Barbell Shrugged - [Stress] A Root Cause Approach to Relief and Resilience w/ Brian Mackenzie, Anders Varner and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged #652

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Brian Mackenzie is an innovator and pioneer in developing and applying custom protocols to optimize human health and performance. His work harnesses and integrates respiratory (breathing), movement, strength, conditioning, and endurance-based training approaches to elicit unprecedented positive results. His protocols and programs have been used to accelerate and raise mental and physical performance in world-class Olympic and professional athletes, musicians, actors, top executives, elite military operators, prisoners in institutions, and the health of people suffering from chronic and pathological issues.   Brian’s work is voluntarily and repeatedly subjected to rigorous 3rd party scientific testing, re-testing, and improvement, at top institutions. He has been contracted, and his work is involved in research projects at Stanford University School of Medicine, California State University Fullerton, San Francisco State University, and the UFC Performance Institute.   Brian is himself a highly accomplished practitioner. He completed the Ironman (Canada, 2004) and completed the Western States 100-mile and The Angeles Crest 100-mile runs using adapted training protocols he developed to improve performance.    He is the co-founder of The Art of Breath, a division of SHIFT that teaches a principles-based approach to breath & performance. Brian has also co-authored the book Power Speed Endurance, The New York Times Best Seller UnBreakable Runner, and UnPlugged, which assesses the integration of emergent technology and human performance.    He has voluntarily integrated and run his program at San Quentin State Prison with tremendous success. His programs have been featured in Outside Magazine, Men’s Health, Runners World, Triathlete Magazine, Men’s Journal, and periodicals such as The Economist. Brian and his protocols have been featured in 2 of Timothy Ferriss’ New York Times bestselling books, including: “The 4-Hour Body” and “Tools of Titans” and Scott Carney’s New York Times best-seller “What Doesn't Kill Us.”   Brian is the Founder & Creative Director of SHIFT, Co-Founder and President of The Health and Human Performance Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching how breath and innate tools can optimize and help health and human performance. In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged we cover:   Brian’s path to finding breath work Common misconceptions about using breath work for training The difference between relief and resilience Finding root causes and eliminating negative stressors How physiology impacts stress response How to begin your own breath work practice   To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com   Connect with our guests:   Brian Mackenzie on Instagram   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   Dan Garner on Instagram   ————————————————    Please Support Our Sponsors   Eight Sleep - Save $150 on the Pod Pro and Pod Pro Cover   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we're hanging out with Brian McKenzie. We are at an event in Boulder, Colorado, and Dan, or not Dan, Doug and Travis were not able to make it. So there's going to be a couple shows here, which Doug and Travis are not on, but we had some awesome interviews. This one with Brian McKenzie is really cool because I've been following and kind of like living in the same circles as Brian McKenzie for the better part of the last decade. We have so many of the same friends, but we've never actually sat down on Shrugged before and done a show.

Dan Garner and I took this one with Doug and Travis not being at the event. And friends, we've got a couple other cool shows coming up because a bunch of people from NASA were at the event. And this show with Brian today really kicked it off talking about breathwork, building relief, resilience, and root causes of stress and how we can use breathwork as a tool, not just a tool, but as a performance tool for downregulation as well as uncovering root causes and really digging into why breathwork is so important and misunderstood in so many circles. I hope you enjoy the show. Before we get into it, I want to thank our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by our good friends over at Eight Sleep Friends. You heard Mateo on the show. I am a couple weeks into using my Eight Sleep Pod Pro cover right now, and let me tell you,

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there are no strings attached to this offer. There are no automatic subscriptions or renewals, so there's nothing to cancel. So just go to Masszymes.com forward slash shrugged free now to get your exclusive free products. Let's get into the show. I found it interesting yesterday being here.

You know, one of the guys brought up about the tech industry refusing to work with the military. I don't think you guys were here. So the guy who was talking was from the SpecOp community, does a lot of work within human performance, but he's made it like more accessible for people so he's not actually he's a contractor but intimately integrated in within the you know cia's the soft community all of it right and he's trying to make it accessible for for a lot of people right who have struggled to get involved with these and to find new ideas well one of the guys brought up yesterday that um you know he's like yeah what do you think about like how the tech industries decided that they're

just not they won't even touch anything military anymore they're because they don't want any part of anything that's going to blow babies up or whatever and all that and i instantly was just like that is so funny like we are such an interesting species, aren't we? That we could create technology in a place that is literally driving addiction and changing the brain. And nobody's being held accountable quite yet. But we're starting to get our wits about us. And people are going to begin to become accountable for things like this. But it's like what do you think the difference is?

Oh, that you're not dropping a bomb, so you're slowly killing somebody through their brain and their whole – like how they're actually working through problems and not being able to solve their own life problems. They're on medications they're on you know like dude like mental health is crazy right now so anyway yeah um i actually am super excited to have you and this is the first time i've had you on barbell shrugged obviously you've been on here multiple times um i've been watching your career for like 12 years now and i i like to say that i was inside like the first thousand people in the country that was doing crossfit uh like way back in 2006 and it may have been every second counts yep as your first introduction when you were doing crossfit endurance even before

crossfit endurance john wellborn which is like what it's still hands down like i will watch a training montage movie forever like if you just go to the youtube it's like nhl hockey fights and training montages and that is all my youtube filter looks like basically um but i'd love to know just kind of the progression of like i feel like where you are now when i hear you talk when i see what you're working on this there's something about what you're doing now that like speaks to your soul like you're really solving the problem that you were kind of searching for through crossfit endurance through power speed endurance through um working with kelly starrett and and all the pieces to it but i feel like you've like found your home now what was kind of missing along Starrett and all the pieces to it. But I feel like you've like found your home now.

What was kind of missing along the way and all of those of like what questions weren't being answered that you were like trying to find in essence, like the truth, like finding the thing at its core that has brought you to where you are now? Yeah. Oh, I appreciate that.

What I really appreciate is how you just were able to articulate that because that's exactly what has really kind of happened is it's like what I understand right now, I've always known. Yeah. I just didn't know how to explain it

or get it out there. Yeah. And when I made fun of a training mask and breathing and I knew that that was just the definition of ignorance, I put the training mask on and I took a breath and I sat up to do it and it changed everything and about everything I had ever done in my career in a moment. And I was just like, holy shit. And it wasn't the training mask. It was that I understood myself organizing around something from like what I talked about this morning when we were training. But it was like, wow, the, the, the epicenter of like human movement is organized around this thing. I wonder, I, you know what,

I need to start, like, I understand some physiology, like I've read it. I've been involved in it. Like I'm around a lot of smart people. Um, but I didn't really ever dive into respiratory physiology and I wasn't interested in why i ignored yoga totally like i went to yoga i was a yoga practitioner i fucking was in it four days a week like hardcore like into it and all that and i still ignored what the what the you know the teacher was presenting about breathing because he and or she didn't really know what the fuck they were talking about. To be honest, they just were passing something on. And I dove into the respiratory physiology and literally my head exploded because I connected that to movement because that was my original background.

And I was doing the endurance thing because I was like, oh, like I'm not an endurance athlete but I can go do endurance events. And if I train specifically in using these ideas or these principles, I actually am doing it quite well. And I've got people who are doing it even better than me now. Like it was just crazy. But all of that got flipped on its head when I got involved with breathing and understood respiratory physiology. And then I had to understand the neurobiology of it

because breathing's tied up in the brain. I think there's something super interesting about the breathing. So, like, I'm in the suburbs now of Raleigh, North Carolina, where the options for awesome yoga classes is very minimal, if any. But when I was in San Diego, and many things go back to CrossFit of when I really took the deep dive.

It's like, I'm going to be good at this thing. And then, of course, you have to break up with it because you realize you hit the end and you go, there's got to be way more to life than this. And that was when I actually realized I've been playing life at intensities that are so high every single day in business and running a gym and trying to compete and going and competing and doing well and then it was like well what do i do next and i was like what if i just played

this game at the exact opposite end of the spectrum and that was when i started to dive into a lot of the breath work and finding good yoga teachers and it radically changed my life like it it gave me this just it gave me time to heal if that's a weird weird thing um why is it so hard for people to understand that like more just runs you into the ground and that it's it's it's so beneficial because they feel like they're not doing anything almost yeah well for one you know i i tried to convey that today it's hard in that short of a period of time but we're under the assumption because of where we're at like culturally society like civilized that training is this thing that we have to push the limits on when we don't even understand what we are really biologically capable of like we we don't know the extremes we're actually

able to like people are i mean that's what i found out when i was doing like ultra endurance right like i'm like oh shit like i can do 100 miles but then i was like anybody could do 100 miles if they really put their head into it and don't overstress themselves yeah like and pay attention to what nature's provided they could actually do this now they're not gonna win a race but they could survive yeah right and they have and they do there's feats of strength that if we look back they don't have anywhere near the abilities and the capabilities that we have today like we look like so my point here is that like I just don't know I think we've gotten i'm pretty sure we've all gotten

myself included i've gotten gotten a bit lost and thinking that training needs to be this thing that's at the extreme level of things yeah when yeah it could be extreme if you get there but like to just do that all the time and not understand it it's like like you're just not learning anything yeah um the there's you know one guy one person really comes to mind is like laird hamilton is like he is incredibly extreme with everything he's doing except if you were to see his progression through it it's not been like everything's just extreme it's been a it's it's been a very methodical approach to it and he has things buffered and layered in ways that his body responds to yeah get banged up yeah

but he's not like he's not doing the stuff that like i i see athletes and people burn out like just get crippled like i mean how many executives i've dealt with that like are just like oh i get up and i get up at four four a.m and I go and get after it in the gym. And then I go and charge it all day and then I jump on my plane and go to Europe and do some business and I fly back in like three days. It's like, so what do you think the cost of that is? Yeah. Like. Yeah, it's killing you.

Literally. Yeah. Like. Yeah, it's killing you. Literally. Yeah. I didn't realize the intensity or how far like a lack of sleep can take you until Dan read my labs and showed me cortisol curves and was like, you're upside down. This is the exact opposite of what you actually want. And I think so many people look at what they do and they're like, I'm disciplined. I wake up at 4 a.m. I'm like, maybe we should change the conversation to like, I'm disciplined. I didn't wake up to an alarm. But that doesn't fit the narrative of where people feel like they need to be to be considered like a high- person. Yeah, the whole like, I'm not trying to shit on like Jocko's thing, but discipline equals

freedom is kind of an oxymoron. If you have to use the thing that's take like if you have to discipline yourself to take yourself out of basically the shitty habits that you're already in yeah you're not you're still in a prison you still are confined to a prison how about we introduce you to what quality eating and quality living looks like yeah and what is that what does that look like and we'll show you that through blood work like what dan does right like so like you go and you do that. And what do you feel like in a, in a few weeks? Like if I introduce somebody who actually follows things through, like when I met, when

I take people through my mentorship, if they're following things within three, two, three, four weeks, there are so, there are crazy changes that have already happened that they're just like whoa like this is kind of nuts what's going on it's like yeah and although that took some structure to get you to do should that require you to do that further and if it does what's the behavioral problem that's centered around that and that's where the psychology really starts to come in is why am i actually not taking care of myself not listening to myself not prioritizing sleep not prioritizing downtime for my family yeah well you know what what what are these things that i'm doing what well the thing is is it's like when he when are we going to actually prioritize ourselves

yeah and and we don't understand what that actually means. Yeah, for sure. Like when you're talking about waking up at 4 a.m., training, working all day, flying to Europe, doing some work there, flying back, never getting adjusted to any schedule, your body is going to keep the score on that the whole way through. And that's going to pop up in your labs. There's a book written with that title. Oh, really? Yeah, The Body Keeps the Score. I actually thought you said that knowing that.

Oh, I've never read that book. The book is called The Body Keeps the Score. Yeah, The Body Keeps the Score is the name of the book. That's amazing. Okay, well then I should read that book. And the entire book is about trauma. Okay. Well, the body does keep the score.

That's true. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the

inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns, and then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that

he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. Anytime, it's going to keep the score in respect to uh psychological emotional environmental physiological whatever it's going to be your body's going to keep that total score and we

are going to keep it on the labs and to kind of i mean we're going to catch it on the labs and to kind of piggyback on that discipline statement being an oxymoron um i mean brian and i were just talking about earlier about you know following up with some people and how it can be frustrating at times when they're not doing what they're supposed to do because they're trying to be disciplined in that, like they're lack, they feel like they lack discipline in that initial stage. But if they would be able to stick to that for the first two to four weeks, achieve those unbelievably massive changes that occur to a physiology once you start working with your body rather than against your body momentum almost takes you from there because you don't need

discipline as much anymore because you feel so good about everything that you're doing you don't want to actually go back to the way that you were once your inflammation is corrected once your vitamin mineral status is excellent once your hormones are starting to get into a place where they should be for your age and activity level, once your stress is manageable and tolerable through all the things that Brian does, I like that's been, that was an experiment experience of myself, but also just an experience of a lot of my clients is that there's not a lot of cheerleading needed when you understand how good your body's actually designed to feel. I'd love to get your thoughts on, you know, so many coaches kind of in that intermediate level of coaching are going to go to the exercise science books and they're going to like

stare at energy systems and be like, well, I have to do 15 seconds of really hard work and I have to rest for a minute and 45 seconds because it says this right here. But nobody ever thinks about like how well you're breathing while you're doing those things. I'm sure you have a million thoughts about this. Where do we miss the boat on, like, the book says train this energy system, but nobody thinks about how well you're breathing while you're doing that work or the rest periods. This is the problem with people wanting to apply science but not really understanding science, right?

Like, oh, science says 12 reps, it's hypertrophy. Yeah. Is it? Is that the only method's hypertrophy. Yeah. Is it? Is that the only method for hypertrophy? Yeah. No. Not – you ever seen a CrossFitter at the games? Like they're not doing sets at 12.

Yeah. Right? um you know there's a like there's a good reason why ito portal is is considered like the preeminent thinker on movement yeah and you know he he i just listened to his interview with with andrew and um he talked about yeah i'll routinely throw in like the number nine for a rep scheme for people because they're so used to because they're so five eight and twelve because it just throws them they want to go to ten they just want to go to ten right right and it's like yeah that and that's exactly the type of shit i did like i would do with people but i just fell into that kind of naturally after challenging

these ideas of where i was at because I had been so structured it's not like I didn't like have discipline like I wasn't in that intermediate stage of all of this I have been um but the thing is is we actually need everybody to be a little bit more authentic and you can't be authentic when you're stuck in a fucking wall inside walls and that means you're following something in order to get somewhere. And there's a time and a place for that. But then it's like, it's exactly what Dan was explaining. It's like,

Hey, this is what it feels like to be amazing. Now off you go and try not to fuck this up. Like, right. Like, Hey, go and experience this. Oh ate that it didn't feel

good i didn't sleep well that night yeah or i i had diarrhea the next morning yeah probably good not to eat that one again right like just you know i'm low-balling this stuff but it's more complex than a lot of things but like even with breathing it's so funny like people are come up i mean we even today somebody came up and was like people are come up i mean we even today somebody came up and was like yeah i went and did this class and this this yoga gal was like you know we're gonna do six six six six breath hold them like do you know what that she's like do you know what that pattern is i was like i do she's like well what do you think of it and i'm like i don't know it's a good number to count too it's a good number it won't work for everybody like i don't want to get in the minutiae with her yeah but i'm like

look box breathing is great but the fact is it's been marketed as like the navy seal breathing protocol and it's not it couldn't be anything further from that it's just a set that worked to help a few people shift their state somewhat but that's not the only pattern that does that and there's many patterns that do many things and they're very complex they do a lot of things and some things can fuck people up yeah and i've seen that a lot yeah so i think in a huge way um like those kind of protocols and those kind of numbers are actually quite good for people in the beginning. At least this is just speaking from my coaching experience, that those kind of protocols and numbers can be quite good for people in the beginning

because they don't know the language of their body. 100%. They don't know how to speak the language of their body. So I've kind of broken it in my brain into two model-based approaches. The first model, I call it quantification, to where we are going to quantify what we know from the scientific literature from the outside in and place it upon you. So if you want hypertrophy, we will put you into a hypertrophy protocol. If you are after lean mass gain, we will put you in that slight hypercaloric state. If you want this, this, we will actually utilize what we know from excellent scientific literature from the outside in to quantify the best beginning approach in your progression towards achieving the goal that you came to me with. But once you have followed the protocol and listened to the language of your body, you progressively move into what I

call the qualification stage. And that's where coaching moves from a dictatorship to a relationship. Because it's very much a dictatorship in the beginning, because I am going to put you on numbers and I am going to create your protocol kind of in the absence of your opinion on it. So it's going to be based on labs, it's going to be based on your physiology. It's going to be based on your symptomology. It's going to be based on a lot of things because right now I know better than you. I'm sorry. I know better than you, but you're going to do what I say for this first X amount of time during quantification. But as you learn the language of your body, your opinion on your own body is arguably more valuable than my opinion on your body because now we're moving

into qualification where it's now a coaching relationship to where my guidelines are now qualified through you rather than prescribed to you. So we're moved from quantification into qualification. And I think that that's actually a long-winded way of saying now you have life transformation instead of body transformation because you've learned how to speak the language of your body, what foods, what training, what rest periods, what breathing, what actually works for you. You are now at the wheel of your own life. Go kill it. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Like definitely an introduction into any world needs some sort of structure.

It's, it's like the martial arts. It's like, Hey, like we're going to spend the next 10 years or in a black belt. Right. But as soon as you're a black belt, it's like,

let it free. But I mean, it's even before that it's like really after a white belt to let things kind of flow, but you're still learning, but they become a flow and they're not so fundamental because you've got the fundamentals right and that's what science is about is understanding those fundamentals and where to get back and they and it needs guidance from people like you who actually understand that um and then the the exploratory phase begins and it's like what do

i want to do well what do i want to learn And unfortunately, we are so hardwired and we are just talking about this to just get into a pattern of repetition of doing something that we feel is good or we're good at. And we forget to explore those things that we're not and that could actually be enhancing everything which actually makes us a more intelligent species the more specialized we get the less intelligent we are yeah and that's brought into our own thinking to where we're like oh mind and body and it's like no there's no such thing yeah it's all one thing yeah one thing i think is so great, and I've learned a lot of this from you, Dan, is eliminating the constraints on your progress. And I think your work is so cool because – and a lot of people that are intelligent in the breath space because we limit ourselves when we have this like amateur kind of of training where it's like, I either need more reps, I need more weight, or I need to do it in less time or in longer training periods for more volume. But nobody ever thinks about the number of ways that you can also layer. Like, can we get more done in less time by just improving our breathing or add a variable of breathing into that?

And what happens when you bring that in there is you immediately feel a change. Like the workout that we did today. So many people have no idea that they can get on a bike and limit themselves to a specific breathing count and do zone two. They only know zone two. Yeah. But they don't know what that means. They don't know how to measure that. they don't know what that means they don't know how to measure

that they don't know where they can um but if you can go in and go hey yeah i'd love it if you added 10 pounds to the bar but also can you do it with this breath count can you squat just 225 today don't worry about squatting 400 don't we don't have to worry but do 225 for like six reps and then do it with this breath count. And you immediately change the stimulus. And what's super cool about it is that you're eliminating a lot of the constraints that was stopping them from getting stronger because they're able to move better. Their body's in a better position. They're actually connecting that mind muscle connection that everybody talks about, but very rarely feels. When you start breathing and you start

becoming focused on positions, your ability to breathe breathe your ability to breathe well while you're doing things you own you own their brain for that hour it's a very cool process when you can take them over that quickly yes and i couldn't have said that better it literally that is like that variable of change you can tweak with breathing changes the dynamic of what is probably the thing that people don't understand the most, which is that intensity marker. I'm removing your ability to go harder than you think you need to go today, but still making it hard and stressing you and pushing that edge. But what I'm getting out of that, and this is one of the cool things, especially about strength and conditioning, is like if I actually have somebody lift less weight on a day because they're roasted, they're probably going to rebound quicker because we're creating a growth stimulus with lighter weight or that that's one

of the i think the most underutilized things with inside strength and conditioning is utilizing strength and conditioning for recovery day where somebody's fried and they come in and just do three sets of 10 or 12 at like light moderate weight not at all. Like just do it to get a blood pump. And what are we doing? We're creating a bit of a growth change, but it's not a high stress growth change that you actually think you need. But it's the next day you're like, boom, I'm on. And I feel like tuned in today.

Or I slept better last night. Wow, that was weird. Yeah. You know what's funny, Dan? When we design programs for people in Rapid, we have like all these buckets. But because people that are like healthy are coming to us and looking for optimization and like they want their labs done, they want to find out what's going on inside their body. Like they're working out. They're trying to eat well.

They're doing everything right. They think they have it dialed in and then we throw them on your co2 tolerance test and the very first thing we need to work on is like we got some nutrition we got to figure out supplementation but also your co2 tolerance test came back with a seven day rolling average of 10 seconds where'd you guys design that test is that your test um ripped it off from the free diving world man free divers there it is fucking the people the people that i don't love that underutilized people in human performance there's there those people are quite literally so happy you said that i've watched multiple documentaries on them they're of course you have you're like and everybody has who's like who's

ever watched anything on tv they're like oh, oh, wait, somebody's doing what? Would you see them preparing? It is one of the coolest breathing practices. They're taking those giant, very intentional deep breaths. And then they're over- Massive VO2 maxes. Yet how much work are they doing? Oxygen saturation that they have going on is crazy yeah

yeah when it comes to to breath work um i i'm still new to the world of breath work i know how important it is but i don't understand the science behind it at a high level which is why i was so excited to meet you this weekend um because i've heard nothing but amazing things about you're the freaking man for this stuff um and andrew's been following you for 12 years it's like yeah everyone's like you got to meet this guy so i was like let's go um but when it comes to breathing i think um and i could be wrong but i feel like still not enough people know that that's its own constraint like i think people they they can overemphasize training or overemphasize nutrition but even i I'm the nutrition guy. Let's say like somebody comes to me and they want to improve their conditioning.

Like my conditioning, I just need a lot of help with it. You know, should I take the supplement beta-alanine? Because I heard that that's good for improving anaerobic capacity. But imagine if like that, but you breathe like shit during training. So you, there is no such thing as high-level program design without a high-level analysis first.

If you haven't identified the correct constraint to solve your current pain point, no matter what you throw at it, you're only going to perform to the degree that you are constrained. So if it's not beta alanine, that's your current constraint, which it's never going to be, and it is breathing, you're only ever going to perform to the degree that you are constrained. So in your experience working with athletes, working with military,

working with people, how many people – or coaches – how many people are still unaware of the amount of science and importance is behind breath? I think there's a good amount of people at this point that actually are getting that this is a real thing. Like they should be looking at this for real. But the amount of high-level thinking is very limited. People who are actually able to take scientific literature and go, okay, this is where this applies to this person. This is what I can use for this person. Just like you're talking about sets and reps.

I'm going to first take what the science says with somebody and apply that to them, right? And then I'm going to step outside the lines with that and start to build in things that I know work from a physiological standpoint, right? So then we start to play with that stuff. But, you know, I don't know. Like even like we're doing stuff at the UFC right now and even like just piloting research. Like people don't know. Like they – like even the lead exercise physiologist there was like – I mean it's not that he didn't know. It's that he just never explored that. And it's like now we're introducing things and it's like, oh, wow.

Like that's making a very big change to things. We need to actually look at this a little deeper. Yeah, like I got my world rocked because I did a breathing routine with somebody before, and I didn't actually get much out of it. And the practitioner matters. That's what I found, and obviously I won't mention his name. It's okay. Yeah, but then I went to Southern California, and I went through about maybe it was 45, 60 minutes with Kenny Kane. Rocked my freaking world. I was like – there was like a feeling where I felt like I was on drugs.

Like there's an enormous euphoria, enormous stress release, enormous huge benefits. I was like, holy crap. This is absolutely an undeniable thing. I got rocked by it. And I think a lot of people actually need to just feel that to get, understand. That's usually the barrier of entry for people, especially with like doing some breathing is some sort of rock, getting rocked type of thing. Um, I know that's what, I mean, that didn't happen to me, but did. When I first heard of Wim Hof, it was before anybody even knew who he was really. It was like we – Laird and I were screwing around with it.

We just started fucking around with this breathing thing he was doing because we – he had this book on him that was about the ice. Like that was his book. There's a book on him called The Iceman that literally is it's kind of like a piece of shit but like it really it was poorly done but laird had it we looked at it and then i looked the guy up and he had this method and it was like you know whatever we so we started screwing around and i was like boom i'm holy shit. Like this is potent. I had already been playing with stuff before that method, but I started to understand it. And that was the thing is like most people need some sort of potent thing like that.

But then the problem is, is that with that is that we all get driven into, well, we tend to gravitate towards what it is we really like about that right and so when you get these high potent high stimulus breathing things that rock you that's when we start to go oh i need to do that every day and it's like oh no no no like you don't want to go down the road i did because I did that. And several of us did that. And we started to notice some changes that started to occur that we didn't like. And that's where you have a lot of the type A people who run into something that – well, a lot of type A's don't want to slow down. I don't like slowing down man yeah and and so i want something that makes me feel like it rocks me but then knocks me off my

ass and then i slow down yeah right and that comes with consequences just like everything else and so if i'm a high stress individual and i'm actually participating in hyperventilating on a daily basis like and I'm training in high sympathetic like training and high anaerobic training you can bet that will find a limit it's you're gonna find a ceiling yeah it may not be right now and the younger you are the longer you're gonna get away with it but then when they come to see you when they're in their 30s or 40s you're like oh the body kept the score the body kept the longer you're going to get away with it. But then when they come to see you when they're in their thirties or forties, you're like, Oh, the body kept the score. The body kept the score.

And we need to uncouple all of this. Like how many people come up to me after I do talks like anywhere? It's, it's the same story, man. It's like, Oh my God. Like I've been like this my whole life and I just sold this company and it's like, Oh my God, I, my HRV, it's like super low. Am I, am I going to die? I just sold this company and it's like, oh my god, my HRV, it's like super low. Am I going to die?

It's like, well, I wouldn't say you're going to die, but like you could probably get that up. How do I get it up? I'm like it's going to take some behavioral change. Yeah. So it sounds like to take an example of a high school boy who wants bigger biceps. You find your favorite exercise and you want to do it every day as hard as you possibly can until you get some sort of injury, until you get inflamed and you also see that they're not growing. And then you're introduced to the concept that, okay, even though that's my favorite thing to do, it is more appropriately placed within a complete program design and properly periodized over time.

So it sounds like breathwork is the same thing. There are certain methods that do certain things. And just like the over-application of something in training will have a negative outcome, the over-application of something in breathwork can have a negative outcome. What kind of negative outcomes have you seen in people who have over applied certain breathing methods oh good that's a great question i actually love this course yeah uh well the one we just i just touched on was you're basically just over stimulating the sympathetic nervous system you get people who start to get some autonomic disorders um you'll like tinnitus is one big one like scott carney

who's here he not he pinged me about it. He's like, what? Yeah. He's like, dude, why do people keep contacting me about getting tinnitus from doing Wim Hof method? And I'm like, well, probably because the Wim Hof method camp won't answer those questions because they don't want anybody thinking that their method is doing something. And while it, while that would be the easy way to state is that the wim hof method is

responsible for that it is not it is the type of breathing that somebody's engaging but it's the activation of the sympathetic nervous system into a high stress response right from an individual who's already in a high sympathetic driven response i mean how does an autoimmune disorder happen autonomic nervous system well let's think about it foods introduced that are constantly fucking setting me off or what i'm high stress and how do we respond to stress and if it's like oh i'm i'm i'm stressed all day and then i'm going in and stressing myself with my breathing what's supposed to happen with these met with something like a wim hof method you're supposed to rebound into a in a parasympathetic right? But people aren't actually doing that who are in these high stress places. And

some people can get away with this for a while. Um, but even like going the opposite direction, breath hold work done to extremes. I mean, there's stuff that can happen. I mean, you go look at free divers, you hand them a weight, uh, you know, know and they're gonna come apart at the seams right like there's like these extreme ends exists right like when you become a specialist in something you have literally lost intelligence and a lot of other things and as sexy as free dive the free diving community is it's hyper specialized in something right like i don't want to break a record in free diving, but fuck, I love hold my breath underwater in the ocean and like diving and surfing and all of that.

And I'm able to do it at a level that most people are not because of the training I've invested in that. But I'm also able to get in the gym and take care of myself and keep myself strong enough so that when I'm mountain biking and if I crash, I rebound from that crash a little bit faster than somebody who doesn't jump in the gym and take care of that stuff. Breathing fits into this. Where there are problems that start to show up is people get hyper-focused on everything, onto it, like doing the bicep curls. It's so funny you brought that up because I'm reading this book right now called endurance it was written in like 1926

that means it's real it's better it's held up and the guy is literally he has no science to back up what he's talking about but he's talking about these guys who go and do this endurance training and they just torture themselves all day every day and then he was talking about weightlifters in the same way and guys would go in the gym for three hours a day every day and they're working out and and they're talking to him about this and he's like so have you made any gains he's like no i haven't lately he goes yeah and he goes do you have any advice and he's like yeah 30 minutes no more than 30 minutes a day. End it at 30 minutes. And the guys are like, wait, what?

Like, it's like this, like, it's not a new thing that's happening right now. Like, this is a human problem, you know? But it's like, you go look at the endurance athletes out there who just think, I mean, there was a guy in the back today who talked to me earlier, and he's a runner. And I'm like, dude, you think it's about miles and it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with your physiology and how it's responding. But how do I – how can I help you understand when your physiology is starting to go down to where you're no longer going to start to make that rebound back up to supercompensate, right? Yeah.

Like that's that thing that people are missing. And that's what I'm interested in is finding that level to where people can – myself in particular is I can really start to like go, oh, that's where my sweet spot is. Yeah. People get – they don't like realize that they love the feeling more than they love the result. Yeah. Because they're actually – they're doing nothing but the feeling and they're not tracking the proper metrics for results i'm like yeah so that's that's such a crazy thing um so then on that note with respect

to like breathing and being overemphasized possibly on the wrong things um there's a lot of like uh say let's just i just use workout analogies there'll be like a lot of workouts on youtube that are one-off workouts that people can follow. And they are not part of a long-term periodization plan and they are not specific to the person. But something's always better than nothing. So somebody can go in there and do that routine and then at least they were somewhat active.

But now there's a lot of just different people putting up a lot of breathwork routines, whether if it's on Instagram, if it's on TikTok, if it's on YouTube, if it's an app, if it's any. There's a lot of people that just have daily routines or this routine for this, this routine for that, but it doesn't belong in a breathing program. What's the difference in results from doing routines rather than having a program made for you in the world of breathwork. That is the difference between constantly seeking relief or developing resilience. What people are actually doing is just finding a relief, a place for relief. Got it.

Right? Yeah. Which for most people is a great thing. For a lot of people, it's a good thing. But that's the starting point. Everybody needs breathing in some respects currently today to apply for relief, right? To chill out, right? But it's way more than that. And you can develop – so your bucket for – just pretend you've got a bucket for stress.

No amount of fitness will change that. It really won't. Like I have seen world-class athletes who literally will walk off a track and not on the start line because they're so fucking anxious and they're in a panic yeah right that's health just so we're clear yeah and and even though that that guy or gal is at the world stage for that meaning they're in the top fucking 10 in the world at a time for that event they can't make it to the line because they're so concerned about what that is like dude whoa wait what hold and although that's got a lot of mental stuff to it that stuff has to that that there's no like you don't like that person's so fine-tuned from a fitness standpoint

like i've dealt with crossfitters who are literally anxious as fucking all hell it's like dude you didn't change the bucket the bucket hasn't changed it's still the same side you're breathing your compensatory breathing begins at the earliest stage of your movement that shouldn't be happening like that should not be happening. Your primary muscles need to be working until you're just above submaximal, below submaximal. And even at maximal levels, your primary will be involved, but it's like your second – it's now secondary. It's not compensatory at that point, right? Yeah. So here's a question for you in the world of improving

people's health there's there's a lot of branches but let's just simplify it and say there's two branches symptom management and root cause management you can either manage a symptom or you can actually solve a root cause problem if and you've brought up mental health a few times with anxiety and stuff like this in this podcast so I wanted to ask, in the world of breathwork, it's so fantastic at calming the body down, getting parasympathetic, reducing anxiety, these types of things. Have you come across situations where breathwork can actually be a symptom manager or it could also be a root cause manager. So what I mean by that, if something gives you anxiety like going to the starting line, managing symptoms with breathwork is actually a phenomenal thing to do because it'll improve performance output. It'll get you into a state of flow.

You're going to be able to do your thing. But it ultimately wasn't actually the root cause problem. The root cause problem was something that was in their mind. So in that case, it was a symptom manager that improved performance. But does anybody have anxiety where the root cause is their breathing? So it's like, it's not necessarily, like it's almost a physical thing rather than a mental thing. Their breathing is so bad that that was actually the root cause problem. It's a fantastic question, and I couldn't definitively say that,

but I can say that if you hyperventilate long enough, you're going to get anxious. I was going to say, with both you guys kind of like being in the UFC world, I feel like I've seen, maybe not studies, but I've seen people talking about when you, like, in between rounds, when the guys are in their shoulders, in their traps, they're breathing, and then you can see them gassing out. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so it's actually, excuse me, it's actually like chicken or the egg.

Yeah. It really doesn't matter, man, because yeah you know that at the end of the day the breathing is a reaction to what's going on or the breathing's happening because it's a pattern yeah something right so you just naturally fall into the pattern the poor pattern of something whether it's sleep apnea or whether it's hyperventilating which both can happen for one individual yeah that's like nutrition yeah like it's can, it's, it can be a symptom manager or the root cause problem solver, but eat good anyways. Yeah.

It's kind of like breathing, right? It can be the symptom manager or the root cause problem, but let's breathe correctly anyway. Correct. Yeah. You don't bookend your day right now with some breathing and then actually start to get you to understand after phone calls that you're losing your

shit, that you need to calm down. Yeah. Like, you know, I mean, I talked to a guy earlier today about it he's like dude i've multiple businesses blah blah heart stuff afib like da da da da and it's all because of how i've suppressed my response to adrenaline i just thought that was what you do yeah yeah yeah why do you think like guys who leave special operations communities go and become base jumpers and you know extreme shit because of their relationship

to adrenaline like that that's they need something to feel alive still and i'm not talking down about that it's like a like i'm a high drive, adrenaline junkie kind of guy. Um, but I also have done enough work to come to understand that to where now it's super calculated with what it is I'm doing. And it's actually, there's a process to it of approachment of approaching it during it and after it. Yeah. And I think that that's something I want the listeners to kind of get today is how important breathing is and the fact that you can get a real program out of it. It's absolutely individualized.

It can be a symptom manager and a root cause manager. It checks all of these boxes for something that's such a freaking no-brainer to get on board with. One thing that I think we lose a lot of touch of too is like it's a performance enhancer. Like I I had never thought of this until I met Ben Pekulski and he was telling me that like when he was training for Olympia it was like he would meditate

before he started training to get his mind right and then as soon as he was done training he was like you have to go find like 10 minutes in the corner just by yourself. The faster you get sympathetic the better or parasympathetic what ben's so far ahead of the game like it was like the faster you can get into a parasympathetic state the better chance you have a building muscle if you if you drive home you shower you do it all and you've wasted an hour and you got to go back and like do the work still so just go to the corners are just like after they're done training whatever practice whatever the third

yeah three practices a day they're right here on instagram we're at an event right now there's a bunch of nasa people here and yeah people going to space which is super we just literally listen to a guy that's been to the bottom of the ocean, fought. In Desert Storm. In Desert Storm. And then does spacewalks. Done the spacewalk six times. Something like that.

He's had different things. Have you ever worked with pilots? Because that's an interesting. Couple. Couple. Very short, but couple. Yeah. I've actually had a pilot who was like, this is the first time anybody's ever recreated what it's like to be in a fighter jet and hitting like two Gs or something.

Yeah. And having to deal with that by using breathing and breathing breath work in that. Because that's an interesting thing. I really believe that when you think about breathing, there is this massive thing that can help with mental health and solve root causes and pieces that you're talking about. But there is this performance side of it that I think a lot of people forget about. They categorize this like, it doesn't have to be anything dude it can be the way the guy that stood on stage at mr olympia thought about building muscle yeah it could be the way pilots get through their day so that they don't black out at a million miles an hour whatever it is yoga today i mean if you just go study a little bit of yoga like but i mean study what it was yeah you just look at today and go oh it's not okay sun salutation times eight dude it's just like it's been just this like hey like pass on but tweak it to fit my mold type of thing i mean the iangars the the people who

like were really responsible for bringing that they couldn't exist in the ecosystem of yoga today they could not exist um because they didn't stick to structures of things they understood those things and those were the fundamentals to begin to build the practice but those things were stretched out way beyond basic asanas and things that were poses that were restrictive towards things and it's like we did that we've done that in crossfit we you know and it's like, we did that. We've done that in CrossFit. And it's to nobody's fault except our own human fault. But we've done that with bodybuilding, all of these things. We restrict ourselves to these places that we don't realize have such broad, like you can, it's so much deeper than that.

And breathing. Yoga has been talking about breathing for like 5,000 years, right? It's at the foundation of the practice. And some of these methods come with very stern warnings, like very. And certain people are not allowed to do them for real, real reasons. I've seen. I know people. You probably know people who have engaged in these things who have

had problems with this who have had heart attacks as a result of things who have passed out or uh shallow water blacked out because they didn't understand the physiology there's uh there's specific athletes too you know living in SoCal you have access to pretty much everybody's mood is based off whether there's waves or not. So, um, and that's a really cool community when you get into stuff like this,

because they know what it's like when the water goes from warm, where you're swimming and surfing to really cold. Cause that means you're deep and, and you don't really know where up is. And it's just dark. Um, people that have to have a breath practice or understand breathing and have a real relationship with it like when you're getting held down and

then you're still down there and you're like man i'm under this is deep and all you're there is yourself and your brain yeah that's a very real thing and i feel like people just um and i think it's one of the reasons like something like crossfit's so powerful right you go and do that workout and it's the first time that your breath has just you're dying you it's this pain you have this like metal mouth metal fire breathing thing and it's why it's so powerful that very first hit and if people could find a way to experience that with breath work and kind of take that big that big like get hit by the get hit right off the bat they start to find places that their breath may matter to them and i think it's really important for one to be able to experience

that side of it but where can people pick up really like the low-hanging fruit of this to be able to implement it into their life um i mean the easiest thing is just going to the website and getting an understanding of how to start a breath practice it really just introduces them the co2 tolerance test the exhale test and what are they going to learn with that because we we do it but what why do you guys uh why, all right. Why just – Yeah, I'll explain that. So when I really got into the physiology of this, I went into stress physiology a bit. And I picked up on the fact that between species, stress physiology does not differentiate. So pH, like the chemistry of things, it all does basically the same thing the weird thing the interesting thing about us though is that over time we've not been able to kind of we've lived at this like kind of mid-level stress like where it's a constant stress where we're

unable to get to these really really high blood gas places that where real like like wild animals are like zebras there's a i got a presentation in a slide i do of um of a researcher out of hungary um his name is dr andre sichter and he talks about the diseases of civilization and then the the acute responses of hypo and hypercapnia. And what can happen. And he shows in it the blood gases of zebras. And how high they can get. And what happens to them right afterwards. Is they come right back down and regulate.

But within people who deal with acute hypercapnia and hypocapnia. Which is basically you are either hyperventilating or you're under breathing, elderly under breathing, younger than that, over breathing. Most of us are over breathing during the day. All right. And so any sort of over breathing limits your ability to use oxygen, but it also changes your pH just very slightly. So you're at this relatively mid-level stress range. And so I really started looking at that and CO2 was the thing that really started coming up.

And CO2 is the real mechanism for why we breathe during the day. So we take a conscious breath due to CO2. But it just so happens that the amygdala we've now found out is not just, yes, it's involved with fear, but it's mostly involved with interoceptive fear, which is carbon dioxide. It's a modulator of carbon dioxide. So a friend of mine who's a researcher just did a paper found these, I think it was two different sets of twins who had these like calcified amygdalas. And so that's a problem in society because you could step out or put your hand on a hot surface because you just don't have, like you just don't understand like a lot of things that are going on in terms of like fear. Stepping out in front of cars, et cetera, or not understanding consequences of things that would hurt, right? He introduced them to a bolus hit of carbon dioxide.

And they – I think it was like 30% or something. And like tolerable CO2 levels for any human being is really like 6%. And you're like, whoa, like that – I got a panic urge to breathe, right? You hit one hit and everything else is regular breathing of about 30% or so of CO2. And these people went into this panic that they had never experienced in their entire lives. And then that's where he was like, wait, what? So they don't have this modulator of understanding co2 and so our chemoreceptors are on a predictive set right so chemoreception is the chemical detection in the system for things like smell and taste are the easiest way to understand that but

inside the system it becomes oxygen carbon dioxide etc carbon dioxide is the major player your aortic artery and your carotid artery have chemoreceptors set up in them and they are detecting on a constant what those levels are and they're sending them signals to your brain so your brain stem for your rhythm for breathing so the unconscious breathing that you're doing right now, unless you engage your breathing, is done off of that modulator of predicting, and it's important about this, predicting what those carbon dioxide levels are going to be in the system because they're in the arteries. Aortic artery is right off that heart that's newly oxygenated blood nothing's happened going to the brain on that carotid it's going to the brain nothing's really happened so we've got

blood that hasn't really utilized oxygen right that hasn't been dispersed into the tissues or the organs to be used yet so the byproduct is not carbon dioxide yet. So it's predicting off of this. And so when we can develop sensitivity, we have a sensitivity to this that's individualized. And it's all how we manage stress because the complexity of the brain and the nervous system is to go, oh, is this a threat or is this safe for simplicity's sake, right? Like I walk into a room and I meet a bunch of guys and it's like, all right, yeah, I feel good.

But one guy's acting a little weird. My fucking spidey sense is going off. And well, guess what? If I asked you to hold your breath at that point, it would change from when you're relaxed, right? So the easiest way to say it is like, all right, everybody listening, hold your breath right now. So you hold your breath and you

do that and then all of a sudden you breathe well how long was that 10 seconds 30 seconds 40 seconds maybe a minute for somebody who's really got a low sensitivity well if i allowed you to do a breathe up for two minutes and calm down how long do you think you'd hold your breath that just changed instantaneously right yeah so we got you caught so almost every single person can hold their breath for like two to three minutes and they'll but you have to go through the you have to go through the process well we did that during your lecture yeah the second time around was totally different right yeah it was totally different i couldn't really see so yeah usually every single time people like

what the fuck just happened like and if you've ever been to like a uh like a breath work uh where everybody's like in it together and the instructor will lead you through it and they're like okay now hold your breath on that third one everyone gets to like two and a half three minutes and then they and and no one knows they're there and then the instructor goes that was three minutes and then they and and no one knows they're there and then the instructor goes that was three minutes and it was like how yeah how'd that happen well you remove co2 and that's exactly what happens yeah so the test we ripped it off from the free diming community because they use it to kind of set they set breathing rhythms for this to build up to do breath holds based off of an exhale test,

which is rather unique in that it's actually the exhale test unlike the bolt test, which is what Patrick McKeown uses for the oxygen advantage, which is from the Buteyko method is where you just exhale and you hold your breath and the first urge you get, that's your score, right? Like however many seconds that is. That's a very subjective test because it's a guess. You're like, oh, this was my first urge to breathe, right? Like I don't know exactly what that is. With the exhale test, it's very objective. It's very scientific. Like it's a full inhale to a full exhale. And if you panic or need to breathe anywhere in between there, the test ends, right? So we've got a marker for where you're at regardless of where you're going from. And so we've got a physiological marker, we've got a psychological marker, and we've got a mechanical because we're asking you to exhale through your nose as slow and as controlled

as you can. And that eccentric contraction of the intercostals and the diaphragm is very hard to do for people who don't have control of that and so that then begins to get integrated and so motor control can play a control can play a part in this to begin with but once motor control is achieved you really start to balance out and you start to see the the the you know regularity or the baseline of it and that's where you can start to see the dips in it right and so that test really became pretty evolutionary for us in making an assessment for somebody we were working with and knowing what to do with them and how far to push them yeah where can people find that test shiftadapt.com forward slash breathwork killer simplest way and so that exhale test will line up

with a breathing protocol that goes from beginner to advanced what that means is a big very the easiest entry point is an equal in equal out exhale okay gear one what we talked about today From there, it goes to inhale, hold, exhale. Then it goes inhale, hold, exhale, hold. But then there's variable change like a 1-2-1 or a 1-2-2, you know, like multipliers, right? And so all of those things can change. And roughly what we do is just we give people a jump in to start something with that and find something that works for them. But essentially when we launched Pneuma, which should be like in a week,

which is P-N-E-U-M-A, Pneuma dot plus, that'll be a fingerprint of what rhythms actually work for that individual based on how they psychologically screen. So I've been able to work through the psychological screening because I've been at this for as long as I have now to where I've, I've noticed the types of personalities and how we manage stress work with specific protocols. Yeah. Meaning it kind of fingerprints you to a protocol instead of just like the range of what those were. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Where can people find you? Easiest is Instagram, at underscore Brian McKenzie. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, that breath hold test is something we put all of our clients through. That's like the baseline for us seeing kind of where they're at with stress levels.

Yeah, well, I appreciate it, but I know Andy, who is a skeptic, literally, he was so skeptical of me at first. He was skeptical of me, too. No, totally. He actually – it's written in text. He called me a wackadoodle. Yeah, he used to – he was like, I thought you were such – I was so skeptical of this shit, and I brought him in and showed him some shit and he was like, what the fuck? Yeah.

Dude, the breathwork stuff will take you – I've done a couple of halotropic breathing classes and I felt like – not to turn all this into like a conversation on psychedelics or anything. But there was some breathwork stuff that went on in that class that was like low-level mushroom. I've done ceremonial journey work. A friend of mine is MD, also specializes in the ceremony work. Plenty of work with him. I've done breath work that's taken me far deeper than any psychedelic has. It's really intense. I've lived out 10 years of my life back in my teens under breath work and come out within two minutes and thought I had lived for 10 years. And I'm like, what just happened? Yeah. I literally felt like I was just in a free-for-all through the universe.

Yeah. I was just like, whoa, I am rolling through space right now. Here's the thing, though. Here's the thing, and was just like whoa i am like rolling yeah here's the thing though here's the thing and here's what people don't like they they they get in this woo-woo side of things with it like oh it's a psychedelic breathing it's like well no it's not what it is is it's your brain actually thinking you're dying is what's happening so you don't want to do it every day because that amount well i mean look here's a guy who's looking at chemistry. Yeah. How often? Daily? Daily.

Yeah. How tight is our pH in the system supposed to be? Tight. Super tight, right? So if you hyperventilate long enough. Your body will do anything to keep that regulated. Correct. So when your body thinks it's fucking, like when that pH gets super alkaline your brain just goes sorry motherfucker yeah lights out we're gonna we're gonna override all of your conscious work right now and that's the

intelligence of our biology right there's it's like no no amount of shit like that i do in the acute stage will override what the physio for the physiology and our biology is capable of going click and you go and have this euphoric experience near-death experience and you're like override what the physiology and our biology is capable of going, ah, ah. Click, and you go and have this euphoric experience, near-death experience, and you're like, oh, it was psychedelic. No, no, no. You were actually – your body thought it was dying. Dan Garner. I am at DanGarnerNutrition on Instagram.

There you go. And CoachGarner.com with all your courses. And CoachGarner.com. I want to say thank you to JP for having us out to this awesome event black lab sports here in boulder colorado we're meeting some really cool people and uh we gotta go run to a meeting because andy galpin behind you has walked by three times and told me to wrap it up and that was 30 minutes ago which makes me happy thank you for having me buddy uh it's a pleasure man i really have been following you for 12 years now which is really crazy yeah well i mean we we met for the first time i think at kenny's old gym spot yeah

um and uh it's been very cool i feel like there's so many people in this industry where like i'm traveling in my path and we're but we're all doing we're like all in the same ecosystem um so it's very cool to be able to like, first off, the number of people that fall out of the ecosystem and have made it a decade plus in this game. And then to be still doing work that you love and that you're passionate about is like, it's just on a, it's a very cool thing.

I think we're all chasing this truth thing that we're trying to find. That's right, buddy. And it's very cool. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We're Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you're over to RapidHealthReport.com. You can see Dan Garner read my labs and see

how I fixed all my cortisol levels, the amount of stress I was under, and to see everything that was going on. RapidHealthReport.com and friends, we'll see you guys next week.