Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #150 Mark Cheng

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

Jeet Kune Do practitioner, life long Martial Artist and SFG certified Kettlebell master and creator of K3 Combat Movement Systems, Dr.Mark Cheng is one of the smartest people in the strength and conditioning world and we sat down to talk about some of his strength and conditioning practices,K3 Combat Movement Systems and we get into his philoshopy on parenting and life.    Connect with Dr Mark Cheng Website | https://www.drmarkcheng.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/DrMarkCheng/ Twitter | https://twitter.com/DrMarkCheng/ Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/DrMarkCheng Youtube | https://www.youtube.com/user/DrMarkCheng   K3 Combat Movement Systems | https://k3combat.com/   Check out Dr. Mark Cheng’s Newsletter | http://bit.ly/2R9ie3S   Help support the podcast by visiting our sponsors: Ancestralsupplements - Grass-Fed Colostrum  https://ancestralsupplements.com Use codeword KING10 for 10% off / Only Valid through Shopify Option   OneFarm Formally (Waayb CBD) www.onefarm.com/kyle (Get 15% off everything using code word KYLE at checkout)     Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Instagram | https://bit.ly/3asW9Vm   Subscribe to the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY IHeartRadio | https://ihr.fm/2Ib3HCg Google Play Music | https://bit.ly/2HPdhKY   Show Notes  Pavel Tsatsouline | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Tsatsouline Pavel Tsatsouline Books | https://amzn.to/366lgu0 The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt | https://amzn.to/2NID1cu Do Brain training games actually do anything? | http://bit.ly/2NH2bbo The Align Method by Aaron Alexander | https://alignpodcast.com/align-method/ Tai Cheng | https://amzn.to/36bbhUj Rickson Gracie on JRE | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH5dBdpIiJw

All right, friends, we are we are in my guest room at the crib on lockdown. And we've got a very special episode today. Dr. Mark Chang is a Dan Inosanto understudy who is largely known as Bruce Lee's main understudy. Jeet Kune Do practitioner, lifelong martial artist, also RKC certified through Pavel Tatsulin's kettlebell certification, and really one of the smartest people in the history of the strength and conditioning game, if I may say. So Dr. Mark Chang has some legit lineage in his martial arts and strength and conditioning background. He also has a wealth of knowledge on life's philosophy. And really, you know, for people who study Bruce Lee, they come to understand this guy was much more than high kicks and movies. He was dialed the fuck in for lack of a better term. And I think Dr. Mark Chang is beautifully following in those footsteps of some of the great traditional martial artists and really has just a wealth of knowledge that

he offers on this podcast. I think you'll find a lot of value in it as I did for myself. I tried to hang out with him as much as I could while I had him in town. He was teaching a seminar on it and I could only attend a day, but we got to do lunch the next day, and every moment I had with him was a blessing. Truly just a fantastic human being, and the world would do very good for itself having more people like him on it. So very happy with this podcast. Hope you guys enjoy this one. Also, don't forget to click subscribe. Leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show has helped you out in life. Visit my website kingsboo.com. Also, you can check out Tosh and I back on the gram through one account

called Living with the Kingsburys. I think my newsletter had just gone out maybe two weeks ago before I made my return, but due to all of this quarantine and really at this point truly is social media at this point for all of my qualms and bitching about it, it does appear to be the easiest way to communicate with people rapidly outside of doing mass Zoom calls and things like that. So find us there, Living With The Kingsburys. And of course, check out our sponsors, which help make this show possible. We've got some good ones that do support immunity. No doubt about it.

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and you'll get 15% off everything in the store. Thank you guys for tuning in this episode with Dr. Mark Shang. Hit us up on the gram at living with the Kingsbury's and let us know what you think of it. And we can start the dialogue there. I probably won't be doing a solo cast on COVID-19 or any of that shit, but I will be doing Instagram lives answering any and all questions around routine, what we're doing to stay sane in a quarantine time and these weird and strange times that we're living in. Love you all. Thank you for tuning in and let me know what you think. All right. Officially, we get to start now. Dr. Mark Chang is in the house. Thank you, sir. Honored to be here.

Hell yeah. So you're in town in Austin. This is your fourth rendition of the K3? Yes, yes. We did a closed group to begin with, and we did one in LA. Then we did New York, and then now here in Austin. It's been amazing. Yeah, awesome, brother. Well, let's unpack some of that. Talk about your life growing up.

What was your family like? Where'd you grow up? And then get into your training, who you train with, all that good stuff, and then developing these systems. Right on, right on. I'm from Delaware. I know it's one of those funny things where it's like, wow, Asian kid, Chinese kid from Delaware, like not exactly a hotspot for Asians. But yeah, born and raised in Delaware. My parents emigrated there because they were able to find jobs with the state. So grew up there. Actually, notably, attended the high school where they shot Dead Poets Society.

Probably one of those movies that a lot of folks kind of dig. And actually, Robin Williams was there shooting that. That was my junior year, I think. End of my junior year. So it was a really cool experience to get a peek into how Hollywood works. Graduated from there, came out to LA and started off at Caltech and then transferred to UCLA. And so in LA, of course, LA being one of those meccas for martial arts training, I was lucky enough to train with kind of some of the who's who from Shorokan Karate's Tsutomu Oshima, who was the guy that translated the Karate do Kyohan. It's like the Bible of Shorokan Karate.

Trained with former Bruce Lee student Daniel Lee in Tai Chi, Wing Chun, and some JKD. Shaolin Masters, Sui Jiao, which is one of my great loves, Chinese wrestling. And then up till now, I spend a lot of my time training at the Inosano Academy under Bruce Lee's probably most notable student, Dan Inosano. Awesome, brother. So it's been a wild ride. I mean, from a kid in a semi-rural environment, like just thinking, man, how great it would be to just meet some of these folks

to then actually training with them regularly, like having them text me, like for example, Guru Inasano, when I was in Korea at one time and I was really homesick, he messaged me, he, I messaged me like a video clip of him training my son. And it was like, oh my God, just like totally bowled over. Yeah, that's so incredible. And for people who don't know, I had some experience with Jeet Kune Do when I first got into mixed martial arts. It's really like, you could call it the first mixed martial art.

You could call it really where, you know, Bruce Lee had taken a conglomerate of everything he thought that was good. And his philosophy was, why just use one? Why do we have to do that? But that was good and and his philosophy was why just use one why do we have to do that but that was kind of the old construction of how martial arts were practiced you know who was better than your wushu and you have like all these different styles that you even uh kind of like the kumite and blood sport right you know you've got muay thai versus the the monkey guy from

right right right spinning around and on his hands and feet um that kind of was the style of fighting and he got in a lot of a lot a lot of heat and a lot of flack from the old school regime in wanting to combine those martial arts but you could see that seed a new way of what martial arts can be yeah i you know a lot of people think of JKD or Jeet Kune Do as like the first mixed martial art. And like, I kind of think about it as the first modern mixed martial art. You know, he was looking at stuff that was outside of just the classical. So, you know, modern boxing, fencing, weight training, all of these other influences that

maybe he would not have been so privy to if he just stayed in Asia. But as an Asian American, he had a different lens through which to view the world, which is really dope. You know, like if you look at styles like Shotokan, for example, everyone's heard of Shotokan that's done martial arts. Like Shotokan is considered a classical martial art, but that's already a mix. It's already a hybrid of two different styles of karate. Shoryu and Shoreru.

Judo also, like judo as a martial art. A lot of people think about that as like one monolithic martial art. But it's several styles of jiu-jitsu that Kano, Professor Kano, amalgamated and reclassified in terms of categorization of techniques to make his soft way, his judo. So mixed martial art per se isn't something so new, but to take it outside of that limitation of just other classical arts and other arts from different countries is something really special. Yeah, hell yeah.

So talk about the development of K3. You said that you had been working on this for years and prompted by your homie and partner even longer to start developing this and to get it out to the masses. Yes. So around 2008-ish or so, prior to that, I'd been training with kettlebells for quite some time. I've had the really unique opportunity to spend a lot of time training privately and semi-privately with pavel tsulin who's like pretty much the godfather dude the dude totally the dude i mean i think we're i don't think

i'm sure there's no doubt in my mind were it not for his efforts kettlebells would still be a fringe tool that would be used maybe by some strongmen clubs or like you know eastern european countries but not something that would be as ubiquitous as it is here now um and i've had a lot of time luckily with pavel directly and so um and i think that started in like 04 so then in 06 i you know i went and i took his instructorship course you know past that. RKC? The RKC back in the day. And then went through that and then started teaching. And then luckily had the good fortune to rise through the ranks.

So around 2008, after traveling for a little bit and then being known for both martial arts, since by that time I'd already been serving as a contributing editor for Black Belt Magazine. And then, you know, teaching for RKC and some other stuff. And then also, you know, occasionally authoring an article or something like that in regards to Chinese medicine or wellness. So people kind of knew me through those different venues. And they say like, hey doc, what is it that you do? What's your workout like? What does does your training consist of if you were doing like an ideal training what's doc's perfect day of training like and i thought about it i'm like hmm well obviously kettlebells is part of it and then some kung fu karate whatever some kick punch stuff some kickboxing kick

calisthenic type thing right so it's martial there's a tactical aspect to it but it's it's empty hand and then the third k that i thought it was like ah kali and kabika wong thai martial arts thai weaponry martial arts and so i thought wow that's three k's k3 and so i was like oh that's a cool moniker k3 combat movement systems And so we ran with that. Over time, what was interesting is that I thought, man, all of these things are so dope. I love doing them. But the people that want to come and train and learn these things for the reasons of wanting to learn a martial skill or a combative skill are a very thin slice of society. Could we take these drills? Could we take these practices? Could we take these insights and expand them to serve people in the rehab world? Could we expand

this to serve people in the professional sports world? Could we expand this to team building? Could we expand this to like helping kids with learning disorders? And the answer was an unequivocal yes. Yeah, that's incredible. And I only I got to show up to the last I think, hour, hour and a half of the seminar last yesterday, which was mostly working on the Kali. And it's funny, because, you know, reading about your background, and I followed you for a while, I was like, damn, dude, because Pavel's had that kind of influence on me. I've read several of his books, relaxing to stretch, easy strength that he did with Dan John is one of my all-time favorites. And something that I do before every single workout, and this is a little off topic, but every single workout, no matter if it's a slow nasal breathing only run or I'm using the Concept2 gear or if I'm in a power lift, or even just do a bag workout,

I always do three simple movements with the kettlebell. I do bootstrap squats, halos, and windmills. And Steve Maxwell, when he went through the RKC certification, Dan John had already been certified. And that was the question that he asked Steve Maxwell. He said, what are the best three kettlebell movements for mobility? And Steve Maxwell, who's an older guy and definitely put well, you know, he's well put together and still doing it all. He was like, I do these three before I do anything. And that has greatly improved my ability to not get injured, to be warm, to prime the nervous system before I work out. And I think about how simple that is. You know, like one of the beautiful things about the kettlebell is that you can have one singular piece of equipment, take it with you anywhere, keep it in your trunk.

You can work out with it right outside of your, of your office on your lunch break. You can do anything with it. You can do use it to open the body. You can use it for a lot of things. And, um, and it doesn't even have to weigh that much. I remember in one of Pavel's books, he talked about working out at the, he got tested at the Sports Science Institute, something like that. Waterloo, I want to say. Yeah, probably Professor McGill's lab. Yeah, up in Canada. And he had a standard 53 or 54 pound kettlebell, 24 kilo.

And he was hiking it so hard in between his legs that when they measured the um the poundage underneath his feet on this plate they were they were going 10x so it was 500 pounds of force that he was generating so his nervous system recognized 500 pounds of load while he was only holding a 24 kilo kettlebell right like that's that's bananas. When you think like, Oh, you can get the technique that like that. And you don't actually have to deadlift 500 pounds. And yet he's moving that amount of weight in motion. Right. And I think of that too. Like when you, when you train for different sports, you're training usually with a purpose, but people have this idea from, and this is a conversation I have with our buddy jay faruja like most people who get into fitness or strength training came from the 80s background

of muscle and fitness and muscle bag international and flex magazine and that kind of shit and it's all bodybuilding but that's not how you train for sport you train dynamically and kettlebells are as dynamic as they get absolutely you know pavel actually turned so much of my understanding of both, I mean, not just training in terms of like strength training, but also clinical medicine really on its ear. I mean, with Pavel, it's funny how we met. Guru Dan, Dan Inosano, actually called me up one time and was like, Doc, I need a favor.

I'm like, sure, what is it, sir? He goes, can you come by the school? Can you come by the academy? I'm like, sure. What's up? He goes, well, I need you to come by at this date and this time because like one of my students got me these private lessons with this Russian weightlifting coach. And like, you finally gotten my lower back to feel better. Like I would, it would be awesome if you could be like the medical voice in the room so that if this coach asks me to do something that's dangerous or i get hurt you can either like object on my behalf or you can like put me back together i'm

like sure i'll be there no problem who's the russian weightlifting coach pavel tsulin so i'm like it was one of those moments like holy shit um and as i'm listening this is my first time actually seeing kettlebells in person right never mind pa mind Pavel. And so as I'm listening to Pavel talk, as I'm watching him explain these concepts, I'm like, the one concept that keeps coming through my head is like, shit, why aren't we taught this in terms of like not only physical education as kids, but certainly as medical professionals. Every single person that takes an anatomy course, every single person that's like either a trainer or some sort of wellness professional needs to know this shit. Like this is totally contrary to, or like left field-ish to some of the stuff that we're taught. Some of his concepts like change of activity as a form of rest, leave two quality reps in the bank, don't train to failure. It's like, you know, everything I'd been hearing about training prior to that was go hard or go home. You know, sweat is fat crying.

Like, you know, you're... Sweat is fat crying. Shit like that. That's great. You know, and okay, I can see that there's some sort of pull behind that because it's great to motivate people to do stuff, to get off their asses. But on the other hand, like, there are way too many people that push themselves a little bit too hard and fuck things up for a long time. And if fitness is about a baseline of wellness, then why are we, why are we impeding our wellness by training ourselves into injury? And Pavel for such a hardcore guy, former Soviet special operations instructor,

to be able to say like, don't train like like that don't push yourself to the point where you're broken leave two quality reps in the bank for every set it was like wow mind numbing yeah that that blew my mind he talks about that in easy strength and uh really looking at what you do as a practice rather than exercise right because whatever you're practicing is something that you're building upon. So you practice the movement of a squat or a hinge or fill in the blank, rotational, you know, any of these practices are just that. And even if you have goals to get stronger, the more often you can practice, the better, right? But if you beat yourself up, whether you're, you know, somebody that's sedentary that was told by the doctor hey you should try weight training or you should lift or get out in nature more or

do anything activity wise we have the tendency to go all in you know and so that's when people who are not used to that get hurt and even at the highest level of athletics you look at how many guys get hurt in the UFC all the time still. And it's because of the fact that people still have that old school bust your ass instead of leaving two reps in the tank and using it as a practice. And the more consistent you can stay with a practice, the better you're going to get because you're training the nervous system just as much as you're training the muscle itself. But if you're not mindful of the nervous system, that's when you're

going to run into issues. Absolutely. I mean, you just nailed it right on the head. I mean, we're so prone to wanting to go all in so we can devote ourselves to something, so we can concentrate. But oftentimes we go so far all in that we tune out. And the moment that we tune out mentally, that we lose that kind of awareness of what are the important things that we need to do in this practice rather than just the physical exercise we lose the awareness of the totality of what we're doing we lose the experience we lose the richness of that experience and so when we lose the richness of that experience then we're just that hamster on the wheel like mindless moving our bodies but no real engagement which is part of the reason why like k3 to me was such a big like shift in paradigm i wanted people to be able to move to continuously move but never be

disengaged they always have to be on and in a reactive environment when you've got to react to a stimulus you can't tune out. Like if we're playing catch and I'm just kind of tuning out and like not really looking at you, like odds are pretty good I'm either going to miss the ball or be beamed by it. Either way, right? I'm going to fail at the exercise or it's just going to take on a different kind of angle. With the K3 stuff, whether it's the empty hand stuff, whether it's the strength training stuff, whether it's the empty hand stuff whether it's the strength training stuff whether it's the implement based stuff everything is reactive so when we're working with uh an object with that first k we're talking about kettlebells which i've expanded to mean more than just any kettlebell like it can be any strength training implement like whether mace whether a steel belt whether

whatever right so one of the things that we were doing on day one was playing catch with a steel bell and throwing it around a circle so we have like let's say eight to ten people in a circle playing catch with a couple of steel bells what are they all doing when that this the circle's that big to be able to catch and then to project the steel bell hinge so what does that look like it's like a micro swing but then not using a kettlebell. So you're practicing that hinge mechanics on a ballistic object and being able to decelerate and accelerate. But then again, you have to do it in a reactive environment. So the brain, the intent is always there. Yeah. You're keeping people engaged. That was something that I noticed yesterday too, when we got to the implements with the sticks was, and it's something that I had forgotten

large part. Now, maybe I didn't fully grasp it when I first started with it in 2006, but it had been since 2008, since I had worked with the sticks and I had thought, you know, right now, this is, and this is something I told you afterwards, this is one of the best meditations I've had in months because you're engaged, but there's a part of me that would, would just, it just dropped. It just dropped the monkey mind. It dropped the noise. And thankfully through my experience in martial arts, it's not something where if I miss or mess up that I'm going to beat myself up over. And you talk quite a bit about that, you know, like, you know, don't say sorry while you're training because it just wastes time right

and we have a goal we have a place to get to the second you stop to apologize you're now delaying getting to that goal yep but that was something that was that that i thankfully didn't have to grapple with i could just keep going and it's fun when you really can't and just shift gears and pick right up where you left off and continue to go through that. But I mean, I was, I felt amazing afterwards because I was like, damn dude, like this, I feel so much peace and so meditative and I'm breathing through my nose the whole time. And I don't think it, you know, what was cool too, is in showing up late, I was trained by everybody who had been there to get the movement patterns down.

And they were the coaches for me, you know, alongside you. And all those people could teach it well enough for me to be able to pick up right where I left off 12 years ago. That's way cool. You know, to address that point of meditation, just like our friend Peter Krohn has talked about, in one of the podcast episodes that he's done, he talks about the distinction between meditation and meditative. And I think a lot of us associate meditation with, we've got to go into a room, we've got to sit down on a cushion, got to light some incense, got to chant some kind of sutra or something to be able to just get into that groove, get into that kind of zenned out space. And while that is one interpretation of meditation, it's different when you can make aspects of your life meditative, where the exercise

or the thing that you're doing, whatever you're engaged in, is automatically bringing you to that zenned out state. And especially when you can do it in concert with other people like when you don't have to like go away or isolate yourself from everyone else but you can be in the thick of things and then still in the groove that's a special level of dope so with k3 one of the ideas that i was that i that you touched on just now was like the don't say sorry so i have a drill called the road rage drill we went over on day one and it's one of the things that I use with the US speed skating team when I was working with them. When the coaches was telling me, hey, doc, you know, speed skating, believe it or not, is in some ways kind

of a contact sport, right? If people get bumped, they could get disqualified, you know, or if rather if they're doing the bumping, they could get disqualified. If they get bumped, they could throw them, they could slip, whatever. It's like it's very hard to keep your mind in the game or in the race when sometimes you get bumped and that could totally throw you off. And he goes, you got anything for that? I go, shit, yeah, I got something for that. So I had everyone get in a room in like two lines.

And I said, look, I want you guys to walk from that end of the room to this end of the room and walk through these two lines. And I said, look, I want you guys to walk from that end of the room to this end of the room and walk through these two lines. And as you walk along those two lines, people are going to push you. Not like deck you out the window, but push you and shove you and kind of distract you. You can either be locked into that moment of the distraction. You can either get frustrated by it, you can tense by it, or you can relax and keep walking towards your goal point. So if you think about it, that's road rage, right? The moment you get pissed off on the road, like that motherfucker cut me off or whatever, right? The moment you get upset about that, that distraction from the stimulus, you're not engaged in the act of driving anymore. You're locked up in that moment in the past. And the moment you're locked up in that

moment in the past, you are not reacting to the stimulus that's in front of you. You're locked up in that moment in the past. And the moment you're locked up in that moment in the past, you are not reacting to the stimulus that's in front of you. You're not engaged in the act of driving as optimally conscious because your mind, your heart, your emotions, your aggression is geared towards something that has already gone by. And odds are pretty good that the person that like cut you off or that like did whatever already doesn't give a shit and has moved on but you're still locked up in that moment in the past so the road rage drill was designed so that like people could then be exposed to those noxious stimuli and practice letting go like it's not important i gotta go there and just repeating that kind of mindset it's not important i gotta go there oh i missed a contact point or i missed a technique or i missed a

movement it's not important i gotta go there so having that ability to let go of those moments where we quote unquote screw up need to apologize need to somehow make a a compensation for it really the best compensation the best apology is just making sure that the future is better that's huge yeah it really is i mean think about all of the things that we see on social media about how like the best apology has changed behavior it's really true like saying i'm sorry doesn't do shit really doesn't especially how often that word is misused like if you actually tell someone i'm sorry but then you actually ensure more than just the words i'm sorry ensure that your behavior in the future is more on point more dialed in that's rich yeah yeah and that obviously you

know people the analogy is perfect because you're using that in the road rage example and of course you know reading the happiness hypothesis that's where most americans have their their most disgruntled time of day is in traffic but thinking about that outside just in terms of our goals how many times do you have your eye fixed on the goal and something takes you a little off course and then that becomes the fixation point right yep like i'm preparing for a jiu-jitsu tournament and now i just tore my knee and with an inside heel hook and and then that becomes the focus the woe is me my knee is torn how long is this going to take to fix and you lose sight of the goal that you were training for to begin with whatever the case is and in cases like that let's say when you're training in the face of

injury a lot of times injuries you know people hate to hear this phrase but i think it's true sometimes when we get sidetracked those are blessings in disguise because sometimes the the sidetracking frees up time for you to do something else so let's say i for example myself when i got back from the Winter Games, I was jet lagged as fuck. And I took my kids, my kids were enrolled in Taekwondo. And so like, I, that was my time with them, you know, because I don't get to see them all the time between their mom's house and my house.

So I was like, I just got back from a month away in Korea. I'm dying to spend time with my kids. Okay, we'll go to Taekwondo training. And like, I was totally smoked. Went in there in a sparring night, of course, jet lagged and I'm like, my feet aren't underneath me, end up really severely spraining my ankle. And so part of me is like, fuck, I sprained my ankle.

This is great. I'm gonna have to take time off of training. But then when you can't use that ankle, that frees up time for you to do a whole bunch of other things that you'd been sidelining elsewhere so looking at or rather finding rather than looking at trying to find ways or learning to find ways where you can see where there's an opportunity that's presenting itself because now you can't do something else that you originally prioritized that in and of itself i think is a skill that we need to practice as well yeah that's a huge skill it reminds and i

know i've probably quoted this way too often but aubrey when he talks about using hindsight as foresight you know whatever challenge that we've had in the past if we're here talking about it today that means we got through it right and so whatever the stress or whatever the challenge is that's the thing that that got us here today that in some ways, in many ways likely made us better by having gone through that stressor, right? You don't get stronger just squatting the bar. You got to add weight to it. You need a new stressor.

You need to change the dynamics of the motion in some way that's challenging. And through the challenge, that's where growth occurs. So if you can use hindsight, knowing all the times in the past where that benefited you as foresight when you're in the eye of the hurricane right now, then it's a lot easier to be like, I can't see how this will benefit me,

but I know that it will and this is happening for me, not to me. Another important point right in there is talking about how you can be doing the same old stuff, right? But just a little bit of variation, oftentimes it's a stimulus called the 24 count and then we'd vary it. Like for your listeners that are familiar with Kali, most of you guys have heard of Heaven Six. It's one of the drills that you'd done before with just a six count drill and double stick. There's so many ways of skinning that cat with Heaven Six, even though there's six beats all at the high line. You can do forward grip, grip you can do inverted grip you can use one stick just to answer all six beats you can break back and forth

so it's like so much variation that can still keep that drill super rich so let's say you're working with a partner that's only that's barely learned how to do heaven six but they can manage to keep it together once they're at that point where they can keep it together and handle that, then you can now change the stimulus for them to still make it unique, novel, and beneficial. Like the three things I talk about a lot of times in K-3 programming are, is what you're doing beneficial? Is it challenging? And is it fun? If it's not those three things, then why the fuck are you doing it you know that's not training that's like testing like you let's let's see how well you endure some shit but if it's training like why not create everything in that training environment that's

a eustress right something that brings out a better response like a beneficial adaptation rather than a compensation. So as we're doing that heaven six drill, right? Like you're in your groove, you're practicing that inward, backhand, backhand, inward, backhand, backhand, inward, backhand, backhand. So as you're doing that, maybe I get to practice, all right, I'm going to flip and invert. So now it presents a different visual stimulus to you. You've got to stay on track with that. I get to practice a different coordination pattern and we both benefit. You know, so there's that scalability aspect. Everyone can come to the drill and still be fed. Yeah. Yeah. It's so massive. And you've had, I mean, just in looking at the group,

you had people that were, some of them personal trainers some of them working um you know in corporate wellness keeping people that are mostly sedentary at desk jobs all day long in cubicles active and you know all the way to different professional athletes and martial artists all training there and all finding benefit and seeing new ways in which they can bring that to their clientele totally and that you know i mean i think the thing that was really fun for me was the fact that it was so enjoyable you know i went from this meditative state where i really felt deep peace and then as we picked it, I couldn't wipe the smile on my face. It was so, so much fun to add speed as the element now that we had some comfortability there. But I want, I want you to break down. I mean, I want to talk medicine and I also want to talk about really the ways in which you see this benefiting everything from kill kids with

developmental issues to, to all aspects aspects because there's so much more to this training than just i'm gonna learn how to how to throw some sticks with somebody right um as far as the medicine goes i think when you look at how much of our sports how much of our physical pursuits these days allow our bodies to be wound one particular direction, right? Like tennis, golf, even baseball, like sports that are like one side dominant, writing, shooting, whatever, right? Like there's so much of our lives that allows us to be wound in one direction, allows our fascia, allows our nervous system to be biased in one direction. That's great in the sense of it allows the body to find like a very quick expedient pathway. But as far as training,

training is about, to me, pushing the envelope of our human experience, pushing the envelope of our human abilities. So if we can push the envelope of our human abilities why not develop actually develop those attributes on the sides of our bodies that are non-dominant so when you're in an environment where you have to work each movement on the left just as well as you do on the right for a lot of folks you'll see insane amounts of brain scramble and they sweat like you have a freezing cold room and people will be sweating buckets um and i thought in as far as in the medical aspect as well as the fitness aspect of that i think that's very telling like i remember hearing alan cosgrove one time say like what do you think i can't remember was alan or great cook once said that like what do you think

is the biggest single burner of glucose in the human body? And people were in the room going, oh, the glutes, the quads, the pet, just naming off muscles. And he goes, how about your brain? And it was like, whoa, central nervous system. So when your nervous system or your brain or your thoughts are totally engaged in the movement and you can't tune out, all of a sudden your metabolic system ramps up. And so that same person that may be able to spend an hour on the treadmill at a fairly decent clip and not really sweating, all of a sudden in doing five minutes of work starts sweating profusely when they're doing something with a negligible load, that's telling you something. That's rich. That's when the body starts reforming itself. And that's also when you's when the body starts reforming itself and that's also when you see

like the body not just remolding itself in terms of a fascial line but also sometimes in terms of a cosmetic way as well it's very cool to see um so kids that are often passed by for whatever reason due to learn labeled as learning disabled when they're given physical exercises play like hey let's play these games but these games are directed like let's work on these stick patterns or work on these games where we're actually just playing touch with these instruments and they get to develop both left and right sides of the body both left and right sides of the brain and you have those pathways myelinated, and you can see the academic scores improve, that's seriously dope. Because a lot of times we think that, okay, martial arts is martial arts,

training is training, fitness is fitness, and academics is academics. But we are starting to realize more and more these days that sometimes how you fine tune the brain, sometimes how you approach the brain and optimize the brain is really through the body, through movement. Yeah. That, that to me is something that I've, I've felt from martial arts and I felt in, in different practices, but it's never really been explained, um, from the neurochemical standpoint. You know, a lot of people talk about, I remember reading this, I forget who put it out, but there was a cool study that showed if you train a brain game like luminosity, it makes your brain

really good at what? Brain games, nothing else. There's no crossover. You become a master of word puzzles or brain games or any, fill in the blank. If you learn music or a second language, that creates enough crossflow and connectivity in the brain that you actually get smarter everywhere. And the same without question is true of the body. When you start training both systems, including the weak hand, you get smarter everywhere. And that's something that I think is not as well known, but for any who has experienced that, you understand, like I see improvements everywhere as I develop these systems because you're training what? The central nervous system. You're training it in a way where it's completely engaged through

movement patterns. And, you know, our buddy Aaron Alexander talks about this in his recent book. What is it, Giles? The Align Method? Yeah. That's out now. Get it? Phenomenal. Talks a lot about posture and different movement patterns. But, you know, to your point, like it's something that you've seen directly with children who really don't have a shot with our current standard of care. And you've seen these vast improvements. And I think that's such a beautiful thing. We get to see it with people that have been suffering from TBI, from stroke. What's really crazy is that like you've got someone that's doing stroke rehab have them doing these exercises for fun or have them doing these exercises for rehab and all of a

sudden like memories start coming back to them that's that's really powerful and i'd love to be able to win the lottery and fund a ton of these studies but until then we've got this anecdotal evidence that's very powerful and suggests that there's so much that so much benefit that we're leaving on the table um it's interesting too because like we talk about in in the in the functional movement systems paradigm we talk about asymmetry as a predictor for injury or something that might impair performance so if you look at asymmetry i i break it down to more than just asymmetry from left and right. I think as I teach, I talk about five asymmetries. First one, left, right. Second one, anterior, posterior. Third one, top, bottom. Fourth one, medial, lateral. Fifth one, internal, external. So let's say you're doing an exercise that's very top heavy, meaning like very hand oriented, right?

And then all of a sudden you get really good at that but then like you have to add in the feet and then watch brains just melt down right because now you have to instead of just thinking about symmetry right that are the feet as capable as the hands let's think about let's swap out the word coordination for symmetry our left and right coordinated our anterior and posterior coordinated our top and bottom working in sync? Are they coordinated? You know, medial lateral working in symphony, right? Internal and external. Is who you are on the inside the same as what you look like outside cosmetically? Like those kinds of things, that kind of congruency. So as we're working these skills, as we're working these practices, your left hand, your right hand, favoring like one of the things that we did on day one was I had everyone take a right lead while we're doing some of these drills, like let's say

the 24 count. And people were like, okay, cool. Got this. No problem. Okay, great. Switch leads. Same hand starts, just switch leads. Meltdown. And then the moment they got pretty good at that left lead and you go back to right, the right is even better, symmetrical, even better. So it's like when you put people in a position of gentle discomfort where they can explore and then allow them the time and give them the chance to become comfortable, competent, and confident, man, what a change. What like an overall improvement you see across the board. Yeah. I want you to expand upon that because that's one of the principles that you're known for is this training slow. Training slow because you create an environment that's easier to learn in. And then from there, you can pick up the pace.

I think I got that from my dad. Honestly, I think the roots of that whole training slow thing probably started for me as a kid. Like my dad was one of my first martial arts teachers um and exposed me to tai chi and i remember like as a kid listening to my dad talking about tai chi and tai chi training principles and like yeah yeah yeah whatever and like typical typical you know american raised kid and then as i grew older and especially through my own experiences in my own research especially in the field of sports performance and human performance i'm like holy shit everything that almost everything that my dad has taught has said to me since like i was 10 was spot the fuck on and it's mind-numbing and like tell him now like now he's visiting me in la and staying

with me like i tell him all the time and that he's visiting me in LA and staying with me, like I tell him all the time and I apologize to him. I get debt, which I shouldn't be apologizing. I should just thank him. I go, dad, thank you so much. You know, like, you know, everything that you said to me back in the day, like it was gold. Like it's taken me 30, 40 years to figure it out.

But yeah, it was seriously gold. So thank you for that. The slow thing is huge because if you think about what we do to improve awareness of a situation in movement, what do we automatically do? Anytime it's in sports, let's say we just watched a UFC fight. We want to know better. We want to better understand, better have a grasp of what just happened. What do we automatically do? Watch a slow-mo replay, right? Because sometimes in real life, even if you're sitting there ringside, even if you're the ref in the cage, because of your perspective, because of whatever, right? You may not have been able to fathom all of the details of what just went down. So when you've got the ability to play things back in a slow-mo setting,

you can then examine it from different perspectives and go, oh, shit, I didn't catch that before. Like, oh, wow, there's a detail that I missed before. And when you can slow things down like that, something that seems utterly common and mundane, you can then examine it from different perspectives in a way that like, I say with Tai Chi, right? Tai Chi, I've been involved with that since I was like 10. Like I'm almost 50 now. So like for me, Tai Chi is one of those things that no matter how many times I practice it or train

it, I examine it, it's never held the light the same way twice. It's like a really well-cut diamond. And I think any pursuit, and certainly with with k3 the whole idea was to be able to make it like that you can take a drill or a series of drills or a series of principles and if you are able to modulate the speed and generate greater awareness or create an environment where the awareness can be deepened you will then be able to have all of these different breakthroughs that because you didn't realize you were leaving shit on the table. You know, so like if I can take this and realize, oh my God, I wasn't breathing there. Oh my God, I was tensing there.

Oh my gosh, why am I like, why am I, why is my movement kind of like shaky or off there? These are little points of attention that ordinarily at sports speed or at higher speeds we're not able to be aware of. So when you can slow things down, then you can see like, ah, okay, I don't need to be tense. I don't need to be amped up. And if I'm still amped up, why am I that amped up? How come I can't downregulate? And in today's world, when we've got this high stim environment, like everything's about like, what's got more caffeine? What's got more of a boost? What's about like what's got more caffeine what's got more of a of a boost what's gonna what's gonna help me accomplish more i think all of those are good because yeah we are we let's face it we are in a higher output than ever lifestyle but we also

have lost by and large the skill of down regulating so having the ability to be able to do that in movement in our training and vary the speed like a dimmer switch right like if you're in a room that's got a dimmer switch you can amp the light up if you want to do work you can tone the light down when you want to chill it's a it's a comfortable environment for more than just one thing right and so if you can do that in your movement if you can do that in your training then you can take that skill and parlay that out to other aspects of your life as well, even in conversation. Yeah, I love that. So important. Talk a bit about Tai Chi. It's something that was introduced to me from Paul Cech., you know, it's one of those things when I practice, it's a unique experience, you know, it's, it's not psychedelic per se, but just like psychedelics,

it's new to me every time I do it and it's used for different reasons. But I think of, I love tools that can engage us in the down regulation that can calm us, that can help us find our deep inner stillness that are not sitting in a dark, quiet room, which I still do. I still like it, but I just like, I think, I think for many people, and he talks about this, Parathasi talks about this in the Vedanta treaties, which is one of my favorite all-time books, how the body requires prep before you can sit still. The mind requires prep. The intellect requires prep all before you can achieve the union and bliss that comes from meditation. But I think if we do meditative practices that include the body, then that's a hack for so many people in the West who are go, go, go, do, do, do.

Yep. One of the concepts that I talk about a lot in K3 is point of entry, right? Like, if I tell you right off the bat, hey, we're going to do Tai Chi. And for people that are like, very active, very like, go, go, go. If the first point of access to them doing this kind of meditative work is Tai Chi, it's going to to be so slow it'll bore the pants off them so how do we break them into that we have to give them the right point of access point of entry right um were you there did i were you there when i did that tai chi move at the very end at the very end yeah so you were right yeah um to me that's one of those things that's really powerful like just doing that first move and then actually feeling like, oh my God, my fingers are buzzing. Like I can feel there's blood, like increased blood or like my hands are sweating.

There's a different kind of vasodilation. That, you know, getting people to realize you can control your blood flow. And it's, you know, not something mystical or magical, but just by virtue of becoming aware of your posture, your breath, your tension levels, you can then increase blood flow to parts of your body. And for a lot of us, we lack that awareness. We're never exposed to that. And so that first time that you can experience that, especially for people that have stuff like cold extremities, like when they're like oh my hands are always freezing and then they do an exercise like that and they shift out of that sympathetic nervous

system dominant state and allow their body to experience parasympathetics for the first time it's huge it's huge tai chi is one of those things that like i think most people don't understand they just think about it as like octogenarians in a park like old chinese people that can't do kung fu they do that shit um and really if you under like if you look at it linguistically taiji means the extremes so in that sense of the extremes you need to be able to explore the extremes that's one of the things one of the posts i put up on my instagram like you need to be able to explore maximal tension as well as maximal relaxation maximal disengagement maximal speed as well as total stillness and then explore everything on that spectrum in between because otherwise like you're pigeonholing yourself

to just a very narrow expression of the human experience. Damn. Yeah. So important. When Jay introduced us and I knew you were coming to town, it's funny how many, I guess there isn't a ton of them. Maybe I can count on one hand. But there have been pretty significant moments

post-fighting career where I've been introduced to something and I've thought, fuck, I wish I had this when I was fighting. And as anticipated, fuck, I wish I had this when I was fighting. Dude, that means the world to me to hear that. Really.

Yeah, brother. That's deep. I mean, I think Tai Chi, the way I understand it, the way I've been exposed to it and had the chance to learn it and and digest it it's pretty different i mean like a lot of folks think about taiji as like there's this classical lineage thing that has to be preserved move by move breath by breath line by line written in chinese spoken blah blah blah blah blah but

really like what's the concept the concept should, what's the concept? The concept should be universal. And the concept of Tai Chi should be that like, A, you're healthy. And the more healthy you get, the more vital you get, the more vigorous you get, the more you can push that envelope to explore the extremes. You should be able to generate tension. You should be able to lift weight. You should be able to move fast. You should be powerful and vital. And you should be able to lift weight. You should be able to move fast. You should be powerful and vital. And you should be able to totally down-regulate, be chill, be still, and not be antsy, right? Like everything in between should be accessible to you. It should be your right to be able to be comfortable in all of that. And that's Tai Chi.

Like the classical moves are useful. They're great. I mean, like when you actually understand them in terms of the combatives, they're actually really cool. Like joint locks, throws, neck cranks, sweeps, like, you know, kicking and punching. Like it's legit. A lot of people don't practice it that way,

which makes it kind of like, you know, that sort of McDojo-ish whatever thing. McDojo, yeah. Like fake foo, whatever. But I think when you understand it and you take the time to break it down and really understand like the mechanics of combat but also the principles guiding it it is so deep and so rich you know like beach body the people that put together the p90x asked me to put together a tai chi program which they christened tai chang and i changed the chinese character for the chang from like what would have been my last name to the

chinese character for like achievement or accomplishment so it's like the great accomplishment the idea with that was to be able to take the best parts of taiji and translate that to a modern audience so that like regardless of who you are whether you're the octogenarian that just wants to like be able to move a little bit better without pain or you're like the 40 year old who's still vital still exercising and wants to be able to enjoy the vitality of their youth while working with an aging body. Like let's face it, when we hit our 40s, shit's different. We've still got enough strength, enough power, enough knowledge to be able to do great stuff, but we have to moderate. We have to modify what we do because we're not 18 anymore. But also too, to be able to take that same kind of training method,

and this was really cool. One of the D1 schools told me, Hey, you know what we're doing for our track athletes? I go, no, tell me. He goes, you're a Tai Chi program. And don't you breathe a fucking word about that to any of our competition. And I thought, wow, that was really cool. So I always wished I could have just said like, which school was doing that. And I still do but anyway

um wow for injury prevention for training single leg stance for training efficiency and movement that's all in tai chi so a lot of people will look at tai chi is like yeah I'll do that when I'm old and I can't do anything else but oftentimes like being able to down regulate and change the pace it's just like driving a car i mean if you had a car that only goes in fifth gear like what the hell kind of driving experience is going to be that you know like if you can take your car and like i can move it at any speed comfortably like i can go into chill mode i can drive slowly I can floor it with the best of them. And the driving experience is comfortable and controlled and like enjoyable no matter what. Isn't that human optimization? Isn't that like experiencing the most out of life?

Yeah, brother. Well, let's talk a little bit more, I guess, in the medicine. Let's talk about pain. Yep. You know, this is a conversation I just had recently with Dr. Mike Hart. And, you know, it's brought up, everyone is aware of the opiate epidemic, everybody is aware of what's going on. And certainly, I think there's been less over prescribing, but people are still hooked on pain medicine. And one of the things that I think is critical is a reevaluation of how we view pain and how we move through that pain, how we rehab it, and how we don't lean on pharmaceuticals for the rest of our lives. Yeah, absolutely. I think if we were,

I say this a lot, but I really wish that kids, our educational system was totally different because right now they're taught oh if something hurts like either go to the school nurse or there's a pharmaceutical intervention for it right like our media is bombarded with like advil whatever you know like not not to knock it because it's got its place like let's face it western medicine has its place surgery has its place but you know it's one of those things where a lot of us don't know any better and so like our default is that okay we've got a problem therefore we have to turn to this so it's like we're only given that hammer so now everything looks like a nail whereas like you may have pain, you may have discomfort and let's get to the bottom of what that could be. It may be because we didn't rest enough. It may be

because we ate too much of something. It may be because like we over-trained something or we have a dysfunctional movement pattern. And those are the things that we're not taught to see unless we're like professionals. My feeling on that is like, I would rather be out of a job when it comes to that. Like if I could have all of society know like, all right, I'm experiencing this pain because like I've been overtraining these particular movements. And because I've been overtraining

these particular movements, now that's affecting my tissue elasticity or my circulation or causing compression in a joint. To be able to see that and be able to act on that, that's something that I wish would happen. And I think that really needs to start with our education system. We've got an education system that's fixated on brokenness. Like, oh, you're broken. Here's a solution. And it's a ready-made solution. Rather than like, let's retrain how you live so that you are not broken. Yeah. And diving into that, it's like a certain degree of self-inquiry, right?

Like you have to be able to have enough knowledge to where you can look and see like, oh, maybe this is repetitive stress. Of course, if you don't have that ability, thankfully, there are people like you in the world. But, you know, we really do. We give away our personal power. Because we're taught it's almost like a programming, you know, we talked talked about this with Peter Krohn and with Bruce Lipton. My apologies, the Bruce Lipton episode was lost. It'll be regained at a different point in time. But that programming we have from the third trimester till we're seven years old, because our brain state is theta, it's ready to receive the programs.

And we're programmed in a myriad of ways. But one of the first ways we're programmed is we go to the doctor anytime we need help. They're the expert. We go to the doctor for the checkup. We go to the doctor when we're sick. We go to the doctor for everything. So why would that change when you're older? That's the expert who has the golden key to your health. It's almost like, and this is not to shit on any one particular religion, but you go to the priest to confess and the priest can relay the message to God and he's the mediator who holds the fucking key to your getting into heaven, as opposed to, I have this connection to myself and I can ask

and think outside the box and I can look. all you have to do is look and see. Western medicine has many benefits. And I said this before, I had a labrum tear in my right shoulder. The best surgery got my shoulder working again. It's non-preventative. It's not working for preventative health. It's not working to teach us how to live better so we don't need to go to the doctor. and i think that's that's one of the key missing ingredients but with that program from a young age of they're the expert we don't think of ourselves as somebody who can become knowledgeable who can learn the way our body works or find people outside of what our insurance covers that may know more. Totally.

Actually, I think we're programmed to break ourselves. I'll say that. I think we're programmed by society. We're programmed by media. We're programmed by our peers to break ourselves. Go hard or go home. What's wrong with you? Why aren't you concentrating?

Push harder. Give me more. Lay it all out in the field. Leave it all in the gym. What if we're programmed to listen to our bodies and to actually pay attention to where we're not functioning well or challenged by exercises that put us outside of our comfort zones or put us outside of our favorite pet lifts like monday's international bench day damn you if you work on your legs or some shit you know like come on like what if we did things that actually forced us to

constantly be more aware of our inventory of movement and our health rather than just pushing hard? Oh, you got to push hard because that's the measure of how much you're really devoting to this life. Maybe the measure of how much you're devoting this life is how much joy you yourself are experiencing. You know, Hicks and Gracie, I think one time, if I recall correctly, during one of his episodes, interviews with Joe, Joe Rogan, Joe was asking him something about like, you know, what's important in life to Hickson. And Hickson was like, you know, my friend, he's very simple. Are you happy? Are you healthy? Are you horny? To me, like that, it sounds kind of tongue-in-cheek but it's very true like human beings these days spend so much freaking money and energy on trying to figure

out like how can i have more sex dude what if you just rested and listened to your body ate well didn't push yourself to do all this crazy shit and actually took the time to communicate with the other person that you wanted to be down with. Do you think that would add to a better intimate environment? Of course it would. But no, we don't want to do that. We want to just like go run through everything else. And so we're running away from our problems. And a lot of it is just because we've been miseducated to do so. Yeah. It's the focus on the external, right? The shiny object you don't have,

the extra half an inch you can get from the boner pill, whatever it is. That shit doesn't work. It does not work. I've tried them all. Wishful chinking. We look external. We look for these external sources of happiness

instead of internally. And part of that is there's a discomfort, and this is me speaking from my own personal experience, an uncomfortability in my own skin. I had for many years. And seeking that elsewhere, outside of myself, rather than truly trying to know myself and getting into the inner workings and paying attention to the lowest level of anxiety. I feel a slight level of anxiety. Where's the source of that? But we've been taught to run away from that. Yeah. Like how often have you been taught as a kid? Like, okay, what makes you anxious?

What makes you feel insecure? What makes you feel unsafe? What makes you feel less than? What makes you feel like scared? Let's examine that. Normally we're talking, oh, don't worry about that. You have no reason to feel that. So we're invalidated. Peter talks a lot about that in his work. And I think that's something that we would all do better as a society, delving deeper into. But if we were able to train, able to look, able to be comfortable inquiring about that and then

learning to converse about that in a kind of accurate language man how much we would evolve like most people like most couples i see have a hard time getting down to really talking about what's important to them because they don't want to be judged like one person doesn't want to be judged it's the hard conversation that everyone avoids and it doesn't have to be the hard conversation. You know, I mean, that's, that's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read on relationship was nonviolent communication because you, it's, it's, it's a, it's a program on how to speak with compassion. And at the end of the day, when I communicate with somebody, the best communication is where I'm heard

and where I hear you and understand you, right? Totally. We're not just talking to each other. I can listen and then I can reframe it in a way that lets you know I understand you. And if I'm off, we continue the conversation until we're both heard so back to that point which i think is beautiful or back to the point of k3 and that and tying that

in like as we're working did you notice that when we're working through the lines and then like in the group exercise setting or the group training setting one of the things that we were doing was like you work at the speed of your partner, right? So like make it as simple and accessible as your partner needs. And at the same time, like confront your own impatience. Like that was one thing I said quite a lot of on day one. I don't think I said it on day two because it was so drilled in. And I think people actually got that, but you're trying to figure out a way to improve the level of your training partner, whoever you're working with in that round. But you're also trying to confront your own impatience and trying to figure out how to

improve your own technique, how to improve your own posture, how to improve your own diction and communication. So the training is multi-layered there. You're never just trying to like vomit at someone, whether in movement or in word, but always trying to figure out where are they. And that kind of awareness allows you to like listen in a tactile way, in a visual way,

and also an auditory way. Yeah, that's incredible. Well, this is making me think about kids. I know we talked about a little bit about this last night. Patience is such a critical piece when you're a parent you know it's absolutely critical and i think um you know gabby reese told me this once when we were in her sauna and she was talking about how the problem we have with our children is that we think wherever they're at in life that that's where they're going to be as an adult if we don't fix it right so damn but

that's heavy but that's not heavy but that's never the case because kids at fucking adults we all go through phases we all go through a phase where we try this new thing out we see how well it works and as a parent we think it's all on us to curtail a behavior that maybe won't fit in with a larger group right but guess what they're also a part of a larger group they have school they have teachers they have coaches they have all these other influences that also shape them so it's not all on you right and if i think we exercise patience and a deeper understanding and awareness that our kids are going to be influenced by everybody, for better or worse, that those things do have a way of writing themselves as they grow older.

But to that, I just want to say, where do you see, I mean, what are some of the principles that you've used with your kids? Your kids are in martial arts. Obviously, as a dad, I'm sure you've taught them a great deal of the wisdom that you have through K3 and your lessons and from your dad with Tai Chi. I'm sure that there's been exposure to everything. How well have they gravitated towards those things and where have they pushed back? I've been really lucky. You know, like I've had the chance to expose my kids to martial arts from

the cradle. When their mom and I were still married, they grew up in a house where the living room was basically a dojo. It was matted out, surrounded by weapons. Nothing was baby proofed. The baby proofing was sort of like, at least for my daughter at that time, my daughter's baby proofing consisted of being on the mat. So if she fell, she could just like fall on the mat rather than like hardwood floor. And it's funny because like speaking of that and not having to child proof or baby proof things, when my son I think was in first grade or kindergarten or something like that, he had some schoolmates over you know to do some homework and once they were done homework i said yeah you guys can go into living room and

play and there's like sword sharp swords spears all that kind of shit all over the place right and the kids are like oh this is awesome and they went to grab it and he's like uh you need to put that down so like he regulated without me having to say a thing, which is kind of cool. Like when you look at how you educate kids and how you take the time to inform them about stuff, and then they're aware of what the concept is. They're aware of what the realities are. They're aware of what the liabilities are. And then they can then inform others, their peers, which is kind of dope. So to answer your question as far as my kids like and how they've been

gravitating towards stuff they're it's really cool like i can i can tease them away from their devices tease them away from their iphones tease them away from their ipads tease them away from netflix or whatever like that and go like hey let's let's train let's play and they're usually down to do it unless they're just way physically beat from the day before or they're under the weather but um more often than not they're cool they're like yeah let's go play like i've converted my my garage to basically a dojo like if you look on my instagram like the majority of the stuff that i have going on at home it's in that room and it looks like man cave par excellence,

minus like the massage chair, which one of these days I'll get. Probably not in that room. But Olympic level judo mats and stuff like that. So it's a great place to train in. And so the kids get to play there. And that play is an exploration of movement, exploration of skills, exploration of coordination. So it's like, if my daughter sees something on TV that she thinks is cool, like let's say she's watching Arrow or like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Or some other thing where there's like a cool female like Ming-Na Wen's character in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Right. Is a great martial artist. And she sees this woman that's like cool empowered doing dope shit and

then like she looks at it and goes like oh dad taught me how to do that and then there's a buy-in then she wants to do more of it um same thing with my son like when my son is is like you know just as his a lot of his friends are they're like on their devices they want to play games you know play fortnight do whatever. But if I go, hey man, like let's work on some, like some stick or knife disarms, let's do some stuff like that. And then he like watches TV and gets to see like, hey, I recognize that pattern. Oh, he did a disarm off of an angle one. And like, he can thin slice it like that. There's an excitement to doing more of it. So it yeah that's awesome what have you seen in them

in terms of how they cope with the i don't know what their ages are my son is 13 so he's in that kind of getting a little bit salty age group um and then my daughter's seven so she's still in that like a cutesy little girl bit yeah so so for your son, who's a bit older and now stepping into his teenage years, how do you see martial arts helping him in terms of finding his quiet center as opposed to being so caught up with the external that we all remember from junior high and high school? Yeah. I think a lot of the benefit for him in this is that he's understanding that there can be stressors placed on him that he doesn't have to react to.

I think that's a big thing in martial arts. Like you can choose to react and you feel like I have the option of reacting because like whatever you're saying, whatever you're doing physically, you're pushing on me. I can't like, it doesn't pose a threat to me. Like my dad threw a tie kick at me and I had to deal with it, you know, or like I've dealt with like having swords flying at me doing these drills. Like you pushing me, you mouthing off at me doesn't mean shit. So there's a different level of comfort in your own skin when you know you've dealt with potential quote unquote threat that's way higher than anything that most of your classmates

are going to bring. So that I think is a beautiful thing. You know, he still has a little bit of a temper, which is, you know, part and parcel of, I think, a red-blooded young man. But, you know, I think it's something that he's got a little bit of a handle on. As far as my daughter, one of the coolest things I'll say is this. Whenever I get the chance to drop her off at school um and before she goes into the gate i'll like throw a fake punch it or something like that and she'll be like pop pop pop pop and it'll be like just something out of like yip man and she'll like

you know she'll she'll perk up stand up real straight smile give me a big hug and like all the parents are looking at me like oh fuck how come we don't do that or how come we don't have something like that um and so that's kind of that's that's a cool moment i mean like just to have your little girl you know a lot of people are focused on making their little girl really pretty really dainty really whatever and it's like me, she'll have plenty of years to explore all that. You know, like, let me give this child some confidence, feel good about herself, feel like she can stand up straight

and then like no one's going to mess with her. Not like she's got to carry a chip on her shoulder or any weirdness like that, but just like she's good in her own skin. She has nothing to fear. She has like a skill set to be excited about. She knows her dad loves her. You know, know she gets she's not afraid of like showing physical affection she's also not afraid of like standing her like you know standing her ground establishing her boundaries and she knows that she can do it so like that's i think that's one of the things that

stands out in my mind as far as benefits for my daughter yeah that's huge brother it's it's dope it's really dope i mean to i there's never been a morning honestly there's never been a morning that i haven't dropped my daughter off at school where like i walk away and i'm not grinning i mean that's i just like i've noticed that so many times like i don't always get to drop her off at school depending on on what the custody schedule is with her mom. But on those mornings that I get to drop her off at school, she goes into the gate smiling, skipping on her way, and always happy. And the teachers have even commented to me about that. They're like, hey, man, when you drop her off, her energy is so awesome.

She's got the glow she does she does and then i do too by default like i'm grinning i'm like you know that kind of thing i don't know how to i don't know how to verbalize it i just feel like i'm walking on on air yeah i think that through our kids is the truest act of compersion you know where their happiness is our happiness for sure about it for sure well where can people find you online where can people find you on the gram all that good stuff um my social media handles are all uniform it's at dr mark chang that's d-r-m-a-r-k-c-h-e-n-g um and i have my website drmarkchang.com but mostly like social media like so through facebook twitter insta

and i'm probably most active on Insta for sure. Cool, brother. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for the honor of being here, man. And thank you again for making the time both yesterday and today. You got it, brother.

Thank you guys for tuning in to today's show with Dr. Mark Chang. If you're feeling called and you're on the gram and you want to say what's up, I'm back at Living with the Kingsburys, a joint account with my wife. We'll be doing an IG Live talking about the comeback, why it happened. Obviously, it's quarantine related and wanting to be able to connect to the people that listen to the show a bit more.

Love you all. Talk to you soon. See you in a week.