Danny Jones Podcast - #366 - The Sunlight Lie, Secret to God-Like Longevity & Ancient Human Strength | Nsima Inyang

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Nsima Inyang (@nsimaInyang) is a strength athlete, movement coach & co-host of Mark Bell’s Power Project, one of the top fitness podcasts in the world. He’s a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a professional natural bodybuilder and elite-level powerlifter. Nsima focuses on unconventional training tools like kettlebells, maces, sandbags, and rope flow. After nearly 20 years of lifting and martial arts, Nsima has developed a unique way of helping people build muscle, move better & avoid injuries. SPONSORS https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Nsima's channel: @nsimaInyang https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang https://thestrongerhuman.store/pages/danny-jones https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman/about FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Training with Mark Bell 04:44 - The key to a balanced fitness practice 08:39 - The new wave of weight training strategies 13:57 - Why everyone should use a weight sled 21:41 - The golden age of fitness education 23:44 - Why Nsima is 100% natural 26:08 - Testosterone 33:31 - Nsima's fitness framework 41:54 - Rope flow 45:07 - How rope flow fixed Nsima's back pain 50:19 - The mechanics of good rope flow 55:48 - Exercise practices that create flow state 01:01:16 - Why you shouldn't always listen to doctors 01:06:29 - The problem with peptides & ozempic 01:11:44 - What happens when you quit TRT 01:14:17 - Rope flow improving Danny's skateboarding 01:18:12 - "Feet forward" walking posture 01:21:45 - Soft tissue work to relieve tension 01:30:32 - How much pressure is ideal for tissue work 01:34:04 - The truth about flexiblility 01:38:10 - How to get a jacked neck 01:45:16 - The importance of microdosing fitness 01:55:25 - Strength & dexterity hand training 01:58:54 - The tennis ball method 02:02:42 - The problem with modern fitness gurus 02:07:06 - Benefits of club swinging for fitness 02:15:03 - Why the younger generations are at risk 02:19:17 - Diaphragmatic breathing 02:26:49 - The dangers of mouth breathing 02:31:25 - Back sleeping vs. side sleeping 02:32:59 - How Nsima optimizes for sleep 02:37:38 - Mattress firmness & elevation 02:40:32 - The risk of holding your breath while lifting weights 02:44:30 - America's problem with pooping 02:48:05 - Fascia training 02:51:09 - Nsima's conversation with Dr. Jack Kruse 02:55:01 - Why darker skin tones need more sun 03:03:19 - EMRTek red light therapy 03:07:34 - The REAL cause of skin cancer 03:13:10 - 95% of doctor literature is outdated Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You are like a wizard when it comes to this, the most unconventional type of weight lifting and muscle movement and even jiu-jitsu that I've ever run into. And not only that, but you are like one of the most physically impressive human beings I've ever hung out with. How the fuck did this happen? Yeah, yeah. Okay. First of all, introduce yourself, to give yourself a proper introduction. In SEMA, how do you spell? pronounce your last name?

Is it Nyang? You know what? Honestly, people, if you want to say Nyang, say Nyang, technically is pronounced Iang, but there's-I-Yong. Close. Yeah, there's aspects of that shit. That's like Nigerian inflection, right? So it's going to be hard to get it right, but you were close. In-yang, I young doesn't really matter. Okay. You do it. You do it. Yeah. I had the pleasure of meeting you a couple, what was that, like two months ago maybe, when I went up to Sacramento and went on the podcast with you and Mark, we had a great time. You taught me all the sandbag stuff. And we need a cool

podcast and all day yesterday we spent you spent teaching me all of this crazy wicked looking workout stuff we used we used the the what are those berserker bars the berserker bars we were using the ropes doing all kinds of rope twisting and throwing and the juggling this trampolining and we just did some jihitsu this morning yes so how did you get into all this stuff dude you know um i'm i'm really thankful to my buddy Mark Bell. Mark Bell. I got to give props to that guy because he brought me on to his, I actually discovered the super training gym back in 2013 for the first time. That's 12 years ago. I'm 21 years old and I go into his old gym to go to a seminar that he was holding with two guys, Mike and Omar Yusuf. I asked a question in there. And then a year later, I go to the LA Fit Expo and Mark sees me

randomly in the gym. Mark, by the way, he's big on YouTube. He's one of the first O.J. fitness influencers. He's he got millions of people into powerlifting. And I met him once, okay? He sees me across the room. I met him once. He's like, you're that guy from Sacramento. You're that big Jack Black dude. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, you should come train out my gym. Like, really? He's like, yeah, come train my gym when you're back in Sacramento. So I start training at his gym. I've already been doing jiu-jitsu a little bit at this time. Then a few years later, he invites me on, I'm like maybe 23 or 24, nine years ago, to co-host his podcast, the Power Project. Mind you, Mark has been podcasting for like five or six

years before that, right? He had a prior podcast that was like one of the biggest podcasts in fitness. He was on Rogan, what, like 14 years ago? Yeah, with his brother, Chris Bell. Yeah, bigger start. You had a Chris Bell on. Yeah, yeah, you know Chris. So he invites me on. At that point in time, I've already, I've already gone and done pro-natural bodybuilding. So I've done a bunch of pro-natural bodybuilding shows. I placed top five in the world as a natural bodybuilder. I competed in powerlifting, right? So I did 7.55. I've squatted 6.25 in the meet. I had a pretty solid power lifting total. And I really thought, I'm like, I know my shit. You know what I mean? I know how to get people lean because I was coaching people for bodybuilding shows. I've been a personal

trainer for like maybe six or seven years prior to working with Mark. So I was like, I know my stuff, right? Even when he brought me on the podcast, go, I was still nervous because I'm like, okay, well, now I'm going to be in front of these people talking. And having so many, different professionals come onto the show with very different viewpoints. You notice that everybody has a big piece to this overall puzzle. Nutrition has its tribes. Training and fitness has its tribes. But the thing is, is everyone that comes in has good things to share. And over time, it forced me to kind of just put myself in the student perspective. Get out of the mind of like, in Seema, you know your shit. And instead of, and instead of

being like that, it's like in Seema, let's learn. Let's learn from this person, ask them questions to not just try to prove the things that I thought were correct, but more so ask them questions to try to get better at what I already think I know and to try to improve what I know. And through that constantly doing that and being in that student position, that's why I do the things that I do now, because I've realized that there is a lot of, there's a lot of good aspects and good ways to eat, right? Some people are pure carnival. some people are plant-based. There's all these tribes. And you tend to see that nutrition can be somewhat individual and it can land somewhere in the middle. And I've found that when it comes to your

personal fitness or building your own movement practice, it's a similar deal where there, again, our tribes, there's the traditional training tribe. That's all about barbells and dumbbells. And they typically look at the people that do the functional fitness with the kettlebells and the ropes and the sandbags. Yeah, they're like, what does that fluff work? Like why? And then the functional people are like, we're functional training warriors. And those people are stiff traditional lifters. And then you got people that do yoga and Pilates for like, all you people are super stiff and you got to be bendy and stuff like us. But you tend to find that the answer for building a balanced movement practice is first off interest based. So are you interested in what

these parties have to offer? What maybe the flexible people and the yoga people have to offer? What the functional bros have to offer and what the traditional training people have to offer? What are you most interested in? But then how can you potentially meld these things and find the best of all of these worlds? Because that's kind of how I've landed where I've landed. I think there are many aspects of traditional training that is really great, right? That's great for building muscle. That's great for maximum output. That's great for putting on tissue, building maximal strength. But then you'll notice that when there are things within this functional, the crazy stuff that you were talking about, it forces you to work with weight in a very different way.

You interact with the weight differently than you would with a barbell or a dumbbell. There are things that you cannot do with a barbell or dumbbell that you can do with a club, a kettlebell, a rope, and a sandbag. Totally. And these force, and not, not even just force, these will bring about different, um, different progressions in terms of the way your body is able to move. You'll discover inefficiencies in the way you move with these implements that you didn't notice when you're working strictly with traditional weights. So again, over the time of that podcast, it's brought me to a place where, and I'm still learning more. I sit here and my goal is to continue to take the mindset of a student as I continue to learn more and just share these things with people and let them,

and just help them develop their own personal practice. It might not look exactly like mine, but it's going to be something that you truly enjoy, you want to do every day, day and you can progress. That was a lot. It's crazy because one of the things that kind of doesn't connect for me or didn't connect to me to start with, you're enormous. Your legs are wider than my entire body. And you only do sandbags, rope flow and these unconventional things. You're not, you never do like traditional squats. I do a lot of high volume calisthenics for like my muscle work these days. So are you so big because you used to be like a hardcore, competitive bodybuilder. And now you'd all you have to do is maintain. That's the catch 22.

That's the catch 22. I this is the thing. I can't say I know because when I was young, I started watching YouTube fitness when I was maybe 16 years old when there was Bismo Jones, Chris Jones, the Hodge twins who are now the conservative twins. I don't know if you've ever seen anything of the hodge twins. They're they're funny. There was like this this guy Matt Ogis, they were this but when it came to fitness all the things that you and actually my first, my first foray into watching YouTube for fitness education was Mike Chang of six-pack shortcuts and I don't know if you have ever seen six-pack shortcuts but Mike Chain now he does this thing called like flow 20 he's now into like fluid movement

and and all of that type of stuff very different from how he built his brand initially right but and Greg Plitt actually I want to mention great plate Greg Plitt was like my kind of David Goggins when I started watching fitness YouTube he's now he's now passed he's been dead for a few years but that's all I saw So I did what I saw when it came to training. I bodybuilded. And I don't regret any of that.

I think that learning how to build muscle with those traditional tools helped me build muscle. But the thing is, nowadays, I'm really stoked about the newer cats on the block who are starting off with more information than I did. There's this guy. Gosh, I wish I remembered his name. but his YouTube channel is the Stone Circle. I appreciate him, and we had him on our podcast. I appreciate him because he started out with calisthenics and sandbags. And he's jacked, right?

Really? He's big and jacked. He never did traditional weight. He does high volume calisthenics, which is traditional. Like, this is the thing. I also, like, what I really, I need to find different ways to put this terminology. Because when we think about traditional, the thing is, is the club, shit, that's been done for hundreds of years in Persia.

Right. The Pavlani clubs, exactly. Right. And Indian clubs, too, done for centuries. When it comes to the kettlebell, the Russians have been doing that for a very long time. The Chinese had their, a stone lock type tool. That was a kettlebell type tool for hundreds of years. So even when we think about... You're talking about flipping the kettlebell?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right? They would flip those and they would lift those and they would do a lot of different types of movements. And this has been done for centuries. So it's not like this stuff. is new, right? It might be new for some people who in our modern era have been seeing the barbell, the dumbbell, the commercial gym where you have to go in and train.

But these tools have been used for a very, very long time to strengthen the human body. And the only thing I want people to think about, or one of the things I want people to think about, isn't just the muscle-building side of things. Because I want to come back to your question of like, what I have gained all this muscle? It's how, how,

many ways do you know how to interact with weight of all kinds? Think about this. The barbell is the most efficient tool to put the most amount of weight on. It's the only reason I would be able to deadlift 755 pounds if we're on a barbell. Because if there's symmetrical weight on both sides, it's easy to grab. There's markers where you're supposed to fingers. Right, right, right. It's perfectly leveraged so you can put your body in the perfect position to hip hinge, keep a neutral spine and drive that barbell off the ground. There's no way in hell I could lift a 700, 600, 600, sandbag. No. No way at hell. There's no way I would have been able to lift that way with the sandbag. Yeah. Right. The dumbbell is also a great symmetrical weighted tool that you can do curls, presses,

all these things. They're very efficient tools. Yes. Right. But there are certain things that you're not going to do with those tools. Like for example, when you work with the sandbag, you can lift it. You can do explosive throws over the shoulder. You can do squats. You can do hinges. But the way you interact with that tool, instead of it being a barbell where the weight is perfectly in front of you, you have these perfect glids you can wedge yourself in.

You have to create different shapes with your spine to get your body interacting with that sandbag. Like you noticed when you were lifting a sandbag, what did your back have to do? How did it feel? My back had to get round. And I had to really focus on my hands, my grip around. around that bag, I had to think about, because my sandbags aren't packed to the brim. So I think it's probably easier to grab them, right? Actually, I like it when sandbags aren't fully packed.

It gives you a little bit of a shifting weight. Yeah, yeah. So now you have to make these micro adjustments as you're working with it. But keep on. Yeah. So, like, focusing on that hand grip because it's going to be different every time. You're not grabbing the barbell, your fingers in the same exact spot every single time. You, everything is, it's fluid.

So you have to figure out your grip, come up. And the breathing stuff is insane how that changes the game 100%. Because if you breathe out, you go on the on the on the exertion and then pull it to your body. It makes the it makes it almost I don't want to say effortless, but it diminishes a significant amount of pain and effort. Yes. I feel like. Yeah. So we're going to come back to that breathing bit that you're talking. Yes. But let me now kind of fully answer your question about like. would I be this big if I didn't have traditional training? I think there are still aspects of traditional training

that I would use to this day. I think I would still have gotten this big. But the thing is, if I was training with the ropes, with the kettlebells, with the sandbags, that wouldn't be the only thing I would do, right? I would still use the cable machine. I would still use aspects of the barbell. I wouldn't barbell deadlift, to be perfectly honest.

But I would use aspects of the barbell to load my body heavily with load because that compression force is really good for your bone density, as we were talking about. And I would have probably landed at the same spot. But the thing I want people to think about it. You don't have to be, I like the way you describe this, is like you, because most people like to think about when they get into stuff like this. They like to think about it like very myopically. Like they like to be cultish about their workouts and the type of workout they do.

Yeah. Instead of like being monotheistic about it, you're, you're polytheistic about it. You embrace everything, right? You just, you're very, you're very into the woo-woo stuff that we were doing that we were doing yesterday, which is, to be fair, most people just don't have access to that kind of stuff, right? Yes. Like, I'm very grateful that you've been sending me all this shit for the past few weeks. And now I have everything. We were pulling around a sled down the street using a ghee as a grip.

Yeah. Which is so fucking cool. And like, no one, I guarantee you, like less than 0.001% of the population has ever done that. Uh-huh. But the benefit you could get from that is astonishing. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy.

So we'll talk about the sled real quick. There's something I'm going to come back to later. But the sled is something that at this point, every commercial gym financially should buy a sled for their members. Right. No matter if you're a crunch fitness, if you're a small garage gym, if you're a big, if you're like a big box gym, every single gym should have a sled. It's a really cool thing that Hirox has been doing. If you've seen Hirox is like the new CrossFit competitor. They do like they have sandbag stuff.

They have like med ball throws, but every single high rocks box has a sled. The sled at my gym down the other gym I used to go to down the street has a like a regular sled with no wheels. Yeah, yeah. We have the badass rogue. What is the torque? The torque. Torque. The torque sled.

Yes. The tank. And they're actually coming out with one that's just like the M3, except it's even. it's going to be an even smaller profile. Right? It's got the three gears so you can dial it in. Magnetic resistance. Yes.

The funny thing about sleds and magnetic resistance is, again, it's one of those things where when certain things come out, people tend to like dis it. So the thing to dis about that sled is like it's on wheels. Like, of course it's easier to pull. It's on wheels. That's why they have magnetic resistance. Like that's why because like it's on wheels. So you're naturally going to be with it.

That's it right there. Yeah. But the thing about the magnetic resistance is when you put it at level two or level three, when the harder you pull, the harder resistance it pulls back. Wild. So you remember when- It's wild how hard it is. Yeah.

So like if you have a little hill that you can use it on, it's like when you're going up that hill, it's like you're playing tug-of-war with the sled. But the main thing I love about the sled is the fact that like my mom comes and works out with me. And it's an implement that I can do with her, boom, and I can then do it myself. And we can switch back. But I can get my mom moving through space backwards and forwards laterally, pushing and pulling a heavy load for her, right? And then I can also make it difficult for me.

Who's a hundred and something pounds heavier and much stronger than her? It can be a challenge for both of us. But not only that, when you're working with the sled, you're working through space with weight with locomoting through space. So again, when we come, when we have like our, our lists that are easy to teach, the squat, the deadlift, pressing, these are like They're like two dimensional workouts, right? And that's not a bad thing. Right.

It's like these, I look at these as like fundamentals. And again, it's like in the space of fitness, man, people, it's like me in my early 20s. I lifted heavy. I had the ability to do all these types of lists. I was able to power clean 315. Like I done these lifts. And at that point, I was just like,

I know everything when it comes to this. Or I know a majority of things. Like it's gonna be hard for somebody to show me something that's really gonna bring me much benefit because I can already do all of this. I get it. I get being that way because you spent so much time invested into learning this thing. It's like martial arts in a sense, where we got MMA fighters who have learned all of these different practices and how to meld it together so now they can go for a take down, immediately come up and be striking, immediately go,

like they can go between all these things versus someone like me who just does jiu-jitsu. Like we just do Jiu-Jitsu, right? But when it comes to fitness, the thing to think about is like how, again, what are the ways that I can expand the way that I can work with weight? Now with a sled, your feet, when you're moving through space, you're not only strengthening your feet, because you're pushing a heavy weight forward. So yesterday, when we were moving that, you noticed that you were getting deep into the toes, right? You were able to, when you're moving backward, you're getting deep into the feet, but you were having to put all of that force through the implement as you're moving through space. That also,

So I, not even I believe, is an absolute safer way to load every single human body on the planet. Not that you cannot put a barbell on somebody's back or that you shouldn't put a barbell on somebody's back. But when somebody who's, let's say they're a bit on the more fragile side, they come in and you do want to load them with something and you want to, you need to put inputs to make their body stronger, the sled. The sled is where I think this, again, if people had the ability, Jim's had the option,

That's where you can put everybody and get a great stimulus for the feet all the way to the upper body. It's something that when people start walking backwards, this is something that Ben Patrick, my friend, knees over toes guy, I learned from him years ago when I was in my early 20s how great backwards walking is for the knees. Right. So when we were doing backwards walking, by the way, you know, you made a comment about this. Yeah, my knees were my knees were like I felt weird soreness in my knees. You were getting a massive pump into knees because when you move backwards, when you take a step back, That is an introduction of a knee-over-toe position, right? When you walk back, so you could do that without a sled. You could do that up your stairs.

You could do that up a hill. But that's one of the easiest, safest ways to start making the knee get stronger, right? So, like, again, it's one of those things where people will look at that torque and be like, it has wheels, it's easy. But it's one of those things where it's like- It's not easy, folks. It's not easy, especially when you load it up and you use that magnetic resistance.

Yeah. But it's also extremely safe. Mm-hmm. If you enjoy watching our show on Spotify or YouTube and you want to be more involved, I encourage you to please come check out our Patreon community. Not only does our Patreon community get every episode you see on YouTube early, fully uncensored, and ad-free, but we're also doing Patreon exclusive episodes, as well as live Q&As, and you can get your personal questions answered by our guests

every single week. For me, being able to collaborate and communicate back and forth with our Patreon community every week has been huge. And this is my way of saying thank you for the cost of a couple of calls. coffee a month. Now back to the show. And pulling it with the ghee, I noticed a lot of the things that we, we did yesterday, a lot of that stuff really works your hands and your fingers and all the little micro muscles that are in between your fingers and your joints and stuff like that. My fingers are sore today. My hands are sore. Especially, I mean, not just pulling with the ghee, but also doing the berserker bar and all that kind of stuff. Like the way that it strengthens your wrist and your fingers and stuff is unbelievably, it's got to be unbelievably. good for things like jujitsu. And that's what I like about this stuff is because, like, getting to the age that I'm at, you know, I'm approaching my 40s. And I want to do more fun stuff like jujitsu, like skateboarding, like stuff with my kids.

So like, I don't want to be this, you know, super unathletic, unflexible dude who's going to get injured a lot, right? Like I want to mitigate injuries. no matter what it takes. So doing this kind of stuff is amazing. Like it's like I said before, it's not like working out in a two-dimensional space. It's like you're doing it in a three-dimensional space

where you're literally turning one way, turning the other way. You're working your hands, your wrists, your forearms, like scapula, like different scapula positions, like thinking about your gate. Yeah.

It's just, it's like drinking from a garden hose or like a fire hose the first time you do it. Like for me yesterday, but like I haven't been able to, stop thinking about it. It's just so, it's so amazing how this stuff works, dude. You know, one of the reasons why I, I, this age of information is amazing, I think, for health and fitness. It could be a little bit overwhelming because there's, there's so many things.

If somebody comes across my channel, they'll see me talk about all these things. Yeah. But it's also great because you can see the transformation of people. For example, for myself, I have everything that I've done on my YouTube channel all the way to when I started Jiu-Jitsu. Yeah, yeah. I was watching some of your old videos bro. Right when I was talking, I don't know if you saw the video when I started Jiu-Jitsu, the black belt that tapped me six times in six minutes. I have that video there. I put all this stuff out so people can see what it takes to learn new things. Right? Because if I, if I just put all those things out after I've learned it, people would be like, oh, you just know how to do it. And what I was getting at was actually Chris Bumstead. You know who he is?

I've heard of him. Probably the most famous modern bodybuilder in existence. Oh, yeah, the Australian dude. Actually, I don't think he's Australian. He's, I think he's, I think pretty sure he's American. Or does he live in Australia? Maybe he lives in Australia. I don't know if he lives in Australia, but he's, he's American. He's a dude who wears like the big baggy jeans. That's Sam Sulloch, I think.

No, I'm not thinking of Sam Sula. No, no, I know who Chris Brumstead is. My brother, my brother showed me this guy. Okay. For some reason, I thought he was Australian. Yeah, that's Sibu. Yeah. Is he Australian or am I crazy?

Canadian. Canadian. Okay. He's Canadian. Okay. Way off there. He's so nice. I apologize to my Australian.

million listeners. I've never met Chris Bumston. Dude, he is a monster. He is. He's probably, no, not probably. Not only that is, he's got like the most insanely chiseled jaw I've ever seen. Yeah, yes. He's got the crimson chin. That's death face that. I mean, he still has a great chin when he's not in competition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but when you get lean, that chin, uh, uh, it just, it pops, bro, it pops. Go go down, zoom out, zoom out, zoom out, zoom out. Go, oh, click on that one, bro. Jesus. Is that him? Why does that not look like his face kind of?

It is him. It must be him younger. It's him younger for sure. Yeah, it's just his face looks different. All right. Is this guy natural or is he on gear? Of course not. Okay. Okay. We should lay this out up front because there's going to be a lot of people in the comments. Yeah. You're natural. I am. And your blood work's available online for the haters. Yes. We've done and I have a video on my, on my second channel where literally one of the doctors from Merrick Health, because I get blood work done. So I know what supplements I should take. And I'm going to remember. I'm going to remember. I'm going to remember. I'm going to. I'm going to make myself remember to come back to C-bum, let me write down C-bum. Yeah. I put it out there so that people can see,

because first off, if I'm someone who's gonna be talking about health and fitness all the time and maybe potentially giving people suggestions on things to think about with their health, I'm gonna be transparent with my labs. I have no reason to hide it. And we've also on our podcast on air, we've done my blood work has been analyzed

by someone on air when I was at my when I was at my leanest. So this is really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna just continue to, because when I've got my blood work done, I'll record it and I'll put it out for people to see. Yeah. I just pray to God. LH and FSHs are high and your testosterone, like in like the 900s or like? No, no, my test was like 750 or 760 something. But the cool thing about that is when thinking about testosterone, come back to sebum, when thinking about testosterone,

um, that was my testosterone while still training jiu-jitsu, while still doing my activities. So the thing is when you train a lot and you get your blood work done, this is something to think about. If you see low markers or something, realize that those are your markers underneath stress. That's typically when I like to get my markers. I like to see what are my markers like when I'm training, when I'm training hard, because that'll give me a true baseline of how my body is doing with the inputs I currently have and if I'm able to handle it or not, right? So if I took like two weeks off or a week off, my testosterone would probably be higher.

Everything would probably be in nicer places. But I like to see my blood work when I'm under a level of stress because that's the most accurate. That's how I live my life. Right. You know what I mean? So I should see my bloods under that under that prescription. So you'll do heavy lift before you go and get your blood work done? I won't do it like heavy. I won't do anything different. Okay. I'll just like train my jiu-jitsu, do my lifting, get my blood work. Yeah. Right. Because this is how my body's running underneath the stresses I'm placing upon it. Right. Right. And if for some reason in the future, if I start to see things starts to go down, things starts to look bad and I'm getting, I'm starting to feel a way. That means I need to adjust. my stimulus. I need to adjust maybe how much work I'm doing or adjust my sleep. That doesn't mean I need to just turn to TRT. Do you think you'll ever hop on roids? Not roids. I mean T R testosterone.

I want to, if I hop on testosterone, I want to push that back for a long time. Yeah. It's it's we've talked to so many people on the power project. Yeah, yeah. Testosterone and all these things where I'm at a point where I'm just like, yeah, this is all great, but like I don't want to have to pull that trigger when I'm young. And I don't want people because there's a lot of there's a lot of guys in their 30s and and their 20s, the guys in their 20s who are doing it, it's partially because of the fitness industry

and people in the industry really push testosterone as just being this found of youth for men, and it's great. But I think people turn the testosterone knob too quickly before addressing their sleep, their activity, their supplements, their nutrition, all these levers that can be pulled to affect your hormone levels positively. Now the quick thing is just like, let's take test.

But the thing that people don't think about is when you pull that trigger, Most guys don't turn back. Once you... Never. It feels too good. Right. So it's like you now have this, you've pulled, you've flipped this switch before you've gone

through all these other switches that could potentially get you similar results. And not just that, come back to Sebum, remind myself. Not just that, there is a, there is a speed that people seek when it comes to progression in their fitness. And it's one of the reasons why I feel for the younger generation of people who are, interested in their physical development. The reason is when I was younger, right, when I started lifting, there was no YouTube. I was 13 when I started lifting.

There was no YouTube. So I just like, literally there was this big black guy I'd look at in the gym when I would start training in the neighborhood gym that I had. And I would kind of just be a creep and kind of just do what he did. I realized that he was there at 7.30 every single day, for the most part. And I'd have my mom like, either take me there

or let me walk there around that time so I could watch him train, right? So I learned how to train by kind of, kind of mimicking somebody. And then I got YouTube and all that stuff. But the thing is, is early days of YouTube, there wasn't as much steroid and testosterone talk as there is now.

And being normal. Now you got young guys hopping on TRT in their early 20s, mid-20s, because they see young kids like Alex Eubank and all these other fitness influencers. Sam Tulek, yeah. Just kind of, and the thing is, is like, if that's your prerogative, go ahead,

but I don't think people are being realistic with the health ramifications that come using these tools and the dependency that you're gonna have mentally, psych like psychologically and physically to these tools where you're not gonna want to come off right there's a there's another guy and also how many these young kids that are doing it are actually doing blood work and getting it getting it monitored by a physician and it's because they want to get big fast right that by the time I started making YouTube videos I've are I was

already lifting for like nine years you know what I mean I was I've already been in it you know what I mean so most people don't spend that time of time kind of time just learning to lift, learning to move, all these things before they choose to hit that dial. And it's because they're seeking it too quickly. Let me quickly take this back to something we were talking about earlier. What I have gained this amount of muscle. Yeah. I would have. But the thing is, is my time horizon would not be the same, right? So instead of doing an upper lower push, pull split five days a week, just just resistance, resistance, hypertrophy, hypertrophy, maybe I have two days or three days where I do some of that traditional type of stuff,

maybe some high volume calisthenics, and then I can mix in rope flow every single day because to practice that doesn't really take away from any of that. It just helps you move better. And then other days I can maybe do this stuff that helps my body move well, right? Like the sandbag work, some of the club work for the shoulders and the grip. I can do that on other days. There's been so much research to show that for the general population to gain muscle,

all they need is two to three days of lifting a week. So one can apply that to themselves. I mean, even there's this guy, Mike Menser, who it's funny. Oh, yeah. There's, you know, I'm not even to get into, there's a coach that was dissing Mike, Mike Menser's training. Oh, yeah. And he's the guy that got the giant legs, right? Mike Menser.

Yeah. Mike Menser has giant everything. Okay. He's a great looking bodybuilder. But he was all about like intensity with like less sets and high intensity sets. So the thing is, if you have. And he used to say he only trained legs like every other week. Is that the same guy?

I'm not sure about that. Okay. So someone may have to look that up. Someone has to look that up. Okay. But there are many bodybuilders and many, many of these athletes who they just had very, very powerful training sessions, very intense training sessions. And who's to say that you can't do those types of training sessions, but they don't have

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You know what I mean? So would I have gained that amount of muscle? Yes. But would I have also increased my time horizon for muscle gain? Because that's not the only thing that is important. Muscle and strength isn't the only thing that exists within a movement practice. It's not the only thing that's important. If it were the only thing that was important,

Christopher Bumstead, who's probably the best modern bodybuilder, wouldn't be trying to do all these functional things to game his athleticism back. In his own words, in one of his recent posts, he said, this specific coach is helping me fix my broken body. One would not think that someone who looks like Chris Bumstead would refer to his body as being broken. Of course, when we say broken,

Chris is not disabled in any sense. he can walk, et cetera. But there are certain things within his limited movement. Limited movement. Like he, and again, with everything I'm about to say about Chris Bumstead,

I give him massive kudos for going out there and showing the things that he's weak at. I love it when people bring you on the journey with them doing something. Because he did, he did a, I think a 40-yard dash. He did, his obvious tests of strength were great,

but his tests of movement were not high, right? And it's because for years, this guy spent all of his time dedicating himself to being the best bodybuilder in the world. I think he was maybe five, four or five time Mr. Olympia. That is 0.001% work ethic and not just genetics and talent and skill, but also dedication, focus on trying to get better. He has all these other attributes too. But now, even though he's so high level

at all of this stuff when it comes to lifting, he chooses to do something and progress at something that is antithetical to the skill that he's built. Right. So I'm saying that because it goes to show that this aspect of lifting is not everything when it comes to moving well. And some people would say then, all you have to do is just lift and move, right?

And if that's what you want to do, you can lift and you want to play a sport, that's fine. But I think there are other forms of lifting. and interacting with load, right, that can yield positive movement benefits for everybody without taking away from the goals that you're trying to achieve. Mm-hmm.

100%. So when it comes to your like personal routine, how much of, we talked about, we covered the sled stuff. Yeah. The, what are the bars called again? The berserker bar stuff. Yeah.

The mace. the rope flow stuff, the kettlebell stuff. How much of the like traditional compound movements, like bench press or like barbell squats do you incorporate in? Or even like dumbbells? Yeah, yeah. So I work out in my home gym, right? Or in my garage.

That is- Pull out a picture of his home gym. Yeah, it's pretty much my garage space. I've turned that into, I've actually turned my home into my gym. Insane, bro. The video with you and Jujimufu is one of the sickest, most inspirational videos I've ever seen when it comes to weightlifting and like personal training stuff. Yeah.

Jujimuf was another guy who I really appreciate. And I love the way his mind works when it comes to movement because he's also an eternal sponge. Someone that is very high level at the things that he does but is continuously willing to learn and apply and share. He's great at that because he's an amazing acrobat. He has great amazing ability on the rings in terms of his calisthenic ability. Yeah.

He's super strong. He moves super well. but he's he's constantly evolving. But going back to your question, what my movement practice looks like. Right. So it's, I'll explain my movement practice.

His gym is full of clubs, maces, trampoline sandbags, sled. It looks a little bit better now. You have like, it's hard to see because of the lighting here, but you got like a hundred ropes.

Yeah. Look at this. It looks much better now. I added a cable machine onto my wall. Okay. There's a cable machine on my wall. I have a, and I don't have that much more equipment, but I have a cable machine to allow me to do some isolation work every now and then.

So let me actually just first explain this. So I can kind of give people the framework at which I look at fitness through. We'll talk about the breath because you kind of alluded to that earlier with the sandbag. But the breath is like a baseline later and when I think about moving and fitness. But let me just kind of give you a quick rundown. The breath is extremely important. We'll come to that later. There's a foundational aspect when it comes to whatever you set up for yourself.

And your foundation is exactly as it sounds. Can your structure handle load and can your structure produce a good amount of force? This is a very broad idea. But what that means is when we look at barbell trading, it's exactly that. Can your structure produce force against load? Can your structure handle load? When we look at calisthenics, same thing, but with your own body. body weight.

If you define calisthenics for folks who might not be familiar. Calesthetics is like body weight training. Think about people that are, think about gymnasts. Olympians that use the rings and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's all calisthetic type work. You could do that on the rings when you're doing pushups.

You're doing calisthenics with the body when you're doing pull-ups. That's calisthenics. You can add weight to that and add extra low to those calisthenics to build muscle or or make yourself stronger, right? That's calisthenics. So the thing is, is like you even have an ability to build your foundation with your body weight. Let's just think about guys in prison.

Of course, they have aspects, they have access to weights. They usually give them a bench press and stuff. But they also do a lot of high volume calisthenics. And I'm not just trying to use the prison population as a group of people. But the thing is, is like, you see guys go in, come out jacked. Jacked. Right. And a lot of them will say, I just did a lot of pushups, pull ups, dips, and I did some squats.

You know what I mean? So like. And on the shittiest diet imaginable. Hey, a lot of carbs, a lot of food, a lot of sleep. And you're not, you know, you're just, you're just focused on. Yeah, gaining muscle. So there's the foundation aspect. The next kind of framework that I, not even framework, but the next aspect of this framework is your ability of elastic movement or elasticity. So your bounce. A lot of people as they get older, and I think something that ends up happening with people is a lot of people that end up finding my stuff have been lifting for a while. They have a feeling of I don't see myself jumping anymore. I'm pretty stiff. I don't move well. And I've already been training in this way and it's not solving those problems. Right. So your ability to bounce and jump, I believe, is I believe that every single person on earth, if they've lost it, can get it back. Because it's all about doing these movements in small amounts and microdosing them.

We're going to come back to the idea of microdosing. But I have parts of my movement practice where I hop, jump. The easiest way of bringing yourself back to being able to jump is by literally just like bouncing and not leaving the ground, but feeling that elastic bounce of your body on the ground. and then you could do light hops, or if you go on a walk, you can do skips. I mean, once the last time you've skipped, right? It's a very childlike movement. But over time, we stop leaving the ground in that specific, ballistic type of way. And many people cannot remember, especially as they get older,

cannot remember the last time they've jumped. If you slowly bring that back a few minutes each day, this is the idea of the microdose, and just like do a few hops in the morning or skip a little bit on a walk and just be making your mind, I want to start bringing this back. Over time, you'll be able to start hopping elastically, where now your hops don't take you any energy. And then if you want to start jumping higher,

doing depth drops and all those types of things that need a lot more recovery, you can do that. But bounce is your ability to leave the ground elastically and handle the force of the ground, right? So that's another aspect of the way I look at this. The next thing that I look at is your ability to control your body in different ranges of motion along with controlling different objects, right?

So object manipulation is kind of like an idea. So when we look at things like the rope, right, you're funneling energy, energy through this object and you're rotating using your spine as the lever of movement. Because a lot of the foundational work, which most people already do a lot of foundational work, your focus is this neutral spine, right? You don't rotate, you don't do any of these types of movements

that allow you fluid rotation. You keep your spine neutral. And a lot of people from that end, when you watch them move, it's undeniable. You don't see any type of spinal rotation. You don't see fluidity in the way they move. They're very stiff. So the rope is one aspect of control. I also, I do a lot of juggling now, right?

And that's mainly for my eyes and my hand-eye coordination. I do a lot of things with juggling where one hand is doing something and the other hand is doing something else moving in different positions because I want to be able to handle multiple inputs at once. This doesn't only help my eyes. And over time with juggling, I do it without looking at the ball so I can train my peripheral vision. It also improves my ability to handle multiple inputs at once and reacting to different inputs that are going in front of me. Because again, most people, when it comes to fitness, people got lives, bro.

I get it. Like, I threw a lot of stuff at you these past two days. I don't expect you to do all of this at once, right? Yeah. This is something that you're going to be learning and improving at this stuff for years, just like you're going to be improving at Jiu-Jitsu over the years just like you're going to be improving at skateboard over years. It takes time. But over time, you're going to be able to add all these abilities into your movement practice where you can pick and choose what you do and what you improve at.

Yes. Totally. So the best way to optimize this stuff is to make it so it works together. Right. Like it's if you're doing jujitsu or if you're skateboarding or if whatever you're like whatever your sport is. If your workouts actually improve your ability to perform those things, then that's the Holy Grail. If they all, if it's a puzzle that all fits to get, where every piece fits together and makes the other piece better. Yes. That's the key. Exactly. Exactly. And I think another key, all right, and I'm going to come back to this whole framework thing that I was talking about, but another key is finding practices that can allow you to improve at your main goal, whether your goal is being a runner, whether your goal is your main interest athletically

is jiu-jitsu or martial arts. Or maybe your main goal is being a strong lifter. Finding other practices that don't beat you up, that can still give you positive inputs towards the goal you're going for. So let's quickly come back to this idea of like rope flow and control, et cetera. The benefit that rope flow brings everyone that does it

is that first it's a practice that everyone can do. That's one of the reasons why I love it. It's a movement practice everyone can do that can allow them to get in this flow state, but teaches them how to move better. We should show a video. Find a video of Encema doing his rope flow on YouTube. It'll be illustrated for folks who are watching.

Teach them how to move better because I want to also mention, I make sure to give credit to the people that have helped me along the journey. David Weck, you know, I think we were talking about him before the episode, but he's the guy who created rope flow back in the year 2000. He's the guy who created the Bosu Ball. He came onto our podcast. He shared rope flow with me. Initially, I try not to have this reaction when I hear certain things from people,

but it sometimes still hits the back of my head a little bit. I heard it. I was like, this is stupid. Because I see this dude swinging a rope around. And like, why would that be how beneficial for me? My goal is being a kick-ass graphing. And he's not jacked. He's not jacked.

Like, the reason this stuff is so interesting is because you're fucking jacked, bro. Like, you are, you are like unusual physique for someone you see doing this stuff. So it's like, there's some sort of thing that happens where it's like, I'm in You know? Like if I saw some skinny, you know, nerd doing this, I'd be like, turn it off. Which I find very unfortunate. I find I find unfortunate because I had that reaction to David when he showed me. But the thing that one of the things that convinced me was his his coach, his main one of the right hand of Weck method. The guy who helps explain everything Chris Chamberlain. His Instagram handle is eroding weakness. This man is a freak of nature. Let me tell you he's a buck 70 bucks 75. He's shouldered 300 pounds in terms of a sandbag. That took me warm to shoulder 300 pounds. Chris Chamberlain his shoulder

300 pounds. Maybe he was a little bit heavier when he did it, but he managed that. Crazy grip. Does a lot of uncommential things. Well, in your Jimmy Jufu video, you toss. Jimmy Jiu-Ju-Mufu. Whatever, tomato tomato. You chucked a 250-pound sandbag over your shoulder like without even warming up. Yeah, but the thing is, is with that, I need to remind us, come back to WEC. You got to, you got to get WIC his flowers, bro. I love that guy. But even with the sandbag, man, I came from a, I came from a background of lifting 500, 600 pounds.

And I would, you know, I would pause. There's videos of me pause deadlifting 650 pounds. So it leaves the ground. I pause, lift it, bring it back, pause, let it hit the ground. I've done stuff like that. And when I start working the sandbags, 150 pounds tweaked my back. Right?

Because it's a very different way of lifting and interacting with a tool. Your body has to get into a different shape. So we'll come back to that. Yeah, okay. We were talking about my row full, but keep me on track. I'm, trust me. That's why I have this.

I have this here because I'm like, we got to come back to this, right? You're the first guest who's ever been on here who also had a daylight. Dude, I mean. We're daylight twins today. Yeah, yeah, I love this thing. It's the best, bro. It's the fucking best. But David, when he showed it to me, I initially thought it was BS.

But over the period of time, the reason why I love, I love podcasting is we're able to bring in high quality people that can selfishly, we can ask them about our specific issues. So for the longest time, I had this pain in the right side of my lower back that would not go away. And every single guest that came on, we had soft tissue folks, we had different movement folks. We had people that like ran the gambit of fitness and movement and bodywork. No one was able to help me fully solve this issue. It was the only thing in my body that like I couldn't fully figure out and I couldn't understand why. So when David showed me rope flow, it took me a while to build a consistent practice with it because I wasn't staying consistent with it.

I should have just applied my, the microdose idea. And microdosing isn't my idea. Pavel Tatsuel talks about greasing the groove, which is just daily inputs. You see around a patch we're talking about movement snacks. Like people are talking about this and I'm happy that that's happening. But I wasn't applying the micro dose to it.

So I would do it inconsistently. But every time I do it, I'm like, it feels good. This feels good. This feels good. And then finally, I was like, you know what? I am starting to really like this. Let me just, let me really really.

dive in and give this practice more of my time. Like I want to improve at this. I want to, I started treating rope flow like I treated jujitsu. Like I would watch videos. I would drill. I would practice. And with any type of new practice, there's a level of frustration that comes with it because it doesn't look like the guys who are doing it well. But after I start doing it more consistently, there was a morning I woke up where the back pain wasn't there on the right side of the back. I got out of bed and it wasn't there. I was like, okay. And then it happened again and again and again and the pain didn't come back. And I was like, okay, let me figure out why this happened. The reason why it happened was because with practicing rope flow, inherently,

this is going to be a little bit confusing. It's an asymmetrical practice that is symmetrical in practice. What that means is one side of the body is doing one thing, right? And, and, and, And the other side of the body is rotated in a different way. When you bring the rope to the other side, this is contralateral movement, just like when you're walking through space. One side of the body is rotated, the other side of the body is doing another thing.

You're learning to move the rope with something that people call the spinal engine. It's a theory that was popularized by Serge Grakiewski. He wrote a book on it. I have a video on my channel that kind of explains the spinal engine. And it's this idea that good movement funnels through the spot.

right not just through your arms and your legs because people sometimes think to move through space you just swing the arms and the legs but good fluid movement is actually funneled through rotation a figure eight rotation of the spine and what was happening was a rope flow was improving my ability to funnel energy through the tool of the rope using my spine as the main lever so I was learning how to really get my spine rotating versus every practice that I was doing was typically keeping my spine perfectly neutral the second thing was that one thing was that one that one's Everybody has a dominant and a non-dominant side when it comes to their ability to move. I'm right-handed. In Jiu-Jitsu, I tend to sweep people towards my right side. I tend to dive on my right knee when I go for certain takedowns. When you roll with people, you will tend to do the thing that feels the most comfortable to you and your body because you'll throw with one arm, right? Rope flow forces you when you swing the rope on one side of your body, you then get a rep on the opposite side of your body. Your left side for me, which is the non-dominant. And one thing that happens within your brain is like, let me try to make the way I move on this side of my body as good and as beautiful as the other side of my body.

So now, you know, you feel the rope hitting you constantly on your left side. You're like, let me fix that rotation and make my rotation work as well as my right side. And then over time, what I found was like, I'm doing more sweeps towards my left side. I'm doing more movements that I don't typically do with Jiu-Jitsu towards the other side of my body. because every single sport and every single martial art and every single movement that you do is a rotational movement. Or ideally, it should be if it's powerful.

Punches are rotational. If you look at a good punch or throw a punch, he doesn't just throw it with his arm. He funnels power through the ground and throws it through his spine, funneling it through the arm. They you know how to use their spine to produce force.

And the rope, in a very gentle way, if you want it to be gentle, will teach you how to do that. You'll start to develop more movement intelligent on the opposite side of your body, the side that you typically don't work. I mean, for people, they should think about what tan do I brush my teeth with?

How do I get out of the car every day? There are always ways, especially when you have a routine, there are ways that you move consistently that are just patterned into your body. And you won't get out of a chair in a certain way. You won't get up in a certain way because your body's like, this is what we do. This is the groove that we grease.

And Rolfo teaches you to get that opposite side, fluidly moving through space, which is why, over time, that back pain went away because in Jiu-Jitsu, I was overdoing right-side rotational movement. And the rope was able to bring in the opposite side, which evened out my movement, helped me get rid of tension in certain areas that I didn't even realize I had tension, and made me a more symmetrical moving human. So let me ask you this. Is the rope specifically doing anything mechanical to the body? to the bones, to the muscles, to the tendons, to relieve pressure, or to build muscle or anything?

Or is this strictly cognitive? It is because you're swinging a tool through space. So a heavier version, not even version, but a heavier implement would be a club or a mace, right? You swing that implement. To an extent, when you have a lighter clubber mace, you can swing it like a rope, but when it's heavier, there are certain things,

there's certain ways you can swing it. But the rope, since you're swinging it, initially, it's very handsy. So you'll see people when they swing the rope, it's very with the hands, right? The hands are doing the control, the wrists are doing the control. But the goal is to learn how to use the spine along with the weight shift that happens naturally in the feet and the hips to funnel energy through that rope as you're moving it through space. So this is one of the reasons why when people watch rope flow, you'll see certain people do rope flow. And it won't look, I'd say it just won't look cool or it won't look the way the, it won't look appetizing to do another video, his rope flow. Look at his Instagram. He's got good videos on his

Instagram. Right. But when you see someone who has learned how to funnel energy through their spine to move that rope through space, it's a very different looking practice. It's, it looks martial in a sense, right? Because there's a lot of patterns within the practice that you can throw elbows with the rope. You can throw uppercuts with the rope. You can, I like getting low and doing takedown type movements as I'm working with the rope because all these movements are inherently rotational. And because of that, when you learn to funnel the energy with your spine through the rope, it brings you a level of decompression to your spine and your shoulders because you're using that to funnel energy. Right. So since it's swinging and there's a light amount of inertia

if you're using a lighter rope. As you use heavier ropes, I have a rope that's like 2.5 kilograms. You're going to feel even more inertia and you're going to feel that it's really pulling at you and you're going to start feeling tired in the wrist and the forearms and the hands. That can potentially be beneficial for some muscle,

but the goal isn't purely building muscle. The goal is improving the way that you move so that everything else you do feels better and feels easier. That looks like a big ass rope you got there. That is a big ass rope. That one is like 2.5 kilograms. And you know, you're like almost dancing with that fucking thing. I feel like it's the thing.

I look at rope flow as it's like own. It can it can look like dancing. And you know what? I've seen, I've seen people in fitness. People with fitness love this tribal stuff. So there are certain people I've seen who are like, I'm not going to spend my time dancing. Right. But like, well, you're not going to spend your time dancing because you're stiff as bored, dog.

Right. It doesn't look. I mean, one thing you can say is it doesn't look boring, especially like once you get flowing. And if you're playing some music, like you can have fun doing this. It's not more. It's super fun. And this is the thing.

I, the reason why I look at row flow kind of like jiu-jitsu is because in the beginning, movements don't make sense. You feel uncoordinated because you are uncoordinated. You are uncoordinated. That's okay. We all have the ability to learn new skills and new movements. But over time, as you learn the link with your body, these movements, the way you rotate in your spine,

it becomes a flow state practice. This is a practice that when I found it, I then realized I can actually improve the movement that I'm gonna be doing when I do Jiu-Jitsu without having to always go to Jiu-Jitsu. It's a practice that made me comfortable with stepping back from my frequency on the mats and doing other things because doing this helps me do Jiu-Jitsu better.

I'm not saying that doing this will, is helping me to perform the arm bar or it's not, it's not specifically making all these movements. You have to go to Jiu-Jitsu to get better at Jiu-Jitsu. Right. But there's also your ability to become a better moving human being, which will then allow you to do those moves in Jiu-Jitsu in a smoother fashion. That's what I mean when I say finding things that don't beat you up as much, but still

allow you to go towards your main goal with as much vigor, more intensity, and to be perfectly honest, more longevity, right? I know so many people right now that are in the stronger human community or that like this guy, Jade Teda, we had him on our podcast, but he sent me a DM, and I put I put it in a blog because I'm like I love hearing stuff like this. Jade said that he's been lifting for 37 years and this past year he just started rope flow and it was the one practice that finally helped him solve his shoulder issues and back shoulder issues that he's been dealing with for years. Wow. Right? That it's on my blog. I put the screenshot there and I put it there because this is someone who is done and has do is done all the lifting. He's a trainer. He's written multiple books on metabolic health. Jade is he knows what he's doing. But even somebody with all that experience can get benefit from learning a new practice, right? And it just goes to show that you, it doesn't matter how much you think you know. Doesn't matter how much I think I know. I'm going to keep learning. I'm in a constant state of

learning and evolving. And yes, I'm open to ideas. Doesn't necessarily mean that everything that I do is going to be the thing that I do forever. But I've applied so many things that I've learned to build a practice that is working and benefiting the way that I move and improving the way that I move. So the last actually thing that I was going to mention here, I mentioned that control piece, right? We talked about that foundational aspect of your movement practice, having something within your practice that promotes your bounce, like even like a rebounder. If you're someone who leaves the ground and you can't jump without hitting the ground and feeling pain, get yourself a rebounder, right?

Because you can start to pop off of that thing and that can actually help you learn to release like jump and handle force because it takes away a bit of that ground reaction force right so you can start building that jump that like there are people that rebound that are 250 300 350 pounds right and it gets their body ready for handling lands on ground right so another way to regress bounce and then we talked about control which is like controlling your body doing movement slowly or object manipulation in certain ways improving your hand eye foot eye coordination reaction right which is great that you're skateboarding yeah because like you have a practice is that's inherently working your balance. You're not having to handle that shifting of weight on the board. You're falling and learning how to fall well.

You have jujitsu, which also is really beneficial for control. But then the last thing that I look at is flow. And I look at flow as its own thing, because flow is integration of all of it, right? The best feeling for an athlete is a flow state. 100%. And a majority of people, because of life, you got work, you got kids, you got responsibilities.

Many people, when it comes to their fitness, the main thing that they look at is I want to look better and I don't want my heart to go when I'm 50 or 60. So I'm going to do a little bit of cardio. But they don't think about how can I make this practice pleasurable by getting so good that I can get into a flow state with it. A flow state is when all of this stuff becomes unconscious. You're not thinking about the way that you're swinging and removing the rope. You're rhythmically moving. everything is just bam, bam, bam. It's your brain is off, your body's on.

I can get into a flow state with jiu-jitsu because I've been doing it for so long. I didn't used to in the past, but now I've been doing it for so long that jiu-jitsu is a flow-state activity for me. I don't have to think about all the moves I do. They just happen, right? And it's still a skill,

just because I can get in a flow state, doesn't mean I'm not getting better. I train so I can continue to improve. But when you get good, it's why you see certain grapplers, they look like they're asleep when they're rolling. Because they're in a flow state.

Runners can get into a flow state because it's a runner's high. They're not thinking about the next steps they take. They're so proficient that they're not there. Their brain is off and they're just moving forward, right? But I have practices like rope flow, like maces and clubs, like even juggling. It's a control tool. But over time, when you become proficient enough, it's a practice that now you can just go with the rhythm and you're in a flow state when it comes to tossing those up and interacting with different tools in your space.

And I think that having a flow state activity is, I want more research to be done on these things. I really do. Because Mihajik set me, I wrote a whole book on flow. And then Stephen Cotter, there's a guy who wrote a, I don't think it's Stephen Cotter. Steve Cotter is a kettlebell coach that passed away.

But there's a Stephen who wrote a book about flow states and how beneficial it is for the brain. And the thing is, is when people think about flow states, a lot of the activities that people use to get into flow states, It's like, yes, you can get into flow states with work. But a lot of physical activities are pretty stressful. And it's like to induce flow, we think that we also have to have a lot of stress. But that's why I like rope flow as a flow state practice.

There are many flow state practice. But the reason I'm like rope flow is because the flow state practice doesn't beat you up, which is another reason why I felt comfortable kind of backing away from my jiu-jitsu frequency a bit and progressing at other things. Because now I have a movement practice that I can reliably get into a flow state with that can just help my body feel amazing. Yes. Right. And that is like it's decompressive for my system. So instead of it, instead of doing all these things that beat me up all the time, which is good.

But you need practices that can benefit you that don't beat you up. Right. People that are, you know, there are people that are very anti new things. So something I see is like, well, then just rest. sleep like of course of course but a lot of benefit comes from movement you know a lot of times when you get an injury some of sometimes some of the best things you can do is like go on a slow walk yeah you can sit and rest but movement and getting blood flow to those areas is really great for recovery yeah and that's one of the reasons why

like rope flow also the psychological benefits of of getting into flow are unheard of you know absolutely absolutely you know when it comes to these tools like the reason why it's difficult for researchers to do studies on this, which is why all of the popular health individuals like the Andrew Hooverman's, the Gabriel Lyons, the Rhonda Patricks, all these people have started getting into resistance training and understanding its benefit for longevity.

Building muscle is amazing for longevity, bone density, tendon strength, keeps the body strong as you get older. But the thing is sandbags are hard to study because there's a skill element and a way you have to work with these tools. Same thing with, clubs and the way that you have to interact with your rotation of your spine and your shoulders.

You're trying to tell me there's no double blind peer reviewed study on sandbag training? There's no double blind studies on any of this type of training. And it's one of those things where we're in an age where the doctor before the name is the thing that gives people their their pillar to stand on. For good reason, it's very hard to become a doctor. Yeah. But when it comes, to movement ability. Everyone can move and everyone can learn to move. And when you're a doctor, you're stuck kind of paying attention to what the research tells you to do.

Yeah, and in one very specific lane. One very specific lane. So if you're going, like, if you're going to talk about anything, honestly, that's why I'm happy that I get to do what I do. Because I don't need to wait. I don't need to wait for these people to tell me that this works. Because I've experienced it. I've shared it with people who have massive benefit from it.

So I don't need a test to tell me that this is good for muscle gain or this is good for the body. Right. Because these practices are things that, first off, have been done before we were doing double-pline placebo tests. Right. Yes. But along with that, people that take it upon themselves to put it into practice before the doctor says you can do it, are gaining benefit. Right. So what I want to encourage people to do is pay attention.

to what Huberman says, pay attention to Rhonda Patrick, pay attention to Gabriel Lyon. Use these things. But don't, even the Dr. Mike Isertels. The what? Dr. Mike Isretel.

Oh, oh, okay. He's a guy who's variance of body, but yeah, yeah, he's a doctor, guys. I know some people have some things to say about that, but he is a doctor. He's very, very, he's a, he's a jiu jitou black belt,

but also someone who's done bodybuilding for a long time. And his movement ability is hampered because of it. He's been on video sprinting and trying to do certain things movement-wise. And his lifting has not helped him with any of those things, other than being able to bench and being able to do pull-ups. But Mike Israel still has amazing things to share with people when it comes to hypertrophy and optimal training and all of those things. So you've got to listen to some of the things he has to say.

But that doesn't mean that you have to do. those things every single day, or that has to be all the things you do in terms of your training. Right. Right. Like you got to, it's hard because there's so much information, but you got to learn how to take the good pieces of what these people share with you and develop your personal practice. My buddy Mark Bell, this is like one of his catchphrases. And it's a very generic catchphrase, but I like it. It's like he always tells people to follow their interests. Right. If you see something, don't worry about what the study says. Don't worry. about what other people tell you.

Right. Pay attention to the benefits how other people have gotten and if interest you go towards it. Give it an actual shot. See what you see because you are your own end of one. You gotta think of yourself as your guinea pig. You're your own human guinea pig.

Right. Before red light therapy was like on studies and stuff, Mark and I, we've been doing that shit for like the past seven or eight years. When back then, it was like, oh, that's fruit for that's pseudoscience. Now it's science back and Andrew Hooverman's talking about red light therapy. Now people are like, okay, let's do.

do it. And doing all, and that's a good thing, by the way. But the reason why I say that is because you got to try some of these things out before the doctor gives you permission to do it. And if you have to wait for them, it's going to be a long time before doctors say, Roep Flo is good for you. Right. Yeah. Because they need a study to give them permission. And I don't want everyone that's listening to need studies. All those studies are great and they're good because they'll prove the things that people have been doing for a long time. But they take time. And you can't wait for that. No. No. No, which is why, I mean, there is an overwhelming amount of access to this stuff online more than ever. Yeah. You know, so I think that's definitely a good thing, but it can be a double-edged sword because there's like a lot of bullshit out there too. And there's a lot of gurus and a lot of charlatans, which I think has made the space a little bit more difficult to navigate, which is why I really can appreciate people like you and Mark. You guys have been doing this stuff forever. Yeah. Practice what you preach. And you guys, you know, aren't out there selling snake. You're like literally living this lifestyle.

Yeah. And like to be honest, it's an absolute privilege. Yeah. That we get to, this gets to be my life. Yeah, yeah. My life, I get to, because like, you know, I loved training people in person. I love working with people online.

But the reason why I love podcasting and being able to talk to people all the time is because I get to fast track my knowledge. I get to learn about things earlier than most people get to hear about it. Sometimes it might be, like something like, dude, A lot of people come to our podcasts, and I'll be asking questions, I'm just like,

I don't buy shit, I don't buy anything. Real talk, real talk, for real, for real. And that makes it hard for the audience. That's the nature of the game. Yeah, because my job as an interviewer is to try to extract the information from you and the things that you believe and the things that you've seen from people

that you work with are studies that you've done. Right. Right. But sometimes you might be just putting bullshit in my face. You know what I mean? This is why certain things that we've done have stood the test of time within our personal practices, and certain things that just fall into the wayside,

and there are certain things that I just don't even fuck with. Like the peptide stuff, I get that that's all the rage and stuff now, but I am very, very, very careful about the things that I put into my body. And I need, like, I'm still, I'm still kind of iffy about TRT in terms of being like an absolute health benefit. Because in my mind, okay, this is not super scientific, but in my mind, it's like, if you are outside of the people that actually need it. Let me put that caveat.

Because there are people that really do need testosterone replacement therapy and it changes their life. There are people who, let's say that they're overweight and it's already difficult for them to get up and go do the things that they need to do. Right. They're getting the sleep. They're doing the nutrition and just like it can be a huge catalyst to motivate them and to push them over the edge to like improve every other aspect of their lives because maybe they just needed that little boost. You know, similar to OZempic, right? Like there's a lot of really overweight people and you know, you could say there's a lot of negative things about OZempic, right? But for some people, maybe they just need that little boost just to push them off the ledge.

That good. Yeah. You know? I agree with you. OZempic is like people in fitness love to disOZempic. And I know that there's a lot of side effects and stuff. But the thing is, is like, a lot of people, a lot of people have not had the privilege or the opportunities in life to maybe learn how to deal with certain things in healthy ways.

Right? So maybe their stress relief is food. Their stress relief is just relaxing and eating. And it causes this just negative feedback loop. And then life can be fucking hard. Spirals out of control. Life can be hard. And then you're super heavy and you have metabolic issues

and you have all these things and it's just difficult. And then you have this drug that can curb your appetite and allow you to lose 100 pounds in six months. Take the drug. But also do your due diligence on trying to think figure out how you can do this in the healthiest way. So you don't lose a crazy amount of muscle at the same. Right.

So you don't do damage to yourself. Don't overdo it. But these things responsibly are, are changing the landscape of health, right? Including TRT. But it's just one of those things that I just wonder. I do worry about like I always wonder about when it comes to things like OZEPIC, like what is going to be the long term? Is there any like long term negative thing that's going to rear its ugly head down the road?

Like at least TRT has been studied for decades. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's one of those things. Like that's why like, I'm happy that where TRT is right now, because I'm 33 years old and I don't plan on needing that until hopefully never, because like I'm not a needle fan. Whenever I go give my blood, I still sweat.

And my shit like, I have good veins and then I start sweating and then my vein goes away. You don't have the testosterone, the TRT veins. There's a dead giveaway for people that are on it, you know? But they like they look like they have garden hoses running down their arms. When they're cold. That is a tell. Like it's when you're cold and you still have. have a crazy pump. Because when I, when I get a pump and I have electrical, I can, I can, like,

you look like you can look like you're on drugs. Right. Because like you're, you're pumped. You got good glycogen in your system, right? But it's when you're, you're, you're just chilling and you're cold and you're still like veined out. Yeah. I mean, shoot, you might be a mutant, but like there's a WW guys. Yeah, yeah. But like the, the reason why I'm, I'm just, again, I'm very careful about all those things. Even like the supplements I take, I don't just take every single supplement. The supplements I take are suggested based off of things that are seen in my blood work. Yeah.

It's just because like I, you know, you gotta be careful about what you ingest. Like peptides are very new and everyone's like, oh, these help gain muscle, blah, blah, blah, but I mean, y'all don't really know. I tried this one called El carnitine injections. I actually tried Al carnitine. I love it. I hated it. Really?

It was, oh my God, let me tell you, El carnitine was super effective. I love, because even during Jiu-Jitsu, I took El carnitine. Yeah. And it was the first. time that I took an injectable. And the reason why I hated it is because every time that I would take El carnitine in the morning, I would like, I would have the needle and I would start to like shiver and sweat.

And for some reason, I asked Mark about this. I'm like, why the fuck does El Carnitine burn when it goes in? It burns. I'm like, is this normal? He's like, nah, just El carnitine. But my rolls, my rolls felt great. Like I had a lot of energy. I even noticed that my metabolism was faster because I'd get done rolling and I'd be way

sweeter than I typically am. So like I'm like this is doing its job. Yeah. But I just couldn't handle the needlework. Oh really? I could I can't I couldn't do it. It makes me too anxious. It makes me and like I I it's I'm just kind of a I'm a bitch when it comes to that stuff. Yeah, but it is very effective and this is the thing like I don't think all peptides are bad like a guy. Yeah. Yeah. Like all that type of stuff is great. But I just I really just think that people got to be careful about the stuff they inject into their body. Even the supplements they take like that's what again. I don't mind sharing my blood work. I will continue to do it. So people. people like, and people will always say things about me. They'll say, oh, you took drugs when you were younger. Of course.

It used to bother me when I was much younger. It tickles my brain a little bit these days, but at the end of the day, I just really think you gotta be mindful, because there's a lot of shit people sell that will mess you up. And even when it comes to TRT, there are a few people that have started making YouTube videos about getting off of TRT because they want to start having children

and having to go through, because like there's this guy, I've met him once in person when I was younger. He is a fitness influencer. He was named Shali Coker. He did some professional natural, not professional natural body because he was taking testosterone, but he did professional NPC bodybuilding. And now he's trying to have kids.

And he's sharing how he's getting off of it. And he's trying to encourage younger guys not to mess with it. How long was he on it? I don't know, maybe five, six, seven years. Right? Whoa. Yeah, yeah. But like he was like his system was shut down for that long.

But he's, he's made videos recently. He's gonna, I believe he's gonna be able to have kids. Like he's doing stuff now, he's off. He's taking post therapy, all these types of things to be able to. Rebound your system after being on for that long. Some people can't. Some people cannot. I remember when I was a personal trainer when I was younger,

there's this person that I was trying to caliper test him. And I was like pulling his skin and I was like, dude, what is going like, what's, what's weird with your body? Cause like, I couldn't pull, I couldn't pull his skin from his muscle to like caliper test. And I was like, do you take stuff by any chance? He's like, yeah, I've been on some, he started like, he was taking steroids and stuff for a while.

And one of the effects is like the effect that it has on your, on your skin for some people, right? It makes sure your skin doesn't come off your muscle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His sit was like very tight. Everything was very tight. He had a lot of tension. So I told him like, you should, you should,

do you get any testing done? Do you pay attention to any of that type of stuff? He's like, no, I was like, go to a doctor and just get some blood, We're guns, just check out some things. And then this was in my early 20s. I should probably check in with him, but he was like, yeah, the doctor said that

there's some stuff going on. I do wanna have kids later, but right now he says that I won't be able to have kids in my current situation. So it's one of those things where you, before you pull the trigger on any of this stuff, you need to know what you're potentially getting into. And you need to really think hard.

It's like, if you're just trying to get big and jack, can you just like spend time and train and then like figure out ways would enjoy movement, right? Instead of just like seeking this look. Because again, so many people that have gotten to that point realize like there is so much more, right? Like a Chris Bunsted realizing that there is so much more

to movement and athleticism than just being big and strong. And he's reworking himself to try to build those abilities back. So just be careful. Yeah. You know what I mean? Going back to the rope stuff and the flow stuff, I was thinking about this how I think without even real, now that I'm actually,

thinking about it. I think the rope has made me better on the mini ramp, like skateboarding on that little mini ramp out there. It's done, I don't know. Maybe it's not. It could just be that I've just been practicing more. But I think it's really helped with my balance doing things switch. So switch means when you're skating with the opposite foot forward. And you do that a lot on a mini ramp because you're going back the other way, right? A mini ramp is actually, I think it would be. it would benefit skating something like that more than anything else because that is going back and forth. You're going up. You're going up one way with your left foot forward and you're going back the other way with your right foot forward. So there has to be a balance there if you're trying to do the same thing on both sides. And I've noticed I've been getting a lot better with my other foot forward skating switch.

And now I'm trying to wonder, I'm like, does that have something to do with the rope maybe? Is there some sort of muscle memory that's getting like baked into my balance on a skateboard? I don't know. I want you to take that and I want you to just bring awareness to it in your personal rope practice. Like think about your non-dominant side. Think about improving the way you move and make it as good as you're dominant. Because I don't want to tell you. I want you to discover that for yourself.

But a story I'll tell you. And other people in the stronger human community, especially the people that run, have noticed that their gait efficiency or the way that they run is much more. more efficient after doing row flow. Because it's not just the movement of the spine. It's the shifting of the weight along with the movement of the spine. You learn to use the whole body fluidly as a unit. This is why flow is its own thing

within what I was talking about. You learn to use the whole body, not just using the spine, but shifting the weight from the front foot to back foot, the front hip to back hip, coordinating that with the spine, the shoulders, the scapula. You learn how to do all of this together and you get in all those reps on your non-dominant side.

On our podcast a few years back, I bring this up because he set it on air and I'm happy he did. CJ Cblisca, his Instagram handle is Movement Exploration Channel four years ago or maybe five years ago now. He spent a weekend working and doing some rope flow with David Weck. He was his first exploration into the rope with David.

And he was doing a lot of trail runs, right? Up until that point, he's a really great trainer. And his Instagram is literally what he does. He's a great trainer who loves to explore movement and share that with the people that he works with. Anyway, he did rope flow for those two days. went through the fundamental patterns, overhand, underhand, drag and roll, learn how to transition, goes and PR has a nine or ten minute PR on one of his longer trail runs. And he was like,

what's going on here? Again, this guy set it on air, right? It's because his efficiency when it came to his gate was much better. He was learning how to move through space and run, not just running like this. You see a lot of runners. They run in a very stiff fashion. But CJ started actually using that momentum and using that spinal engine to propel him. when he was running through space. So his balance with every step was improved. His coordination of his spine with his movement was improved, thus hitting a PR on his run,

because the underhand pattern in rope flow mimics the human gate. It makes so much sense. It's one of those things you can't describe, you can't teach somebody that with words, right? Like you can't just teach somebody that or show them a video of that or explain it to them in language. It's something you actually have to learn.

There's a switch that has to get, that has to, that has to get turned on in your brain. Yeah. And then it will start to bleed over and everything else. Yeah. And it makes so much sense with the gate, with the walking. And like the way you walk, the way you walk with your shoulder, like the left leg goes forward, the other shoulder to balance it out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The spinal engine. Yeah, yeah. It's contralateral movement is what it's called. Contralateral movement. And, okay, so also explain how this idea of walking with your toes and your knees forward, is that at all, affected by the rope stuff.

And because like we've been talking about, me and Mark have been sending you, my algorithm's been sending me all these videos. You get all the feet forward in your algorithm. It shows you Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Simone. Yeah, yeah. All these like super athletes that walk with their toes pointed forward,

if not even a little pigeon toad. Yeah. Right. And, and it seems like the most high performance athletes have this specific gate. Yeah. Right? Except for the one, the one outlier here is LeBron James. There's many outliers.

There's not just LeBron. There's many outliers when it comes to that. Look at Luca Donchich, who is one of the best players in the NBA. Oh, yeah, he's a little duckfoot. It is a little duck foot. He has quite a bit of duck foot, right? So then it begs the question like, well, shoot. What's what makes the elite the elite?

Is it the way that they walk? Is it their feet forward? Like, what is it? Because you can find somebody on the other end of the spectrum. Sure. does great in that way. Sure. So, and there are movement systems that have been built on, on improving this.

Like there's this movement, Go-to, greatest of all-time athletes who their whole thing is getting people to move and walk in that way. Now, there's a few things to think about when it comes to that. Rope flow, over time, can benefit, along with a few other things. There's tension that a majority of the population is holding in different parts of their body that affects the way their skeleton is structured at rest. If you hold extra tension in your glute mead, your upper glutes, which a lot of people have,

and you also hold a level of tension in your lower back. Some people will hold some tension in aspects of their quads. It can make your skeletal structure kind of go outwards and put you in that duck foot position. Compound that if you're someone who also loves to do a lot of resistant training in a traditional sense. You're squatting and you're deadlifting with this same position. So you're putting forward.

on your body in these positions, and you're not doing anything somewhat contrary to that, that that allows you to move fluidly through space. So you'll end up in this position. But the thing is some people, their skeleton is also kind of oriented in that type of position. Like there are some athletes who skeletalally, they are in a pigeon-toed position. Jordan was that way. There's Rich Froning, the greatest crossfitter of all time is that way. What's his name? Russian weightlifter, Dmitri Klochkov was duck-footed too.

So when people see these amazing athletes who have this duck-foot pigeon-toe, there's a sense where some people just try to figure out a way to mimic it, which isn't a bad intent. Really? Yeah, I mean, which isn't a bad intent. But the thing is, is like, my skeletal structure is not naturally pigeon-toed.

But over time of paying attention, doing body work, and paying attention to day. different parts of my body that were holding excessive amounts of tension because of the activities I was doing and lifting and working on that over years, I now walk with my feet forward, not because I'm trying, but just because my body is not holding excessive tension in different areas. That was affecting the way I was holding my skeletal structure. What specifically would you attribute that?

What would you say? I know there's a lot, but what would you say contributes to that the most? There's so much. But I think the biggest thing that people can begin to bring awareness to, and people probably should try to add to their practice in terms of a recovery type of sense and a bodywork type of sense is your overall bodily tension. How much tension are you holding at rest? So this comes back to the breath, but let me first talk about tension.

When people go see a body worker, oh my God, I need to like get the technical name of these professionals correct. because when I say massage therapist, I always get a comment saying, we're not massage therapists where, fill in the blanks commenters, are you physical therapists? What exactly are you? What do you like being called?

Now, you really run into that? All the time. Whenever I talk about soft tissue work, it's always like, where? Massage therapy. Is this on your podcast? No, in the comments. Whenever, like, I make videos about like soft tissue work

and learning how to become your own body worker. And these people are also always positive on like doing your own body work. But there's a technical, profession that they like being called. I always butcher because I call them massage therapist. What is the politically correct terminology for a massage therapist? I need to burn this into my brain.

Yes. But over the years, we've had a lot of professionals like Chris Kadoski. We had a recent guy that we had a really good conversation with on doing your own soft tissue. Kelly Sturret is like the OG in the space of self-mile fast release. He wrote the book on Becoming a Sepalepard back in 2000. It's the thing that introduced me into doing my own soft tissue work. It's called supple leopard. Becoming on becoming a supple leopard.

Everybody should probably just have this book in their library. I think it's a great resource for being able to attack specific aspects of your body and learning. What soft tissue work allows you to do is it allows you to build a relationship with yourself and pressure. Right. Like when you were using the body lever yesterday, right? and you were working around your torso, you found something. Just kind of explain what you got from that. So the body lever, there are these two giant sticks, right?

And they have like a row. They're kind of like num chucks, right? But they're big lever sticks. And you can use them to like wrap it around your leg and like apply, use them to press them together to apply leverage, which will squeeze certain parts of your body and massage certain parts of your body or relieved, you know, tissue or whatever it is. Yeah.

And you told me to use it around my torso, which I never would have thought of. So I wrapped it around, I think this side of my body. Yeah. Or maybe it was like around my back. I had it like this, right? So if like I was two big sticks holding it out this way and I was like squeezing it in. So it was like squeezing in here. And I noticed right here on this side above my hip.

It was like it wasn't. pain, like injury pain, but it was like a muscle that has never had a massage. Like it was like very, very tender. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I had no idea that was there before I used that thing. And you didn't feel that on the other side of your body. I did not feel that on the other side of my body. Yeah. Which I know because I got an x-ray recently from a chiropractor because I did like tweaked my back doing jihitsu a few weeks ago and I have a very minor curvature at the bottom. about my spine and he was telling me, I think it was my, now that I'm thinking about, I think it was my right side was a little bit, like my, whatever muscles are right here, I think he was saying

it's a little bit weaker than my left side for whatever reason. Yeah. So I must be putting too much pressure, too much stress, too much emphasis on this side of my body. And that might be what's contributing to that. I'm not sure. So this is why global soft tissue work is very important. And this stuff takes work, like hitting all the tissues on your body and building that level of awareness that you built some of it yesterday. You realized this side underneath my rib cage is really tense. And this side I'm able to handle pressure. What's going on? And maybe not just what's going on here, but what might be going on in your lats?

What might be going on in your traps? Because the body is a system. So there are certain areas like you might feel a level of pain at your wrist and you'll go to the wrist. It might actually be because there's something in your forearm that's really, really tight. There's a strength coach who I admire. His name is Ian Danny. I admire him because he's amazing at applying different practices to the professional athletes that he works with. He works with the top football players, top sprinters, and there are going to be certain days that he does stretching with them.

And there are many people in the strength community who say stretching's bad. There are days that he'll do soft tissue work with them. And there are many science-based people within the community who'll say there's no proof that that that's, that's, that's, soft tissue work works in terms of testing. It just makes people feel better. But through application and through seeing how this affects his athletes positively, he knows like, he doesn't need the science catch up to application.

Years ago, he came to our gym and I was having a lot of this referred wrist pain. And I already knew about soft tissue work. And I was like, Ian, for some reason, I can't figure this one out. And I felt stupid after he worked with me. He was like, he took my arm. He started squeezing and working manually the tissues

in my upper forearm. And I was like, holy crap, why does, I wasn't working any of those tissues. I wasn't adding any pressure here. Because all I had to do was probably take some pressure from maybe my lever, right? And I wasn't even using the body lever much at that time. I had to apply that pressure here.

Literally, as he worked on that, it's almost like I felt blood rushed into my wrist. And then I was able to start doing push-ups again. So the tension that I had here caused referred pain here. This is why if you want to, like there are people like the Kelly Sturrette who can, who will look at certain pain and just be like, okay, that's probably coming from there.

You have pain here, that's coming from here. You have pain here? That's the suppleopard. Kelly Sturrette. That's a supplept. Kelly, yeah. Kelly, man, Kelly's a G. But you, like every single tissue of your body needs a level of pressure and love. And you can do that to yourself.

Because when you add a little bit of pressure to this trap, oh my gosh, I have so much tension in my traps, right? or I hold more attention here than here. Oh, that's why I stand like this and I can't keep my shoulders down, right? You need to figure out a way. And that's why I love the body lever as one of the tools. That electric tool that I shared with you today. I love that as another one of those tools.

I love tennis balls, simple, not this, but simple tennis balls. Or there's a ball. It's from Jill Miller. There are these. I'll mention this somewhere else. I'll put a link on my site or something. It's these soft tissue therapy balls that have a little bit of give. They're not super hard.

But when you, let's say you put it on your back and you're on the ground and you roll on top of it, you're able to find certain tissues and there you go. Tune up fitness balls. Yes, I love those things. I wish I didn't travel with it this time, but I love those things. Because it allows you to, you can get it on your glutes. You can get on your hamstrings and get on your calves. Yeah.

You should, and these are things. these are things that you got to micro dose it. Okay, I want to mention that real quick as I talk about body work. I'm talking about so many different practices right now. I've shared so much with you when we were working yesterday and today. When someone listens to this, they'll be like, oh my God, how am I supposed to do all of this? I have kids. I have a wife or husband.

I got all these things to deal with. Try to bake these things into your daily routine or have things around. Like have have a tune up fitness balls or a body lever by your couch so that when you go chill with your your your significant other end you guys are watching something you can sit there on the couch is what I do I sit there on the couch and I do some soft tissue work, right? You also have a gymnastics rings all around that yet. Let's not talk about that yet. I sit on my couch and I do some soft tissue work, right? I get down on the floor. Another another concept that I try to get people to do is build a relationship with the ground something that a friend of mine, Kador Ziani, he used. the first professional dunker. At 50-something years old, the guy can like, I'm pretty sure he can still dunk. And he's like this five, eight or five, no, five nine guy from Israel. He, he's amazing. But Cordor has amazing movement ability. He can still jump. And like if there's a light above you, he can jump and he can kick his foot above his head and kick that light. He has amazing movement ability. But he's also very powerful. But is his, a big aspect that he does that anybody can do is start

to be on the ground more. Right? Because the good. ground is its own form of tissue therapy. Of course, you can have a tool that you sit on top of, on top of your glue on top of your hamstring, and put pressure into the ground and figure out, am I holding tension to my hamstrings? I'm holding tension to my calves. And as you do body work, a big concept to think about

is not too much pressure. People make this mistake of, I'm gonna get a body lever, I squeeze as hard as possible, and I'm grimacing and like, I had to work through that pain. First, relax your face when you do with any, any, all of this type of way. And if you find that no matter the amount of pressure, you, you're always grimacing, take some pressure off. Put the amount of pressure that your nervous system can handle and you can keep calm and you can keep breathing so you don't hold

your breath. So you can actually get deeper in those tissues and learn how to relax under that pressure. Because this is the thing. Tension when needed in when you're sprinting, when you're maybe lifting something, tension when needed is not bad. The tension that's negative is the tension that you're holding when you're at rest, that you take with you from the gym. I think that this is one of the reasons why so many large athletes have a level of sleep apnea. I don't necessarily think it's because of their big necks. This is not based in science, but it's just based in what I see when I look at these people

and hear, oh, you have sleep apnea. I'm not surprised because I'm 250 pounds. I don't have sleep apnea. I know other people who are good athletes who are large and they don't have sleep apnea, but these athletes are also not overly tense. You'll see certain athletes where they, you'll see them chest breathing all the time. They have shallow breaths. They don't breathe into their diaphragm because they want to keep their stomach super flat and tight, right?

And they're holding all this excess tension in their body, which means that when they're asleep, their body can't just relax. Their shoulders can't go down. They're still in a state of sympathetic tone, right, which is fight or flight. Slight when they're asleep. So you wonder why you have sleep apnea? It's because you're breathing through your mouth and you're super tense when you're sleeping

because your tissues are still holding onto this tension that you brought with you from the gym. Mark tells all these stories where he's like, when he's talked about it when he was in the midst of powerlifting, it's like his workouts would stay with him for a few days. He would feel them for a few days. And it's because of the tension that he created within that session he continued to hold on to

when he went about all the other things that he was going to do, which affected his very things. recovery, which allowed him not to be able to just like relax, because there were certain tissues that were still on when they didn't need to be on. So again, it's, it's again this, it's kind of a yin and a young when it comes to the tension that you hold. You got to be able to young, which is energy, light, you got to be able to turn it on when it needs to be on. But when you need to relax, you need things like being your own body worker and working on your tissues and finding those areas that are holding too much tension.

And you need to learn how to put pressure into them, relax, breathe, see what comes of it. Move, see how you move through space, which is one of the reasons why I really like the body lever because when you use it, you can leverage a certain area. You can put rubbing massage pressure. I love using it in the sauna because when your tissues get really, really warm and your body gets a little bit of sweat,

you're able to really kind of get in on these specific tissues and really work on yourself. But when you move along with work, with these tissues, you can get high levels of release in certain areas. And to go back to what we were talking about, walking with the feet forward. I didn't, I did things to train my foot strength, right? But I think the big reason that now I walk the way I do is because this is, I don't even know if I'm gonna be able to explain this while on this podcast.

I try to get people to move through their skeleton, almost like to think about moving like you don't have muscle. And the only way to move like you don't have muscle is if you're not holding excessive amounts of tension in your muscle. Because even if you look at the most inflexible person, like a Chris Bunstedt. Now, I say this because this metaphor comes from Ron Penna, who was, he created Quest Nutrition. And we were visiting him one day. And he, this guy's crazy. He put his leg up on a wall.

Ron's like six foot one. He put his leg high up on a wall. He was doing like a stretch, like a Van Dam stretch while he was talking to us. And I was like, Ron, what the hell? He's like, you don't think you're flexible in seem? I'm like, I don't think I could do the splits. He's like, if I shot you in the head, you could. I was like, whoa, whoa, dude.

Like, what? He's like, well, yeah, if I shot you in the head, your body has all the range of motion my body would have and more. Because your nervous system isn't guarding you in any of the, any of these positions, right? Your nervous system pretty much tells your body what is safe and what is unsafe. So you'll see people that build levels of flexibility. Yes, changes happen in the tissue and the tendons and the muscles, but also their nervous system lets them know that I can now go into this position safely. I can get into the splits safely and come out. So that's how and that's by relieving tension in certain areas. And when you're dead, you have no tension. So that's why even the buffest, thickest person if shot in the head could do the splits because now there's nothing guarding them from this movement. Right. But if you took a dead person and you made the, you made the best person. And you made the same thing. You know, you made the split. You know, you're shot in the head. You could do the splits. Because because now. Right. Right. Right. But if you. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. them like the most tense person with the most tense tight legs in the world. Wouldn't their tendons snap still if you made their legs do that? There would be certain positions that like, yes, their tendons would be tight because

of probably all the things that they've done, but they'd have way more range. Oh, sure. They would probably be able to get into the splits without causing crazy amounts of damage because there's nothing guarding them from those positions anymore. And one of the things that guards people is excessive amounts of tension in certain tissues because they've never touched those tissues or brought pressure to it. This is why when people go to, I don't know if you've got the specific term for those body workers. Oh, did you find that?

Massage therapists. It just said massage therapists. Oh. I'm sorry, y'all. I know you're not technically massage therapists, but that's what the internet calls you. So right now I'm going to call you that. Body worker, masseur, masseuse. License massage therapist, certified massage therapist.

What do you guys want to be called? Like, what is it? Huh. Let us know in the comments, folks. Yeah. That's why when people go to these folks, they leave and they feel better, they feel lighter, their body feels great. But financially, it's difficult to do that multiple days a week. And professional athletes are doing this multiple days a week because they just got people come to their home and boom, do their work while they're doing other stuff. But that's why you have to build that relationship with your body if you want to not hold excessive amounts of tension, right? This is why now, again, my feet angle the way they do and I walk the way I do and I move the way.

way I do. Yeah. Because parts of my body that I used to be holding all of this tension in without realizing it, I was able to find those areas by doing my own body work and putting pressure on my body. And I was able to slowly learn how to relieve tension from those areas. So I'm not, I build the ability not to hold excessive amounts of tension when I'm at rest. Right. Now, I still have the ability to produce that tension when I have to go lift something heavy or do any of that, but I don't take my session with me. I don't take that tension with me into all the other things that I do during the day. And I also have practices that teach me how to move with fluidity, right?

Like rope flow, like working with clubs, like these different practices so that I build the ability of being able to move without holding excessive tension. That's why fluidity of movement is very, very important. That makes sense. Yeah. Now, what are you doing with your neck? Because I'm sure rope flow doesn't make your neck jacked. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So. This is like one of your biggest videos. It is. The neck workouts that I didn't really think that that video would go as crazy as it did. But I didn't make that video specifically for people to build a big neck. Because that's why people find the video. I actually just had somebody message me today. And he was like, how much of this should I start doing? Like should I start training at four days a week, five days a week? The neck, just like the feet is a very underserved area of development when it comes to physical training. And training it will like, you you gotta realize your cervical spine is up here. And strengthening these areas around the neck will also shift the way your posture forms. Like you see a lot of people who have this forward head posture. Or they- Yeah.

Or in a lot of jiu-jitsu, a lot of people injure their necks in to get you. Thinks about all the inverting positions that you get in. And it's- And you use your head to post sometimes. Your head is literally a base, especially when you become more experience. You learn how to use your head against your opponent

as your base, right? So you gotta think like this is an area that you want to bolster. And your neck has a lot of different abilities. You can go into flexion, you can go into, you can rotate it, you can go into extension. You just need a good way to load the thing. And the thing is, is you don't necessarily need equipment to load your neck yet. You could literally use your hand, right? And something that didn't mention that video that I have in my neck course is that when you do neck work, you want to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Like actually, right now, press your tongue to the roof of your mouth. And then I want you to

resist pressure that way. Actually, do it without pressing your tongue. Okay. Do that and push your head and just go like this. Use breathe and use that pressure. Don't be too crazy with it, but just, right? You feel that tension that's being created in your neck. Yeah.

Right? That's a lot of it. I feel it in my upper back, shooting down. That's a low level slimness. Now I want you to do it by pressing with pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth. And tell me if you feel anything. If you don't, tell me you don't feel anything. You feel stronger.

Okay. Definitely. That's weird. Now, the reason why I feel stronger is because there's this idea of there's tensegrity in the human body. Censegrity is like when when certain aspects move, other areas follow along with them. And tension, when you press your tongue to the roof of your mouth, your jaw, your muscles around here, even aspects of muscles around your neck, create enough tension so that when you're moving, it keeps you safer in those positions.

Right? So that's why when you do neck work, you want to press your tongue against your for your mouth and don't do it super hard, but enough so you feel some tension, then do the work and you'll notice that you'll be able to do it with less inhibition because now everything is connected to the force you're creating with your face against whatever load you're working. So that will keep your neck work much safer than just moving your head around and being super loose with it. Something else that I think is quite interesting is like with with there there tools like I think the best tool is the iron neck head harness or any head harness the iron neck itself is a really great tool but it's quite expensive like it's very expensive but head harnesses especially the ones that have multiple loops excuse me this white rat yeah they got the rings got the rings allow you to work your neck from different angles you don't even need necessarily a cable machine because you could use load all you need is a light band and a head harness and like uh there's a attachment that allows you to put an adored

frame and I'll travel around with me. I went to this origin immersion camp where with this company origin and Jocko Willink was there and stuff. And in the mornings, I would be doing my neckwork with my harness before jiu-jitsu. And I always do network before jiu-jitsu. Yeah, that's me doing it on a cable machine. But the thing about, about network, and that's something you can do, uh, um, retractions to help to help with your traps. Yep. Yep. I do the one where you just go like this, you, you tuck your chin in. Yeah. Or you turn around the other way and you focus on pushing it out. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And I think that works the front, right? Yes, yes, yes. And the thing to just be mindful of, the thing to be so mindful of is not going crazy with it. When you start that training, you can injure yourself. You can injure yourself. You should be light with it when you start.

Now, the thing is, you can do it frequently. Like I microdose a little bit of network, maybe four or five days a week, right? But the thing is, is people, when they start doing this type of stuff, they're like, I got to add load, progressive overload. I got to do more weight. I got to do more reps. And you can, but your neck is a sensitive area. Yeah.

If you tweak something in your neck, that does not feel good, turning, et cetera, right? So if you venture into neck training, which I think everybody should do and everybody can do, literally with a hand, even if you don't even have a head harness, you could grab a light band, put it around your head, put it in a door frame, and then you can do different movements against the weight of a band, pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth, making sure you're not holding your breath, right, so that you can, you can, That's hard to, that's hard to remember. We'll talk to, but you got to make sure not to hold your breath. It's going to allow you to move freely. It's going to, that's, that's, that's, that's, again, I mentioned that beginning of this episode. That is the basis of all of this. Stop holding your breath when you, you'd create some of these movements.

Over time, you're going to be able to build a much more resilient structure. Like, I noticed, and this is something that Andrew Hooperman mentioned, and I was like, yeah, yeah, I feel that. It's like, training your neck does do something to you psychologically. Because when you don't train your neck, you don't even realize how sensitive you are to like neck movements when you don't train your neck. But after like a few weeks of training your neck, you're going to notice that you're just like, like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like you're like. I'm not an aggressive person by nature, but it makes me feel like if I wanted to I could I could be more aggressive. Like even in jiu jiu-jitsu, it makes me more aggressive because my body has more trust in this area that is the area that people will be attacking. But now it feels strong because it's it. It's it is strong and I have I have a less feeling of risk and apprehension when doing movements in the martial art. So of course it's great for grapplers and it's great for people to strengthen in the sport but it's also great for people outside of jiu jitsu and it's one of those things where if you're

at your desk at work or you have a little band or something you could you could literally have a band that you put around your head and you just go like this tongue to the roof of the mouth breathe rotate breathe rotate microdose it put the band away go about work right you can get that input every day and over time, this part of your body will be better connected to the rest of your body along with your cervical spine. You got to remember, our spine is over here. You know what I mean? And strengthening that will is a big net positive for people. It's like we have these underserved areas, our neck, our hands. You got a lot of people in the science space starting to talk about the benefits of grip strength and our feet, right? And there are ways to strengthen these areas

is that don't require you to have to go to a gym and focus on it within your workout. Like, I'm throwing a lot of stuff at people and it can be one of those things where it's like, okay, this guy wants me to start training my hands and he wants me to start training my neck, and he wants me to juggle, and he wants me to do rope flow.

It's like, you can microdose this stuff. Meaning when I say that, the term microdose came from Corey Schlesinger. He's the one who can't use that name And we've just been using it ever since. He's, I think, the director of performance for the NBA right now. But he's worked with different NBA teams, et cetera. And what he does with NBA athletes is he'll have them do multiple small movement sessions throughout their day.

That's outside of, like, maybe their big strength conditioning session. Keeps the tissues warm. Keeps them making progress. Doesn't beat them up too much. It allows them to just touch these things and move on. Pavel Tatsu, you'll call it, greasing the groove where you like, maybe you do three minutes or five minutes of a head of bell movement or certain things throughout your day. So you get multiple repetitions of the skill, right?

And you're able to, instead of it being one heroic session that like you feel really, really beat up, you can get multiple inputs that can be sprinkled throughout your day. So we gotta think there are many people that work from home nowadays, especially after 2020. Many people work in offices. There's some people obviously work in trucks with your specific lifestyle. How can we microdose different aspects of? our fitness, right? If we have, if we're interested in it. So one thing is like, can you keep a kettlebell by your desk? Or maybe can you keep a band by your desk, right? So maybe that band,

you come to your computer to start working, you look at the band, you've been working for 15 minutes, you take the band, you come here, you do some of this work, you come here, do some of this work, you come here, do some of this work, you put the band down. You've done some neck work today, and you're not killing yourself. Right. Cool. All right. You don't have to break a sweat. That's break or sweat. Let's say you're also interested in now making changes to your feet. My feet are so different now than they were five years ago, but it's because I've microdosed footwork. So I have certain things that are underneath the podcast table for a period of time out of towel that was there, where underneath while we were podcasting with guests, I'd be doing towel curls with my feet. Meaning like I would have my feet on this towel and I would curl my feet. I have a video about increasing your foot strength on my YouTube channel.

I think it's called like something about this $200 billion industry is trying to destroy you. Something about, yeah, it's something like that. But keep a towel underneath your desk so that when you put your feet underneath your desk, oh, the towel's right there. Okay, let me do some towel curls right now as I'm going through this. Now you're building dexterity and strength within your toes, right? You have those toe splay things, the correct toes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now you're getting a level of toe splay when you're chilling at home with your wife and kids, right? people get barefoot shoes and barefoot sandals. Why? So now that when you're walking, instead of your toes being compacted in your shoe, now you're getting reps every single time you choose to take a walk, getting your foot totally spread, along with getting that input from the ground,

which changes the way you walk. People that go from normal shoes to barefoot shoes always realize, like, wow, this is what the ground feels like. This hurts. Because most people are used to wearing shoes that are super padded, that can give them a lot of cushion, right? So their feet and the way their feet interact,

not just with the earth and the ground, but the way their feet interact with the rest of their body, totally changes, right? But micro-dosing. Now I have something where I'm working on my feet and I have a tool that I put in between my toes and I have shoes that every time I take a new step, my feet are stronger, right?

The hopping that we are talking about, taking some skips, right? Building the ability to bounce. Right. Now your feet are getting this pliometric, input with the earth. And this is why you take a walk. You can do a few hops, a few skips. Now you've microdosed a little bit of jumping and improved the strength of your feet. And you still haven't gone to the gym, right? Let's say at home, your, your soft tissue tools by your couch.

Or like for us, we were talking about hands. I keep a rice bucket in front of my TV. Right. Oh, the rice buckets right there. We're watching Desperate Housewives. Let me go ahead and let me start doing the rice bucket on my hands and sit down here on this because I have a stool. I sit down on this stool and sit in a low position and work on the rice bucket in my hands. I'm doing two things at once. I'm getting low into the ground in a squat position because the stool is low to the ground, which I can sit in Sesa or a squat. And I'm also now working my hands while I'm doing something leisurely with my significant other. Right. If you have kids, like this is this is why I love the microdose because no matter your lifestyle, I, I, I feel for people who who do have very,

have a lot of responsibilities. Not that I don't have a lot of responsibilities. Not that I don't have a lot of but a big, a big excuse for aspects of fitness is time. Like when I was a personal trainer and I would try to get people to become my client, they'd be like, oh, but in Seema, I don't have time. And I'd be like, we make time for the things that are important to you and all this, but this is, with this practice,

if you start to change aspects of your life around your health and your movement, right? And you create an environment that feeds movement, movement. So there are things around that you can interact with. Right. This is, this comes from James Clear's atomic habits. Keep things around that you'll actually do. When you put the guitar in the closet and you're trying to actually get better at guitar, you won't grab the guitar off in this closet. If the guitar is sitting there in the living room and every time you look at it, you realize you haven't touched that thing in 30 days, you're probably going to start picking it up, right? So, so keep

things around that encourage you to move. Maybe you don't do it every day. But every day you pass by that pull up bar that's on your door, you're going to start telling yourself, let me do a few pull-ups. And then you'll start to get good at pull-ups. And then you'll start to gain some muscle. And then every time you go through that door, you'll do 10 pull-ups, 15, 20 pull-ups. That's what I did as a kid.

And now I still have pull-up bars on different doors in my house. Yeah. I keep rings in my living room because I'm really trying to get better at my gymnastics skill. It's a weakness of mine, so I want to improve. And the only way I know I'm gonna improve is if I frequently touch the skill. So I keep rings right there in my kitchen

so I can hang, I can do some pull-ups. My girlfriend also started doing some hang on there, right? And it becomes, if you have kids, it can be on this thing where your kids see that mom and dad move. Yeah. I'm going to move too. And if you have kids, you got to look at those little ones and realize, dang, he just sprinted, ran and fell. I can't remember the last time I did that. When I talk about all these things, I want people to think about the abilities that kids have that you just, you had, you had all the abilities that I'm talking about right now, but at a certain point you stopped. At a certain point, you just stopped jumping because maybe you didn't find joy in that or people started thinking you were childlike and you just stopped jumping and skipping. And now you don't jump anymore, but you see those kids, they'll jump on everything. They'll fall. Think about falling. Yeah.

You know, like as you get older, people always reference studies of fall risk. So can you do things that like put you close to the ground so you can build a relationship with the ground so that if you fall, you kind of know how to land? Mm-hmm. Right? It's it's learning how to build your environment to serve your fitness because we have built our personal environments to serve the things we're interested in. Yes. You might have a TV. there and your PlayStation there and some snacks there and this environment serves play and snacks.

Right. Or play on the PlayStation and snacks. But now can we also have the environment serve our movement? Our home environment, our work environment, and the places that we frequent. Let me quickly just mention people that drive trucks, right? There are quite a few people in the stronger human that are truck drivers. Yeah. You got a lot of listeners that are truck drivers.

I encourage them to take, you know, if you can, have some of these light tools in your truck, because you have stops. When you stop, go do a few rotations of the rope. Just go go get, go decompress yourself because you've been sitting here driving for hours. Go decompress yourself. Go get a little bit of movement. I wish I remembered this truck driver's name on Instagram.

This guy between his runs, this guy's doing calisthenics and stuff. And realize that you can use these moments to get in a bit of movement. It doesn't have to be a crazy calisthenic workout, but you could do, you could spend five minutes. You could do some pushups. You could do some squats.

You could do some squats, you could do some rope flow, you can get a fluid movement, you can go back and drive and your body now feels better. You are feeding your body. It's as simple as that. It doesn't have to be the gargantuan long task of having a long workout, although that's not bad. I'm not saying that's bad. But I'm saying that if we get in these more small frequent inputs, you will be surprised at the compound effect.

There's this like cheesy quote that you'll hear every motivational speaker sound podcast. You overestimate what you can do in one year and you underestimate what you can do in 10. Right. That's the idea of the microos. Right. Because if you just take small steps, some days you miss certain activities,

but because now you have certain things around, you can touch different capacities, different things that you are trying to improve at, right? Over time, you'll notice how, oh my gosh, my feet are so much stronger. My hands are so much stronger. My neck feels so much better. In between breaks, I've been doing a little bit of juggling.

I feel like my reaction time is a little bit better. by little small inputs, not by having to set 30 minutes aside, 60 minutes, 90 minutes aside each day, which now in the new year, a lot of people are trying to set these goals. And unfortunately, they set these big goals and fitness that they cannot stick to. And I just want you to stick to two minutes, one or two minutes. If it turns to five or ten, great. But if you can just set these small goals every day, can I do two or three minutes? You will build upon it.

It will get more. And even on your most stressful days, kid got sick. you did something and now you're super stressed. Even on those days, you can still do something because it's all it takes is just a few minutes a day. Right. But consistently, that builds you into somebody that now moves.

You move more than you ever have because it's now just a part of what you do. That's who you are now. You're a mover, right? And it doesn't take much. What are your thoughts on those grip things, those things that they look like, you know, I'm talking about like the grip things.

I have some of those in my car. Yeah. I think they're good. You believe you're a believer in those? They're they're good. This is the thing. Not as good as the rice bucket. Not no, no, no, no. Not that it's not as good. Different. Different. Because I think one of the beautiful things about our hands is that they're there, they're a tool that can handle very fine objects. They're a tool that can play an instrument. If you're someone who plays the guitar, you'll notice that like the development that you build within certain areas, like guitar players, they have this fine motor skill within their hands, but they also have fairly strong hands. too. Your hands can squeeze objects in different ways. Like when we think about the sandbag, the way your hands have to interact with the tool. You have to have this open palm grip where you create this tension within your hands when gripping the back. Right. That's a strength that takes time to build. But it also brings tension towards like your forearms, your body, you learn how to integrate that with the hands. The rice bucket, you're opening and closing. You're also rotating. So now you'll actually start to feel a lot of stuff in between the fingers. You'll feel a lot of

blood flow gets the wrists. It's an amazing tool. The grippers are a squeezing type of strain. So now you're developing your ability to squeeze, right? Something that I got from Ido Portel, who people love to make fun of Ido, but another person who I truly admire, and I only spent a very small amount of time with him, but he's someone who I was paying attention to for years. I was asking Mark, Mark, Mark, let's get Edo, Mark, let's get Edo. Like, let's talk to Edo years ago, because he's the OG movement guy. He's the guy that that like, because fitness was like building muscle and cardio

and the crossfit, right? Edo came in and showed people variable types of movement. He can do acrobatics. Edo can do high level gymnastics. He could do one arm handstands, going into pull-ups, going to crawls. Like, Edo was Connor McGregor's, he was Connor McGregor's movement

coach, right? And people, a meme that got super popular at the time was like, oh, that, because Nate Diaz was like, oh, I see you doing some touch buck with that guy in the park. Because Ido had, you know, had Connor doing some different types of movements that would help build his fluidity. But I mentioned him because I'm very thankful for him. Because if he wasn't there, I don't know if people like me would be doing what we do. Right. It kind of, that space kind of became popular. with him. But when he came onto our podcast, I told him some things that I was trying to work. That's Edo. Wow. That's like, that's prime Edo, bro. Like he does, he does wild stuff, man. He has such a ability of not just, this is the thing. People can do handstands. I can't.

I have a lot of work to do on that. I can't handstand right now. But Edo can get into that in such a fluid fashion. Look at how he chains things together. Look at his fluidity. This man can get into a flow state by just using his body. That's something that I want to build my ability to. That is a weakness of mind, the things that he's currently doing. And I'm very excited for the next decade of my personal training because I am going to be doing things like this in years, right? It's going to take me a long time. And I have to, my body has to adapt to the stress and I'm heavier. But I'do would do many things, right? Now, with the hands and grip that I was talking about, I talked to you know about some things I'm working out.

And he was like, how often do you use a tennis ball? I was like, tennis ball, I don't really use it much. Then he, he, he, the guy, the dude, one thing I appreciate about him and our podcast with him, and it frustrated many people that were listening to that podcast was that he, he wants people to think and he wants people to explore for themselves. And the reason why I appreciate that is like,

in this age, you can go to chat beat, Cheap, type in something and get an answer, might not be the right answer, but it'll be an answer to a question that you were thinking about. And the thing is, is like, you really didn't have to think about it. You just had to ask something to give you the answer. So you don't have to try to come across solutions to the problem that you're going about. So answers are everywhere now. But Edo came onto our show and we were asking him questions. And he would like give us certain pieces that could be an answer to that. but it was more so an invitation to try things out for yourself.

Right? And I love that he did that. And I love that like, there were certain answers that were clear, but there were many answers that were just like, I want you to figure it out. I want you to work on it. So he told me to get a tennis ball. And all he told me was like, I want you to break this tennis ball.

I was like, what? He's like, I want you to rip it apart. I was like, well, what? And he was like, yeah, yeah, just work on ripping this ball apart. It'll take time, but you'll be taking it apart. taking a tennis ball and ripping it apart, right? I haven't yet. But the thing is, is when you have a tennis ball and I don't have mine with me right now, when you begin to put pressure, like in a tennis ball is something you can carry around. You can keep a tennis ball in your car, right? But if you're

someone who's trying to develop hand strength, right? There are many things you can do, but with a tennis ball, if you're trying, if you have the intent of ripping it apart, you might be putting pressure into that ball with your thumbs. You might be putting pressure into it with your fingers. You'll probably grab and then use your other arm and put pressure into it multiple ways to try to rip it apart. Now think of all the ways your hands and your fingers are now interacting with this implement.

That is frankly, will seem impossible to rip apart. Yet he's done it, right? Wow. So that's the thing. How strong will your hands get when you're able to rip a tennis ball apart? Right. Don't get me wrong.

There are many ways to strengthen your hands. Traditional lifting can strengthen your hands. You're grabbing a barbell and you're lifting. You're grabbing dumbbells. you're lifting weight, but your hands don't have to interact with those implements in the way that they would interact when you're doing juditsu with the ghee. I mean, think about it. You've seen a lot of grapplers over time their hands get, right? Narnly. But all they're doing usually is just jujitsu. If you have other things outside of your practice like the rice bucket, like maybe trying

to rip the tennis ball apart, like using different types of grippers within your personal practice of training, you can strengthen your hands to a point that jiu jitsu no longer damages it. I'm 10 years in And outside of this one finger, right? My hands feel great. And I know, like, I was very scared about that. I'm like, over time, are my hands going to get messed up from Jiu-Jitsu? But now I'm confident that my hands aren't because my hands feel better than they did five years ago. Right.

They feel stronger than they did five. Yes, because of the practices I've been able to add into what I do. And that's a thing. Having a tennis ball around and working on that or having a gripper around or having a rice bucket, these are small inputs. But these are small inputs that keep the body strong. These are small inputs that go a long way if you touch them a little bit, a little bit over periods of time. So again, it all goes back to setting up your environment to serve your movement goals.

And then also being open to realizing that you, I have many weaknesses, right? And these are weaknesses that I'm trying to work on. But don't look at your weaknesses and have the reaction that so many people in fitness have. That's useless. Mike Izertel loves to make videos about kettlebells. that he's not even swinging the kettlebell correctly. It's like, if you can't do it, stop talking about it. Unless you've actually tried for yourself

and become fairly proficient and found that it's useless, don't speak on it. Or speak on it with a level of care. Not this level of I know it all and this is what you should do. Just speak with it with a level of care. Maybe just tell people to think about it. But if you can't do it, stop talking like you know about it. Yeah.

Right. That's one of the biggest problems with the ubiquity of having, of this access to shit online. And people that are experts and gurus and things online is like, it's an unfortunate psychological thing that happens with human beings is that when they hear somebody talking with extreme confidence, it makes them trust you more. Yeah. Right. And that can be a positive feedback loop for these people that are doing this and using tools like Instagram or YouTube to try to grow their audience. They realize the more confident they are when they talk about things, the more people are going to buy whatever it is that they're throwing out there. Right. Yeah.

And, you know, humility is a huge thing that I think has been lost when it comes to just, most people online, I mean, even with podcasts, right? Like there's people that just have podcasts that just like talk about things that they learned or something they read in a book and talk about it with the utmost confidence. Yeah. It can even be historical stuff, right? That they, that, you know, they read a book about somebody who wrote, who wrote, who read somebody else's historical book about who was not even there. Yeah, somebody else 150 years down the road who read a book about it can speak about something as if it's objective fact. Yeah.

And it's it's crept in to the zeitgeist more and more in the last few years. And I think it's a problem. Because when you create an enemy, you create your own silo of agreement. Right. Right. When you are somebody who is very good at working with barbells and dumbbells and these types of implements, your enemy is the foo-flu functional crowd. Right?

That that does kettlebells and stuff. When you've become very good at the kettlebell stuff and some of that work, your enemy is the stiff bodybuilders that don't move well. And now you have these people that have found your work and they're like, yeah, fuck the bodybuilders. They don't know what they're doing. And if you're the bodybuilder guy, it's like, yeah, those weak functional guys, have them try to pick up groceries.

Like, it's this thing where you will find your audience. You will find the people that will agree with you, that'll rub your ego and tell you that everything, you're doing is the best and these other people are wrong. That's how, and I get it. That's how all these groups develop their cult's type of mindset. And I'm not going to knock them for it. But that's why I try to be very careful with how I put things forward.

I'm not going to, I see the weaknesses that come from excessive amounts of traditional type of training. But it also has a lot of strengths. I see the weaknesses that come from the functional side of training because you can't load a kettlebell. as heavy. You can't load a sandbag as heavy as you can, a barbell or a machine. You can't lift on a machine. Machines are great because you get to push in this linear fashion and load it. And you're, actually, one of the greatest machines out there for absolute load is a Smith machine or any of those

machine presses because you can really load that tissue with a lot of load. Yeah. But doing that chronically can have negative impacts on the way you move. If you don't have anything on the other side that allows you to exhibit that with fluidity and force and interact with weight differently. That's what this other tools allow you to do. The ropes allow you to interact with a lighter load because a rope is still a weight. Remember, rope is weight. It means it's a technically resistance training because you're swinging a 500 to 600 gram or two, three, four, five pound rope through space. So your resistance training. A club can be five towns, 10 pounds. You can swing club. up to 50, 60, 70 pounds, but you're interacting with a different type of tool, which is the leverage is all the way away from you.

So when you're holding it, it feels difficult on your hands and wrists. Yeah. That's another interesting thing is that I saw this on your video with Jujimu Fu. Jujimu. It's like, Mo Jo Jo Jo from Powerpuff Girls. So a 50 pound club is extremely heavy if you're going to do something with one hand, right? Oh, yeah, with one hand, 50 pounds. Club? Or even 20 pounds, right?

Yeah, Gigi Movie was having trouble with a 20 pounder with one hand. Yeah. And he's incredibly strong. He is. There was a video you guys showed of like a Japanese dude who like a skinny, these skinny dudes who didn't have it barely any muscle who were swinging these things around effortlessly. He was Persian, yeah. And they were a Persian dude and there was bodybuilders trying to do the same thing and they couldn't fucking do it.

Yes. And because they'd figured out, they figured out the physics of it or something. It's not it's the coordination of the body and the, the lack of excessive amounts of tension in the muscles when doing those movements, which is one of the strengths of these practices. These clubs and maces, what they allow you to do is they allow you to work on the natural throwing patterns of your scapula and shoulder in a pattern with your spine and your feet. Right?

So you notice like clubwork isn't just hands. It's feet, the feet are rooted and you're rotating through your hips and your spine is rotating and you're not if you hold too much tension you're not even going to be able to get this over your head so you also need to have a level of mobility and lack of tension within these tissues so you can throw like a good thrower doesn't have a bodybuilder throw a ball and see what it looks like right then you look at like an athlete and a muscular athlete right throw a ball and they know how to get they know how to get something to another side and throw that guy oh is that larry wheels that's leary wheels right there larry wheels yeah and larry again larry's a cool dude because

this guy, man, he's huge. He's huge. But he tries different things, man. Like, I, one thing that actually got me like, ooh, you know what? I really need to start taking my calisthetics seriously. Years ago, I saw Larry make a video with this guy who does calisthenics, and Larry got himself close to being able to do a planch. And being able to do that stuff at Larry's weight is extremely crazy.

But this guy right here, you know, I think those right there that he's doing in each hand are probably 40 pounds. What? Probably 35, maybe 40 pounds. Let's see, let's see Larry do it. Right? Also, Larry's next like twice as wide as his head. Larry's a big boy. Larry's a big boy.

Whoa, that's me. I think what's even more impressive about the guy that was doing is that he was doing it in those foamy Adidas. Like, I would not risk myself doing that with those types of shoes because I would not be able to get, I knew I wanted to be able to root into the ground. You know what I mean? I think it's those pants that gives them, gives them an edge. But that's the thing, like you look at his body, look at as he's swinging. Look at how mobile his shoulders are. Look at how he's able to get his shoulder behind him.

He's not using muscle. He's using his skeletal structure. That's what these tools allow. They're not focused on purely muscle, although they can help build some muscle because he's very strong. This guy is very strong, even outside of this. But they allow you to learn how to move your body as if you don't have muscle. You have to let go of the tension that your muscle holds to try to, skeletally move those things. I mean, I want you to think about baseball.

What's his name? Otani. I forgot his, I forgot his first name. Shoh-Hoh-Hoh-Hoh-Hoh-Ho-Hi. Or watch any baseball player that that throws fast. Look at like a lot of these guys aren't crazy muscular, but for some reason they can like throw 90, 95, 100, like 100 miles per hour in terms of a ball. Yes. It's not because of their muscle. It's because they're able to, use their body like a sling and put that force through their structure and have a level of fluidity between all of it. That's why clubs are beneficial because now you can do that with load. Your hands like as you were doing it yesterday, what did you feel on your hands?

My hands were on fire. I want to mention the club that you were using was probably around 18 pounds. The one that we had that didn't have any weight on it. Right. Maybe around 18 or 19 pounds. Right. But what were you? Yeah.

What were you feeling? I was feeling my hands felt like they were on fire. They were they were burning. Like my hands and my wrists were the most thing. Like not only was it kind of especially like if I landed in the throw like a little bit past 90 degrees. I definitely felt the pressure my wrist and my fingers trying to hold that thing up. Right. Like you have to like you got to dial in that muscle memory first of all to get the balance right.

I feel like. But the biggest thing I noticed I would have to say is that my hands were on fire. And the reason is, is when you're using these types of implements, they put torque on your body, rotational torque. So if this were longer and the weight were farther away from me, holding it like this, right, whenever I shoot, my whole body has to adjust to be able to keep this thing up. I have to learn how to create a structure against this so it doesn't pull. But you can also do things where you're lifting it and it does put that rotational torque on your joints. These are pressures that you can't mimic with any of these commercial gym tools. Not saying that these tools are bad, but they're different.

And that's the point. You're building different types of movement ability, different types of strength, learning how to move your body in a different way that doesn't have you holding as much tension. And that's where the strength of some of these tools are versus these tools that cause you to create so much tension that when you see people who focus on this, they then move. with all of that tension, right? So again, that's, I don't know how we landed on this. Or actually, it was the people speaking with so much. Yeah, confidence.

But that's the thing, man. It's like, I think that in health, our enemy isn't the person that's training differently than us. Right. Right. Our enemy is sarcopenia, osteopenia, and lack of movement ability as we age. Yeah. Right.

Those are, our, our enemy is the, degradation of the human body. It's becoming stiff. It's becoming clumsy. It's it's it's feeling frail. That's our enemy. We all have that enemy. Yeah. And we need to figure out ways and ways that we can handle it through our health and fitness to fight these enemies. That's what we should be fighting. We should not be in fighting and what term of fitness is the best. The best form of fitness is the one that you're going to actually go and do. Yeah. Right. Totally man. And it's with the you know, the development of the technological world that we live in, right? The more technology, becomes a integral part,

it already is an integral part in our everyday lives. But the more and more technology compensates for the things that we do every day, right? Like our work, sitting in front of our computers or using chatGBT. I mean, it's not only compensating for physical things, but it's with AI and Google, it's compensating for our cognitive power,

our ability to think through problems, right? When you can just find the answer, like that dude, And Connor McGregor's trainer was giving you, leading you in the pathway so you could use your mental ability to figure out the answer on your own. Right. Like the more we like the the more advanced technology and AI and these things become the harder we are going to have to work to keep our human faculties in more in tune and stronger, right? For lack of a better term. Absolutely.

It's a blessing and it's a curse. And I'm actually just, I'm, I'm just more concerned. I'm always concerned for the younger generations, man. Because when it comes to fitness, the younger generations are getting spewed with ideas that like, if I want to get big and strong, I got to hop on TRT. You know what I mean? And that wasn't the thing when I was younger. But now it's just like, now all the answers there. We had Google when I was like 11 or 12.

It's like when the internet became a thing. Yeah. Yeah. actually not like yeah yeah like 2005 2006 yeah right and that that was like okay you got to search some shit but then you have to look up articles well that's the thing too about young about younger people too is the majority of them who get into this stuff or get into lifting in the first place are just doing it for the goal of looking good hell yeah i mean right started training because of dragon ball z yeah exactly right you want to you want to be muscular you want to get girls or whatever it is

like you're not doing this because you want to be mobile or because when you're 40, you want to do jiu-jitsu, right? Or like, pick up skateboarding again 20 years later. Yeah. So like, I feel like this is a natural, like, it's a natural thing you have to find on your own, right? Like you did. It's not something that like when I'm 21 years old, I'm not just going to pick up these things. Like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to keep my flexibility through my through middle age, right? It's like, yes. Like the way you get inspired to do things like this or to learn new things is to overcome obstacles, right? Like Tim Ferriss with his back pain that he's fat.

You know, he's obviously, I could tell listening to you guys' podcast, he was obviously super interested and obsessed with this stuff because he has this burning desire to overcome his back pain. Yeah, right? Yeah. And that's going to change his, that had a negative impact on his life. And he'll do anything in his power to get over that. Yeah.

He's gonna figure it out. And one thing is, as you were mentioning, again, the people that typically start finding my stuff, where my stuff starts hitting their feed, are the people who they have a level of pain now, right? And the things within their movement practice aren't necessarily making their issues better, right? So like you said, it's like,

when you need it, you'll come across it. But one of the reasons why I want to encourage even younger, younger cats to have some of this stuff within their repertoire of movement, maybe even rope flow as like just your, and you don't even need to go to my website to buy a rope. You can go to Home Depot, right? You can go to Home Depot, get yourself a cheap rope, cut it up. It's going to be a cheap rope. But it starts just practicing that movement. It doesn't have, it's not going to take away from any of your resistance training stuff. It's just going to help you start moving with the level of fluidity. But the reason why you want to keep that a part of

your something, a part of your journey as you're working on building muscle is to, help mitigate some of the negative effects of overdoing hypertrophy. Because hypertrophy isn't bad, strength isn't bad. But you just want things within your practice that are going to feed the other end of the spectrum. Right. And as you develop that skill, let's say you're 20 years old, 21 years old, in a few years, you're going to become very fluid with that tool. And you'll be able to get what you need out of it as you're heading down this goal. It's like that's one universal tool that can help any athlete feel better and move better. Yeah.

Right? You don't have to get into the juggling of the kettlebell. You know, you probably even shouldn't get into the juggling of the kettlebell. Unless it interests you. But the thing is juggling kettlebells interested me. So then I started learning how to juggle kettlebells. Right. But, you know, that's the thing when it comes to all of this.

It starts with like a need. You go and you do something. You're like, oh, my gosh. I jumping is really difficult. Oh my gosh. I can't sprint like I did when I was a kid. Right. Or like, why am I feeling pain whenever I try to go down and pick something off the ground?

Why do I? Why can't I bend at my back? Why is it feeling that way? What do I need to fix? And then that's when people start having some of these inputs. You know what I mean? Totally, man. Yeah.

And I also want to talk about the breathing stuff. Oh, yeah. That seems to be like the most fundamental part of all of this, right? Yeah. The, um, the diaphragm breathing. Yeah. And, uh, which is something I never really paid attention to. I mean, I paid attention to like the breathing through the nose stuff when working out a lot. Mm-hmm.

But, um, the diaphragm breathing seems to make a huge difference, especially when you're lifting these ridiculous weights in sandbags particularly, right? Yeah. And it, it, why don't you just explain? How, how did you discover? this the diaphragm breath breathing and and when did you start integrating that in your lifts yeah it's something i started thinking about um yeah okay so there's a book i read um patrick mckew and the oxygen advantage that's not what got me started thinking about diaphragmatic breathing before that you know i think i was watching like a youtube video because again it was like i was having like quite a bit of back pain when i was in my early 20s and i was also trying to

figure out how i could improve at my jiu jiu jitsu Right. So then I came across, I came across some, actually, I think the first time I actually realized or thought about diaphragmatic breathing was when I watched the Hulk movie with Hicks and Gracie at the very end. I don't know if you remember the scene where he was with Bruce Banner. And then he started sitting there doing the, he started explaining that in his English, started explaining when you breathe here, it's very tense. You need to breathe here. And then he started breathing into the diaphragm. Yeah. Then he started doing these diaphragmatic waves, which for the longest time I wanted to teach myself how to do that. And I finally learned how to do that. But that's the first time I was like, I started thinking about that. Yeah.

Now, diaphragmatic breathing isn't necessarily, it's not novel, but it's something that gets lost. It gets lost through lifestyle, stress, habits, and a tendency to want to look sexy. So when people, you know, when people start being very subconscious, very aware of like, the way they look. They're trying to hold their stomach top. You have women that wear these waist trainers to keep their stomach in. You have guys that are walking around constantly flexing their abs so that they don't look like they have any type of belly, right? Because we want to look trim. But what that inherently causes is it causes us to take more shallow breaths. That one habit

causes us to start breathing shallowly. Instead of allowing like 360 degree expansion here and into our diaphragm. And our diaphragm is this kind of like it's a pan-shaped. thing that's right underneath the rib cage, right? And when you breathe, it flattens when you inhale. That's why the stomach comes out. When you exhale, it goes back in. But you'll also notice, if I are trying to keep this really tight and breathe, I'm going to breathe up here. My shoulders will rise. My chest is going to rise. These auxiliary breathing muscles start working for me to breathe. So it's not that you can't breathe that way, but when we think of the nervous system, we We have our parasympic nervous system, which is rest and I digest, keeps us calm.

We have our sympathetic nervous system. It's when, oh, something shocked. Fight or flight. Yeah, I need to be ready. What does happen when that happens is shallow breast because you need to be ready for what happens. But the problem now is that a majority of people, especially those that are focused on like working on their bodies and looking good and the competitors that always do the waste stuff, majority these people are now breathing here when they breathe. Even at rest, they're having these shallow

breaths, right? Their diaphragm isn't moving because they want to keep their stomach. They want to keep their six-back. They want to keep their stomach. Right. Right. And this causes the tissues around here don't get a lot of movement. So now you're holding excessive tension in your abdomen and excessive tension in your back and also follows along other tissues because now you're more tense. Your breaths and your heart rate is going to be a little bit higher than it should be because now you're taking these shallow breaths up here and you're right you're you're when you see people start to panic this is how they start to breathe but you're doing that to a low level all the time chronically even when you're asleep so just bringing a level of awareness to learning how to breathe diaphragmatically

is going to make a big difference for you. Hickson Gracie has videos about this on YouTube and I'm going to get to something about Hickson because I love how he approaches the breath when it comes to movement But putting your hand on your lower chest, right? And you can actually, an exercise I like to do or tell people to do is like get like a little kettlebell at home or something that's not too heavy and put it on your stomach while you're lying on the floor and put your knees up and put your other hand on your chest. I want you to breathe. I want you to ask yourself what raises. Do your shoulders come up? Does your chest come up when you take a deep breath?

Take a deep breath and see what comes up. If you're breathing like this, if this is your deep breath, you're not really using your diaphragm. What you want is you want to feel this come out, but not only do you want to feel your belly come out and you want to keep this down, so you want to breathe so that this doesn't move. Right.

But you'll also want to start feeling an expansion through your obliques, through your back. You're going to feel this 360 degree expansion of your rib cage and your muscles of breathing. Yeah. That's going to allow you to take a deeper and calmer breath. calmer breath. Being able to do this is going to allow your resting heart rate to naturally come down. Right. It's going to allow yourself. It's going to allow your nervous system to calm down too. What are you doing

tissue work, a tendency is to grimace and you start to tense up. Relax. Breathe into the diaphragm as you're doing your tissue work. Now you're going to be able to find different areas because you're your calmer, your nervous system knows we're resting. This is this is chill. You're on fight or flight. let me do what I need to do, right? So that's that's diaphragmatic breathing. You were going to say something? No, I was going to say, like, I'm sure the more you practice doing this, like if you're somebody who habitually breathed shallow into their chest and not through their diaphragm,

I'm sure that translates into their sleeping. And if you do this enough consciously, I bet you that would transfer into sleep. And I'm, I'm, I'm betting that that would significantly improve the quality of your sleep, your recovery, everything. Yes. It's, it's an awareness thing, though. Just, it's, it's annoying. Because, like, when you start doing this, you have to, this is why I told you, like,

sometimes before your podcast, I want you to build the habit of just maybe before the store. Or when you wake up in the morning, when you open your eyes, put your hand here, put your hand here, and start breathing into the diaphragm. Trigger yourself to do that throughout your day. Because you're going to find, you're going to find that maybe while you're a computer typing, you have a habit of like when you get focused, you're, yep, oh shit, okay. All right, now, right, you'll have to trigger yourself.

Maybe you can even keep notes in certain areas that, you know, you freak or in a work. So you can look at it and be like, are you breathing right? Or are you breathing into your diaphragm? Yeah. And you can bring awareness there. The whole point of continuous awareness is to shift yourself. Because we were all doing this as babies and kids. We all, all kids breathe.

When they come out, you'll just see this beautiful, deep diaphragmatic breath. But over time, because they're sitting on devices like this, right? Everything is here. You slowly build the habits to start. Anjin from daylight was explaining that. You guys talked to Anjin too on your show. He was explaining to that. There's something that happens to your brain when your conscious mind turns off.

And you're scrolling through shit like Instagram or social media. It changes your breathing. It makes you breathe shallower and like through your mouth. And you're just like, it's a weird phenomenon that happens. Yeah, I mean, shit, not that it's great. But when I was a kid and, you know, kids called kids mouth breathers and that was Yeah, dude. It's like, fucking mouth breather.

Mm-hmm. Sorry, Mom, I won't curse. My mom's probably listening. But that's, you know, there's a book by Sandra Khan and Paul Erlick called Jaws. And it goes deep. We actually, we had Sandra on our podcast to talk about this goes deep on the phenomenon of, um, oral facial health and fixing those issues with people. Because in Western culture, like dentistry is such a big industry.

And removing the wisdom teeth is a huge thing. And I'm not going to, you know, I'm not a dentist or anything. But certain areas where like the young eat hard food and train their, like through the food they eat, their faces develop in a way that all of their teeth can fit into their mouth. Yes. I mean, we have to, we have, that book does a really good job at making people begin into question the even the way that they were brought up with food and et cetera. Because, you know, a lot of these things go back to when you were a kid.

You know, like, so it's one of those things where even when you're, like, remember when I told you to keep the tongue at the roof of your mouth, that's a part of natural orifacial resting posture. When you're just chilling, your tongue, your tongue should not be pressing hard against the roof of your mouth, but there should be some pressure of the tongue against the roof of your mouth, just some, right? But a lot of the, but a lot of the tongue, of people when they start to bring awareness to this they might be sitting around and they're like when i'm sitting my tongue actually just rest at the bottom of my mouth that's a level of slack within the whole face right when you're chilling and this is one of the things that can help people especially

people that snore right this habit of if you're someone who has the tongue on the bottom of your mouth when you're doing things and you bring awareness and you realize this well when you're sleeping your tongue probably falls down and then your mouth open and you start to you start to snore. So it's an awareness thing like during the day can we change that habit of how we're holding our face. So the tongue is sitting on the roof of our mouth. We have a slight level of or facial tension that now becomes second nature. And then over time, when you start to fall asleep, you're going to realize, wow, I'm, I'm breathing through my nose when I sleep. And when you breathe through your nose at your sleep, you're going to have a lower heart rate and

more restful sleep, which is why years ago, all the bros like us started sleeping with mouth tape. Do you sleep with mouth tape? Sometimes, but I don't have to anymore. Like, I don't, I don't, do it just because I'm used to it, right? But I've tested myself to see, well, I still wake up with a dry mouth, do I still have my mouth fall open? I asked my girlfriend, let me know if I was snoring when we wake up in the morning. And now I don't, because I used to snore.

And it was because of all these things I wasn't thinking about. Like when I first started thinking, when I first started bringing awareness to this maybe, maybe eight or so years ago, one of the first things I noticed is when I would be working on my laptop with my beats headphones on, I didn't realize my ex-girlfriend actually told me, in Sema, you're breathing through your mouth,

where she was sitting with me once. I was like, what? She's like, yeah, you're breathing through your mouth while you're working. I was like, I started to get self-conscious. And this was before I knew about all this, but that was like her bringing awareness towards that got me to be like, I need to keep my mouth closed

when I'm fucking, when I have, because when you're not thinking and you're listening to music and you're working, your things will just drop into the way they are. And you will have to do the work of bringing awareness to the diaphragmatic breath, bringing awareness, to your facial posture so that you can make these subtle changes over time that long term

will have big health benefits. But in the short term, it's going to be a level of frustration and work because you're going to be like, it's not clicking, it's not working. Well, it's because it takes a constant effort to change the patterns that have been built into your system for probably the past decade. It takes work. I've been taped my mouth for probably like four years and when I sleep and I still snore. Last night before I went to bed, before I fell asleep, I made it,

I consciously did like 10 deep diaphragm breaths. And this morning where I was like, god damn, you snored like a motherfucker last night. She's like, you were sawing logs all night long. I'm like, God damn it.

Give it time, dude. Yeah. All this. All this. When I sleep in my back, even if my mouth is taped, I'll snore. Do you,

back sleeping is quite interesting. I've always found it people that can sleep on their backs quite interesting because I cannot. I sleep on my, I always sleep on my side and I kind of have my head a little bit raised, right? But have you ever tried side sleeping? Just curious.

Yeah. I switch back and forth. I fall asleep on my back typically. Yeah. And through the night, I'll switch from side to side. But I don't snore them on my side. That's for sure. Hey, this is just a curiosity thing for me.

I want you to try put a pillow in between your legs. I'd try to. I try to. I love it. Yeah. It's super comfortable. Okay. Okay.

Okay. But I don't, for whatever reason, I don't have the discipline. to like think about it every night before bed. This stuff is like, but when I do it, like if I can find that perfect like pocket where I got the pillow between my legs, I'm on my side, the pillow is the right elevation. It's like the, I could be in the Goldilocks zone and I could sleep great, but it's, it's just like, it's hard to get that every night. Here's another thing to try to.

Just just, just, just, just, just, just see how you sleep. Put a pillow in between your legs. Take a second pillow and like put another pillow here and kind of like, put another pillow here and kind of Yeah. Just just try. Like hug it? Just humor me. Just hear me like, yeah, you have a pillow between your legs and you have another pillow on your upper body.

Just humor me. Try that. I just want to see what you might see. Okay. You might see nothing. You know what I mean? Just see how that feels when you're asleep. Okay.

Is that what you do? Yes. Do you track your sleep with like any like devices or anything? Yeah. You know, I haven't even looked. I have, okay. So I have an eight sleep. Right.

Really? Do you like it? I, okay. So this is the thing. The quality of my sleep, because I'm a, dude, as I've been sleeping at this hotel, I sweat. I've been a hot sleeper all my life. Even with that room at 68 degrees, right? I sweat when I sleep.

So that eight sleep has been such a lifesaver for me because it cools. But the reason why I'm going to be actually getting one of those chili pads is because they do. Chili pads. Chili pad, yeah. They've been in the space way longer than A's sleep. It doesn't mean eight sleep is bad. Yeah. But chili pad has no EMS.

And not that I've, no. This is the thing. I haven't noticed any negative benefit. Negative ramifications on my sleep with my eight sleep. I haven't noticed it. But so many people have like that we've talked to that are really big on the EMFs. Things have been like, that's not good for you. Yeah. That's bad for your mitochondria.

Right. I'm like, I got this. I could sleep. Okay. Well, good. The chili pad is, but this is the thing. The chili pad, I've been able to, I don't have it yet, but I was able to test it. and it does the same thing, but no EMFs.

So it doesn't track your sleep or any of that, but like I've, I haven't, I haven't like paid attention to those metrics for a long time now. When I, I still do. The eight sleep does that tracking for you. Yeah, it has stuff inside that tracks your heart rate. But you don't do like an horror ring or any watch or anything.

I have stuff in my watch, but I don't really pay attention to it. I did that stuff for a long time and I found it beneficial, but I've come to a point where like, it doesn't necessarily serve me anymore to track those things because I don't, I don't get any data. I have my sleep is on point.

I have solid nutrition. Right. You're doing everything you could possibly do to optimize it. And I don't get me wrong. It's like I'm doing everything and I know everything, but I'm doing a lot. Yeah, yeah. Right? And I've come to a place where now for years, I've been good.

You know what I mean? So it's like me constantly paying attention to what does my, what does my oaring say about my recovery? What does my, because I used to have a whoop too, what does my Rup say about my recovery today? It's like, it's just an extra level of unnecessary, like, like checking and potential anxiety that I don't need. I've tuned into the way my body feels and I have systems and things that I can do for my body

if I, because I can feel when I'm off. So let me, let me fix that. I have things that I could do to fix that. I don't have to track everything to do so. The only time I track metrics is when I'm doing like some high intensity cardio or I'm doing something where I'm trying to keep a specific heart rate zone. So I'll use my watch or my Morpheus chest strap to pay attention to those things so that I'm staying.

within the heart rate zone that I have for the goal of this workout, right? Right. That's that's that's that's mainly where I'll like track things. But outside of that, not that you shouldn't, I'm not telling people they shouldn't, but I would say, I think the awareness is the name of the game, even bring a level of awareness to how tracking all these things makes you feel. If you have a whoop, when you see that the recovery says, Plycemo effect of it, yeah, yeah, right? If you see that the recovery says you're you're not good. Do you actually feel not good? Would you have still gone and done something? Or, and I, and I think, And I, because I again, I sometimes when my, when my o'er rings is like,

I had the shittiest possible sleep, I feel the best. Yeah. Right. And that, that could be an opportunity where like, you could have done some work, but maybe, because for many people, the case is when they see that, they're like, okay, I'm going to back off. And maybe that's a good idea. But sometimes maybe you could have done something because you had a better idea on how

you felt versus the ring, right? So I would just say, maybe even if you, if you're someone who loves wearables, don't use them every day. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Maybe take the OR ring off for a few days. Put it back on. Take the, like, don't pay attention to what your eight sleep says. Right. And pay attention. You know what I mean? Um, is the eight sleep an actual like mattress or is it like a pad that day out of a mattress. Oh, they do. They have a mattress. And they have a top. They have a top. And they have a top. So even if you have another mattress from other brands, you can put that topor on top of your, your, you're that, that mattress and it'll work. Right. It's improved. It's helped me, man, when I got an eight sleep, that, that changed the way that I sleep. But now the only thing that brings me a level of concern with it is that EMF. And some people say,

just put the tower far away from you, but I don't even want that in my room to be perfectly honest. Right? So that's why for me I'm going to be using the chili because it does the same thing as the eight sleep, except now there's absolutely no EMF involved with it. It's just like it's something that you can just put on your mattress. And it's less expensive than the eight sleep. So I think that that might be a better solution for a majority of the population.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the eight sleeps are everywhere. Everybody talks about the eight sleeps. It's right. I have a sleep number and I fucking love it. Oh, does a sleep number do temperature stuff too? Yes.

So mine doesn't, but the new ones do. They have like where both sides can do heat or cool. I'm so happy that more brands are doing that. Yeah. Yeah. The the sleep number's interesting because it, which is like, I don't really need it, but it's it adjusts the firmness level. So you can adjust like it's got airbags underneath everything. So mine's got like foam and it's got the temper

And at the very bottom, it's got airbags. So you can adjust the, the level of firmness or softness of it. But I sleep on a hundred. I never changed. I never changed it. So it's a hundred like the firmest? A hundred is the firmest. That's like, if I slept on one of those, I probably would sleep on the firmest too. Yeah. Yeah. I, that sounds so cool. I also like the elevation aspect. I think Hooperman just had a podcast where he was talking to somebody about like, having your head slightly elevated for lymphatic drainage when you sleep. Really? Yeah, yeah.

So when you're sleeping, instead of sleeping flat, just have your head at slight elevation so that like your limp, because your lymph is not going to be pumped by your heart. It's pumped by gravity and movement, right? But when you're asleep, if you're flat, right, you're not getting any of that, any of that kind of drainage. Whoa. So just a slight elevation can be pretty powerful in terms of improving your sleep quality. So that could be something you could try.

Just slight elevation. Yeah, they make the bed. frames where you can elevate like the head the head of it maybe? Yeah, yeah. Or like was he saying specifically with a bigger pillow? Um, I think he was mentioning like there are their options. If people can raise their bed a little bit, that could be an option. I just use a pillow because my, my bed is not fancy in the, in any sense.

Right. Uh, it's a mattress. Right. Right. So I, I sleep with like, you know, I sleep with like kind of like two pillows under me. So I'm kind of like, oh. And, uh, I've actually just been doing that because it just felt comfortable over the years. But it's good to know that there's also that, that side benefit of it.

Yeah, I'm a like super pillow snob. Like I have to have like the perfect pillow. It can't be too soft. Can't be too stiff. It can't be. It's got to be like specific kind of down feathers on it so I can fluff it up and it gets cold. Like if I don't have the right pillow, my sleep is fucked, bro. Dog.

Now, like even through this conversation, I'm like, maybe I should just get myself one of those big old body pillows. You know? My girlfriend sleeps right next to me. But like I'm over here sleeping away. Oh, like the full body like the full body. You know what I mean? Like maybe I should just sleep with one of those. Those.

But anyway, going back, going back, actually, is there anything else because I wanted to go back to the breath on. No, go to the breath. Yeah, let's go back to the breath. So bringing awareness to that is going to be super important so that you can learn how to breathe into the diaphragm all the time. And it becomes something that's automatic where you're not thinking about it. So when you release that tension from your abdomen, you're not breathing deep.

And you can take that into all the activities that you do. You'll be able to take that into jiu-jitsu. You'll be able to take that into running. daily life will feel a little bit less stressful. But the next place where I think people should start thinking about incorporating more breathing is when they're lifting loads. And this is something that for some people it's elementary and maybe they do it. But many times when you start learning how to lift weights in a gym setting,

a lot of breath holds tend to happen, right? There's a lot of like the Valsalva maneuver, which is, you know, you create extra intra-abdominal pressure. You hold your breath. You do your lift. That is something that is used to lift heavy loads. And it makes sense. When you're lifting the heaviest loads,

the Valsavent maneuver is going to be the safest maneuver. It braces your core, right? Yeah, so that your spine doesn't buckle when a bar is on your back. And so maybe you don't curve when you're trying to pick up a barbell from the ground to do deadlifts. But the pattern that this causes people, when they're doing the Valcelle maneuver all the time,

is they create excess tension for the low that they're trying to lift. So instead of creating just the correct amount of tension for the demand of what they're trying to lift, maybe when they're lifting a 200-pound barbell, they create the tension that they would be using when they're lifting a 400 or 500-pound barbell. More tension than needed, right? And it's because the maneuver, the Valcival maneuver,

this is its inherent function. Yeah. To increase the pressure you create so that you don't buckle under it. load. But that's why, you know, in traditional martial arts, boxing, karate, you hear people in boxing, when they throw a punch, it's a, right? It's not a, it's not a, it's not a, they breathe, they exhale, and they throw that punch. And when you exhale and do movements, that exhale allows you to create a level of bracing, right? Like, you know, I had you do this earlier, but if you

if you growl, yeah, you will feel a level of tension that's then created at your core. that tension is a level of spinal bracing. That's a level of abdominal bracing. And that's why when a concept to take into your lifts, and you don't have to take this into your lifts, take this into when you're picking up something from the ground. When you wanna go down to the ground to pick that up, inhale, exhale.

Exhale on the effort. Exhale on the effort. Exhale on the concentric. Exhale when pushing on a bench press. Inhale, right? Or you can use your nose. But learn to exhale on the effort, right? Because that exhale is something that will, it will allow you to exert force, but it will also allow you to create enough stability for the load you're lifting. What you shouldn't do is listen to what I'm telling you to do right now, go into your close to max effort work, and then attempt this with that.

It's an easy way to injure yourself. You should take this into your daily practices. And for a majority, of people who let's say like you lift some weights, but you know, you don't think about all the stuff when lifting. I want you to take this into your practices that you're just picking things up. You know, when you go and you pick up something from the ground, I want you to pay attention to, am I holding my breath when I go down to pick something up?

Right. Am I bracing? Because like a lot of people without realizing it when they go to pick something off the ground, they'll hold their breath to do so. I mean, when you think about when you injure yourself. Tying your shoes. Tying your shoes, you hold your breath. You should be able to breathe through these things. Why are you holding your breath? You're holding your breath because you have this tension response to bending and movement,

which you shouldn't have. And when you do have these types of responses, what ends up happening is your body guards itself. When you hold your breath, it's harder to move fluidly, right? So your body, when you go and you pick that thing up, you hold your breath because you don't feel comfortable creating spinal flexion to pick the thing up. Right? But if you then start building the habit of inhale when I go down and pick it up, exhale when I come up, when I'm pooping, right? Yeah.

Instead of bearing down and pushing, can I exhale, like inhale, right? Yeah, yeah. Exhale, relax the muscles of my sphincter and just let it come out. We talked about this with Gil Helpy and it'll sound weird. Yeah. But even when you're defecating, realizing how much tension you're holding down here. Right. Because you push.

That is not supposed to be something where you push. This is why in other areas, parts of the- It is a natural thing though, a natural reaction to tense up doing that, you know? So it tends up doing what? When you're taking a shit. It's a natural reaction, but it causes unnecessary stress when doing so.

Right. If you're taking a shit, you don't have, hey, find it's so funny that we're talking about this now. But real talk. Yeah. The reason why the squatty potty exists is to bring your knees, to a position where defecation becomes easier. Because naturally, the squatting position is a position of, like, for some people's position

of rest, but in many places, the position of if I'm going to poop and, you know, I got to be mindful of people, I'm going to squat down and poop. In the woods. But the one of the things is people, again, hold a lot of tension in these areas. So they feel like if I'm going to poop, they have so much tension in their, like, their sphincter, all that, that whole area that they feel like they need a push to get rid of it. And when we were talking to Gil, again, the guy who talked to us, about fascia and cadavers.

This is the cadaver guy. This is the cadaver guy. Yeah, he was, I brought up the conversation with him because I was curious. He knows so much about fascia, which is like this web that goes across the body. So I was like, Gil, what are your thoughts on pooping? I was like, I ask him, do you breathe when you poop? He's like, yeah, I inhale and I exhale when it comes out. And then it got us into the conversation of America has a problem with coffee and

needing coffee to poop, which is a whole other thing. But this is, again, breathing through movement. Right. When you think about it, when you push and you're pooping, you hold your breath. It's not good. Right. You're creating all of this tension through all of these movements that is now chronic. And then you wonder, why are you having so much pain and stiffness in certain areas?

Because all of the natural movement that you're doing has excessive amounts of tension associated with it. Even when you use the restroom. Even probably when you pee, you're pushing your pee out when if you could just breathe and relax, that'll just flow out of you. Like this is something I want you all to try as you're listening. This might sound ridiculous. No, no, it doesn't. I've tried it. But you know what I mean?

You can do all of this stuff in a more less tense way. It feels the first time you try, though, it feels very unnatural. You have to really like, hijack your body with your mind. And you have to be like, okay, stop, breathe. It'll come out. It'll come out. You don't have to tense up. You don't have to.

Right, right? That's fascinating, dude. So the cadaver guy. Go heavily, yeah. What was his, why was he studying? Why was he studying cadavers? Was it for this functional training type stuff? No, no, no.

He was studying cadavers just actually for cadaver science, right? He's someone who has just a deep interest in the human body and what's going on underneath things. So he'll go into, or like, Gil has these videos on YouTube. You've been Gil Headley and go across his YouTube channel. You will see so many videos of like dead bodies or just cadavers and he's talking about different aspects of things. But when we were talking about to him,

the focus of the podcast we were doing with him was this tissue called fascia, which has had a level of resurgence within fitness. Now there are a lot of people who are like, fascia coaches and learning, like it's become a whole thing. But the thing about fascia is that it's this web that's underneath your body that is connected to everything.

And it's within, it also is within your tissues, it goes towards your bones. It's this interconnected web that is important when it comes to fluid human movement, right? And I want people to keep this in mind. When people talk about fascia training on the internet, what they're just talking about is fluidity of movement within training.

Like you'll see people doing stuff with bars, you'll see people doing fluid movements, like you'll see a lot of stuff. And it's just learning how to move the body without holding onto a lot of tension and having your connective tissue and your fascia, you to kind of move with your body. The way I think about it is it's moving through your skeletal structure, moving as if you don't have muscle, what we were talking about earlier.

But Gil was talking about how the fascia that he noticed in different types of fascia, he noticed different types of fascia and the fascia seems stiffer in certain athletes than others. Like he's had the ability to, again, work with so many different bodies that have had different types of backgrounds in terms of whether it's like they were a biker, whether they were a fit or an unfit individual. whether they were super sedentary, and he is able to talk eloquently and deeply about the differences you'll see in fascia and the hips and fascia in the spine and fascia in certain areas that people don't really think about, which is why I asked him a specific question

because, again, man, on our podcast, we've talked to so many high-level body workers. And the prevailing view from the science-based community when it came to soft tissue work is that that that, that, That's pseudoscience. There's no research to back it up. And the things that these people that love studies love to say is like, well, placebo.

If somebody feels better, it's just placebo. It doesn't mean that it's doing anything. Gill has been able to tear bodies apart and analyze bodies and see what the body of somebody who does tissue work looks like versus the body of somebody who doesn't. Seeing what their fascia, the consistency looks like there, the muscle, all of that stuff looks like. And he had a great, he had a great assessment. of why body work, whether it's self or done by somebody else,

is extremely important to the fluid movement of the human body. And this is why I stopped paying attention to like, not stop paying attention. I give a level of attention to researchers when it comes to some of this stuff, because they don't apply. As in they don't apply the stuff. They don't, they don't put the work in to see difference. They don't pay attention to, they don't pay attention to end of ones. They only pay attention to broad spectrum research. And Gil is somebody who's putting things into application, doing research.

He sees the difference. And he's just a very intelligent person when it comes to fashion, the human body. It was an exciting conversation. That's interesting, man. You know, not even with like this kind of stuff, like athletic science and like stuff when it comes to like muscle and fascia. But even like there was, and I actually talked about this with Jack Cruz. He pointed this out to me.

Was that the- Well, what- I still have honestly bruises. Shout out to Jack. From our conversation with Jack. But Jack, okay, you know what?

I want you to hold on to what you're going to mention about Jack Cruz, okay? Okay. I have to mention this here because Jack Cruz, an amazing,

brilliant individual that I'm happy he exists. I'm happy that he's able to share his learning on sunlight and health with the general population. But our conversation with Jack, bro, y'all can go check out

some of this conversation. Jack didn't like, it's okay. He's an arnery fella. That is an understatement, my friend. Jack is so smart. I want to preface this with Jack is very smart. Jack is probably has genius level intellect.

He's going to love that you said that. Yeah. It's true. It's true. To do all the things Jack has done and to bring the things to the forefront that Jack has, he's a brilliant guy. And I love that he exists. But sometimes your delivery, brother, it can just like, it's just.

And I get why he is the way he is. because he's had to deal with so many people, like, talking shit on some of the things he's put forward. I think it comes from his career. Yeah. I think that's where it stems from. Okay. That ended that. I think it comes with the psychology of being a high level surgeon.

Yeah. You know, coming up in that world in a hospital where you are the boss and everyone has to do what you say because the stakes are somebody's life. And I think that kind of like seeps into. your psyche. Yeah, yeah. But and then you know what? Again, which is you need that. You do. Jack Cruz, I love what he shares and I pay attention to things that he puts forward. I actually actually have a video that's going to be coming about out on sunlight soon. And it stems from some of the things from that conversation and things that I've learned from other people. But do that whole conversation. He was just like he was berating us about like he was

calling us assholes and all this shit. And it's just a Jack type of delivery. And I think people understand like, Jack. I love his surfer lingo too. He has like this surfer accent, like this California surfer bro. Yeah.

I'd be like, you ain't listening to me, bro. You gotta open your eyes, bro. Yeah, yeah. It's like, Jack, I'm trying to listen to you. You know what I mean? Yeah, but like, uh, take off your sunglasses, bro. Dog. So why do you have bruises?

Um, if anyone goes and watches that show, like Jack, Jack, While he was talking to us, he was also just dissing us at the same time. And I don't think he realized like, like, Jack, I work out outside. Like, I get sunlight. I don't, like, I. Oh, yes. But I don't think he knew. The muscles.

Like, I think he assumed, he looked at the muscle. He's like, this is a dumb gym bro that just works out of the gym all days. That's what he probably thought. And he thought he was, this is to say his delivery was interesting. And I still appreciate him. and that whole podcast, but man, whenever I think about Jack Cruz, it's like PTSD from that conversation. It's like Jack Cruz, I'm like, oh God, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. So, but again, if people haven't watched your episode of Jack Cruz, they absolutely should. I think it's gonna illuminate a lot of things for people. One thing that, and don't forget about your thing with Jack Cruz, but I think one thing that people really need to think about nowadays with sunlight is your ancestry and your personal needs. Because with a lot of information about the sun,

and that's why I love what Jack has put forward, along with who's the other woman you got to learn Alexis. Alexis Cohen, right? Alexis Cowan, yeah. Is because there's so much information from, and okay, when I say this, people, when these types of words come on my mouth, people think like, oh, it's something against white people.

I want to mention this. What I'm about to say is nothing against white people. Right. It's, it's since a majority of, health information is put forward by folks that are white, there is a level of care that you need to have when you go into ultraviolet sun that I probably don't need to have. Right. Because I'm 100% Nigerian from West Africa, where year round, we have UVB that's from ranges

six to nine to 11 to 12. Even in December, UVB is around six. But when someone like that goes to- Is Nigeria, does that go right through the equator? It's close. It's close to the equator. It's close. Yeah, especially because of the UVB.

And this is why people in Africa have developed a high level of melanin. But the thing is, is, and this is where I'm speaking to brown folks, especially, to stop avoiding the sun. Right. Because when you go somewhere like the UK, where there are three, four, actually, no, not, not four or five months of the year, you know, where the UVB in the middle of the day is like two, sometimes one, sometimes you get none of that exposure. you need to try to get as much sun as humanly possible.

And you cannot be listening to this advice from certain people where they're like, avoid the sun for skin. Because certain, even there are certain folks that are brown and black that avoid the sun because they don't want to get darker because of aspects of colorism. Across the world and other places, lighter skin, even amongst brown skin is seen as beautiful.

Yeah. So people will purposefully get less sun exposure so that they can avoid getting darker. Right. But that's impacting their health negatively because when you and I go out into this same sun, you're going to absorb way more vitamin D in a 20 minute period than I will. I might need to spend four to five more times, five more time out in the sun to get that same level for myself because of melanin. So that means I need to be out in the sun more than you do for my personal health.

Right. But because of a lot of health messaging, even my aunt, it's 100% Nigerian. I was talking to her about this last year because sunlight came up. And she's a nurse and she's like, and Sima, you can't be getting out to the sun so much. you're going to get cancer. And like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. You are a dark-skinned black woman. You need the sun.

You have to be out there way more than some of these folks. And people got to realize that sun needs are different for different populations. Totally. This is what Alexis laid out for us when she came on the show. Perfect. She was happy. Yes. Yes.

No, no. She made it out like a mind-blowing connection, which was that people that live in equatorial latitudes across the globe have traditionally darker skin and dark colored eyes, like dark brown eyes. Because they don't need to absorb that meld. Now you go to higher latitudes like Norway. They traditionally have, they by and large, have much lighter skin and light color, light blue, green eyes. So they can absorb that melanin, which is fascinating. And then you look at people who managed to fast travel over the years. You look at Australia. The Aboriginal Australians are some of the darkest people on

the planet. Really? Aboriginal Australians. The people you see in Australia now and Australians hold up the picture of an Aboriginal Australian. Some of the people you see in Australia now have the highest incidences of skin cancer in the world because you have you have fair skin people who are in an area that has high year round UV. These are the Australians. Wow. That's these are the people that came out that are that are Aboriginal Australians. Many of the people, the white people over there are have Again, whether it's through traveling there, whether, you know, slave, all these things. Right.

They're getting high incidences of skin cancer because the sunlight is different there. So they have to slather with sunscreen. Lighter skin people do need to have a level of care, especially when they go to these areas with violent sun. Darker skin people don't need to pay attention to. So it's one of those things where you need sun too. Sun is beneficial for everybody's health.

But the reason why I really need black and brown folks to start paying attention is because there's like, is like, you know, even my mom when I was talking to her about this, she's like, but, but my doctor told me that I need to be careful about my midday son. I need it. Like, mom, you're a, you're a 100% Nigerian woman. Pull up a bath of Africa real quick. You know, I want to see where the equator goes through Africa. I'm really curious. I think I'm really also curious if native Africans on the equator are darker than like the north and the south of Africa. In Africa, you will have a range of skin types. My,

grandmother. Okay. So it's a little bit north. So it's okay. Yeah. Danny, my grandmother, who, um, on my father's side of the family, was a little bit darker than you. Really? But she could tan. This is a thing. The skin has range. So her natural skin color was much lighter, but in the, and when she would get more sunlight, she would darken up a lot. The skin range, but that, that's the thing. The skin's ability to tan is also one of the reflections of their ability to handle sunlight. So she did just fine and Africa, right? But the thing is, is like, there's so much messaging of care for sunlight. Yes. That applies to you more than it applies to me. Right. Totally. I can bake out in high UV sun and I'm just going to get darker. I'll just get a pump and get darker. Right. You,

you need to spend three times the amount of time in the sun to get the melanin that I do. You'll get sunburned. And that's one of the reasons why I've never been sunburned. Right. Like, I've never experienced that. So, so it's just, it's just understanding. I think an app that everyone can download that's There's someone that's called UV tracker. Yeah, I have one of those apps. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, yeah. Because I think it's important, especially for people, like wherever you live, if you're someone who's in the UK,

if you're in Sacramento, California, like me, you're in Austin, Texas. Look at, look at what you're, look at what your, I have the circadian app. Yeah, okay, okay. And it tells you basically what time the UVB kicks in, what time the UVA kicks in, what time you should eat, what time you should exercise.

How do you like it? All based on circadian rhythm. Okay. I love it. That's cool. That's cool. There's an app called UV tracker, also free. That also lets you kind of like, if you're really interested in this stuff, you can go and you

can see the UV in your area and what time you, like the peak UV for the next few weeks, etc. But you can also like go to other parts of the globe and see what the UV is like in other places around the world. And that'll kind of inform you. If you pay attention to, okay, oh, UV in South America. Wow. Oh, UV in Norway.

Oh my gosh. They get such little UV, right? You'll start to see like even Native Americans who are native to the United States. Certain areas have crazy high UV because of altitude, right? But Native Americans had a range of certain types of skin. It's just it's something to pay attention to. Your ancestry when it comes to the sunlight you're currently getting and your personal sun needs. You know what I mean?

So it's not that the sun is bad. The sun will cause skin cancer. It's like, what is the context of the sunlight in your space? specific area for your ancestry, right? If you're an African or a brown person living in the UK, you better have, you better be taking your vitamin D supplements in the winter months. And in the rare times that you get your sunlight and you get a little bit of UVB, you better be trying to get as much of it as possible.

You know what I mean? Because you're not getting much of it naturally out there. It's not like Africa. It's not like anywhere near the equator. And you need that. That's why vitamin D deficiency in the United Kingdom is amongst some of the top in the world amongst brown and pound populations like 40% of brown and black populations in the UK are vitamin D deficient and it's not a surprise why it's because of the the lack of sun that

they're not going to be getting living in that area you know so yeah man I was kind of shocked when I was in Sacramento bro I woke up in the morning and there was no son I'm like oh no that's why okay as soon as we got to the warehouse the sun came out yeah that's why like like I mentioned to you shout out larry wheels we're drinking the larry wheels we're drinking the larry wheel this is actually really good. It's delicious. Larry, good job. It's a this is my second one. I hope it doesn't put me down, you know what I mean? But that's why I'm really thankful for that, that EMR tech red light device. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, UVB. Yeah, I think it's called the yeah, pull that on. I want to see that. Pull up EMR, E-M-R-T-E-K. Yeah. I want to see what that one

looks like. So again, thank you Uncle Jack. I learned about EMR tech. He told me about them too, because the other ones, the other brand, we won't name the brand, but the, the base of ones you can get off of Amazon or the most popular ones. They have like a flicker that he was saying is not good for your brain. And what a lot of people think about too is like when people think about red light devices, it's like you go on Amazon, you'll get a ton of them that are like sort of their website and find the one that has UVB. Go to shop. Which one? Okay. Ultraviolet devices. Oh, this one is this one is ultraviolet. Right. These are the UvS. You'll get a tan from this, the guy, The dude told me.

Yeah, yeah, you will. The Krypton Mini has some UVB and it has also red and near infrared. The one I have is the Krypton 1612, right? The one to the right of it. I have one of those devices. It's sold out right now. But you see those blue lights? Yeah.

That's UVB light. So that, standing in front of that, you will be able to make vitamin D because it's UVB light. That's why right now in the winter months of Sacramento, where UVB is at a level of two, what usually every single season, I've always gotten seasonal depression all my life. Because like I went, whenever the sun comes out, bro, I'm in the grass working. I find like I naturally just got him baking the sun for as much as possible because it makes me feel better. And I also feel it on my blood test also give me that reaction.

But in the winter months, when there's minimal UVB, this device now, like this is my first year using it. And it's been like my first winter where I'm just like, I'm not an absolute mess in terms of my mental out. Right. I feel good because I'm still able to dose myself with extra UVB light that I'm not getting. It is an expensive thing, but it's one of those things where I'm just like, yo, if you live in the UK, if you live in a, if you live in freaking Sacramento in the winter, if you're someone who lives in places that you can't get that sunlight, you need to obviously take your vitamin D subs, but you need a, not need. It would be in your best interest to figure out a way to get that light. with something like this.

And this is the only company out there that has devices that have red, near-infrared, UVA, and UVB light. Yep. So they've crushed it. Like, you know, there's other red light devices out there that are good that only do red and near-infrared, but no one has done this yet. And it's like, great job to EMR for actually making this happen. That ultron's gnarly, dude.

The ultron's insane. I want that. I cannot afford that. No, yeah, that's sick. I can't afford that thing. Yeah. You see all the blue lights on that. Chris is, I think, the founder of EMR tech.

He sent me the two really tall ones, the near infrared ones, which I love. Yeah. I'll use those on like overcast mornings or like rainy days here. If there's like no sun or the small one, I had the small little square one. Like I was telling you, I hurt my, like overextended my calf a couple weeks ago. And it was like hard for me to run. Yeah. And even walking was a little bit uncomfortable.

And I used that thing like twice a day for 20 minutes for five, six days. and my calf healed so quick. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to imagine how light could heal, like, tissue. Mitochondrial, but it works. It energizes your mitochondria. And do you wear the glasses? I don't.

Neither do I. I just, I look, because honestly, like, I feel like it's actually probably good for your eyes. So, you know, I'm not going to tell people staring to your red light device. Right. Because, you know, I mean, I've had my girlfriend look into it and she's like, the colors are weird in the room now. But I, everything looks blue after. I don't get that. Really?

It doesn't happen to me. I can use it. I literally stare into the light, right? And then I get done and everything looks normal. Really? I don't get that effect. So I don't know why that is. I don't know why that is.

But like I put my eyes into that. Those African genes, bro. Those those West African genes. Yeah, man. But what was I about to mention to you? Another thing that, oh, go ahead. Another thing Alexis was telling me when it comes to the skin cancer stuff.

Yeah. She was explaining to me. And I'm not even going to try to explain the science behind it because I'll butcher it. But essentially what she was saying is that the reason that you get skin cancer being exposed to the sun is when, A, you're obviously, you don't have that solar callous built up. And you're not out in the sun a lot and you're not or not microdosing it enough, whatever. And you all of a sudden get a huge exposure to sun, a huge dose all of a sudden. And the other reason is when you. you're out in the sun getting in your body and your skin is exposed to the UV light and you're

wearing sunglasses and your eyes aren't getting the light. So you're you're supposed to get the balance of light in the eyes and on the skin. And when you're just disrupting that balance, that's when you get those basal cell anomalies that developed to be skin cancer. You know, the funny thing is I stopped wearing sunglasses back in 2016 the first time. This is the same time that Mark, we went to go visit Ron Pena, where he was like, shoot you in the head, you'll be as flexible as me. He mentioned a study that was done in Asia on school children because they're noticing a high incidence of kids needing glasses. Why is this happening? So they started like having kids not wear glasses to see what happened over a period of time and they noticed that their eyesight got

better and they were able to stop using as much as like glasses as much. And it showed that like the sunlight getting into the eyes also plays an effect on your eyesight over time. So once Ron told me that, I was like, I was, I just started getting into ray bands and fancy sunglasses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a little bit of cash. Let me. I was like, fuck.

Well, now I don't use those anymore. So along with the skin cancer thing, just in general, your eyesight. It's something I even encourage my mom. I'm like, because like, as people get older, there's a tendency of like, I need to protect my eyes. And it's not that you need to just look into the sun. I'm not saying that, but allow that light to enter your eyes because not only is it probably going to be amazing for, as Alexis mentioned, preventing aspects of skin cancer. It's also going to be

helpful for the health of your eyes and the health of your entire body. Like that's why I think, you know, maybe that's why the light doesn't bother me from those devices. But the, the eyes and getting light is extremely important. And it's like, I don't, other than like a style thing, you know, honestly, I don't know. I don't know. And maybe glare when you're driving. It's like, the only time I wear some glasses now is if I'm out in a boat. Okay, that makes sense. You know, because you're out surrounded by blue water and you're on this white reflective surface.

Yeah. It can be a lot. And it's, if you're fishing and stuff like that, it's good to have the polarized lenses to see through the water. That makes sense, right? So if you're on a boat, I don't go on boats much, but if I did, I probably, you know, probably use some. Yeah, yeah.

Florida's more conducive for boating. Sacramento. Yeah. And guys, I do know how to swim. So let's get that out. I do know how to swim. Not in deep water. I'm not gonna fuck with that.

But Jack was telling me, that his father, I believe it was his father-in-law, had a cataract surgery scheduled. And you remember this? Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah. So his father-in-law had like cataract surgery planned or whatever. And something else happened to him before he was going to get a surgery.

Like he fell off a ladder or something. And Jack told him to get in front of the red light 20 minutes twice a day. And he was asking, he's like, should I take my, wear the glasses or whatever? And Jack's like, no, don't wear the glasses. just keep your eyes open. Like, don't stare directly into it, but let the light get in your eyes. So his father-in-law was sitting in front of this red light for 40 minutes a day and two sessions, two 20-minute sessions.

And a couple weeks down the road, he went in for his like pre-op appointment with the doctor. And they were looking at his eyes. It was like, your eyes are, your vision is back. Like, you don't need the surgery anymore. And take it for what it's worth. Like, if that's real, that's pretty crazy. mitochondrial cells everywhere in the body. And if it's great for your mitochondrial health,

why do you not think it's great for the mitochondrial health? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, that makes total sense, you know? And it's one of those things where, you know, when I started using these red light devices,

it was seen as like a bit of a frou-frew thing, you know what I mean? But like now I'm happy that there's more and more research showing that light is a level of medicine. Yes. Something to, like, that's why I enjoy the luxury of being able to like go outside, and exercise. Like that's, I've been doing that for years because I've been working out from home,

but one of the big benefits I've found was like, I can get outside and move and lift and get that sunlight. That's been a very important thing for my health. And it's made a difference. And it's free. And it's free. That's why some of these activities that we're talking about are great because you won't see ropes or clubs or all these things in a commercial gym, but you could have it at home or your apartment. And you could just go right outside and allow yourself to move around in the sunlight, get some sweat, respirate, you know what I mean? It's really good for you. And the last thing I'll say regarding Jack,

the reason what I was originally gonna say about his podcast with Andrew, I don't know if you've heard of it. This is the best podcast, I think, most entertaining health. Was it with Rick Rubin too? Rick Rubin, Huberman and Cruz. Yeah, I heard that one. One of the most gripping podcasts about health

that I've ever fucking listened to, dude. It was electric. It's worth the listen. I highly recommend that podcast. that was when I listened to before I talked to Jack on this podcast they were talking about their mutual friend who's a Stanford

neurosurgeon I believe I could be wrong I could be messing that up but he's one of the highest level Stanford brain doctors his names I believe Eddie Yang said that and Jack corroborated this

and him and Andy him and Eddie Yang and Huberman all agreed that all of the scientific textbooks and literature that you learn when you're going through medical school to be a brain surgeon is outdated. 95% of it is either outdated or there have been new studies and new research that has proven it wrong or like expanded upon, which has blew my fucking mind. Yeah. Yeah. That this whole system in the United States for going through college and becoming a doctor,

the highest level surgeon on the brain or the heart or whatever is built up on literature that's out of date or proven wrong. That's kind of scary. It is scary. And I think another thing is like, you know, again, I think doctors are an amazing. It's like to go through all of that is grueling. And then to have, especially here in the United States, so many patients one must have to work with. right? It makes it difficult to first off give every single patient some specific type of care in terms of maybe you should work on nutrition things like it's easier to like give them a prescription. But at the same time, it's also hard to try to keep up with education. I mean, there are certain things that doctors do need to do in terms of certifying, et cetera, to make sure that they're up to date with things. But even so, it's one of those things that are like, we're always learning more. So I don't, I don't necessarily, I don't know if that's too surprising now. Like with all the things.

things we know about as we see things progressing, I think it's, we shouldn't necessarily be surprised that certain things are outdated. Because that's a good thing in a way, right? If there was, if there was still this belief that all of this stuff is up to date and it's all perfect, then I think we'd have a problem, right? Because we're learning so many things about nutrition, even movement, etc. Where it's like there are, there are more ways to do these things. So there have to be, there have to be advances and there have to be things that are somewhat outdated. these days, you know what I mean? Totally, man.

So it makes sense. And Sima, we just did like three and a half hours, bro. Wait, we did? Yeah. Really? Yeah, bro. It's almost five o'clock. Oh, shit.

That was super fun, man. That was super fun, bro. Yeah, man. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming down, dude, and hanging out and training me and teaching me all this amazing shit and doing this podcast, man. Please, listen, listen, please send me video, right? You.

Yeah. Please send me video because the thing that the thing about this stuff is, like, again, like I mentioned, it's like it's, it's like jujitsu. When I started jujitsu, there's a video on my YouTube channel of the 165 pound black belt tap me six times in six minutes. I had two options there. I could either quit the martial art. I think it's, think it's stupid like this isn't for me. I can just keep getting strong and lifting or I could get good at this thing that I'm really bad at right now. And the reason why I want you to just send me stuff when you want to send me stuff is because you're going to feel like this stuff doesn't make much

sense for a period of time. You're white bone jiu-jitsu right now and you're getting better, but it still feels like a waterhole is being at you. With all the things I shared with you, it's going to feel like, oh, fuck, the May stuff doesn't make any sense today. This rope flow doesn't feel like fucking flow. All these things don't like aren't. But again, as you do it over time, along with some of the other traditional stuff that you might be doing, you're going to find a lot of benefit. And I'm here as a resource. And also, if anybody is interested in learning rope flow or any of this stuff, the stronger human community is free. I have a free rope flow foundations course there for people to learn. They just go into the stronger human, start learning the practice.

What is the community website called? School.com slash the stronger human. Or slash, yeah, slash the stronger human. And then everything I talked about here is on my website. So if people are interested in like sleds, ropes, sandbags. Yeah, all the goodies. Everything that I use is on the strongerhuman.com or the stronger human. Store. So the reason why I made that Ropeflow Foundations course free is because I knew it was a practice that unless people were able to do it, like you mentioned earlier, they're not like, they're not going to take any action.

So I made it, I made it on school so that you could literally join a community of like, there's 25,000 people in there. They're all building their own personal movement practices. And you can now learn rope flow for free. So I love that community too. The cool thing I like about the community is that everybody is building different things. We got people in there that are musicians. There are people in there that are runners. And it's like there's just this community of people that are all kind of on their own specific practice journey in terms of their movement.

But they're all building their own personal practice. And that's why that's the goal I have for people. I want them to look at their training and their movement, not as like a hard workout, but more so as like something that they can't wait to go do after work. Because it's a time that it feels like play, even though they're still getting a big benefit from it. And it doesn't have to be exactly what I do. But it could have elements of it along with other things

that you're interested in. Yeah. You're doing acrobatics or whatever, you know what I mean? But that's my goal for people. I want people to see movement as play and fun, because if we see it as fun and play and it's still progressive, we can do it for the rest of our lives. 100% bro.

Yeah. Well, you're presenting it in an amazing way. And the fucking app also, the school app, where you can see all the videos and everything amazing shit. I'll link it all below for you folks who want to check it out. Yeah. Thank you, dude. Thanks again, brother.

I want to say like seriously, thanks for having me come out. I really appreciate being able to share this stuff with you. And I'm really thankful, man. I think it's cool to be able to be here and it started with my buddy Mark being like, let me take a gamble on this dude on a fucking podcast. Yeah, yeah. That that education has been amazing. So just thank you.

I appreciate you. man. My pleasure. My pleasure. I appreciate you coming down. All right. Good night, world.