he was like, oh, no, no. You don't even know. You don't know the levels of shenanigan we can get up to with 10 pounds. Yeah. How do you guys get people into the mace? You're going into gyms.

How do gyms feel about you bringing in this piece of equipment? How do clients – what attracts clients to what you're doing? You know, I imagine there's people that listen to this and they go, ah, the mace is silly. I don't want to do it. I really like doing my squats and my kipping pull-ups and all that. What's your big selling point on it? I mean, I want to sell it to people because I love it. But how do you guys see

people come into it i see people come into it from a couple of different places um one is fresh off the street um i've got a couple of clients who have come in that are that were actually really into live action role playing and And they saw the mace and then thought that... These are people who are in a park hitting each other with swords? Yeah, the ones with the big PVCs that they wrap up in just enough padding to not kill each other. Yeah, this is the one group of people where I'm like, that would push my boundaries of weirdness.

I get along with those people. Yeah, in my experience, they're very, very nice people and passionate about the Mace as well. So I see a couple groups like that where people who are not necessarily into fitness see something that's weird. It's a little bit different. Maybe it makes them think of something that was from their childhood. You know, they were into Ninja Turtles or Chuck Norris or whatever. Um, and the other angle I see is people who, um, see my classes at the gym who are into heavier lifting and start to see the value of that creating rotational resistance in their bodies and how that can, uh, positively affect their big lifts.

Um, one of my newest and most passionate clients right now is a power lifter. Um, but she's taken to the mace super, super quickly. And within two weeks she was telling me how she easily added on, I think it was like 20 pounds to her deadlift. Yeah. This was after like two training sessions in one class, just by learning how to create that engagement. It immediately transferred for her. Yeah. I remember, uh, I was talking to John Wolf over on it a while back and he was talking about how he stopped doing traditional lifting for a while and only did the clubs and the maces and some kettlebells for years.

Then he shows up to this certification where they're pulling heavy deads that day. He was like, man, I haven't picked up anything heavy in a while. He can grab a 35-pound club and do weird shit with it. He's an animal. He's crazy. He's like, yeah, I deadlifted 600 pounds that day. What? Yeah.

Oh, shit. Yeah. That's life goals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, like I said earlier, when you're only training two degrees of range of motion, when you start training the other 358, something's going to happen. And it's not what you expect. There's a point when training squats and deadlifts and pull-ups where doing more pull-up squats and deadlifts works, and then it doesn't. And then

it's something else. If you're hitting a plateau in any aspect of your training, try doing something that's very different and see how that impacts you. I know that I've been training so long that doing more of the same is not working anymore. I've got to do things. I mean, we've looked at this in sports science, beginner athletes need to do a lot of the same. And then the more advanced the athlete gets, the longer, the longer their training history is, the more variety they require for their body to keep adapting. Yeah. And that variety like really sparks the, um, the mind, um, the bottleneck in performance is, is not always strength. Sometimes it's cognitive. And when you teach somebody something that is more and more engaged. You mean cognitive fitness?

You want me to think and work out at the same time? Oh, fuck. Whoa. You're probably leaving like half on the table, possibly, maybe. Soft talk acknowledged. All right, so go ahead. You're saying? I don't know. What was I saying?

Oh, yeah. The bottleneck is not always in strength. I mean, performance is increased by learning things that switch it up for you or teach you how to engage more fully. And that's the thing with anti-rotation, which for anyone listening who doesn't know, anti-rotation is the mace is an off-balance tool, so it's trying to pull you over. So you pull it apart to create activation in the rest of your body to resist that rotation. And what I say to a lot of people is, like you get out of mace exercises what you put in. So if you're just kind of holding on to this thing,

just holding it, you might get a decent workout, but not as much as if you like put like try and break that thing yeah and then you carry that over to like i like even like deadlifts break breaking the bar or pulling it apart or a bench press like the the because you know you hear powerlifters talk all the time about like pull the like row the bar down to your chest and then if you add if you think about like the anti-rotation aspect of that like that all transfers yeah to then where you can

get like a similar amount of of like activation from a 10 pound mace that you could get from a heavy barbell because it's like you putting that intention into the movement as opposed to relying on the heavy weight to do it yeah i remember um so i meet john wolf he he introduces me to the the clubs and maces um he's actually my mastermind at one point and he's teaching me all this like animal flow stuff at our retreat and i go fuck yeah this is cool he's like i'm gonna send you some tools so the tools showed my house and i fuck with them for like 20 minutes and I go, I don't know what to do with these. And I saw some videos and I was mimicking. And then he comes over one day, he comes over to my house and he goes, I'm going to take you through this. So he trains me for an

afternoon and yeah, he, you know, putting tension into the mace throughout all the movements. I was like, Oh, I get it now. I get what's happening. If you're only watching what's going on, there's no way. It's an experiential thing. I was hanging out with Adam von Rothfelder the other day. We were training.

We were kickboxing. By the way, don't let that guy kick you. He was talking about, and that guy is one of the best movers I've ever met. When that guy moves, it's like, what is going on?

And he talks about keeping that constant tension during moving. And he had this analogy. He goes, look at, he said, I can tell this story as long as I give him the credit. So someone's going to listen to this.'m like i told adam that there's no new information out there he was like if you look at like a lion so a lion is just they spend most or they're fucking yoked right that's a yoked

animal who doesn't want to be like a lion right but those carnivorous prey predator animals they what you see is they relax and relax and relax and so when they're creeping up on prey the reason they're so smooth is because the entire body all all the muscles are engaging. So they're intentionally like, like if you've ever done like qigong. And that's another thing. If you just see qigong, you don't realize that that person's, everything in their body is being activated during that. That's like one of the things that's going on.

So it's like every muscle, you're like pretending like it's hard to push in and push out. And he said that they're just like, they can move so smooth and quiet and stealth. And then so that when they have to pounce, everything's already engaged. They're not pouncing from a relaxed state. They're either like laying around, just fucking off 23 hours a day. And then they're for a few, for like a few minutes, they're creeping with everything. everything and then when they go to pounce there's all that energy is just ready to go and ready to fire and he really got me thinking about that and with a lot of the the flow movement when I go oh he goes that's why when you see people who are training a lot of this flow stuff they're like they have

that constant tension going on and they you don't have to lift a lot of weight, but what you end up with is a really healthy muscle that is ready to explode. And that, that really resonated with me and really got me thinking about that more because it, that, that gave me a more of a why it's like, sometimes I get lazy. I'll be doing some flow work or I got the mace. Next thing I know, I find myself not putting tension into the bar. And then I go, oh, yeah, I need to remember to do that. But I'm like, I'm a fucking lion. And it's because like that helps so much because so much of flow, you can do it choreographed, but so much of it is improvised. So you have to have that engagement ready to go for whenever you get that impulse.

It's like coming from an actor's perspective, the first rule of improv is you say yes and to everything. So when you're flowing, like – That's how I treat romantic relationships. Yes, yes. Why not? Let's explore. Yes and both. Because you have to be ready. If you go into any certain step and your structure is not there, you can't say yes and to everything.

So the physical practice then prepares you to say it. As above, so below. Like you were saying, getting the mind right with the body. When you have the body in the position to say yes and to whatever impulse comes next, that then carries over into your everyday life, being capable of saying yes and to things. All right. We're going to make a hard left. Let's do it. Tell me about your experience with the Strong Coach.

It's a rocket ship. We'll let Ben go first because I didn't realize this until I asked Danny. I was like, is there anything that I should know about? He was like, you've mentored. So we have a mentorship program inside the Strong Coach. I got to mentor Jeff. Yeah.

So tell me about your experience uh going through that and yeah i'm curious yeah well i i what i when i decided to sign up for it i was um i mean i am still an actor i'm still paying my union dues for that because the door is still a jar i was doing a show um i had done a string of shows where I should have been like... It should have been amazing because it was great theaters, a whole bunch of great shows, and then I was looking at all these things

happening elsewhere and feeling like I was missing out on them. I thought, wait, if I'm living the dream, that's what every actor says. Oh yeah, living the dream. Then I shouldn't feel like I'm missing out on stuff. And that's when Serena had already been, she's right there, Serena had already been through the

program. I think Leo had just completed it. I was feeling... Serena was one of the first ones. She made it through. I remember her taking the program and trying to convince Leo to do it and Leo being like, yeah, but Mike said I'm going to have to write stuff yeah that was that was his his objection and now and

now look he's fucking crushing it he he's written a lot yes and he's he likes it now i think seems to be the uh but like i had a conversation with him was like dude i like i know i need to do something uh i'm like scared of spending the money he just goes fuck that money ben like it's it's there for you to spend uh and then i i caught like had a discovery call with danny signed up and then was very fortunate to uh do a a working traincation at my mentor's gym rx strength training in somerville massachusetts where i basically had this whole laboratory to do all of the strong coach stuff um and it was it was incredible like how immediate the benefits were because even like the first exercise we do is service.

Where are you settling? Write about where you're settling. And I was driving from... We'd had our first group call. I was driving from New Jersey to Boston. So I drove up the turnpike and I saw the New York City skyline. And usually when I see it, I grumble. It's like, ah, fucking New York.

It's dirty and I'm not happy there, but I'm there because I'm an actor because that's where you have to be. For some reason, I looked over and immediately went, bring it, motherfucker. That happened. I didn't have to think about, I'm going to reframe this.

That's just what I thought. That was the first thing. This shit works. I tell people, you'll be surprised what shows up. It's not what you think. Yeah. Yeah.

And even something as little as Danny and I were making goals, and it wasn't just about coaching. I've got a goal around hiking the Appalachian Trail. I've got my first time sitting down and saying the mantras. One of my mantras was, I love dogs, because one of my goals is to have a dog. And like that was the one that made me tear up. Like I felt this – I said all these things that are associated with all these other things that I want.

And it was that one that really – that hit home. And it's cool because it is like, the beginning of the strong coach has nothing to do with fitness. That's, that's the funny thing. Yeah. It's, but it's, it's all to do with like working on yourself to then become, become the kind of person who can be the coach that you want to be.

Yeah. Which is, is really powerful. And I keep calling it the strong coach rocket ship. Cause that's sometimes, uh, or most of the time, all the time, what it feels like is like, oh, this is happening already? Oh, shit, okay. It's like in Star Wars when they go to light speed

and everyone goes, whoa, and gets thrown against the back of the chair and everything's happening at once. And then it forces you to lock in all those things that you've been working on. Cause like, Oh shit, these things,

like I've been saying these mantras to become this person. And now suddenly I am this person who does this thing that I've wanted to do. What do I do? What do I do now? And it's been like that whole progression was so fun to experience. That's the thing. It was fun.

Yeah. Personal development. It was fun. Yeah. Personal development. That was fun. Yeah. I loved that. I mean, I, that's one thing I,

it took me a long time to realize. Cause I went through a lot of darkness before I found how to make it fun. Like I, I went, I went like the hard route and then, uh, I started learning from people who were are like this doesn't have to be like this i go oh okay sometimes there's darkness to go through but not with a strong coach yeah

now we make it easy because even like the the idea that uh i have to be in new york because i'm an actor that was like a story i was telling myself. And now even now I'm like, I'm not doing theater anymore, but I'm still in New York and it's, it's different. It's a different experience. Yeah. I'm much, much, much more content. It's still not my favorite place, uh, but I'm much more content there because of, of what I'm, what I'm doing. Like I'm still doing, I'm checking all the boxes of theater. I like Mark Fisher Fitness, I put on a show every time. I remember there was an application process and you had to make an Instagram video.

Is that what it was? Yeah, and I did the Old Spice commercial where he's like, swan dive into the life your life could be and it's all one shot. I did that at a gym. So I was talking about, here's why I'm ridiculous.

All the while, I'm flipping tires. I did a time step, which is a tap dancing step, and then did a clean jerk. I love that video. It was a lot of fun. It was so good. It was a lot of fun.

With coaching, I'm checking all the same boxes. Every coaching session, whether it's a class or a one-on-one with with coaching i'm finding like i'm checking i'm checking all the same boxes i'm like every coaching session whether it's a class or a one-on-one or uh even just a phone call that's a performance yeah and like i get to i get that same that same adrenaline rush that i'd get from from walking on stage and then there's the creative aspect too of creating workouts. And the mace, I always tell people, you're only limited by your creativity. So it's the ultimate outlet. And I have some clients who are like, they're coming for that creativity. It'd be really easy

if my clients were like, I want to lose 10 pounds. Oh, I can do that. I could do that in my sleep. But my clients are coming because they want to play. They want to get better at the mace. So like I've got one in particular, uh, who like programming workouts for him is super challenging because he's at, he's now at a very high level. Um, like he, he did the, the steel mace flow certification last weekend and crushed it, um, passed with honors and like the, the, the creative challenge of, of making sure that every session that he has is worth his money, uh, is incredible. And it checks all the same boxes that I had with theater. So it was like the, the, the realization I had in going through the strong coaches, like I'd been talking about like, Oh yeah, my goal,

I'm going to be on Broadway. But that was what I was told was supposed to be my goal because it was an actor like from that from the beginning of like doing doing community theater when I was like eight or nine years old it was always oh you're gonna be on Broadway something that was as good as it was on Broadway you all should be on Broadway it's like that just got in my head and then the more I got into that business and learned about the business part of it, I was like, this isn't like, this isn't about the art anymore. Well, this happens with a lot. I say this is very common. You know, there's,

there's this interest in something. And then there's this really deep groove that's set in by society. Like culture has, if you want to be an actor, then the pinnacle is Broadway. Or if you're a CrossFit gym owner, the pinnacle is having athletes go to the games or whatever the fuck it is. And I look back on my life and I see where I wanted to be the best at this or this or this. And I ended up sliding into a groove that society had dictated because that was the closest thing to what I was feeling that I wanted. But it wasn't exactly what I wanted. And then end up becoming pretty accomplished in it and then finding no satisfaction in it and going, well, that's not really what I wanted. And what's cool about it being 2019 is the,

those grooves are getting flattened out. So it is a little bit easier to get outside of, you know, we don't have to paint inside the fucking lines anymore. And there, and with this type of training that's available, you start broadening the view and seeing opportunities, places that didn't exist before. And then the next thing you know, did you wake up one day and go, oh, I'm performing and I'm having a good time? Yeah. Were you surprised by it?

I don't know if it was surprise. It was more just, oh, yeah. Like, I feel the exact... Actually, I remember this was, like, the first time I experienced this was long before I even thought about leaving theater, is I had a day, like, I was covering for my boss at this gym called Liberated Fitness. It's, like, a small Upper West Side, CrossFit-ish gym. And I was coaching all the classes in the morning

and all the classes in the evening and had, like, six hours in the middle. I was like, well, I'm not going to just like go back to my apartment and then to come back down here. So I hit up a bunch of friends like, hey, I'm just going to be hanging out at the gym. Do you want to like do some free sessions? And I had that entire six-hour chunk booked. And like everyone came for something different. And like that time flew by. Like I had a 16 hour day and was, you know, like eight

30 after the last class, I was still like, I was still writing that because of the creative stimulation of like one person was like, came in, like wanted to do battle ropes. One person wanted like, how do I like structure my own workout plan? And then some people came in, just wanted to, to sweat. Um,

and the, the constant creative challenge there fulfilled all the same things. So that, I guess that was like the first indicator of like, I don't have to do theater. Yeah. Cause, and then even like with like broadway i

know so many incredibly successful actors who have never done a broadway show right so that's the thing too is people go like like people will be like oh have you been on broadway yet and like the i could i have never been quick enough to respond with this i'd be like oh are you the ceo of a 500 fortune 500 company yet because that's the equivalent. It's like 1% of actors are on Broadway. Yeah. So it's even like that goal doesn't have to be, is not an indicator of success.

Because then I know plenty of people in their Broadway shows who are miserable. Right. That's not success. Exactly. And that's what we do

in The Strong Coach is like, well is what is the success story where it's like all like the like the monetary thing you create the lifestyle but then also like are you enjoying it is this actually like life-giving to you and it got to the point where the things that were life-giving for me weren't life-giving and i didn't know how to find the life-giving things again yeah that's one of the things when were life-giving for me weren't life-giving and I didn't know how to find the life-giving things again. Yeah. That's one of the things when I started that program that I really recognized is I recognized there was nothing like it out there because what we have is you're either, this is what I see in the market. You either have, you got your personal

training certifications, you got your movement, nutrition, you know, the technical aspects of how to be a coach. And most people get some type of personal training cert and then they go, okay, well, everything else is going to fall in place now. And then they get out there and realize, oh, fuck, I've got to sell. Or I've seen a lot of coaches that they're working sun up, the sun down, and then they're not able to take care of themselves, not be able to take a vacation or they don't have the money. And then they're just like, fuck my life. And they, and all they did was copy what someone else was doing. Like, Oh, the train, this is how trainers do it. This is how all this and that. And so I see a lot of programs out there that teach you how to make more money,

like follow my system, create this type of package, all this system, and then you can make money as a trainer. And I've watched people make, you know, they go from being a, you know, $30, $40 an hour personal trainer to making seven figures and like an online coaching business or something. And then they get to that and it's still not, it's like they didn't really check the fulfillment box. They just checked the, I want to make a million dollars box. Yeah. a fulfillment box. They just checked the, I want to make a million dollars box. And so there's nothing as I, as I got deep into entrepreneurship, cause I fell into that same trap, which was first, it was get a dozen certifications, you know, I was like, Oh, that's not helping me. Oh, now, uh, so I'm, I'm the best trainer I can possibly be. And yet it's still not, I don't have the clients I want or, you know, and all that. And I like't have the clients I want and all that

and I maxed myself out on knowledge and my own athleticism and I go okay well if I make money then I'll be happy and so then I went and made a bunch of money and then I go this is actually more I'm more stressed out than I've ever been

more money more problems I got all the fitness I got all the fitness. I got all the money. And I'm losing my hair. Something is fucking off here. And then I end up doing more of the inner work. And I go, oh, okay. All that

other stuff is a waste of fucking time if you haven't done this yet. And if you can layer... And now it's like, oh, I come back to any of my knowledge around health, fitness, business. And I go, now it's fun. It's a game. And it can be playful. And I'm even better at it because I'm coming at it from this new approach.

It's how I approach it that's different. And so I'll go, man, that's how we got to start any kind of coaching program. You want to be a coach. If you're not, if you're not feeding yourself first, if you're not enjoying life, like, like we were talking about earlier, that making a healthy thing, something that's supposed to be healthy by going to the gym becomes unhealthy because it's stressful. And as a coach, I'm your, I'm supposed to be helping you be healthy, but I've created a life for myself that's stressful. How's that even, I'm out of alignment.

I can't help you. And yeah. So yeah, I think it's important. Cause then like the stuff was like, Oh, I just got to make more money. I need more certifications. It becomes just the accumulation of stuff. Cause if you look at like money or more clients, most people go, I want more clients. I'm like, well, what is that going to do for you? Yeah. Cause then like me and like, yeah, maybe more money from those clients, but like that money is just potential energy. It's a battery. So what good is having a big pile of batteries? If like, if when someone comes up, it's like, Hey, can I use that battery to power my toys? Like, no, no, these are my batteries. Right. I could power a lot of toys, but I'm not going to, I might need that for later. Yeah. I might need that. I made that battery made that battery which like the strong coach cost as much money as i had and i recouped it within like three months afterwards it's like

if you want to like look at a money thing there yeah it was like using the things from the strong coach then like we're sitting in austin right now and i bought my plane ticket with money that I received from becoming a strong coach. And it's, again, like what that money was used for. Like even like I'm thinking now, I overslept when we were coming here. I woke up to my girlfriend buzzing on my apartment because I was supposed to go pick her up. Oh, shit. Yes, I was supposed to pick her up at 5.30. 5.55, she picked me or she she buzzed my thing i

totally fucked up she's she's the reason that we're here that i'm here right now um you'd still be asleep yeah i would still uh the plan was the plan was to park the car in this uh a parking lot in queens and then take an uber to the airport we didn't have time to do that. So I was like, fuck it. We got to go in the parking garage. And I glanced and like the day, the full day rate is $39 and I'm here for seven days. And I took us, I did the math. I was like, oh, but it's worth it.

Like any amount of money to make a trip like this happen is worth it. Because then it's like what – like the actual experience is feeding back so much more than the extra money I'm going to have to spend to get my car out of that parking lot. Yeah. Maybe you want to look at it just from a monetary perspective. What potential does this trip create for you monetarily? Like this is going to make you a better coach. Yep.

You're probably going to get some social media stuff. I wouldn't be speaking to Mike Bledsoe with a headset on my head right now. You're podcasting. A good 50,000 people will listen to this. Who knows what will come out of that? Yeah, I think it's like $273. That's worth it.

If you, the listener, want more people to hear this, which I know you do, share it. And if you, if you the listener want more people to hear this, which I know you do, share it. Share these episodes. Anyways, we got a break. You know, let's get to a million

downloads per episode. Yes. Okay, anyways. It'll happen. Yeah. We've set the intention. That's right. Write it down.

Attention set. It's written down. I haven't written that down. Write it down. It's going to happen. As soon as we get off of this, I'm writing it down. It's going to happen. As soon as we get off of this, I'm writing it down. By when do you want to have one?

I'm being coached now. Somebody coach me. Speaking of writing it down, I just want to say, you know, part of the reason that I'm here in Austin is because through the Strong Coach, I got a system to document goals and make them happen. Auditing this program, Ben and I are here to audit the audit steel mace certification program, which we've both gone through before. Um, but it's taking it again is something I've wanted to do for about two years. It was a want to do, it was just kind of out there as something I'll get to that someday i wrote it down in my uh what i call my spellbook now and here we are they had a date assigned with it it had ben's name attached to it and fuck yeah and here we are yeah i mean uh one thing i like to say is one day someday

is usually never right that's the language you're using it that's it that's just how it ends up it's interesting how that sort of that vague someday or one day turns into a binary yeah yeah every day it's one day someday it'll never be now and in going through the mentorship program, I've had three mentees now. Like I can feel through the phone, like when we go through a goal and like we've completed, it's like, okay, read everything you've got. And they gave me like, by this date, this happens because this, I am such and such. And then I say, how does that feel? And I can feel them go, oh, it feels really good.

Yeah. Like I've had like people just start laughing afterwards. Like they say the last mantra and then they go, oh, yes. Yeah. And what you're talking about, most modern or we could call them postmodern psychologists are all now singing the same tune, which is thoughts, feelings and emotions or thoughts, thoughts, emotions and actions lining up is what causes fulfillment. That's what causes happiness and success and all these things. What happens is people's thoughts aren't lining up with their emotions or their actions aren't lining up in some way. And that's what we're doing when we set goals in the Strong Coach is we are creating a scenario in which the feelings, the thoughts, and the actions line up. And you align those three things and massive action happens and happens for you

and it starts with something as simple as writing it down yeah because i love i'd never i didn't know i mean i'm an amateur magician and i didn't know what abracadabra meant yeah and then it's like with my word i create oh fuck yeah that makes so much sense. And then like, there's a physical existence. That ink on the paper has a physical existence now. That goal has a physical existence. And it makes it so much more real than the ambiguous idea

that you have in your head. It's the beginning of the physical manifestation because you physically have taken action on it by writing it down. There's one thing to think it and say it

because it's only going from, from like between your ears to your mouth, but now it has to travel down to your hand. It becomes embodied. It becomes part of a physical thing. I, and I really believe that thinking, saying it and then creating a big movement practice with it.

This is where, you know, having that repeating that thought, that mantra while doing maybe some steel maze flow would just amplify it. Or if you sing it, you sing it from your, like the depth of, from your gut, from your root, really just belt that, that mantra out. And I've had that happen. Like I remember in the car driving to the gym and I'm saying my mantras and then just one of them was like,

one of my favorite mantras, I play when I work. And I was going, I did the breath, I play when I work, motherfucker! And that motherfucker's not part of the mantra, but it just came out. Yeah. And then like you saying,

like combining those mantras with a movement practice that, and then one of the first mantras Danny helped me create was I work from inspiration. And I said that, and I walked into the gym that day, like a, like a, there's a creative explosion in my head. I was in creation mode the entire day thinking about that. Like, Oh, if I i'm like i don't do anything unless it's inspirational so anything i'm doing now is inspirational and any like work is also play so i'm here playing i'm also working because i'm like creating content creating workouts to give to people but i'm playing along the way because that's the intention I've set for the work that I do. Yeah. And as I'm hearing you talk about this, I go back to, um, even before I had the strong coach,

I had barbell business and I was teaching gym owners and, and I, I've been coaching coaches for, I don't know, shit, eight years now total. And one thing I noticed is one of the big questions I've gotten over the years is how do I stand apart as a coach and I my answer way back in like 2012 2013 2014 was like if there's no running coaches in your town you know specialize in something that's unique and now everything has become commoditized from what I've watched. And the only way, and I just didn't know then what I know now. I'm like, the best way to fucking stand out is to show up the way that you show up, the way that you guys show up. Like show up from a place of inspiration, creativity, connecting to your clients. A lot of what we do is teach you how to get more depth in your relationships with your clients.

If you have a deep relationship with your clients, they're not going anywhere. And guess what? They're going to refer their friends in. How many clients have – has it been much easier to get clients since doing – it's like almost magical? Yeah. And retention is so easy. Yeah. I had one of my clients.

We'd been at one rate for a long time. I changed my rates, so it was significantly more expensive. And the first time I showed it to him, I was like, okay, so here, I'm changing my rates. Here are the options, these three options. And he was like, oh, okay, I'll do the $500 one. Didn't even blink.

Didn't flinch. Yeah. And that took me way the fuck aback. I was like, wait, what? You're just going to give me $500 right now. Yeah.

And, uh, it was, it was because of like, like becoming the person who was worth that. Yeah. I think it's a common mistake for trainers, for coaches.

We, our worldview is shaped by our own experience only and most of us have never made six figures or seven figures coaching before and or maybe doing anything before and so the idea of someone for someone to pay you know say you know than $1,000 a month for your training, it probably requires them to have a six-figure income. And the idea of having that just doesn't exist in our reality. And so asking for that amount of money doesn't feel good. It feels bad. And that's one of the things I really like to help people break out of is there are fucking millionaires who think

that $3,000 a month is a drop in the bucket. It's not a fucking thought to them. In fact, I've noticed in myself over the years, I've been an entrepreneur for 12 years and I've made varying degrees of money, you know, some years better than others, but in my, I make good money now and i if you try to get me to do something that's cheap you try to put me someone says uh come to this business conference it's 200 bucks for the weekend i don't even want to go because i know who's going to be there i know like the quality of the content i know i'm going to get the recycled shit that's low level. No, I want the high level shit. Give me a $5,000. I'll pay $5,000.

I'd much rather pay $5,000 than $2,000. One of the reasons I pay my coach what I pay my coach is because of the price. Because I know that I'm going to be more bought in. If I spend pennies, if I spend a little bit of money, it's not even interesting to me anymore. People need to have skin in the game. And that's going to vary depending on the type of clients that you have. So I, I encourage people, you know, the money conversation, we've touched it a few times on the show. It's again, it's connected to everything. It's connected to our childhood. We adopt beliefs from our parents. You know blew i grew up blue collar you know that the

i was roofing houses when i was 12 years old my i remember my mom and dad arguing about money and getting they were it was an emotional topic like i did i never felt good about money i remember my first sales job and asking for money and just like, oh, this is a big topic for me because I had to overcome a lot. And then now I have so much freedom around it. It's almost, it's like, I can't even remember what it was like to be uncomfortable asking for money. So yeah, it's interesting. And like the investment, like I felt that immediately because like i would sit in a burning building if it meant that i was going to make a strong coach group call

because i invested yeah literally every it like it cost exactly how much money i had my first business conference i went to where i was going to learn about you know online business i i it was seven thousand dollars and i had i had to like i had to like make a phone call and be like can i put half of this on a debit card and half on a credit card and i maxed the credit card out to make it happen and i and i remember thinking this i was 100 this is gonna work and yeah had i had 10 times that I probably would have like not paid attention in the conference or something. You need the incentive. Cause there's even the guy that I first, Jim, I first worked at in New York city. He used to work in Boston, um, with my mentor

and he was doing fine in Boston. And he went to New York because it's like, you can, he was like, you can't, you can succeed in other places. New York, though, you have to succeed. That's true. If there is any weakness, that city will find it and it will dig its fingernails into that weakness and pry you apart. Competition's high. You can't afford to have chinks in your armor. Success is necessary there.

What about you, Jeff? Yeah, to have chinks in your armor. Success is necessary there. Yeah. What about you, Jeff? What was the impetus to join the Strong Coach, and what did you find as a result? I think that I imagine that a driving force of me getting into the Strong Coach was a feeling of exhaustion from wearing too many hats and trying to always be a different person in different aspects of my life. I would go to my day job and it's like, okay, here I am. I work here. I have to do this thing. I am a purchaser. This is my role. When I would go to coach,

put on a different hat. I have to have a different kind of personality here. I have to put on some kind of performance. I go home. I want to be mellow. I want to be a supportive partner. You're good. But that gets tired. One gets tired trying to constantly switch roles.

And I imagine that there was a sense of completeness that I could achieve. And that was really a driving force of me getting into it. I started to see what Leo and Serena experienced. I started to see more consistent level behavior. And that was something I was aspiring to myself. So what was the result? You joined. What transformation did you experience

or what was the result of doing the training? Every situation I go into now, I'm who I am. I am complete. It's my favorite mantra. It is my closing mantra. I talked to Ben earlier this morning about how my mantras are sort of organized like a band set list. I have my opener.

I have my starting point. And I have the two that I always finish with. Sometimes they switch around a little bit. But I am complete. I'm loving this. I'm loving this. This is one of the coolest things about teaching this course is I'm getting – I really love seeing the creativity that other people, I go, oh, okay. Teaching me something.

This is awesome. Yeah. And so my closer these days is always I am complete. And it centers me. It makes me feel like I don't need to have any armor on. Because my sense of completeness is more powerful than any armor that I could put on. What's happened with your – I bet that goes over a lot of people's heads. I got chills hearing you say it.

I'm just like, I know what that fucking means. If you don't know what that means, join the Strong Coach. Absolutely. Request Jeff or Ben as your mentor. Fuck yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So what's happened with your coaching business? What's happened with you as a coach?

What's going on with that as a result? Well, that's a very interesting question. When I started The Strong Coach, what I wanted to do was keep my day job and switch to a more part-time capacity coach more. As I transitioned into the strong coach, I discovered that what I really wanted to do was coach all of the time. So suddenly this became, I have to leave my day job. I have to get away from that because it's inhibiting me from coaching. And then as I went through the program even further, I discovered that, wait, I'm a coach at my day job. I'm a coach with my friends. I'm a coach with my family. I'm a coach with my clients. So just by, again, I'm circling around

this idea of completeness because it's very important to me. It's very profound to me. By behaving that way all the time, I have drawn in more clients. Yeah. Like anyone else who's gone through the program and trusted the process, I changed my pricing and got more clients. Like anyone else who's gone through the program and trusted the process, I changed my pricing and got more clients. Like Ben said, I... You make yourself cheaper? Hell no. Yes. Yes. Yes. No.

And I just made one of the biggest sales that I've made as a coach less than two weeks ago. Congratulations. Thank you. Oh, yeah. So the coaching business has grown, and I attribute to the fact that I'm not trying to put on a coaching role anymore.

I'm not trying to put on a performance. That's who you are. And that's been the cool thing because both of our evolution through this program is now we have desires to coach outside of fitness. I actually have a discovery call with someone later today who was a referral from a coaching conversations workshop I did where a guy I was working on then decided to refer me someone. Nothing to do with fitness.

But it's like doing the strong coach made me like showed me different ways to do it. We're now like, like Jeff too is, is coaching outside of fitness. Like he's got someone like we've talked about this a lot and I think it's so dope. There's someone who you're, you're like training them. And then this person goes, Oh, Hey, I kind of like, I want you to coach me outside of this. Yeah. Yeah. I'm training. It was actually a goal in my strong coach. It's on the Slack channel where I trained my successor at my day job because I wrote this goal when I wanted to get out of the day job. Well, we hired my successor.

I've been training him. I've been coaching him. And we had a meeting one day, and I treated it as a live discovery session. And that was the one where he said it kind of towards the end of it. It's like, we get to work together. We're going to do a little bit about this, but I'd be interested in hiring you. Oh yeah. Yeah.

The, um, when I hear this, what you're talking about, this is a pro level move because it's very mature. A lot of people need to go through a phase where they leave their job and go fully into coaching and the fact that you were able to come through that full circle so quickly is like you to me it's maybe consciously or unconsciously you've done a lot of work before this like there is a maturity that you had, or you've had enough life experience because the pro move is to integrate every aspect of your life and to have peace with that and to be able to show up fully to every scenario. Uh, so that's congratulations. That's great. Thank you. Pro level. Um, and I, I, I love that. Um, you know, I ha I've had coaches that come through and they go

I realize I want to be a life coach and I tell people don't call yourself that I mean you can, my only reason for not doing that is because it's less marketable and so uh what i to me the difference between a trainer and a coach is a coach is going to be a life coach you may be selling health you may be selling fitness you might be selling mace you might be selling nutrition but a real coach realizes that it's all connected the the physical mental emotional spiritual

these are all interconnected and every coach has varying degrees of being able to impact each one of those bodies with somebody and as coaches we're always getting better at all four of those things how can I how can I help oh I see that their biggest opportunity to to help someone achieve whatever goal they have is to improve their nutrition. But to improve their nutrition, we need to heal their relationship with food. And that's an emotional experience. That's a mental, emotional thing that's happening for them. So my job as a coach is to get them from point A to point B.

And it's not to make sure they eat a certain amount of fat, protein fat protein and carbs it's to get them to heal that relationship with food now eating well becomes easy and enjoyable they're no longer having this conflict with their food so that's that's the difference between a trainer and a coach I was talking to my business partners this morning and I remembered I remember the moment I had this realization. I'm working with this client, 350 pounds, extremely unhappy, had a hard time getting in the gym, but he was eating paleo. He was coming in doing workouts, and he wasn't making any progress. He was getting worse. And I go, on paper, I'm like, as a trainer, I said, I told myself up to that point is,

I have no business telling anybody anything outside of nutrition and workouts. That's where I draw the line. I have no business telling them anything. And he comes in, and he goes, I go, that's how you're actually eating. Oh, this is how you're, you're coming in a train. You should be losing weight. You should be getting more fit. What's happening? And I go, well, tell me about, you know, like what's going on for you. And he starts talking about working 60. I asked him why he can't make it in the gym more is what it was. And he goes, well, I work 60, 70 hours a week at a job that pays $30,000 a year.

You know, he was basically making just not enough money for that amount of work. And then his job was, it was like sitting in a cubicle, you know, selling pesticide. No. Sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent light, selling poison

for a living. Um, yeah, that's, uh, that's not indicative of health. And I, and it hit me in that moment. I go, the, the, the thought came in my mind, I go, this job is, and he's only getting four or five hours of sleep because he's working so much. And he's probably sitting there watching TV at the end of the day because he hates his job and he needs some type of mental escape. And I'm going, oh, fuck, man. This guy's life is just fucked up. And he's probably listening. You're welcome. Yeah, you're welcome.

Yeah, but I go, do I tell this guy he should quit his job? I didn't have the skills I have now. This is back in 2010. And that was back when I still told people what to do instead of leading them to their own discovery. Now it would be really easy. But I was like, I can't help this guy. There's nothing I can do unless I can help him shift his mentality around his work and his sleep and all these things.

And, you know, I told him what I thought. And that was the first time I stepped out of that box of I'm a nutrition and workout guy. And, yeah, that's huge. That's the difference between a trainer and a coach. So it's the circle of life, like all the interconnected things. Yeah. Have either of you seen one strange rock on Netflix? Watch it. It's crazy. Uh, but it's the first episode is there. They're talking to astronauts about their perspective of the Earth, having seen it from space. And this one astronaut talks about how he watched a sandstorm blow from the Sahara Desert across the Atlantic Ocean to then fertilize the Amazon rainforest. The rain from the Amazon rainforest goes over to the Andes, hits the Andes, washes minerals from the rock into the Pacific Ocean.

Those minerals then feed these teeny tiny little plant organisms that are actually the, like if you take two breaths, one of those breaths was entirely supplied by these little organisms that live in the sea. When those organisms die, they float down to the bottom and eventually the layers of their bodies build up and it becomes land. That land is the Sahara Desert and it blows back over to the Amazon. So it's like all linked together. So if you're missing one part of that chain, we don't exist. So then it's the same thing if you walk into the gym and this is that one piece and your job is that piece that's out of alignment, the loop is not complete and you're not going to get your results because you

can't just have a good workout and then work a soul-crushing job and expect to have a happy life. You have to have the entire thing has to be, or you get to make the entire thing be in alignment. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about how the mentorship has gone. So Ben went through first and you got to mentor,

uh, Jeff. The mentorship was, was great. Um, one of my favorite parts about it, uh, Ben is someone I had a little bit of a rapport with beforehand,

which established, I think I imagine it allowed me to be very open very, very quickly. We went deep fast. There's no holding back. Ben is a master of the curiosity game. Ooh, I like it.

So, our calls almost always started with him playing the curiosity game on me. Until one time I decided to play it on him. Oh, he totally ninja'd me. It was awesome. I had no idea. So you're saying, like, what happened? Yeah.

But it was a lot of fun to help digest the material, to really dial in on my goals with somebody who had some context. It allowed, again, here I am talking about completion or a sense of completeness, having that connectivity and experience and the fact that he was still going through his own journey at the same time established this really, really strong sense of reciprocal empathy.

That's right. What was it like for you as a mentor? It was, at first, nerve-wracking. I was like, can I do this? I signed up to do it, and I remember sitting down at my table to call you the first time, and I had my notepad ready, I had the pen ready, and I had the Strong Coach module open on my iPad in front of me. I have to be so

prepared. And then I didn't use any of them during the entire call. I still have a notepad there with me when I'm doing them just in case, but I hardly ever use it. It was empowering to recognize that I came far enough in the program that I can Sherpa someone who's also going through it.

I mean, it's a testament to Danny because a lot of the time I'm imitating him. Because I did the one-on-one calls with him, which were incredible. I remember he turned... I had a call once where I was like, I feel weird because I don't know what I need you to coach me on. And he turned that into a coaching lesson. So that's the level of coach I had to then emulate in the mentorship calls. And that, like that along with going through the module every week so that I could make sure I was prepared for my mentee was so, was instrumental in helping me integrate. Because it's also like, I was mentoring Jeff

in class five? Five, yeah. And then I got two in class six so then i was like oh back to back to vision casting back to time energy cultivation so i got to do that in really quick basically i've been through the program three times four times now uh through the mentorship process and that's that's helped me integrate everything everything and be more confident in myself. Cause it's like, Oh, if I can help, if I can like guide someone to having these kinds of realizations that I had with Danny, then like, I can do that for myself as well.

And I have done that. I've made some bitching goals that like even like five-year goals i found out last night one of my one of my goals to uh co-own um a gym in california that's gonna happen in like a year or two and it was a five-year goal like oh well i guess i guess this vision casting thing works and it showed me like how how you can trust in the process like the process is it is like it can seem kind of woo-woo sometimes but it's a total it's system it's systematized the whole even like something like goal setting because you do like the perfect day and then like what are your goals okay let's refine these goals and i think it may seem woo-woo at times because, well, two reasons. It's so different than what we were taught.

It's so outside of our reality. And reality, for most people, is pretty narrow. Just our culture dictates. It gives us a pretty narrow view of what's possible. For one, the other thing is I could spend 10 hours teaching the science behind exactly how this works. Or I could just give it to you in 30 minutes and then give you enough to trust the process and go, okay, this is how it works. Because there are physical changes happening in your body as you do these things that create an expanded view of the world. And so, again, I'm not going to go into it right now, but if people have listened to this show long enough,

they probably get an idea of that. But what I've noticed, a lot of things that are woo that work really well, if you dig deep enough, you'll find the science in it. And there's just not that many people doing it yet. In 10 years from now, it'll be a common conversation but if you've ever studied metaphysics it's it's in there and that it's that the thing of like that's being it being what we're taught because i i remember this i mean any anyone i'm sure everyone who's been through high school had this experience where they were like when you get to college you're gonna have to do it like this like don't do that when you get to college they won't let that happen and they got to college no one gave a fuck yeah like mla formatting that i like got drilled into me in high school got to college everyone had a different way of doing it yeah and that like the whole point was it for it to be

standardized and then like reginald's like oh they were saying they were prepping me for college but like that's not what this is. It's a totally different beast. But I was being taught something else. I guess I had the advantage of doing majoring in musical theater. So I had a very atypical college experience singing and dancing all day. I don't remember any of that shit. I don't remember formatting anything anyway.

Like, I mean, I went into a science field. So there was definitely ways things had to be done, but there was nothing before that that prepared me. I had to learn that in college. I think you said on one of your podcasts that the education system is designed around, it's archaic. It's designed around creating industrial workers, basically. Okay. The first schools were designed for the peasants was, I think it was Prussia. So basically the Germans designed it. And so the way it came about was because education way back in the day, only the royalty and the extremely wealthy had access to education, right? And it wasn't in schoolhouses.

It was probably somebody coming to the castle to teach the prince to be a king and all these things, right? And so that's, by the way, we all get to be royalty now. And then the serfs got nothing, right? You just, if your dad was a blacksmith, you were going to train to be a blacksmith. And so that's how it was going blacksmith, you were going to train to be a blacksmith. And so that's how it was going. Well, now what ended up happening is these countries started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Because I went to Europe last year and I toured so many different cathedrals and all these, I wouldn't say castles, but I learned about Paris, France. And they had all these demonstrations of what the town looked like originally.

And I was like, there was not that many people on earth. There's just not that many people. We've exploded really fast in the last thousand years. A thousand years ago, it was small. There weren't a lot of people. And so what ended up happening is that the nation started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And what ended up happening is these kings couldn't get the serfs to fight for them. You know, I need people to fight,

but they have no sense of loyalty. They have no sense of loyalty. And so the Prussians were really, I want to say it was Prussia, were really brilliant. That's where Machiavelli came from, if you read The Prince. And Machiavelli is well known for being manipulative, right? And using fear to get people to do what you want them to do. And it's for their own good, right? And so the prince is basically a letter that he wrote to the prince giving him advice. And I don't know if it was Machiavelli that came up with this, but one of the things that they wanted to solve

the problem was they go, we need to start indoctrinating these people as early as possible. And so school was born. It was called school. And so that area of the world, the Germans. And they always sounded really angry when they said it. Yeah.

School. Yeah. School. And so school was actually originally designed to indoctrinate you into a nation state, to be loyal to your country. And we can see this, if you've ever gone to school, you know, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, right?

We all know it. Burned into the brain. It's in there. It's never leaving. You know, everybody's patriotic and, you know, we all have our different flavors of patriotism and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, if you have yet to travel the world,

then you're likely very America-centric, you know, the world from America-centric. And I have a lot, I've never lived outside the country for an extended period of time, but I have friends that have lived outside the country for a decade and they go, wow, their perspective on how things work is very, very different.

They're not anti-American or anything like that. They're very pro-American, but they get, they've seen the other side long enough to really get what's going on. And they, they don't have that same level of commitment to the nation. You know, these people are more special than those people and, you know, chosen races and stuff like that. So, um, we draw these lines in the sand over here and now fuck you. These imaginary lines. Yeah, imaginary lines.

Because we live in a world that there's enough, there's so much momentum moving, we still need to have borders. I do believe that because you can't have open borders and a welfare state simultaneously. Like the way that the system is built is just not possible yet. But I do see it moving there. A lot of things are going to have to change before we have true connection worldwide.

But so what we have is we needed to indoctrinate people to be patriotic. That was the initial reason for school. And then, you know, the 1800s come along and we go, well, we need to create. And this had to do with unions too. So a lot of people were working in factories. And well, what now factory work required some technical skill, a little more knowledge, and things started moving fast. Blacksmiths weren't really a thing anymore, you thing anymore as much because now we need to transition them in a factory. And the unions came along and said, hey, we can't have people working 16, 17 hours a day in the factories. We need to cut it down to 40 hours a week. And so now you've got

factories working eight hours. So we're like, well, we got to do something with our kids and we need to train the kids to be factory workers too. So eight hours sounds good. The parents are in factories, right? And so, well, how would we find babysitting? So how would we design school?

We should do it like factories. And so, you know, this hour you're doing this. So now we're creating human adults like a factory. So I learned this. Then you go to this and you go to this oh you're you're in a fucking factory called a school and so now it's you're very well formatted if you

go through the school system to to be in a factory and maybe a cubicle and so what's happening is the world is now shifting to where if you have traditional schooling, you're being left behind. And to break out of that way of thinking, it can be a big challenge. So the way I think about it is we're just moving from one box to another, but we're pretty advanced primates. And anyone who's spending time in nature realizes it's like, oh, there's something here. Like if I want to relax, if I want to feel good, I go to nature. But we've done a really good job

of making ourselves physically comfortable and to avoid nature. Anyways, that's a whole nother rabbit hole. Anyways, that's my thing on school. Homeschool your kids. Yeah, yeah. Talk to my mom about it. She's really good at it.

I have a really unique perspective on this because I was homeschooled. And, Ben, you get it. I have a lot of people go, it's, like, easy for you to say. That was your experience. And I don't have kids. But I also have four younger siblings that were homeschooled. And I'm not saying everyone should, everyone should homeschool our kids, but I like to ask people,

you know, like what's your, you know, are you just trying to get your kids out of your hair, you know, or like what's, what's really best for them and what's best for the family unit and so on and so forth.

But I mean, the big thing is, is if you're somebody, this is just a question, everything, you know, like this is more of a call to action for thinking for yourself. Um, and really trying to point out to you that if that's the majority of your life experience up until now, that is a very narrow view and there's

nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with having that it's not your fault it's not your fault that you that's how that's been your life experience at this point but when you hear this it's now your responsibility you now have the responsibility to go look under some nooks and crannies and we see this with the millennial generation you know they don't fucking believe anything anymore you know prove it because i can google that shit you can't you can't fucking lie to me yeah and so that i think there's something interesting happening with even though is it the y generation is what we're calling it no idea uh that's the people in their early 20s right now um yeah they're they won't work like and it's not because they're lazy. It's because they don't have to.

And they know it. Because robots are taking care of everything. The algorithms. And if it's not fulfilling, fuck you. I'm only doing fulfilling work. Yeah. And so I know a lot of people who are older, they look at the millennials and they're just lazy

to grumble, grumble, grumble. And I'm like, like, you're the one living in the old world. Like they're just not, they don't have to, they're eating, they have shelter over their heads. Like, like they're pretty advanced, you know, maybe not in all areas, but I think there's, I think there's a huge advantage to that, that we'll realize at some point soon. And it makes so much sense that you saying saying that school started in Germany, because there is a musical called Spring Awakening that's set in a school in Germany, and it centers around this one kid. He's at the top of his class, starts thinking about, he's masturbated.

He's like, what does it feel like for a woman? And then he is talking to his friend about what could it feel like? And his friend doesn't understand anything. So this guy, Melchior writes for his friend Moritz, writes out the birds and the bees talk, gives it to his friend Moritz because the school has not been teaching them any of this.

Like it opens with them getting drilled in Latin over and over and over again. And because Melchior has no idea what what what the birds and the bees are it blows his fucking mind and he loses his shit and then that starts a chain reaction and kids die like no uh kids kill themselves there's like a girl who gets who gets uh actually like melchior rapes a girl because he, and he doesn't even know that he's doing it, but he does.

Cause she, she's like, no way. And he keeps going and then she ends up pregnant and then she dies. And it's all because like they weren't teaching them like the actual how to be a human part. Right. They were, they were teaching them the,

these are the steps to be a good robot in our system. Yeah. But not nothing about what being a human means. Yeah. And it's a perfect analogy for that. Like what happens when you have some very impressionable minds that get new information that they're not prepared for. Yeah.

Because it's being hidden from them. Man, this podcast went... We're going everywhere. That's what happens when you get around the steel mace people. Yes, we flow. We flow, we explore, we say yes and. I think we have a training session scheduled in about 20 minutes. Hell yeah.

Already? Time to go to Onnit. We're an hour and a half into this show. Damn. Right on. We're going to run over to Onnit, swing some mace, and climb around like monkeys. Yes. Yes. Explore. And then you guys want any leaving remarks? right on as we're gonna run over to on it swing some mace and climb around like monkeys yes yes

explore and then you guys want to any leaving remarks uh question the standard narrative that seems to be a lot of the theme here i read uh sex at dawn and aside from the actual subject matter the biggest point of that is question the standard narrative of like what what you have been told is true because the standard narrative says that nothing question the standard narrative of what you have been told is true. Because the standard narrative says that nothing in the strong code should matter. But it does. Because clearly, we're all sitting here because of that. Love and life.

Yes. What about you, Jeff? Love hard. Seek completeness. Don't be separate from yourself or anything else. We're all connected. We all exist in each other's consciousness. Your reality is everything before you and everything that you can imagine.

And everything happens for you. And everything happens for you. Fuck yeah. Yes. Where can people find you guys? So my Instagram is built underscore by underscore Ben. And also if you Google Steel Mace New York City, you'll find me somewhere. So my Instagram is built underscore by underscore Ben. And also if you Google Steel Mace New York City, you'll find me somewhere.

Got that SEO game. Yeah. I coach at CrossFit Solace and any open green place in New York City. Nice. You can find me coaching at A2 Functional Fitness in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Search A2Steelfit.com. On Instagram, Jeffrey, J-E-F-F-R-E-Y dot O-C-H-S. Pronounced Oaks. Right on.

Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having us. Let's go swing some, man. Yeah. All right. So when we ended this show, we did go work out, and it was a lot of fun. All right. So when we ended this show, we did go work out. And it was a lot of fun.

All right. Make sure to go over to thestrongcoach.com. Sign up for that retreat. Get applied. And start that process. And if you're not already subscribed to the Bledsoe Show, go over to Stitcher iTunes. Make sure you're subscribed to the Bledsoe Show channel. That way you don't miss anything. And go support our sponsor. Organifi.com slash shrug. You'll save 20%. Get that good stuff in

your life. See you next week.